CHAPTER I

THE PIONEER

[Illustration: JUNE]

THE PIONEER

A TALE OF TWO STATES

_By_

GERALDINE BONNER

Author of Tomorrow’s Tangle

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

HARRISON FISHER

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1905

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

March

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS

BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE COUNTRY

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE SQUATTER 3

II THE GRACEY BOYS 12

III THE NAME OF ALLEN 27

IV O, MINE ENEMY! 44

V THE SUMMONS 54

VI THE OLD LOVE 65

VII UNCLE JIM 85

VIII PRIZES OF ACCIDENT 99

BOOK II

THE TOWN

I DOWN IN THE CITY 109

II FEMININE LOGIC 126

III ONE OF EVE’S FAMILY 140

IV DANGER SIGNALS 153

V THE GREAT GOD PAN 166

VI READJUSTMENT 183

VII BUSINESS AND SENTIMENT 192

VIII NEW PLANETS 201

IX THE CHOICE OF MAIDS 214

X THE QUICKENING CURRENT 225

XI LUPÉ’S CHAINS ARE BROKEN 230

XII A MAN AND HIS PRICE 241

XIII THE BREAKING POINT 252

XIV BED-ROCK 265

BOOK III

THE DESERT

I NEVADA 281

II OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES 286

III SMOLDERING EMBERS 304

IV A WOMAN’S “NO” 316

V “HER FEET GO DOWN TO DEATH” 329

VI THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE 341

VII THE COLONEL COMES BACK 352

VIII THE AROUSED LION 368

IX HOME 381

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

JUNE _Frontispiece_

SHE SMILED FAINTLY AT HIM 40

“HERE IT IS! DO YOU WONDER NO ONE EVER

FOUND IT?” 88

WITH THE TIP OF THE LONG SPEAR OF GRASS,

HE TOUCHED HER LIGHTLY ON THE CHEEK 176

MERCEDES 244

ROSAMUND 306

THE PIONEER

BOOK I

THE COUNTRY

THE PIONEER

CHAPTER I

THE SQUATTER

It had been five o’clock in the clear, still freshness of a May morning

when the Colonel had started from Sacramento. Now, drawing rein where

the shadow of a live-oak lay like a black pool across the road, he

looked at his watch--almost five. The sun had nearly wheeled from

horizon to horizon.

During the burning noon hour he had rested at Murderer’s Bar. Except

for that he had been in the saddle all day, slackening speed where the

road passed over the burnt shoulder of the foot-hills, descending into

sheltered cañons by cool river-beds, pacing along stretches of deserted

highway where his mounted figure was the only living thing in sight.

Stationary in the shade of the live-oak he looked about him. The rich

foot-hill country of California stretched away beneath his gaze in

lazy undulations, dotted with the forms of the oaks. The grass on

unprotected hilltops was already drying to an ocher yellow, the road

was deep in dust. Far away, hanging on the horizon like a faded mirage,

was the high Sierra, thin, snow-touched, a faint, aërial vision.

The sleepy sounds of midday had died down and the strange, dream-like

silence so peculiar to California held the scene. It was like looking

at a picture, the Colonel thought, as he turned in his saddle and

surveyed the misty line of hill after hill, bare and wooded, dwindling

down to where--a vast, sea-like expanse swimming in opalescent

tints--stretched one of the fruitful valleys of the world.

Kit Carson, the finest horse procurable in the Sacramento livery stable

the Colonel patronized, stamped and flicked off a fly with his long

tail. His rider muttered a word of endearment and bent to pat the silky

neck, while his eyes continued to move over the great panorama. He had

traversed it many times. The first time of all rose in his mind, when

in the flush of his splendid manhood, he had sought fortune on the bars

and river-beds in forty-nine. Forty-nine! That was twenty-one years ago.

Something in the thought clouded his brow and called a sigh to his

lips. He made a gesture as though shaking off a painful memory and

gathered up the hanging rein.

“Come, Kit,” he said aloud, “we’ve got to be moving. There’s fifteen

miles yet between us and supper.”

The road before them mounted a spur at the top of which it branched,

one fork winding up and on to the mining towns hidden in the mountain

crevices. The other turned to the right, and rising and falling over

the buttresses that the foot-hills thrust into the plain, wandered down

“the mother lode,” the great mineral belt of California.

As they rose to the summit of the spur, the brilliancy of the air was

tarnished by a cloud of dust, and the silence disrupted by sounds.

The crack of whips cut into the tranquillity of the evening hour; the

jangling of bells and voices of men mingled in strident dissonance.

Both Kit and the Colonel rose above the curve of the hilltop with the

pricked ears and alert eyes of curiosity.

The left-hand road was blocked as far as could be seen with a long mule

train, one of the trains that a few years before had crossed the Sierra

to Virginia City, and still plied a trade with the California mountain

towns. The dust rose from it and covered it as though to shut out from

Heaven the vision of the straining animals, and deaden the blasphemies

of the men. Looking along its struggling length, the end of which was

lost round a turn of the road, the Colonel could see the pointed ears,

the stretched necks, and the arched collars of the mules, the canvas

tops of the wagons and over all, darting back and forth, the leaping

flash of the whips.

A forward wagon was stuck, and, groaning and creaking from an

unsuccessful effort to start it, the train subsided into panting

relaxation. From the dust the near-by drivers emerged, caught sight of

the rider, and slouched toward him. They were powerful men--great men

in their day, the California mule drivers.

They passed the time of day, told him their destination and asked his.

Going on to Foleys, was he? Mining? Supposed not. Not much mining done

round Foleys now. Like Virginia, pretty well petered.

“Virginia!” said one of them, “you’d oughter see Virginia! I’ve taken

my sixteen-mule team over the Strawberry Creek route and made my ten

dollars a day in Virginia, but it’s as dead now as forty-nine.”

Then they slouched back to their work. Through the churned-up dust,

red with the brightness of the declining sun, men came swinging down

from the forward end of the train, driving mules to attach to the

stalled wagon. About it there was a concentrating of movement and

then an outburst of furious energy. A storm of profanity arose, the

dust ascended like a pillar of red smoke, and in it the forms of men

struggled, and the lashes of the whips came and went like the writhing

tentacles of an octopus. The watcher had a glimpse of the mules almost

sitting in the violence of their endeavor, and with a howl of triumph

the wagon lurched forward. The next moment the entire train was in

motion, seeming to advance with a single movement, like a gigantic

serpent, each wagon-top a section of its vertebrate length, the whole

undulating slowly to the rhythmic jangling of the bells.

The Colonel took the turning to the right and was soon traversing a

road which looped in gradual descent along the wall of a ravine. The

air was chilled by a river that tumbled over stones below. Greenery

of tree and chaparral ran up the walls. A white root gripping a rock

like knotty fingers, a spattering of dogwood here and there amid the

foliage, caught his eye.

Yes, Virginia had unquestionably “petered.” It had had a short life

for its promise. Even in sixty-eight they still had had hopes of

it. This was May, the May of seventy, and their hopes had not been

realized. Fortunately he had invested little there. California the

Colonel had found a good enough field for his investments.

He rode on out of the ravine, once again into the dry rolling land, his

mind turning over that question of investments. He had not much else

to think of. He was a lonely man, unmarried, childless, and rich. What

else was there for a man, who had passed his fifty-fifth year, who did

not care for women or pleasure, to concern himself about? It was not

satisfying; it brought him no happiness, but he had had no expectation

of that.

Twenty-one years ago the Colonel had waked to the realization that he

had missed happiness. She had been his, in his very arms then, and he

had thought to keep her there for ever. Then suddenly she had gone,

without warning, tearing herself from his grasp, and he had known that

she would never return. So he had tried to fill the blankness she had

left, with business--a sorry substitute! He had spent a good deal

of time and thought over this matter of investing, and had seen his

fortune accumulating in a safe, gradual way. It would have been much

larger than it was if he could have cured himself of a tendency to give

portions of it away. But the Colonel was a pioneer, and there were many

pioneers who had succeeded better than he in finding happiness, if

not so well in gaining riches. As they had been successful in the one

way, he had tried to remedy a deficit in the other, and his fortune

remained at about the same comfortable level, despite his preoccupation

in investments.

This very trip was to see about a new one in which there were great

possibilities. He had a strip of land at Foleys, back of the town,

purchased fifteen years ago when people thought the little camp was to

be the mining center of the region. Now, after he had been regularly

paying his taxes, and hearing that the place annually grew smaller and

deader, a mineral spring had been discovered on his land. It was a good

thing that something had been discovered there. The hopes of Foleys

had vanished soon after he had come into possession of the tract. His

efforts to sell it had been unsuccessful. Some years ago--the last time

he was up there--you couldn’t get people to take land near Foleys,

short of giving it to them. But a mineral spring was a very different

matter.

As Kit Carson bore him swiftly onward he reviewed the idea of his new

investment with increasing enthusiasm. If the spring was all they said

it was, he would build a hotel near it, and transform the beautiful,

unknown locality into a summer resort. There was an ideal situation for

a hotel, where the land swept upward into a sort of natural terrace

crested with enormous pines. Here the house would be built, and from

its front piazza guests rocking in shaker chairs could look over miles

of hills and wooded cañons, and far away on clear days could see the

mother-of-pearl expanse of the Sacramento Valley.

A few years ago the plan would have been impossible. But now, with the

railroad climbing over the Sierra, it would be quite feasible to run a

line of stages from Sacramento; or, possibly, Auburn would be shorter.

There was even a hope in the back of the Colonel’s mind that the

railway might be induced to fling forth a spur as far as Placerville.

The Colonel had friendships in high places. Things that ordinary

mortals who were not rich, unattached pioneers, could not aspire to,

were entirely possible for Colonel James Parrish.

But--here came in the “but” which upsets the best laid plans. At this

point the squatter had loomed up.

The Colonel had hardly believed in the squatter at first. His claims

were so preposterous. He had come shortly after Parrish’s last

visit, nearly four years ago, and had taken up his residence in the

half-ruined cottage which had been built on the land in those days when

people had thought Foleys was going to be a great mining center. When

Cusack, the drowsy lawyer who “attended to Colonel Parrish’s business

interests in Foleys,” as he expressed it, let his client know there was

a squatter--a married man with two children--on the land, the Colonel’s

reply had been “let him squat.” And so the matter had rested.

Now, when the Colonel wanted to take possession of his own, build his

hotel and develop his mineral spring, he had received the intelligence

that the squatter refused to go--that in fact he claimed the land on a

three and a half years’ tenancy undisturbed by notice to leave, and on

various and sundry “improvements” he had made.

It took the Colonel’s breath away. That little clause in the lawyer’s

letter about the wife and children had induced him to give his

permission for the squatter to occupy his cottage. Having no wife

or child of his own, he had a secret feeling of friendliness to all

men, who, even in poverty and unsuccess, had tasted of this supreme

happiness. And he had let the man remain there, undisturbed, throughout

the three and a half years, had forgotten him--in fact, did not even

know his name.

And then to be suddenly faced by the amazing insolence of the claim!

He with his flawless title, his record of scrupulously paid taxes! He

wrote to the Foleys lawyer, as to what “the improvements” were, and

received the reply that they consisted in “a garden planted out and

tended by the squatter’s daughters, and a bit of vineyard land that

the girls had pruned and cultivated into bearing condition. There were

repairs on the house, mending the roof and the porch which was falling

down. Allen had made these himself.”

Allen! It was the first time Colonel Parrish had heard the squatter’s

name. It sent a gush of painful memories out from his heart, and for

a space he sat silent with drooped head. Why was not the world wide

enough for him, and all who bore this name, to pass one another without

encounter!

Now, as he rode on the last stage of his journey, and over the hilltops

saw the smoke of the Foleys chimneys, his mind had once again fallen

on the squatter’s name. Strange coincidence that after twenty-one years

this name--a common one--should rise up uncomfortably in his path. He

smiled bitterly to himself. Fate played strange tricks, and he felt,

with a sense of shamed meanness, that he would have regarded the

squatter with more leniency if he had borne any other name than Allen.

CHAPTER II

THE GRACEY BOYS

The smell of wood smoke and supper was in the air as the Colonel rode

down the main street of Foleys. Under the projecting roof that jutted

from the second-story windows and made a species of rude arcade, men

were sitting in the negligée of shirt sleeves, smoking and spitting

in the cool of the evening. They hailed the new-comer with a word of

greeting or a hand raised in salute to the side of a head where a hat

brim should have been.

The Colonel returned the salutations, and as Kit Carson paced through

the red dust to where the drooping fringe of locust trees hid the

façade of the hotel, looked curiously about him, noticing a slight stir

of life, an appearance of reviving vitality in the once moribund camp.

Foleys was not as dead as it had been four years ago. Fewer of the shop

doors were boarded up; there were even new stores open.

He was speculating on this when he threw himself off his horse in front

of the hotel. The loungers on the piazza, dustered and shirt-sleeved

men, let their tilted chairs drop to the front legs, and rose to greet

him to a man. Anybody was an acquisition at Foleys, but Colonel Jim

Parrish, with the rumor of bringing a lawsuit into their midst, was

welcomed as the harbinger of a new era.

They were all around him shaking hands when Forsythe, the proprietor,

armed with a large feather duster, emerged from the front door. He

cut the new arrival out from their midst and drew him into the hall.

Here, dusting him vigorously, he shouted to Mrs. Forsythe to prepare a

room, and between sweeps of the duster, inquired of him on the burning

question of the squatter.

“Come to fire old man Allen, eh?” he queried. “Got your work cut out

for you with him.”

“He’ll find he’s barked up the wrong tree this time,” said the Colonel

grimly, “bringing me up from San Francisco on such a fool’s errand.”

“It’s about the galliest proposition I’ve ever heard. But he’s that

kind, drunk a lot of the time, and the rest of it tellin’ the boys

round here what a great man he used to be. He was glad enough to get

twenty-five dollars a month holdin’ down a small job in the assay

office.”

At this moment a door to the right opened, yielding a glimpse of a

large bare dining-room set forth with neatly laid tables and decorated

with hanging strands of colored paper.

“Say,” said a female voice, “ain’t that Colonel Jim Parrish that just

come down the street?”

“That’s just who it is,” answered the Colonel, “and isn’t that Mitty

Bruce’s voice?”

This question called to the doorway a female vision in brilliant pink

calico. It was a buxom, high-colored country girl of some twenty-one

years, coarse featured but not uncomely, her face almost as pink as

her dress, her figure of the mature proportions of the early-ripening

Californian.

“Well, well, is this Mitty?” said the new-comer, holding out his hand.

“You have to come up to the foot-hills to see a handsome girl. I’d

never have known you, you’ve grown up so and got so good-looking.”

Mitty sidled up giggling and placed a big, red paw in his.

“Oh, get out!” she said, “ain’t you just awful!”

“I won’t get out and I’m not a bit awful. You’ve got to take care of me

at supper and tell me everything that’s happened in Foleys since I was

here last.”

“Let her alone to do that,” said Forsythe. “There ain’t anything that

goes on in Eldorado and Amador Counties that Mitty don’t know. She’s

the best newspaper we got round here.”

Mrs. Forsythe here put her head over the stair-rail and informed the

Colonel that his room was ready. He ran up stairs to “wash up” while

the other two repaired to the dining-room.

A few minutes later he reappeared and entered the low-ceilinged room

that smelled of fresh paint and cooking. It was past the supper hour

at Foleys and only a few men lingered over the end of their meal. By a

table at the window, cleanly spread and set, Mitty was standing. When

she saw him she pulled out a chair and, with its back resting against

her waist, pointed to the seat.

“Set right down here,” she said, “everything’s ready for you.”

Then as he obeyed she pushed him in, saying over his shoulder:

“It’s real nice to see you again, Colonel. It seems awful long since

you was here last.”

The Colonel looked up at her with an eye of twinkling friendliness. She

was gazing at him with childish pleasure and affection. He had known

Mitty since her tenth year when Forsythe and his wife had adopted her,

the only child of a dying woman whose husband had been killed in a mine.

“Good girl, Mitt,” he said. “Have you got all the gossip of the last

four years saved up for me?”

“I guess I can tell you as much as most,” she answered, not without

pride, and then flourished off to the hole in the dining-room which

communicated with the kitchen.

When she had set his supper before him she sat down opposite, her

elbows on the table, comfortably settled for the gossip the traveler

had requested.

“Foleys seems to be livening up,” he said. “I noticed several new

stores. What’s happening?”

“Foleys!” exclaimed Mitty, with the Californian’s loyalty to his native

burg, “Foleys is the liveliest town along the mother lode. There ain’t

nothing the matter with Foleys! It’s the Gracey boys’ strike up at the

Buckeye Belle mine that’s whooping things up.”

“Oh, that’s it, of course,” said the Colonel. “They say the Gracey boys

have really struck it this time. I heard some talk of it before I came

up. The report down below was that it was a pretty good thing.”

“You bet,” said the young woman with a knowing air. “Nearly a year

ago one of the gentlemen connected with it said to me, ‘We’ve got a

mine there; bed-rock’s pitchin’ and there’s two bits to the pan.’ So I

wasn’t surprised when I heard they’d struck it. They’re goin’ to build

a twenty-stamp mill next thing you know.”

“Good for them!” said the Colonel. “The Gracey boys have been mining

for years all over this country and in Mexico and Nevada, and this is

the first good thing they’ve got. How far is it from here?”

“About twelve miles up in that direction--” she gave a jerk of her

hand to the right--“up on the other side of the South Fork. They have

to come here for everything. Barney Sullivan, the superintendent, does

most of their buying.”

She looked at the Colonel with a wide-eyed, stolid gaze as she gave

this insignificant piece of information. The look suggested to her

vis-à-vis that the information was not insignificant to her.

“Barney Sullivan,” he said, “I remember him. He’s been with them

for some years, was in Virginia City when they were there. He’s a

good-looking fellow with red hair.”

“Good-lookin’, did you say?” exclaimed Mitty, in a high key of scornful

disbelief. “Well, that’s more’n I can see. Just a red-headed Irish

tarrier, with the freckles on him as big as dimes. It’s a good thing

all the world don’t like the same kind of face.”

Her scorn was tinctured with the complacence of one who knows herself

exempt from similar charges. Mitty, secure in the knowledge that

her own patronymic was Bruce, affected a high disdain of the Irish.

She also possessed a natural pride on the score of her Christian

name, which in its unique unabbreviated completeness, was Summit, in

commemoration of the fact that upon that lofty elevation of the Sierra

she had first seen the light.

“You’ll be able to see all the Buckeye Belle crowd to-night,” she

continued; “they’ll be in now any time. There’s going to be a party

here.”

The Colonel looked up from his plate with the thrust-out lips and

raised brows of inquiring astonishment.

“The devil you say!” he ejaculated. “I arrived just at the right

moment, didn’t I? I suppose I’ll have to stand round looking at the men

knifing each other for a chance to dance with Miss Mitty Bruce.”

Mitty wriggled with delight and grew as pink as her dress.

“Well, not quite’s bad as that,” she said with bridling modesty, “but I

can have my pick.”

Her friend had finished the first part of his supper, and placing

his knife and fork together, leaned back, looking at her and smiling

to himself. She saw the empty plate, and rising, bent across the

table and swept it and the other dishes on to her tray with an air of

professional expertness. As she came back with the dessert the last

diner thumped across the wooden floor in noisy exit.

The plate that she set before the Colonel displayed a large slab of

pie. A breakfast cup of coffee went with it. He looked at them with an

undismayed eye, remarking:

“Who’s coming to the party? I’ll bet a new hat Barney Sullivan will

be here--the first man on deck, and the last to quit the pumps. But I

don’t suppose the Gracey boys will show up.”

“Yes, they will--both of ’em.”

“What, Black Dan? Black Dan Gracey doesn’t go to parties.”

“Well, he don’t generally. But he’s goin’ to this one. His daughter,

Mercedes, is here, that sort er spidery Spanish girl, and he’s goin’

for her.”

Mitty, having seen that her guest had all that in Foleys made up the

last course of a complete and satisfactory supper, went round and took

her seat at the opposite side of the table. As she spoke he noticed a

change in her voice. Now, as he saw her face, he noticed a change in

it, too. There was a withdrawal of joy and sparkle. She looked sullen,

almost mournful.

“Black Dan Gracey’s daughter here?” he queried. “What’s she doing so

far afield? The last I heard of her she was in school in San Francisco.”

“So she was until two days ago. Then some kind er sickness broke out

in the school, and her paw went down to bring her up here. She was so

precious she couldn’t come up from San Francisco alone. She had to be

brung all the way like she was made of gold and people was tryin’ to

steal her. They stopped here for dinner on their way up. I seen her.”

“She promises to be very pretty,” said the Colonel absently. “They say

Gracey worships her.”

“Pretty!” echoed Mitty in a very flat voice. “I don’t see what makes

her so dreadful pretty. Little black thing! And anybody’d be pretty all

togged up that way. She’d diamond ear-rings on, real ones, big diamonds

like that.”

She held out the tip of her little finger, nipped between her third and

thumb.

“I guess that makes a difference,” she said emphatically, looking at

him with a pair of eyes which tried to be defiant, but were really full

of forlorn appeal.

“Of course it makes a difference,” said the Colonel cheeringly, without

knowing in the least what he meant, “a great difference.”

“They was all staring at her here at dinner. There was four men in the

kitchen trying to get a squint through the door, until the Chinaman

threw ’em out. And she knew jest as well as any one, and liked it.

But you oughter have seen her pretend she didn’t notice it. Jest eat

her dinner sort er slow and careless as if they was no one round more

important than a yaller dog. Only now and then she’d throw back her

head so’s her curls ’ud fall back and the diamond ear-rings ’ud show. I

said to paw flat-footed, ‘Go and wait on her yourself, since you think

she’s so dreadful handsome. I don’t do no waiting on that stuck-up

thing.’”

Mitty turned away to the window. Her recital of the sensation created

by the proud Miss Gracey seemed to affect her. There was a tremulous

undernote in her voice; her bosom, under its tight-drawn pink calico

covering, heaved as if she were about to weep.

The Colonel noted with surprise these signs of storm, and was wondering

what would be best to say to divert the conversation into less

disturbing channels, when Mitty, looking out of the window, craned her

neck and evidently followed with her eyes a passing figure.

“There goes June Allen,” she said; “don’t she look shabby?”

The name caused the Colonel to stop eating. He raised his eyes to his

companion. She was looking at him with reviving animation in her glance.

“That’s the daughter of old man Allen what’s squatted on your land,”

she explained. “You ain’t ever seen the girls, have you?”

The Colonel, who had finished, laid his napkin on the table.

“No,” he answered, “are they children?”

“Children!” echoed Mitty, “I guess not. June’s twenty and Rosamund’s

nineteen. I know ’em real well. They’re friends of mine.”

He raised his eyebrows, surprised and relieved at the information. It

would be less hard to oust the squatter if his children were of this

age than if they were helpless infants.

“What sort of girls are they?” he asked.

“Oh they’re real lovely girls. And they’ve got a wonderful education.

They know lots. They’re learned. Their mother learned it to them--”

Mitty stopped, a sound outside striking her ear. The Colonel was

looking at her with quizzical inquiry. The picture of the squatter’s

children, as educated, much less “learned,” filled him with amused

astonishment. He was just about to ask his informant for a fuller

explanation, when she rose to her feet, her face suffused with color,

her eyes fastened in a sudden concentration of attention on something

outside the window.

“Here they are,” she said in a low, hurried voice. “Get up and look at

them.”

He obeyed, not knowing whom she meant. In the bright light of

the after-glow he saw four figures on horseback--three men and a

girl--approaching down the deserted street. Behind them a pack burro,

his back laden with bags and valises, plodded meekly through the

dust. The Colonel recognized the men as the Gracey brothers and their

superintendent, Barney Sullivan. The girl he had not seen for a year or

two, and she was at the age when a year or two makes vast changes. He

knew, however, that she was Black Dan Gracey’s daughter, Mercedes, who

was expected at the dance.

The cavalcade came to a stop outside the window. From the piazza the

front legs of the loungers’ chairs striking the floor produced a series

of thuds, and the thuds were followed by a series of hails such as had

greeted the Colonel. But the loungers made no attempt to go forward, as

they had done in his case. An access of bashfulness in the presence of

beauty held them sheepishly spellbound. It remained for Forsythe to

dash out with his duster and welcome the new arrivals with the effusion

of a mining camp Boniface.

The Colonel, unseen, looked at them with perhaps not as avid a

curiosity as Mitty, but with undisguised interest. He had long known

the Gracey boys, as they were called, though Dan was forty-three

and Rion twelve years younger. He had often heard of their mining

vicissitudes, not only from men similarly engaged, but from themselves

on their occasional visits to San Francisco. The society of that city

had not yet expanded to the size when it fell apart into separate sets.

Its members not only had a bowing acquaintance, but were, for the most

part, intimate. The Gracey boys had, as the newspapers say, “the entrée

everywhere,” though they did not, it is true, profit by it to the

extent that San Francisco would have liked.

They were not only educated men, who had come from Michigan in their

boyhood, but Black Dan Gracey was a figure distinguished--at any rate,

to the feminine imagination--by an unusual flavor of romance. Seventeen

years before the present date he had met, while mining in Mexico, a

young Spanish girl of fourteen, had fallen madly in love with her, and

when her parents placed her in a convent to remove her for ever from

the hated Gringo, with six of his men, had broken into the convent and

carried her off.

It was part of the romance that a year later his child-wife, as

passionately loving as he, should have died, leaving him a baby. It was

said that Black Dan Gracey had never recovered this sudden severing

of the dearest tie of his life. He certainly was proof against the

wiles that many sirens in San Francisco and elsewhere had displayed

for his subjugation. It was after this, anyway, that the adjective

Black had been prefixed to his name. Most people said it had arisen

because of his swarthy coloring--he was of an almost Indian darkness

of tint--but there were those who declared it was a tribute to his

moody taciturnity, for Black Dan Gracey was a man of few words and rare

smiles.

Now, standing in the brilliant evening light, the watcher could not

but be impressed by the appearance of the two brothers. A fine pair of

men, the Gracey boys, muscular, broad-shouldered, and tall; out-door

men whose eyes were far-seeing and quiet, who felt cramped in cities,

and returned from them with a freshened zest to the stream-bed and the

cañon. Rion was obviously many years his brother’s junior. He was a

more normal-looking person, not so darkly bearded and heavily browed,

more full of the joys and interests of life.

As he slid from his saddle to the ground he was laughing, while his

elder, the lower part of his face clothed in a piratical growth of

black hair, lowered somberly from under a gray sombrero. In their rough

and dust-grimed clothes, they still showed the indefinable air of the

well-born and educated man, which curiously distinguished them from

Barney Sullivan, their companion. Barney was as tall and well set up

as either of them, but beyond a doubt he was what Mitty had called a

“tarrier,” in other words an Irish laborer. He, too, was laughing, a

laugh that showed strong white teeth under a short red mustache. His

hat, pushed back from his forehead, revealed the same colored hair,

thick and wiry. He had a broad, turned-up nose, plenteously freckled as

were his hands, raised now to assist Miss Gracey from her horse.

Upon the one feminine member of the party the Colonel’s eyes had been

fixed, as were those of every man in the vicinity. He calculated that

she was nearly sixteen. For a girl with Spanish blood that would mean a

young woman, full-grown and marriageable. She still, however, retained

a look of childhood that was extremely charming, and in some vague,

indistinct way, pathetic, he thought. Perhaps the pathos lay in the

fact that she had never had a mother, and that the best care an adoring

father could lavish upon her was to hire expensive nurses in her

childhood, and send her to still more expensive boarding-schools when

she grew older.

She was undoubtedly fulfilling the promise she had always given of

being pretty. She sat sidewise on her saddle, looking down at Barney’s

raised hands. Her hair, which was as black as her father’s, was

arranged in loosely flowing curls that fell over her shoulders and

brushed her chest. In this position, her chin down, her eyelashes on

her cheeks, her lips curved in a slow, coquettish smile, she presented

a truly bewitching appearance. Under her childish demeanor, the woman,

conscious of unusual charms, was already awake. The Colonel felt as

Mitty had, that though her entire attention seemed concentrated on

Barney, she was acutely aware of the staring men on the piazza, and was

rejoicing in their bashful admiration. He could not help smiling, her

indifference was so coolly complete. His smile died when he felt Mitty

give him a vicious dig in the back.

“Did you see the ear-rings?” she said in a hissing undertone.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“Do you suppose they’re real diamonds?”

“Why, of course. Black Dan wouldn’t give his daughter anything else.”

Mitty gave forth a sound that seemed a cross between a snort and a

groan.

“And a pack burro!” she exclaimed with fuming scorn. “Did you get on to

the pack burro, all loaded up with bags? She has to have her party rig

brought along on a pack burro!”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” he said soothingly. “She couldn’t go to

the party in her riding habit all grimed up with dust. Nobody ever saw

a girl at a party in a riding habit.”

“Well, the Phillips girl can go all right in a pink flannel skirt and

miners’ boots,” declared his companion with combative heat, overlooking

the fact that the festal array of the Phillips girl had been a subject

of her special derision. “I guess she don’t have to have a pack burro

to carry her duds.”

The Colonel realized that the moment for gentle reasoning was over.

Only the girl’s burning curiosity kept down the wrathful tears evoked

by a newly stirred jealousy. When she saw Black Dan’s daughter slide

from her saddle into Barney Sullivan’s arms, an ejaculation of mingled

pain and rage escaped her that had a note of suffering in it.

The Colonel, in his time, had known such pangs, a thousand times deeper

and more terrible than Mitty had ever experienced. He turned to her

smiling, not teasingly, but almost tenderly, and saw her face blighted

like a rose dashed by rain, pitiful and a little ludicrous. The pitiful

side of it was all that struck him.

“Did you see how mighty easy Barney is with her?” she stammered, making

a desperate feminine attempt to speak lightly.

“A gentleman has to help a lady off her horse; he can’t let her climb

down all by herself. Barney’s not that kind of a chump. You run along

now and get ready. You haven’t got such a lot of time, for you’ve got

to help set the tables for supper. And don’t you fret. I just feel that

you’re going to look as nice as any girl in the place. That dress of

yours is going to be just about right. Hurry up! Here they are.”

Mitty heard the advancing footfalls in the passage and the sound of

approaching voices. As the tail of her pink calico skirt disappeared

through the kitchen door, the Gracey party entered through the one that

led to the office. There were greetings with the Colonel, and he sat

down at their table to exchange the latest San Francisco gossip with

the mining news of the district, and especially to hear the details of

the strike in the Buckeye Belle.

CHAPTER III

THE NAME OF ALLEN

An hour later as the Colonel was leaving his room, the voices of

Forsythe and a new-comer ascending the stairs struck on his ear.

He leaned over the baluster and looked down at the tops of their

approaching heads. Forsythe’s bald pate was followed by another,

evidently a younger one, by the curly brown hair that covered it.

A pair of shoulders in a dusty coat was beneath the head, and, as

they mounted, the Colonel heard a voice of that cultured intonation

which the far West scornfully regards as an outgrowth of effete

civilizations. In short, the owner of the voice spoke like an Easterner

who has had a college education.

The Colonel, if he was doubtful about the top of the head, knew the

voice directly.

“Jerry Barclay, by thunder!” he exclaimed over the railing. “What the

devil are you doing up here?”

The new-comer started and lifted a handsome face, which, in clean-cut

distinction of feature, seemed to match the voice. He cleared the last

steps at a bound and stretched out a sinewy brown hand to the older

man. There was something delightfully frank and boyish in his manner.

“Well, old son,” he said, “that comes well from you! About the last

person in California I expected to see at Foleys. What’s up?”

In the light of the kerosene lamps which illumined the hallway he was

shown to be some thirty years of age, tall, slender, upright, with

upon him and about him that indescribable air of the man of clubs and

cities. His loose sack-coat and flannel shirt set upon his frame with

a suggestion of conscious masquerade. He did not belong to the present

rough setting, albeit he was so easy of manner and movement that it

could not be said of him he was awkwardly out of place anywhere. The

genial frankness of his address was the western touch about him, which

made him acceptable in a society where his manner of speech might

have been resented as a personal reflection. It even outweighed the

impression produced by the seal ring he wore. That it was not the

outward and visible expression of a mellow friendliness of nature did

not matter. What did matter was that it made life much simpler and more

agreeable for Jerry Barclay.

“What am I doing up here?” he said in answer to the older man’s

question. “Looking after my interests. What else would bring a man into

these trails? There’s an old claim of my father’s out Thompson’s Flat

way, that they’ve been getting up a fairy tale about. Ever since the

Buckeye Belle’s panned out so well they keep inventing yarns down below

that sound like forty-nine. But the Buckeye Belle _has_ made a strike,

Forsythe tells me.”

“The Gracey boys are here to-night. They’ll tell you all about it.

Black Dan won’t have anything else to do.”

The younger man pursed his lips for a whistle of surprise.

“That’s luck,” he said. “What’s Black Dan Gracey doing in a center of

civilization like this?”

“Bringing his daughter in for a dance. We’ve got a party on here

to-night. Go into your room and primp up the best you know how. Dancing

men are short.”

The young man laughed, a deep, jolly laugh.

“Timed it just right, didn’t I? Do you suppose the belles of Foleys

will take me this way, travel-stained and weary? I’d like to see Black

Dan’s daughter. They say she promises to be a beauty.”

“Promises!” echoed the Colonel; “she kept that promise some time ago.

She’s sixteen years old, my boy, and she can take your pelt and nail it

to the barn door whenever she’s a mind to.”

The other turned away to the open door of the room Forsythe had lit up

for him.

“Sixteen!” he said. “Oh, that’s too young! No, Colonel, I’ve not got to

the age when sixteen attracts. But you ought to be just about there.

So long! You’ll see me later looking on at your gambols with the

sixteen-year-older.”

His boyish laugh issued from the room, and as the Colonel went down

stairs he could hear it above the swishing of water and the sound of

smitten crockery.

From below the first tentative whinings of the violins rose, and as

he reached the lower hall he heard the rattling of vehicles and the

sound of voices as the earlier guests began to arrive. To the right of

the hall he discovered Black Dan, secluded in a small room reserved by

Forsythe for honored patrons, smoking tranquilly as he tilted back in a

wooden arm-chair. The Colonel joined him, and for an hour the smoke of

their cigars mingled amicably as they talked over the mining prospects

of the district, and the Colonel’s scheme for the development of his

mineral spring.

It was near nine and the dance had passed its initial stage of bashful

gaiety, when they strolled down the balcony to where the windows of the

dining-room cast elongated squares of light into the darkness. This

room, built on the angle of the house, had a door in the front, flanked

by two windows, and down the long side a line of four more windows.

Before each aperture there was a gathering of shadowy shapes, the light

gilding staring faces.

At the first window the two men stopped and looked in. The dining-room,

with its wooden walls, low ceiling and board floor, framed like an

echoing shell the simple revel. Its bareness had been decorated with

long strands of colored paper, depending from points in the ceiling

and caught up in the corners. At intervals along the walls kerosene

lamps, backed by large tin reflectors, diffused a raw, bright light,

each concave tin throwing a shadow like a stream of ink down the boards

below it. In a corner the three musicians worked with furious energy,

one blowing a cornet and two scraping violins. A square dance was in

progress, and at intervals the man who played the larger violin, his

chin dug pertinaciously into the end of his instrument, yelled in

strident tones:

“Swing your pardners! Ladies to the right. Shassay all.”

Black Dan, satisfied by the first glance that his daughter was provided

with a partner, retraced his steps and took a seat at the deserted end

of the balcony, whence the red tip of his cigar came and went against a

screen of darkness. The Colonel, much interested, remained looking in.

It was an innocently spirited scene, every participant seeming bent on

exacting his full share of enjoyment from the fleeting hour. There were

girls who had driven in fifteen and twenty miles from the camps and

ranches scattered through the district, and who, flushed and excited,

were bounding through the measure with an energy which made the floor

vibrate. Their partners, also drawn from a radius of twenty miles about

Foleys, were of many varieties, from the few mining superintendents

of the neighborhood to some of the underground workers on the Buckeye

Belle.

Mitty, clad in maidenly white muslin confined by a blue sash, was

evidently much in demand. Her dancing, which was marked by a romping

vigor, had loosened her hair, and a half-looped brown braid sent a

scattering of hair-pins along the floor. Her partner, the proprietor

of the local livery stable, was conducting her through the mazes of

the dance with many fancy steps. An occasional haughty glance, a loudly

defiant quality in her laugh, and the pert air with which she flounced

through the figures, indicated to the watcher that she was acutely

conscious of Barney Sullivan, leaning against the wall opposite and

eying her with jealous, hang-dog adoration.

In this assemblage of rustic beauty, red, over-heated, and somewhat

blowsy, Mercedes Gracey looked smaller, finer and more delicately

finished than she had in the afternoon glow, with nature for a

background. That she should be participating with obvious pleasure in

such an humble entertainment did not surprise the Colonel, used to the

democratic leveling of ranks that obtained in foot-hill California.

It did not strike him as any more remarkable than that she should be

enjoying the society of Joe Mosely, who kept the Sunset Saloon at

Thompson’s Flat, and twenty years before, in the days of his own and

the state’s uncontrolled youth, had “killed his man” and narrowly

escaped lynching in Hangtown.

The watcher’s eye left her with reluctance, for a man at any age, even

with a heart cold to the appeal of woman, will linger on the spectacle

of youthful beauty. Then his glance swept the wall behind her, where

the opened windows were filled with men’s heads, and along the upper

end of which a bench ran. On this bench sat a young woman, alone, her

head, in profile toward him, thrown out like a painting against the

wooden background.

The Colonel’s gaze stopped with a suddenness which suggested the

snapping of an internal spring. A fixed, rigid gravity of observation

swept all humor from his face, leaving it staring, absorbed, marked

with lines. There was nothing about the girl to warrant this access

of motionless interest. No better proof could be given of the fact

that she was not in any way beautiful or pretty than that, at the very

height of the dance, she was evidently partnerless.

Dejection marked her attitude and the youthful profile which she

presented to the watcher. Her body had settled back against the wall in

a pose of apathetic acquiescence, her hands in her lap, her small feet,

which her short skirt revealed, limply crossed. Her dress, of a soft

yellowish material, spotted at intervals with a crimson flower, set

with some degree of grace and accuracy over the lines of her slightly

developed, childish figure. Her feet and hands, the latter showing

red against the white forearm that her half-sleeve left bare, were in

keeping with the air of fragile smallness which seemed to add a touch

of extra pathos to her neglected condition. She did not look like the

country girls about her. The Colonel noticed that her hair was cut

short as a boy’s. Round the ear and temple that he could see, longer

hairs curled slightly.

His immovable scrutiny lasted for some minutes. Then he threw his cigar

into the darkness, and, pushing by the loungers at the door, entered

the room and threaded his way through the dancers to where she sat. In

the noise about her she did not hear his approach or know that any one

was near, till he sat down on the bench beside her and said,

“You don’t seem to be dancing?”

She started and turned a face upon him, the surprise of which was

partly dispersed by hope of cheer. It was a charming face, if not a

pretty one; the skin of a soft, warm pallor, the chin pointed, the

mouth small, the middle of the upper lip drooping in a slight point on

the lower. Her eyes of a clear, greenish-brown, showed an unusually

straight line of under lid. A smile born of relief and the desire to be

ingratiating hovered on her lips, and brought into being a dimple in

one cheek.

In the first moment of encounter the Colonel saw all these details. The

profile had struck him into a trance-like fixity of observation. Now

at the full face, the smile with which he had accompanied his words

died away. He stared at her for a moment speechless and motionless. And

then, with a muttered ejaculation, he half turned from her and looked

at the dancers.

The girl was amazed, for she had never seen him before. Her hopes of a

partner were forgotten in her alarmed surprise at the demeanor of the

person she thought had come to succor her in a dreary hour. She sat

looking at him, wondering what to say and nervously rolling the wad of

handkerchief she held from hand to hand.

The next moment he had turned back to her, commanding his features into

the conventional smile of young acquaintance.

“I must beg your pardon,” he said, “for speaking to you without an

introduction, but I thought you’d let an old fellow like me come over

here and have a few moments’ talk. I don’t dance, you see, and so I was

having a pretty lonely time out there on the piazza.”

His eyes roamed over her face, their eagerness of inspection curiously

at variance with his careless words. Her surprise vanished instantly;

she turned herself a little that she might more directly face him. She

was evidently delighted to have any companion. Looking at him, she

smiled with pleased relief and said in a singularly sweet voice,

“Oh, I’m so glad you came! I’ve been sitting here just this way for

ever so long. I haven’t danced for three dances. Joe Mosely asked me

and then nobody has since. I thought I’d go home, it was so lonesome.”

At the sound of her voice, marked not only by a natural sweetness

of tone, but by a refinement of pronunciation very rare among the

inhabitants of the country districts, the Colonel was again thrown

into numbed, staring silence. He felt that he should have liked to

rise and walk back and forth for a moment and shake himself, in order

to awake from the strange and poignant memories this girl’s face and

voice brought up. He was recalled to himself by seeing the smile slowly

freezing on her lips, and the confidence of her eyes becoming clouded

with alarm.

“The child will think I’m mad,” he thought, and said aloud: “You’ve

startled me and I guess I’ve done the same to you. But you look very

like--extraordinarily like--some one, some one, I once knew.”

She was immediately at her ease again.

“I look like my mother,” she said. “Every one says that.”

“Where is your mother?” he asked absently, surveying her with a

renewed, wary intentness.

“Here,” she answered.

“Here?” he queried, looking round the room--“where?”

“Oh, not here to-night”--she looked away from him and gave a quick,

short sigh--“home, I mean. Mother’s quite sick. Sometimes I think she’s

very sick.”

Her face, which was one of the most flexible mobility, lost all

its brightness. Her eyes looked mournfully at him, pleading for a

contradiction.

“Perhaps,” he said with the rush of pity that he felt for all small

feeble things, especially feminine feeble things, “she’s not as sick as

you think. When you live with a person who is sick you’re apt to think

them worse than outsiders do.”

“Well, perhaps so,” she acquiesced, immediately showing symptoms of

brightening. “It probably seems queer to you that I should be here

to-night when mother’s sick. But she and father and Rosamund insisted

on my coming. They wanted me to go to a party for once anyway, and have

a good time. But I haven’t had a good time at all. Just before you came

I thought I’d go home, I felt so miserable sitting here alone. Only two

people have asked me to dance.”

“You’ve not been in Foleys very long?” the Colonel suggested, in order

to account for this strange lack of gallantry on the part of the

country swains.

“Three years; nearly four now,” she said, looking at him with raised

eyebrows. “Of course, I don’t know as many people as Mitty Bruce does.

And then there are some of the men round here mother never liked us to

know. They----”

She paused, evidently considering that she had better not reveal the

reasons why she had been cautioned against certain of the local beaux.

But her spirit was weak, and her companion not making any comment, she

moved a little nearer to him on the bench and said in a lowered key,

“Some of them occasionally get drunk!”

“Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly.

“So I don’t know so very many. But I thought I’d know enough to have

partners. But you never can tell. And then my hair makes me look such a

fright. I might have had more partners if it had been longer.”

She passed a small hand, which he noticed was rough and red, over her

cropped crown, ruffling the short locks on her forehead.

“How--how did it come to be so?” he asked, looking at it with

admiration tinged with curiosity.

“I’ve been sick. I was very sick last winter with a fever, and so in

April when I was getting better they cut it all off. We had a bad

winter up here, it was so terribly wet. I never saw anything worse; our

house leaked all over.”

“It was a wet winter,” he assented. “And I heard it was a good deal

worse up here than it was down below.”

“It was dreadful. The rains were so heavy even in March that a big

piece of land near where we live slid down. Where it used to be just

a slope it’s now like a precipice. And with mother sick and all the

trouble to keep things warm and dry, I got the fever. That’s why

they made me come to-night--just to have a little amusement, mother

said, because I’d had such a hard winter. And we made this dress--”

she touched the skirt with a hand that betrayed a conscious feminine

satisfaction in her apparel--“it’s some stuff mother had, very good

stuff. We couldn’t have afforded to buy anything like it, and I don’t

think you could here at Foleys. But we did spend something. These

flowers--” she indicated two bunches of artificial red roses at her

neck and belt--“we bought them. They were a dollar; fifty cents each

bunch.”

She touched the bunch at her waist with a light, arranging hand, saw

something which made her brows contract and her fingers seize on the

flowers and drag them hurriedly away from their resting place. Where

they had been a red stain--dye from the cheap leaves--disfigured her

dress.

She stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at the Colonel in

blank, heart-stricken dismay.

“Why, look what they’ve done,” she faltered.

The Colonel for a moment was nonplussed. He had no consolation for such

a catastrophe. The girl seized her handkerchief and rubbed the mark

with dainty energy. The red dye was imparted to the handkerchief but

the stain was only enlarged.

“Mother’s dress!” she moaned, rubbing distractedly. “Why, she kept it

for years in the trunk, waiting for some such time as this to come. And

now look at it!”

She raised tragic eyes to the Colonel’s face. He would have delighted

in offering her another dress--anything she had chosen to buy. But she

was a lady and this he could not do. So he sat looking sympathetically

at her, inwardly swearing at the social conventions which made it

impossible for him to repair the damage. He felt a man’s pity for the

meanness of the disaster that had such a power to darken and blight one

poor little girl’s horizon.

“Don’t rub any more,” was all he could say, “I’m afraid it’s only

making it worse. Maybe your mother will know of some way of cleaning

it.”

The girl made no reply for the moment. He could see that the mishap had

completely dashed her spirits. She unpinned the other bunch, which had

left an even uglier mark at her throat, and laid them down beside her

on the bench.

“What an unlucky evening!” she exclaimed, looking down at them with

an air of utter dejection. “Only two people ask me to dance, and the

flowers we paid a dollar for spoil my dress, my first party dress. And

they all wanted me to come because I was going to have such a good

time!”

She looked from her flowers to her stained dress, shaking her head

slowly as though words were inadequate to express the direness of

the catastrophe. The Colonel was afraid she was going to cry, but she

showed no symptom of tears. She seemed a strayed member of the class

which is taught to control its lachrymal glands in public and keep its

violent emotions out of sight. But her face showed a distress that was

to him extremely pitiful.

“Cheer up,” he said. “As far as the dancing goes the evening’s only

half over. And partners--you don’t want to dance with these country

bumpkins.”

He lowered his voice at the words, which were indeed rank heresy in the

democratic purlieus of Foleys, and made a surreptitious gesture which

swept the room.

“Who else is there?” said the girl, who did not show any tendency to

combat his low opinion of Foleys’ _jeunesse dorée_. “And when you come

to a party you expect to dance.”

“I’ll get something better for you than that,” said the Colonel,

rising. “Wait here for a minute or two. I won’t be gone long and I’ll

bring you back somebody worth having for a partner.”

She smiled faintly at him, and he turned, passed through the circling

whirl of dancers, and stepped out on the balcony again.

[Illustration: SHE SMILED FAINTLY AT HIM]

By an adjacent window he saw two masculine figures and smelt the

pungent odor of the superior tobacco with which they were beguiling the

passing hour. Rion Gracey’s face, gilded by the light of the window,

was toward him. The well-shaped back which the other presented to his

gaze he recognized as that of Jerry Barclay. He bore down upon them,

clapping one hand upon Barclay’s shoulder, with the words,

“Look here, you fellows, I want partners for a girl in there.”

Gracey frowned and said demurringly,

“Now, Jim, what’s the use of coming down on me? Don’t you know I’m no

dancing man?”

The other answered,

“Let’s see the girl first. Where is she?”--looking in through the

window--“the one over there in pink? Oh, we don’t deserve that. What’s

the matter with your being the Good Samaritan and dancing with her

yourself?”

“It’s not the one in pink, and you’ve got to come. The poor little

thing hasn’t had but two partners this evening and it’s most broken her

heart. Here, come along! I’m going to see that she has some fun before

this metropolitan orgy ends.”

Gracey threw away his cigar with a suppressed groan of acquiescence.

The other man, shaking his coat into shape, said,

“Lead on. Beauty in distress always appeals to me. Having rounded us up

you may as well lose no time in taking us to the sacrifice.”

The Colonel with his prizes at his heels reëntered the room. The two

men looked very different in the light of the kerosene lamps. Gracey

having resolved to do what he had been asked, hid his unwillingness

under a demeanor of stiff gravity. Barclay was evidently amused and not

averse to following out the adventure. His look of a different world

was more marked than ever by contrast with the clumsy country-men

about him, but his capacity to adjust himself to all environments made

him cross the room with an easy grace, when his companion was obviously

out of his element.

The Colonel, flanked by his reinforcements, came to a stand before the

young girl. She looked up, smiling, her eye lighting on one man and

then on the other. She was surprised, delighted, a trifle embarrassed,

as the men could see by a sudden access of color in her cheeks.

“Here,” said the Colonel, “are two gentlemen who have been outside

watching us and dying to come in and have a dance. Will you take pity

on them, Miss--Miss--” he paused, suddenly realizing that he did not

know her name.

“Miss,” he stammered for the third time, and then bent down toward her

and said in a lowered voice,

“My dear young lady, forgive me, but you know I don’t know what your

name is.”

“My name?” she said, smiling. “Why, how funny! My name is Allen, June

Allen. My father is Beauregard Allen and we live on the Parrish tract.”

The Colonel straightened himself suddenly, almost flinching. The two

men were looking at the girl and the girl at them, so that none of the

trio noticed his expression. He cleared his throat before he spoke.

“Allen,” he said, “Miss Allen, let me introduce Mr. Rion Gracey and Mr.

Barclay.”

The introductions were acknowledged and as the men sat down on either

side of the no longer lonely young woman the Colonel, with a short

“Good night,” turned and left them.

He passed quickly through the dancing-room on to the balcony, his body

erect, his eyes staring straight before him. The name of Allen was loud

in his ears. It had struck like a dagger thrust through the trained

indifference of years and torn open an old wound.

CHAPTER IV

O, MINE ENEMY!

In his room he lit the lamp and flung the window wide. It opened on

the upper balcony, and through the foliage of the locusts he could see

the lights of the town, and farther up, between the interstices of

the branches, pieces of the night sky sown with stars. The scent of

the drooping blossoms was heavy on the air. From below the music came

softened, and the house vibrated with the rhythmic swing of the dance.

He stood for a moment staring upward and absently listening, then went

back into his room, and sat down by the table, his head propped on his

hand.

The old wound, so suddenly torn open, was bleeding. The lonely man

seemed to feel the slow drops falling from it. Passion and despair,

dulled by time, were suddenly endowed with the force they had had

twenty-one years ago. They had the vitality of a deathless tragedy.

The time of his courtship and engagement to Alice Joyce had been that

period when he had held happiness in his arms and thought that she

would stay for ever. Alice had been a school-teacher in Sacramento,

an orphan girl sent out from Boston in forty-nine to join relatives

already settled in California. Her parents had been people of means

and she had been highly educated. But her father had lost his money

and then died, and Alice had been forced to earn her living. She was

young, gentle-mannered and very pretty. Her daughter--that girl down

stairs--was surprisingly, appallingly like her, only Alice had been

prettier. Her face in its soft youth rose before him. It was the face

of the girl down stairs touched with a clearer bloom, the lips redder,

the cheeks more delicately rounded. But the eyes with the straight

lower lid and the greenish-brown iris were the same, and so was the

pointed chin and the one dimple.

He had been a miner, doing his work with the others in the great days

on the American River, when he met her on a trip to Sacramento. He was

thirty-four and had cared little for women till then, but he loved her

from the first without hesitation or uncertainty. She was his mate, the

other half of him who would round out and perfect his life. That he had

nothing was of no matter. There was always a living for the man who

worked in those uncrowded days, and Jim Parrish was a worker, a mighty

man with the pick, who could stand knee deep in the water all day, and

at night sleep the sleep of the just on the dry grass under the stars.

Those had been Jim Parrish’s great days, “the butt and sea-mark of his

sail.” Life had unrolled before him like a map, all pleasant rivers and

smiling plains. At intervals he went to Sacramento to see Alice. She

had other suitors, but she was his from the first, and nestled inside

the protection of this strong man’s love with the tender trust of her

soft and dependent nature.

Parrish had one friend and confidant, John Beauregard Allen. They had

crossed the Isthmus together in forty-eight, had roomed together in

the sprawling town scattered about the curve of San Francisco Bay, had

rushed to the foot-hills when the mill race at Sutter’s Creek startled

the world with its sediment of yellow dust. Once in a gambling-house

in Sonora, Parrish had struck up the revolver which threatened his

friend’s life, the bullet ripping its way across his own shoulder in a

red furrow he would carry to his death.

Allen was a Southerner, a South Carolinian of birth and education, a

man of daring and adventurous character, possessed of unusual good

looks and personal charm. To Parrish, a simpler nature, born and

reared in poverty in a small town in western New York, the brilliant

Southerner was all that was generous, brave and chivalrous. The

friendship between the two men was of a strength that neither thought

could ever be broken. The one subject of friction between them was

slavery, already beginning to burn in the thoughts and speech of men.

Allen’s father was a wealthy slave-owner, and the son was in California

to satisfy his spirit of adventure and to conquer fortune on his own

account. He was one of that large colony of Southerners, in some cases

blatant and pretentious, in others brilliant and large-hearted, which

in later years gave tone to the city, formed its manners, established

its code of morals, and tried to direct its political life.

The rude environment of the mines was distasteful to him, and he

returned to San Francisco where, backed by his father, he started

in business. Letters passed between the friends, and as Parrish’s

courtship progressed he poured out his heart to Allen in pages that,

in after years, he remembered with impotent fury. All the hopes and

aspirations of his new life, when a woman should be beside him and a

woman’s hand should be clasped in his, were told to his absent friend.

At length, after an engagement of some weeks, the date for the marriage

was set. Before this took place Alice wished to visit her relatives,

who lived in San Francisco, and there buy the trousseau for which

she had been saving her salary. Parrish reluctantly consented to her

departure. While she was gone he would build for his bride a cottage in

Hangtown where his mining operations were then conducted. Before she

left he wrote a letter to Beauregard Allen giving him her address and

asking him to call on her.

Alice’s visit of a month lengthened to two. Her letters, which at first

had been full of Allen’s name, toward the middle of the second month

contained little or no mention of him. Her excuse for the postponing

of her return was that the work of dressmakers had been slower than

she had expected. Also her relatives had urged upon her to prolong her

stay, as they did not know when they might see her again.

A less blind lover might have seen matter for uneasiness in the more

reserved tone, the growing brevity of these letters. A suspicious lover

might have wondered why Allen had not only ceased to praise the charm

and beauty of his friend’s betrothed, but had almost entirely stopped

writing. Jim Parrish was disturbed by neither uneasiness nor suspicion.

That sweetheart and friend could combine to deal him the deadly blow in

store for him was beyond his power of imagination.

Finally a date was set for Alice’s return. Her clothes were all bought,

packed and paid for. Her last letter, the tone of which for the first

time struck him as constrained and cold, told him the steamer on which

she would arrive and the hour it was due. Before this Parrish had

written to Allen, urging his attendance at his wedding and suggesting

that he act as Alice’s escort on the trip to Sacramento. To this his

friend had replied that he would do so if possible, but the demands

of his business were engrossing. The cottage at Hangtown was finished

and furnished as well as the bridegroom’s scanty means would permit.

In a dream of joy he left it, went down to Sacramento, bought the few

clothes that went to the making of his wedding outfit, and then waited

for the steamer with the high, exalted happiness of the man who is

about to be united to the woman he honestly loves.

When the steamer arrived neither Allen nor Alice was on board. He was

stunned at first, not having had the least anticipation of such a

catastrophe. Then a fear that she might be sick seized upon him and

he sought the captain for any information he might have. Contrary to

his expectation, the captain was full of information. The lady and

gentleman had boarded the steamer at San Francisco, holding through

tickets for Sacramento. After they had passed Contra Costa, however,

the gentleman had come to him, telling him of a sudden change in their

plans and urging him to put them ashore at the first stopping place.

This he had done at Benecia. He had heard one of them say something

about going to San José. The lady, however, would explain it more

satisfactorily in the letter she had left, and he handed Parrish a

letter addressed in Alice’s writing.

The listener had been dazed during the first part of the captain’s

recital. He could not understand what had happened, only an icy

premonition of evil clutched his heart. Alice’s letter cleared up all

uncertainty.

In a few blotted, incoherent lines she told him of her intention to

leave the steamer with Allen, cross to San José, and there marry him.

Her love for her fiancé had been shriveled to ashes before the flame

of the Southerner’s fiery wooing. But she averred that she had in

the beginning repulsed his attentions, fully intending to return to

Sacramento and fulfill her engagement with Parrish. She had not known

Allen intended accompanying her on the trip to Sacramento. Had she

known, she never would have permitted it. It was on the steamer that he

had finally prevailed over her conscience and beaten down her scruples,

till she had agreed to elope with him.

Jim Parrish never knew how he reached his hotel room that evening. He

sat there a long time--a day and a night he thought--staring at his

wedding clothes spread on the bed. What roused him from his benumbed

condition was a newspaper from San José bearing a marked announcement

of the marriage. A letter from Allen followed this. It was short but

characteristically grandiloquent. In it he stated that he had broken

the sacred obligations of friendship, but that his passion for the

woman had overborne every other sentiment. He was from henceforward

an outcast from honest men, a fitting punishment for one who had held

his honor as his dearest possession, and who had brought a blot upon a

heretofore stainless name.

The letter roused Parrish like a hand on his neck. It was so like the

writer, with its theatrical pose and its high talk of his honor and

his name. A flood of fury rose in the betrayed man, and he walked the

streets of the city with murder in his heart. Had he met his one-time

friend he would have rushed upon him and stamped and beaten his life

out. Feelings of hatred he had never known he could harbor burned in

him. At night he walked for miles, his hands clenched as he struggled

with these unfamiliar demons that seemed tearing the ligaments of his

life apart.

For Alice his love neither changed nor ceased. He believed her to

have been overborne by Allen, carried off her feet by the reckless

impetuosity he himself had once thought so dazzling. If Allen had left

her alone, if when he felt love rise in him, he had withdrawn from her,

Parrish knew that the girl would have remained true to him and now

would be his wife, nestled in his arms, asking no better resting place.

At times, in the lonely watches of the night, he thought that, but for

the false friend, she would have been beside him, her head against his

shoulder, her light breath touching his cheek as she slept. It goaded

him up and out into the darkness torn by the rage that drives men to

murder.

Then, his first fury spent, he tried to rearrange his life--to begin

again. He gave the cottage at Hangtown to his partner and moved his

mining operations to Sonora. Soon after he began to meet with his first

small successes. Now that he had no need for money it came to him. By

the time the Civil War broke out he was a man of means and mark.

Once or twice in these years he heard of John Beauregard Allen and his

wife. They had prospered for a time, then bad luck had fallen upon

them. Allen’s father, reputed a rich man, died insolvent, leaving

nothing but debts. Allen’s own business in San Francisco had failed and

they had left there in the fifties. Once, just before the war, stopping

for a day or two at Downieville, Parrish had accidentally heard that

they had been living there and that Mrs. Allen had lost a little boy,

her only son. He had left by the first stage, his heart gripped by the

thought of Alice, a mother, mourning for her dead child.

In sixty he had returned to the East to fight for the Union. Five years

later he came back as Colonel Parrish, a title earned by distinguished

services to his country. It was said by his friends that Jim Parrish

would have been a millionaire if he had stayed by his mines and his

investments as other men had. But Parrish had cared more for the Union

than for money. And, after all, what good was money to him! Often in

the four years of battle and bloodshed he had wondered if he ever would

meet Beauregard Allen face to face in the smoke, and whether, if he

did, the thought of a woman and children would hold his hand. But he

never did. He learned afterward that Allen had remained in California.

After his return from the war he heard of them only once. This was in

a club in San Francisco, where a mining superintendent, recently back

from Virginia City, casually mentioned the fact that Beauregard Allen,

a prominent figure in early San Francisco, was holding a small position

in the assay office there. In the succeeding four or five years they

dropped completely out of sight. It seemed to him that what had long

been an open wound was now a scar. Peace, the gray peace of a heart

that neither hopes nor desires, was his.

And suddenly without warning or expectation, his old enemy was standing

in his path. Allen the squatter, the man who was claiming _his_ land,

the man whose children had been improving it, was John Beauregard

Allen! It was Alice’s daughter who had been sitting on the bench in her

poor dress with her coarsened hands. It was Alice who was the “mother”

that was sick.

He rose from his seat with a groan, and going to the window pushed

aside the curtain and looked out. The lamp behind him sputtered and,

sending a rank smell into the air, went out. The day was dawning. A

pale gray light mounted the sky behind the locust trees quivering each

moment into a warmer brightness.

By its searching clearness the Colonel’s face looked old and worn. It

was a face of a leathern brownness of skin, against which the white

hair and gray mustache stood out in curious contrast. The brows were

bushy, the eyes they shadowed clear gray, deep-set and steady, with an

under-look of melancholy always showing through their twinkle of humor.

There was no humor in them now. They were old and sad, the lines round

them deep as were those that marked the forehead under its rough white

hair.

Through the branches of the trees he could see the slopes of his own

land, the thick dark growth of chaparral muffling the hillside, and on

its crest the glow of the east barred by the trunks of pines. As he

remembered, the cottage was somewhere below them, on the edge of the

cleared stretch which ran along the road. They were there--Alice and

her children, beggars on the land Beauregard Allen was trying to steal

from him.

CHAPTER V

THE SUMMONS

Later on in the morning the Colonel waked from a few hours of uneasy

slumber. He had thrown himself dressed on his bed and dropped into a

sleep from which he had been roused by the morning sounds of Foleys.

The lethargy and depression of the night of memories clung heavily to

him, and as he dressed he decided that he would leave the camp that

morning, sending word to Cusack the lawyer that he would let the matter

of the squatter rest for a few days.

As he left the dining-room after breakfast, he was accosted by a

stable-man, who informed him that Kit Carson was inclined to “go

tender” on one of his front feet. The man did not know when the Colonel

intended leaving, but if it was that day he would advise him to “wait

over a spell” and let Kit “rest up.” Nearly a hundred and forty miles

in thirty-six hours--especially with the sun so hot at midday, was a

pretty serious proposition even for Kit Carson.

The Colonel stood silent for a moment looking at the man from under

frowning brows. It would be possible for him to take one of Forsythe’s

horses, ride to Milton, and there get the Stockton stage. Forsythe’s

boy could ride Kit back to Sacramento when his front foot ceased to be

tender. But after all, what was the use of running from the situation?

There it was, to be thought out and dealt with. It was Fate that had

lamed the never tired or disabled Kit just at this juncture.

With a word to the man that he would stay over till the horse was in

proper condition, he passed through the hall and along the balcony

to the side which flanked the dining-room. Its boarded length was

deserted, with, before each window, a social gathering of chairs as

they had been arranged by on-lookers during last night’s revel. A long

line of locust trees, their foliage motionless in the warm air, grew

between the hotel fence and the road, throwing the balcony in a scented

shade.

Between their trunks the Colonel could survey the main street of

Foleys, already wrapped in its morning state of somnolence, its

unstirred dust beaten upon by a relentless blaze of sun. Under the

covered sidewalk a shirt-sleeved figure now and then passed with

loitering step, or a sun-bonneted woman picked her way through the

dust. The male population of the camp was, for the most part, gathered

in detached groups which marked the doorways of saloons. Each member

of a group occupied a wooden arm-chair, had his heels raised high on a

hitching bar, his hat well down on his nose, while a spiral of smoke

issued from beneath the brim. Now and then some one spoke and the

Colonel could see the heads under the tilted hats slowly turning to

survey the speaker. At intervals, however, a word was passed of sudden,

energizing import. It roused the group which rose as a man and filed

into the saloon. When they emerged, they seated themselves, the silence

resettled, and all appeared to drowse. The one being who defied the

soporific effect of the hour was an unseen player on the French horn

who beguiled the morning stillness with variations of the melody, _When

this Cruel War is Over_.

The Colonel, smoking his morning cigar, surveyed the outlook with the

unseeing eyes of extreme preoccupation. He did not even notice the

presence of the saddled horse which a stable-man had led up to the gate

just below where he sat. Some louder admonition of the man’s to the

fretting animal finally caught his ear and his fixed eyes fell on it.

It was a stately creature, satin-flanked and slender-legged, stamping

and shaking its long mane in its impatience. The neat pack of the

traveler was tied behind the saddle.

“Whose horse is that, Tom?” said the Colonel, knowing its type strange

to Foleys. “Didn’t the Gracey boys go back last night?”

“Yes. The whole Buckeye Belle outfit rode back at three. This is Jerry

Barclay’s horse. He’s goin’ on this morning to Thompson’s Flat. Barclay

rid him up from Stockton--won’t take no livery horse. Has this one sent

up on the boat.”

As the man spoke the Colonel heard a quick step on the balcony behind

him, and the owner of the horse came around the corner, smiling,

handsome, debonair in his loose-fitting clothes, long riding boots and

wide-brimmed hat.

“Morning, Colonel,” he said; “I see the tropical calm of Foleys is

affecting you. Take example by me--off for twenty miles across country

to Thompson’s Flat.”

He ran down the steps and out into the road. There, standing in the

dust putting on his gloves, he let a quick, investigating eye run over

his horse.

“I intended starting at sun-up,” he said, “and then they went and

forgot to wake me. Now I have to ride twenty miles over roads a foot

deep in dust and under a sun as hot as a smelting furnace.”

“Shouldn’t have been so dissipated last night,” said the Colonel. “What

time did you get to bed?”

The young man, who was adjusting his stirrup, turned round.

“Oh, that was the dearest little girl last night. Where’d you find her?

And how did a girl like that ever grow up in a God-forsaken spot like

Foleys?”

He vaulted into the saddle not waiting for an answer. Then as his

horse, curvetting and backing in a last ecstasy of impatience, churned

up a cloud of dust, he called,

“I’m quite fascinated. Going to stop over on my way back. Give May or

April or June or whatever her name is, my love. _Hasta mañana_, old

man!”

The horse, at length liberated, plunged forward and dashed up the

road, the soft diminishing thud of its hoofs for a moment filling the

silence. The stable-man slouched lazily off, and the Colonel was once

more left to his cigar and his meditations.

These were soon as deeply engrossing as ever. With his eyes looking

down the sun-steeped street he was not aware of a blue-clothed feminine

figure which came into view along the highway upon which the balcony

fronted. At first she walked quickly in a blaze of sun, then crossed

the road, charily holding up her skirt, and approached in the shadow of

the locusts. She wore a blue-and-white cotton dress, a sun-burnt straw

hat, trimmed with a blue ribbon, and as she drew near was revealed to

be a young girl in the end of her teens, large, finely-shaped, and

erect.

Walking on the outside of the fence she eyed the Colonel for a

scrutinizing moment, then stopping at the gate, opened it with a

slight click, and stood hesitating. He heard the sound, looked up,

and met her eyes--blue and inquiring--fixed gravely on him. She had a

firmly-modeled, handsome face, full of rich, youthful tints and mellow

curves. Her straw hat sent a clean wash of shade to just below her

nose. Under this, in the blinding steadiness of the sunlight, her mouth

and chin, the former large and with strongly curved lips, looked as

smooth and fresh as portions of a ripe fruit. There was hesitation but

no embarrassment in her attitude. Even at this first glance one might

guess that this was a young woman devoid of self-consciousness and not

readily embarrassed.

“Are you Colonel Parrish?” she said in a rather loud, clear voice.

He rose, throwing away his cigar, and replied with an affirmative that

he tried not to make astonished.

She ascended the steps, again hesitated, and then held out a sun-burnt

hand.

“I’m glad I found you,” she said, as he released it. “I thought perhaps

you might have gone on to the Buckeye Belle. Everybody goes there now.

My name is Allen, Rosamund Allen. You met my sister June last night.”

“Oh,” murmured the Colonel, and then he gave a weak, “Of course. Sit

down.”

He was glad of the moment’s respite that getting her a chair and

placing it gave him. She was the second daughter. In that first glance

of startled investigation he had seen no particular likeness to either

parent. This girl would not tear his heart by looking at him with her

mother’s eyes.

“I--I--enjoyed meeting your sister last night,” he said as they found

themselves seated facing each other. “She--she--” He did not know what

to say. He wondered why the girl had come. Had some one sent her?

She looked at him with her clear, calm eyes, cool and interested. She

was unquestionably handsomer than her sister. A year or two younger

he guessed, though much larger, a typical Californian in her downy

bloom of skin and fullness of contour. Her simple dress had been

designed with taste and set with a grace that was imparted more by

the beautiful lines of the body it covered than any particular skill

in its fashioning. There was the same neatness and care of detail

in her humble adornments that he had noticed in her sister’s--the

ineradicable daintiness of the woman whose forebears have lived

delicately.

“June had such a good time last night,” she said with an air of

volubility. “At first she said it was dreadful. Hardly any one asked

her to dance, and she didn’t see how she could wait for father, who was

going to call for her at twelve. And then you came and introduced those

gentlemen to her. After that she had the loveliest time. She didn’t

want to go at all when father came. She made him wait till two!”

“I’m glad she enjoyed it. It was pretty dull for her at first. She

didn’t want to dance with the kind of men that were there. I was glad

to introduce Rion Gracey to her. He’s more or less of a neighbor of

yours, according to foot-hill distances.”

The Colonel was fencing, watching the girl and wondering why she had

come. She had the air of settling down to a leisurely, enjoyable gossip.

“Yes. We never met him before. It’s funny, because they’ve been here

over a year; up at the Buckeye Belle, of course. But then, they ride

in here all the time. I’ve often seen both the Graceys riding past our

place. The road in from there goes by our land. You know where that

is?--the long strip back there--” waving her hand in the direction of

the Colonel’s disputed acres--“where the tall pines are, and--”

She stopped, crimsoning to her hair. She had evidently suddenly

realized to whom she was so glibly talking. There was no question but

that she was embarrassed now. She bent her burning face down and began

to make little pleats in her dress with her sun-burnt fingers.

“I know, I know,” said the Colonel, exceedingly embarrassed himself,

“right back there. Yes, of course. On the road that goes to Thompson’s

Flat. By the way, I hope your sister’s dress wasn’t seriously damaged

last night. The dye coming off the flowers, I mean.”

The girl heaved a breath of relief and tilted her head to one side

regarding the pleats she had made from a different view point. For her

age and environment her aplomb was remarkable.

“Yes, I’m afraid it’s very badly marked. They were such cheap flowers.

Mother thinks we can arrange something with rosettes.”

She ceased her pleating, raised her head fully, and looked at him.

“Mother was so pleased and so astonished when she heard from June about

meeting you. She used to know you well, she said--a long time ago,

before she was married.”

Her eyes looked innocently and gravely into his. There was no

concealment in them. She was speaking frankly and honestly. Now the

Colonel knew she had been sent. He braced himself for her coming words.

“Yes, I knew your mother,” he said, hearing his voice sound husky.

“But, as you say, it was a long time ago.”

“Mother got quite excited when she heard it was you. You know she’s not

well and the least thing upsets her. She couldn’t believe it at first.

Then she wondered if you wouldn’t come up and see her and sent me down

to ask you.”

Alice had sent her. After twenty-one years Alice had sent this message

for him! And it was all so natural and simple--a moment that sometimes,

in hours of melancholy brooding, he had thought of, and always seen

fraught with tragic passion. He bent to pick up a locust blossom that

a wandering zephyr had wafted along the balcony floor. For a moment he

made no answer. He could not trust his voice. The girl continued, not

noticing his silence.

“She doesn’t see many people. She’s sick, you know; June said she told

you. And then there’s not many people round here for her to see. I

suppose you’ll find her changed if you haven’t seen her since she was

married. She’s changed a good deal lately, poor mother!”

She gave a sigh and looked away from him. The Colonel answered quickly:

“Oh, yes, I’ll come, I’ll come.”

His visitor did not seem to notice anything unusual in his manner of

accepting the invitation of an old friend. The trouble of her mother’s

changed condition was uppermost in her mind.

“I dare say you won’t know it’s the same person. But don’t let her

see that. We want her to be bright and cheerful, and if people look

surprised when they see her it makes her think she’s worse--” She

looked anxiously at him, but his face was averted. There was a slight

pause and then she said in a low voice:

“Mother has consumption, Colonel Parrish.”

This time he turned and stared straight at her. Her eyes, full of sad

meaning, were fixed on him. The other daughter’s remarks had led him to

suppose that Alice was suffering from some temporary illness. Now he

knew that she was dying.

“It was Virginia City that did it,” the girl continued. “She wasn’t

strong for years. A long time ago in Downieville our brother, younger

than we were, died, and father always thought she never got over that.

But in Virginia there were such hard winters and those awful winds

blew so! We were there for two years before we came here; and she had

pneumonia and after that she didn’t get well. But we stayed on there,

for father had some work in the assay office, and though everything

cost a terrible price, it was better than what he got in the mines over

here.”

The Colonel was half turned from her in his chair. She could see his

profile with the shaggy brows drawn over his eyes.

“She doctored there for a long time, and everything cost so much money!

Then one day, one of the doctors told father she’d never get well if

she stayed in that climate. ‘Take her to California, to the foot-hills

where the air’s hot and dry,’ he said, ‘that’s the only chance you’ve

got.’ So we sold everything and left Virginia and came over here. We

tried several places, but some of them didn’t seem to suit her, and in

others they asked too high rents. We had hardly anything left. And then

we just came here and settled on that--on our--on your--” She came to

a stammering stop and then ended desperately--“in that empty cottage

over there.”

The Colonel rose and walked to the balcony rail. He stood for a moment

with his back toward her, then slowly wheeled and approached her. She

had risen and was looking at him with a perplexed expression.

“That’s all right,” he said, taking her hand. “I’ll be up this

afternoon. Will between four and five do?”

She considered as a town lady might whose day was full of engagements.

She was, in fact, speculating as to whether she and her sister would be

free from the domestic tasks which filled their waking hours.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “that’ll be a very good time. Mother rests

and we--we are busy in the early part of the afternoon.”

She held out her hand to him, and as he walked down the steps beside

her to the gate, again expressed her pleasure at having found him.

“June told me what you looked like,” she said over the gate, eying

him thoughtfully as if she intended giving June her opinion of the

stranger’s appearance. “So I knew if you were anywhere round I’d find

you.”

She smiled a last good-by and turned away to the walk under the

locusts. The Colonel went back to his seat on the balcony. He lit a

fresh cigar and sat there smoking till Mitty came to summon him to the

midday dinner.

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD LOVE

At half-past four he was walking through the dust toward the cottage.

The main feeling in his heart was dread. But he could not disregard

Alice’s summons--Alice’s dying summons, he felt them to be. He tried

to prepare himself by thinking that nearly a quarter of a century had

passed, and what havoc it must have wrought. But he saw only the face

of the girl he had loved, fresh and sweet, as it had been when he had

bidden her good-by on the steamer on a morning full of sun and hope,

twenty-one years ago.

He had left the town’s main street behind and was now walking on

a narrow footpath beside the road which, on one side, skirted his

own land. A still, scorching warmth had possession of the hour. The

landscape, glazed with heat, seemed to faint under the unwinking glare

of sun. From the parched grassland and the thickets of chaparral,

pungent scents arose--the ardent odors that the woods of foot-hill

California exhale in the hot, breathless quiescence of summer

afternoons.

His unseeing eye passed over the rise and fall of the rich tract he

had held so negligently. The broken fence beside him divided an

ocher-colored expanse of uncultivated land from the road. The air

came over it in glassy waves, carrying its dry, aromatic perfume to

his nostrils. On its burnt expanse a few huge live-oaks rose dark and

dome-like, their shadows, black and irregular, staining the ground

beneath them. Beyond the chaparral swept up the hillside, a close

growing wall of variegated green where the manzanita glittered amid

duller foliage. A splintered edge of rock broke slantingly through the

thicket, rose and passed like a bristling crest over the top of the

hill, where the pines lifted their plumy heads. It was the “outcrop” of

the ledge--that inconsistent and ill-regulated ledge, the promises of

which had made a town of Foleys and then, being unfulfilled, had left

the town to ruin.

But the Colonel saw none of these things. His eyes were fixed on the

turn of the road just beyond. As he remembered, you could see the

cottage from there. And as he gained and passed it, the low bulk of the

little house broke upon his sight. It was shrouded in vines, carefully

trained over the projecting roof of its balcony so that they hung from

its edge in a fringe of waving tendrils. Around and beyond it, the

juicy, violent green of a vineyard ran into the dryness of the untilled

land, and the even emerald rows and dark, loamy stripes of a garden lay

like a piece of carpeting between the vineyard and the house. Its look

of thrifty habitation came like a shock upon his memory of its ruinous

neglect when he had last seen it. Even the gate, that he remembered

hung dejected from one hinge, had been mended; the rose bushes that

had thrown long festoons across the path had been clipped and tied

to restraining poles. These were “the improvements” upon which the

squatter based part of his claim.

The Colonel’s hand, trembling, raised the gate latch with a click. As

he did so he heard a sound from the balcony, and the younger girl, who

had introduced herself to him as Rosamund Allen, ran down the steps

that led from it and advanced along the path to meet him. Her hat was

off and he saw that she had thick, fair hair, its ashen blondness

streaked with strands of a coarse, bright gold.

“Here you are,” she cried with her easy, friendly manner. “We had just

begun to expect you. Isn’t it hot?”

She fell into step beside him and they walked slowly up the little

path. The cottage at first presented to his gaze only one end cut

into by a single window. As they drew nearer he saw the length of

its balcony, and that the vine he had noticed was a grape, its

thick-twisted stalk running up to the roof like a pillar, its leafage

engarlanding the balustrade. A few steps led to the balcony from the

walk. He saw the black square of an open doorway and near this, sitting

close to the leaf-trimmed balustrade, a shawled female figure in a

lounging chair.

His eye fell on it and he involuntarily stopped. The girl beside him

suddenly jerked his sleeve.

“That’s mother,” she said in a hurried whisper. “Take care. She can see

us. Now don’t look surprised--” then raising her voice a little she

said:

“Mother dear, here’s Colonel Parrish.”

The Colonel, as he mounted the stairs, took off his hat and held it.

The woman in the chair was facing him. From the descending folds of the

many loose wrappings that hung about her emaciated figure, her head

rose, the face looking at him with still, eager interest. She gave a

little smile and a waxen hand of skeleton thinness emerged from the

folds of her shawls.

“Jim Parrish!” she said in a sweet, husky voice, then looking into his

face with eyes of mild, unconscious friendliness, she said softly,

“Jim.”

He would never have known her till he heard the voice and saw the

smile. They were the same. The old dimple had disappeared and a wrinkle

had taken its place. The eyes, the clear, greenish-brown eyes, were

sunken into dark caverns, the satiny skin grown loose and sallow. Yet

it was Alice, Alice old before her time, Alice sick, Alice dying.

He turned round and found a chair, for the moment not daring to speak.

He was conscious of the figure of Rosamund walking toward the garden

dragging a serpent-like length of hose behind her. Then he placed the

chair close to the sick woman and sat down. To him it was a moment

that he had thought of in dark reveries, and even in thought found too

painful. Now he was conscious that there was a tranquillity about it,

an absence of tension, which was due to Alice. Her manner suggested

nothing but a peaceful recollection of old friendship. Was it that

the near approach of death was wiping out all the disturbing and cruel

emotions, all the biting memories, that belonged to life?

She looked at him with her little affectionate smile as a sick sister

might.

“It’s so queer it being you,” she said. “When June told me I couldn’t

believe it. After--after--how long is it, Jim?”

“Twenty-one years,” he said.

“Yes, twenty-one years,” she repeated. “How time flies! And what a lot

has happened in those twenty-one years. You’re rich, they say. And your

hair’s quite white, but I’d have known you anywhere. You’re not much

changed.”

She continued to look at him with the same gentle, softly exploring

air. He had had an idea that even in death he would see shame and

remorse in her eyes, but they were as devoid of either as though he had

never been other than a girlhood friend.

“It was so odd your just happening on June that way. She says you were

so kind to her, she felt immediately you were her friend. Poor little

June! It was such an amusement for her that evening. She’s not had much

pleasure of that kind. And she’s twenty now, just the age when a girl

longs for a little of the good times of life.”

“She’s very like you,” he answered, “it--it--” he was going to say

“shocked me,” but he had a feeling she would not understand him. “It

surprised me,” he said instead.

“Oh, she’s very like me. Every one sees it. Her father says she is

just a _replica_ of what I was when he first knew me. And she’s such a

sweet, loving little thing. You don’t know how they work here--and with

me to take care of. God has blessed me in my children, Jim.”

She turned her large, sunken eyes on him, their somberness lit by the

fire of her maternal passion.

“They are the best girls in the world,” she said.

“Then you’ve been happy, Alice?” he suddenly asked.

“Happy!” she echoed. “Oh, yes, always happy except when our boy died.

That was our sorrow. I don’t know whether you ever heard of it. He was

just a baby, but he was our only son. A beautiful boy. He was John

Beauregard Allen, too.”

The Colonel made no comment, but she did not notice it, engrossed in

her own recital.

“Of course we’ve not been very successful, especially of late years.

But poverty’s not so bad when you’ve got those you love around you.

And we’ve been like a little company, close together, always marching

shoulder to shoulder--‘a close corporation,’ Beau calls it. We’ve

had bad luck of all kinds, but you can bear bad luck when you’re all

together.”

The past, the bitter, terrible past was dead to her. She had probably

never understood what it had been to him. Now twenty years of love and

struggle had almost obliterated it from her memory, and the coming of

death had wiped away its last faint traces.

“You _have_ been blessed, Alice,” he said in a low voice. “Life has

fulfilled all your expectations.”

“Not all,” she answered. “What doesn’t matter for yourself matters

for your children. It’s hard for me to see them living here, and this

way--” she made a gesture which swept the garden and the vineyard.

“That’s hard for a mother, a mother who was bred differently and bred

them for something different. I educated them myself, Jim. They’re not

like the country girls around us. They’re--” she paused a moment and

then said with an air of sad solemnity--“the children of a lady and a

gentleman.”

“Any one can see that,” he murmured, “and they’re happy too.”

He did not know what else to say. He could not condole with her. In her

poverty and sickness she had fulfilled the purposes of her life, lived

it with a passionate completeness as he had never done. The fullness

of it, compared to the barren emptiness of his, augmented the sense of

bleak loneliness that lay heavy at his heart.

“They’re young,” she continued, “they’ve not known much better. Our

bad times began when they were still little. But I--well, before I was

sick it was different. I helped them and I was a companion, not a care.

Virginia City, too, was a place where, as they grew older there would

have been more amusement for them. They’d have had a better chance.”

She paused, her lids drooping, an air of musing melancholy on her face.

Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.

“Who is there for them to marry here?” she asked.

“Marry!”--the Colonel had not thought of that. “They’re very young for

that yet, aren’t they?” he stammered.

“Young? Yes, perhaps. But June is twenty now.”

She let her head drop back on the cushions behind it, and turned

it slightly away from him so that he could see her in profile. Her

hair was dressed in the fashion of her youth, parted and drawn down

sleekly over the tips of her ears. Seen thus, the emaciation of her

cheeks partly concealed, her face caught him with its sudden look of

familiarity. For a moment the veil of years was jerked back and he saw

his old sweetheart. He gave a murmured exclamation and leaned nearer

to her, a word of tenderness trembling on his lips. Simultaneously she

turned toward him, absorbed in her own thoughts.

“I was twenty-four when I married,” she said. “People then thought that

was quite old.”

He turned away his head, unable to reply, and she went on in her

unconscious egotism.

“I want them to marry. It’s the only life for a woman. And I have been

so happy in my married life, always, from the first till now.”

A slight smile touched her lips as her eyes, softened with memories,

looked back over a life that love had ennobled.

Suddenly she turned to him. For the first time in the conversation she

seemed to transfer her interest from her own affairs to his.

“You never married?” she said. “That was a pity. Life’s only half lived

without those ties.”

“Oh, Alice!” he answered with a groan, and rising he moved to the top

of the steps.

“I was mean to you that time, long ago,” she said behind him. “But that

was all in the past. That’s all forgotten now--forgotten and forgiven,

isn’t it?”

For the moment he made no reply and she repeated in what seemed an

absent tone,

“Forgotten and forgiven. It’s all so far away now; such years ago. So

much has happened in between. It’s like another life, looking back on

it.”

“Yes, all forgiven,” he said, “there’s no anger with real love.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, “and time smooths away everything. Isn’t

it pretty now, with the shadows lengthening out that way?”

They looked over the expanse where the low sun’s rays were painting

the already brilliant-hued landscape with a wild flare of color. The

darkness of the oaks was overlaid with a golden gilding, the dry grass

looked orange.

“Have you seen the girls’ garden?” she asked. “They did it all

themselves and they raise enough vegetables for us and some to sell.

They sell the grapes, too. Last summer they made fifty dollars with

their grapes.”

So “the improvements” were of some practical good. The Colonel saw the

word dancing in the air before him.

“But it’s hard to see them working so. In summer they’re up and out

at six. It doesn’t seem right to me--their father’s daughters. Their

grandmother--Beau’s mother--had six house-slaves for her own private

use, and I, before my father’s death, had a French governess.”

A step on the path prevented him from replying. Rosamund came around

the corner of the house, her face flushed, a hoe in her hand, which he

now saw to be earthy. She had an anxious air.

“Mother, are you tired, dear?” she said, mounting the steps. Then

turning to the visitor:

“Mother goes in before the sun sets. It gets cool so suddenly. Just the

moment the edge of the sun gets down behind the hill, the night comes

up, and it’s bad for her to breathe that air.”

The Colonel assured her he was just about to take his leave. The

invalid made no demand for him to stay. Sitting huddled among her

shawls she looked wan and shrunken. He felt that the calm interest of

her attitude toward him had now, from fatigue, turned suddenly into

indifference. He faltered some words of farewell to her, his hand out.

Hers, feeling in his warm, strong grasp like a bundle of twigs, was

extended and then limply withdrawn.

“Good-by,” she said, turning to follow her daughter’s movements with a

waiting, dependent eye, “won’t you come again before you go?”

He murmured an assent from the top steps, but he would leave in a day

or two at the longest.

“The girls like seeing you so much;” now she looked at him with some

animation. “And they have so little pleasure.”

“Why, mother,” said Rosamund in half-laughing protest, “that sounds as

if Colonel Parrish was a sort of circus, just here to amuse us.”

The Colonel was nearly at the bottom of the steps. With some last

conventional sentences of farewell, he raised his hat and turned

toward mother and daughter for a final glance. They were smiling

at Rosamund’s words, both looking at him to return his bow with

perfunctory politeness. When he turned from them he could hear their

voices, low and full of a close and different form of interest,

speaking of the adjustment of the invalid’s shawls, the window by which

her chair should be placed.

He was half-way down the path to the gate when a sound of suppressed

singing caught his ear. Turning in its direction he saw coming down

through a narrow path in the chaparral a fine red and white cow, and

following it, June Allen. She was singing in a crooning, absent-minded

way, at intervals flicking the flanks of the cow with a long alder

branch she carried, stripped of all its leaves save two at the top. As

she approached him she stopped singing, struck the cow with the branch,

and began in a thoughtful way to talk to herself.

The attraction she had exercised over him fell on him again the moment

he saw her. The very way she appeared to be conversing to herself

seemed to him to be imbued with a quaint, unconscious charm, such as

a child possesses. With his mind full of the gloom and pain of his

interview with Alice, he yet paused, eying the approaching figure. As

he stood watching her, she looked up and saw him.

She gave a loud exclamation and her face became illumined with

pleasure. Administering to the cow a smart stroke with her switch, she

crowded by it and ran forward over the dry grass into which the verdure

of the garden intruded.

“Oh, how lovely for me to meet you!” she cried as she came up to him

with an extended hand. “I never thought I’d have such luck.”

Her hand nestled into his; her face smiling at him was charged with an

almost fond delight.

“I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, young woman,” he said, again noting

the astonishing likeness that had so shaken him the evening before. “I

don’t think you’re really glad to see me, or why should you, when you

knew I was coming, go off with the cow?”

“That was a bargain,” she said, “I wanted to stay and see you just as

much as Rosamund did. But as I had the party last night we agreed that

it was only fair I should go after Bloss this evening, and Rosamund

should stay and take care of mother and see you.”

If any commentary was needed on the deadly monotony of their existence,

the Colonel felt that it was now given. That two young and attractive

girls should regard him as a matter of such deep interest was proof to

him of the unrelieved dreariness of their lives.

“So you went for Bloss,” he said, looking at the cow which had now

passed them and was moving forward with a lurching swing toward a shed

in the background.

“Yes, we go for her alternate nights. She wanders all over the tract by

day and in the evening we’ve sometimes a hunt before we can get her.”

They were both looking at Bloss, who suddenly stopped, stepped heavily

on the garden border, and began to bite a hole in a row of neat, green

leaves.

“Bloss!” his companion almost shrieked, “you impudent, desperate cow!

Did you ever see such an impertinent thing?”

And she ran toward Bloss, who, feeling the switch suddenly on her

flanks gave up the happy dream of an evening feast of young lettuce

and directed her course once more toward the shed. June followed her,

calling imploringly over her shoulder,

“Please don’t go yet, oh, _please_ don’t! I do want to see you for a

moment, but I’ve got to put this miserable animal in her stable, or

she’ll spoil the garden. _Please_ wait.”

To which he called back:

“All right. Don’t hurry. I’ll stroll down to the gate.”

And he moved slowly down the path between the pinioned rose bushes,

looking through the barring of the old gate at the dusty road.

He had not to wait long. He was standing there gazing down the road

when he heard her light step and hurried breathing as she ran toward

him.

“It was too bad,” she said as she came to a panting stand beside him,

her alder switch still in her hand, “but I couldn’t let her eat those

lettuces. We’ve had a lot of trouble with them and when they’re good we

can sell them as far as Sonora.”

She said this with an air of pride, as one who vaunts an admired

accomplishment.

“Do you like gardening?” he asked, and then stopped. From the house

came a sudden sound of coughing, a heavy, racking paroxysm. The girl’s

eyes slanted sidewise as she stood motionless, listening. She remained

thus, in a trance-like quietude of attention till the sound grew fitful

and then ceased.

“How did mother strike you?” she asked in a low voice.

“I--she--” he blundered, and then said desperately: “Well, she’s

changed, of course, but after a long period of illness--”

He stopped. Unfinished sentences save more occasions than the world

wots of.

“Yes, of course,” she said eagerly, seizing on even such feeble

encouragement. “And she’s been sick for such a dreadfully long time,

ever since Virginia, more than four years now. She’s thin, though,

isn’t she?”

She looked anxiously at him.

“Long illnesses are apt to make people thin,” he said, turning away his

head.

“Yes, I suppose so, especially--” She too left her sentence unfinished.

For a moment she stood looking down, flicking at an adjacent rose-tree

with her switch.

“Tell me about the gardening,” he said, seizing on the subject as the

one uppermost in his mind. “How do you get your things as far afield as

Sonora?”

“I’ll tell you about that later;” she suddenly seemed to shake off her

anxieties as a child might. Her clouded face turned on him sparkling

with new animation, “I’ll tell you all about that another time. Now--”

He interrupted her:

“But there may not be another time. You know I’ll be leaving soon.”

She looked amazed, quite aghast.

“Leaving?” she exclaimed--“leaving Foleys?”

“Yes, I must be back in San Francisco in a few days. And it takes a day

to ride from here to Sacramento.”

“But--” she stopped, looking thoroughly dashed. The Colonel wondered

what was in her mind.

“But not to-morrow?” she asked, drawing near to him and speaking

urgently, “you’ll be here to-morrow?”

“Yes, I’ll be here to-morrow. My horse won’t be able to take the ride

till the day after. He’s gone tender on his forefoot.”

She was silent, looking down on the path and absently trailing the

leaf-decked tip of her switch in the dust. He regarded her with tender

amusement.

“You haven’t seen the spring yet,” she said abruptly without raising

her eyes.

The remark was startling. It was the discovery of this spring which had

led to the unpleasantness with the squatter. The Colonel would probably

have gone on paying the taxes and letting the squatter live on his

premises till the end of things, if the spring had not waked him to the

possibilities of ownership. He colored a little. For the first time it

seemed to him the young girl had shown bad taste.

“No,” he answered, “I haven’t seen it. I didn’t see that it was

necessary. I’ve had the water analyzed. That was enough.”

“But you ought to see it,” she continued, still looking at the end of

the switch. “It’s a wonderful spring. Everybody says so. I discovered

it.”

Her face, as she began speaking, flushed faintly and then deeper. When

she had finished the color was spread over it in a clear transparent

blush.

“I doubt whether I’ll be able to get there,” he replied with just a

trace of stiffness in his manner. “It’s quite a walk, I understand, and

it’s so hot--”

She suddenly raised her eyes and moved toward him, her look one of

flushed embarrassment, but her manner urgent and determined.

“I’ll take you there,” she said hurriedly. “I know a way that’s quite

shady, a path hardly anybody knows of. I found it, the spring and the

path both, and I would so like to show it to you.”

Her voice fell to the key of coaxing, which was belied by her

countenance, full of a keen, waiting anxiousness. She seemed to the man

to be tremulously hanging on his word of consent.

“I guess I’ll have to go,” he said, looking down at her with eyes from

which all disapproval had gone. “I’ll come up here for you--let’s see!

The late afternoon’s the best time because it’s cooler. Say five. How’s

that?”

“Here?” she said, looking away uneasily. “No, don’t come here. You

know--” she drew closer to him, and resting her finger-tips on the

lapel of his coat pressed them gently against his chest, half

whispering--“this is to be a secret expedition. No one must know about

it but us two.”

The Colonel backed away, eying her with tragical gravity from under his

down-drawn brows.

“Look here, young woman,” he said, “what are you up to? Are you trying

to kidnap the Colonel?”

Her dimple came, but no further indication of amusement disturbed the

fluttered uneasiness of her countenance.

“No, no,” she said quickly; then tilting her head to one side and

looking at him cajolingly, “but how I would like to!”

“I don’t think it’s safe for me to go,” he answered. “I’ve a suspicion

you’re some kind of wood nymph or fairy who steals good-looking young

men like me and keeps them in the woods for playmates. Can you give me

any guaranty that I’ll reappear?”

“I’ll lead you back myself. And you will go? That’s settled. Well,

listen:--down the road before you come to the turn there’s a break in

the fence. It’s near the large oak that throws a limb over the road.

I’ll be there waiting for you at half-past four. Five’s too late. And

the path I spoke of goes up right behind the oak and is ever so much

shorter than the one everybody takes. That’s this way, back of the

cow-shed and the garden.”

She indicated it, and both turned to follow the direction of her

pointing finger. As they stood with their backs to the road they heard

a heavy, regular footfall padding through the dust. The girl turned

first, and her quick, half-frightened ejaculation, “It’s father!” made

the Colonel swerve round like a weathercock. It was too late for him

to escape. Beauregard Allen was close to the gate and was looking at

him with a somber, unmoving gaze.

He would have known his old enemy in a minute. But yet there was a

change, subtile and demolishing as that which had made Alice a stranger

to him. The debonair arrogance that he had once taken for a proud

self-respect was gone. A destruction of the upholding sense of position

and responsibility had bowed the upright shoulders and made the haughty

hawk-eye heavy and evasive. John Beauregard Allen had failed in life,

gone down step by step; not in one cataclysmic rush, but gradually,

with a woman and children striving desperately to hold him back.

His drinking had been a habit of recent years, a weakness grown of

ill-luck and despondency. It showed in a coarsened heaviness of

feature, a reddened weight of eyelid. He wore a pair of loose, dusty

trousers, thick, unbrushed boots, the blue-and-white cotton shirt of

the country-man, and an unbuttoned sack-coat that sagged from his bent

shoulders. A grizzled brown beard straggled over his breast, and the

hat pushed back from his forehead showed hair of the same color. Yet

there still lingered about him the suggestion of the man of breeding

and education, and once again upright with the hope of life restored to

him, he would have been a fine looking man.

He knew who the Colonel was before he turned, but he too realized

there was no possibility of escape. In that one moment before his eye

challenged that of his old adversary, he had recognized the situation

and decided on his course. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his

coat and tried to square his shoulders into their old proud poise. As

his glance met the Colonel’s he withdrew one of his hands from his

pocket and raised his hat.

“How d’ye do,” he said in a deep, easy voice; “how d’ye do, Parrish? I

heard you were here.”

The _savoir faire_ of his address was remarkable. His eyes, however,

conscious and ashamed, showed his discomfort in the meeting. The

Colonel returned the salute and the two men stood facing each other,

the gate between them.

“Colonel Parrish,” said June in an embarrassed voice, “came to see

mother. She had such a nice talk with him. He says he doesn’t think

she’s so much changed.”

“I have to thank you,” said the father with a faint reminiscence of his

old grand manner, “for your kindness to my little girl last evening.

June tells me you introduced Rion Gracey and young Barclay to her.

That’s the son of Simeon Barclay, I suppose?”

The Colonel said that it was. He was extremely uncomfortable, and after

the manner of his sex, wanted to escape from this unpleasant position

with the utmost speed. He opened the gate and stepped into the road.

The squatter slowly passed through the aperture into the disputed

domain.

“It was very kind of you, Parrish,” he said. “We appreciated it. June

would have had a pretty dull time if it hadn’t been for you.”

The Colonel deprecated all thanks. He was now in the road, his hat

raised in farewell. He had noticed that Allen made no allusion to his

wife and thanked Heaven that the man who had shown himself so dead to

other decencies had enough left in him for that. A backward glance of

final adieu showed him the father and daughter side by side by the

gateway. The girl was smiling at him. The man stood with his ragged hat

ceremoniously lifted over his heavy, hang-dog face.

CHAPTER VII

UNCLE JIM

An hour before the time set by June Allen to go to the spring the

Colonel was sitting in his room before a table littered with papers.

They were the title deeds and the tax certificates of the Parrish

tract. They represented an unmarred record of purchase and possession

from the date of acquisition to the present time. As he looked them

over he wondered again at the astounding boldness of Allen. Had he

relied upon the rightful owner’s leniency when he should discover that

the claimant’s wife had once been Alice Joyce? The thought called forth

an angry sentence of pain and disgust. Perhaps so. It was of a piece

with Allen’s behavior. But--

The Colonel rose to his feet. He had made up his mind what he intended

to do. Allen’s baseness had no bearing on the matter. Alice and her

children were all that concerned him. He threw the papers into the

table drawer, looked at his watch, and picking up his hat, left the

room.

There were many breaks in the fence--lengths of it were entirely

down--but the one June had selected as the place of rendezvous was easy

of discovery because of the live-oak that grew near it. The great tree

cast a heavy, twisted limb across the road, making an arch of foliage

almost as impervious to sunbeams as a roof. A narrow path made a pale,

meandering line through the grass beyond it, and then came and went,

red as a scar, through the shrubbery of the hillside. As the Colonel

drew near he saw June sitting on the ground under the tree. Her figure,

clothed in a dress of dull blue, made a harmonious note of color in the

gold, bronze, and olive of the landscape.

She caught a glimpse of his head over the fence and jumped up with a

gesture of welcome. Then as he stepped through the gap she met him with

extended hand.

Viewed at close range, her appearance was an illuminating commentary

on a poverty which could never be degraded or ignoble. Nothing could

have been cheaper or poorer than her scanty cotton gown or her straw

hat. But she had taken pains that the ribbon on her hat should match

the tint of her dress, and the old-fashioned turn-over collar of lace

which encircled her throat was arranged with a dainty preciseness. She

had even put on her one and only pair of corsets--a treasured article

of dress reserved for parties and the Sabbath--so unusual was the

occasion. The Colonel did not notice these delicacies of detail. He

only saw, as any other man would have seen, that a rare distinguishing

fineness marked her despite her poor apparel and coarsened hands. It

would have taken a woman’s deeper insight to see that this was a girl

in whom a taste for all that was luxurious, costly and elegant was

innate and ready to wake at the first call.

They followed the path across the open land and then began ascending

through the chaparral, the girl leading. The shrubs, which were

low-growing, offered no shade, and the sun, though slanting to the

west, followed them with scorching beams. It was by no means a gentle

climb and they spoke little. At intervals a lizard flicked across the

path, and an occasional stirring of the underbrush told of the stealthy

passage of a snake. From the whole hillside aromatic odors, that seemed

to be ascending in swimming undulations, rose into the heat, not sweet

and delicate as is the breath of gardens, but coarse, pungent, almost

rank, in their triumphant, wild vitality.

In an opening under the pines they paused for a rest. The Colonel

noticed that his companion was not as talkative as she had been on the

two former occasions. There was an air of troubled abstraction about

her. She indicated notable points in the landscape like a dutiful

cicerone, but the intensity of interest she had displayed in arranging

the trip seemed gone. He wondered if she had revealed to some member of

her family her design of showing him the spring and had been reproved

for it.

The last portion of the walk was again through thickets, up a hill

where the poison oak grew close and high, and then among larger growths

of bay and alder, with the Digger pines raising their dim bluish shapes

among the more juicy greens. Here they began to follow a faint rill, a

tiny thread that broke into a shower of drops over roots and splinters

of stone. Finally, pushing aside intruding boughs, she led him into an

opening ringed by tall pine trunks, and cried triumphantly:

“Here it is! Do you wonder no one ever found it?”

There was a hollowing out of the bank under the eaves of a large pine

root, and here the spring had been bubbling unnoticed for centuries.

A delicate fringing of fern hung from the moist earth motionless over

its reflection in the small, quivering mirror. Near by there was an

outcropping of rock, and broken bits had been used to pave the edge

where the crystal lip of water trembled, and to make a little channel

for it to slip down. A rusty tin cup hung on a dead bough, and the girl

rinsed it, and dipping it in the clear depths, handed it to him.

“Try it,” she said. “It tastes quite different here among the pine

roots with the smell of the woods all round.”

He drank it, marveling at the sharp, acrid tang. She hung the cup back

on the twig, and taking off her hat, sat down on a bent root that

the pine above it seemed to have thrown out in a kindly desire to be

hospitable. The Colonel subsided on to a flat shoulder of rock, rusted

with lichen.

“Hasn’t it hidden itself in a pretty spot?” she said. “And didn’t it

hide itself well? Coming on it from the other side you never would have

suspected a spring was here among the roots of the trees.”

“And you discovered it?”

She nodded, looking down into the tiny basin.

[Illustration: “HERE IT IS! DO YOU WONDER NO ONE EVER FOUND IT?”]

“I traced it up from the little stream that runs away from it. I found

it in March, one day when I was prowling.”

“Prowling! What’s prowling?”

“Prowling?” she smiled, but pensively, her eyes on the water. “It’s

just wandering about, generally alone, and not going to any particular

place. I’ve prowled all over here. I can lead you straight to the two

old shafts and show you the dumps and the remains of the old windlass.

They’re almost entirely hidden by wild grapes and things. People who

don’t know could easily fall in the shafts; one of them’s quite deep.”

It was now her companion’s turn to look pensive. He had sunk the two

shafts, and in them, as in the property, how many thousands of dollars

he did not like to think.

“Those shafts were made,” he said, “fifteen years ago when we all

thought you had only to turn over a few shovelfuls of earth and find

your fortune.” He struck the rock with his hand and said laughingly:

“What an old fraud you’ve been!”

She looked at him without returning his smile.

“Colonel Parrish,” she said anxiously, “did you sink those two shafts?”

He nodded, once more surprised at her indirect reference to his

ownership of the land. She made no reply, but, plucking a fern growing

out of the earth near her, began slowly to shred its leaves from its

stalk and sprinkle them on the surface of the water.

“And,” she said suddenly, “you intend now, quite soon, to build a hotel

back here, under the pines, at the top of the hill, don’t you?”

That she should disappoint him with these persistent and almost

indecent inquiries, considering the situation, hurt and irritated him.

It was so out of keeping with her general suggestion of something

sensitive and girlishly naïve.

“I _had_ intended building a hotel; came here with that intention.

But--” He rose to his feet and said coldly, “Don’t you think we’d

better be going back again? It’s quite a long walk.”

“But?”--she echoed, unheeding his last sentences--“but what?”

She made no movement save to clasp her hands on the broken fern. Her

face, raised to him, suddenly was pale and set in a curious tenseness

of inquiry. It moved the Colonel strangely.

“But what?” she repeated insistently. “You were going to say something

else.”

“My dear little girl,” he answered, “don’t trouble your head about

these things. It’s--it’s--a man’s dispute and for men to settle. But

rest assured of one thing, you’ll not suffer by it.”

“I!” she exclaimed; “it’s not I that matters. But, Colonel Parrish, our

mother.”

She stopped, her voice quivering like a taut string.

“Your mother?” said the Colonel, with a rising inflection.

“You see how it is with her. Let us stay. Let us stay a little while

longer.”

“Did you bring me up here to ask me this?” he said, looking steadily at

her.

“Yes. I wanted to see you somewhere away from the house, and I thought

the spring would be a good excuse. Talking of these things makes

me”--the tears rose to her eyes and stood thick in them--“makes me do

like this.”

They ran over and she brushed them away with her hand.

“You can see; you understand about mother,” she went on, struggling

to speak clearly. “It’s only a question of time. It’s nearly the end

of everything. And I brought you up here to-day to ask you to let us

stay--right or wrong--let us stay till then.”

Her voice broke and she held her head down, trying to suppress her

sobs. The Colonel turned away, walked to where the tin cup hung, took

it off its twig, and looked into it.

“Don’t do that,” he said, his voice rough; “for Heaven’s sake, stop.

I’d be angry with you for asking me such a thing if you weren’t

so--so--I don’t know what. Of course you’re going to stay.”

“What?” he was not looking at her, but was conscious that she had

stiffened both in mental and physical fiber at the word--“you’re going

to let us stay?”

“Of course. As long as you want, always. Don’t talk any more about it.”

A quick sound came from her, and he heard the rustle of her dress as

she rose, her footsteps on the stone near him, and then felt her beside

him. She seized the hand hanging at his side, pressed it against the

softness of her bosom and against her cheek, then dropped it with a

murmur of broken words.

He turned on her bruskly. Her face was shining with tears, but she was

smiling. She tried to speak to him, but he laid a finger on her lips

and looked at her, shaking his head.

“Don’t say any more about it,” he said after a moment’s pause. “I can’t

stand this sort of thing. I’m not used to it.”

She gently laid her hand on his and drawing it away unsealed her lips.

She was smiling radiantly, her dimple deep. And for a moment she

enveloped him in a beaming look of affection and gratitude.

“There’s lots I want to say, but I suppose I must be obedient,” she

murmured.

“Of course you must. Come, we ought to be going. Put your hat on or

you’ll get all freckled.”

She went back to the spring and picked up her hat. As she pulled the

elastic down over her cropped locks she said gaily:

“I feel so different from what I did when I came up--at least twenty

years younger and fifty pounds lighter.”

“You’d better not forget how to accomplish that miracle,” said her

companion. “Thirty years from now you’ll probably find it a great deal

more to the point than you do to-day.”

They started down the path, laughing. The red eye of the sun, a flaming

ball, stared at them between the trunks of the pines, and shot long

pencils of flushed light into the rustling depths of the thickets.

June led the way as before, but she was a different guide. She seemed

as light-hearted going down as she had been oppressed coming up. The

Colonel was to realize later how ready her optimism was to respond to

the first glimmer of cheer, how quick and far was the swing of the

pendulum.

Coming to a grassed plateau under the pines they paused for a moment’s

rest. From the high crest of ground they could see the cottage with

the cultivation of its garden cutting into the unfilled land, like an

island of green floating in a yellow sea. It looked meaner and more

insignificant than ever in the midst of the lazily out-flung landscape

now swimming in a bath of colored light.

The Colonel saw in imagination a house he owned in San Francisco on

Folsom Street. He had bought it as a favor from a pioneer friend whose

fortunes were declining. It was the stateliest house of what was then a

street of stately houses, with wide windows, vine-draped balconies, and

scrolled iron gates shutting out the turmoil of the street. The thought

had been in his mind when it came into his possession that it was the

sort of house he would have given Alice, and the still more sacred

thought had followed, that his children’s laughter might have echoed

through its halls. Now he looked down on a hovel, also his property,

where Alice had been glad to find a shelter, and in which her daughter

had prayed that she might be left to die! Life and its mysteries! How

inscrutable, how awful, it all was!

The voice of June at his side roused him.

“Mother’s gone in,” she said, evidently making these small domestic

comments more to herself than to him, “and Rosamund’s getting supper.”

“How do you know that?” he asked, glad to be shaken from his thoughts.

“Have you got second sight? You’re such a little witch I shouldn’t be a

bit surprised if you had.”

“You don’t have to be a witch to see the smoke coming out of the

chimney.”

A faint reek of smoke curled up from the cottage roof into the evening

air. The Colonel looked at her with a sheepish side-glance. She

returned it, smiling in mischievous triumph.

“I’m afraid we’re not both witches,” she said saucily.

The rest over, they continued their descent by a wider path in parts

of which they walked side by side, talking together sometimes, or June

talking, for she was very loquacious now, while her companion listened.

At the end of a description of their life in Virginia City he said,

“How long is it since you’ve been in San Francisco? Years, isn’t it?”

“Oh, years and years. I was born there, but we left when I was a child.”

“It must have been a prodigious length of time ago--in the glacial

period, you might say. Sometime you and Rosamund must come down there

and visit me. I’ll find a place for you to stay, and take good care of

you. Would you like it?”

“Oh, Colonel Parrish!” Words failed her. The path was wide and she was

walking beside him. He saw her eyes shine.

“I’d see to it that you’d have a good time. Lots of parties and

first-rate partners. You’d never sit along the wall there. The fellows

would be just breaking their necks to dance with you. And theaters--you

like theaters, don’t you?”

“Theaters!” she fairly gasped. “I saw _Mazeppa_ in Virginia, and it

was--oh, I haven’t got the words! It was something wonderful.”

“Well, we’ll see ’em all. Better forty times than you saw in Virginia,

and every night if you want. It’ll be just as good a time as San

Francisco and the Colonel can give two girls like you and Rosamund.”

He looked down at her, smiling. She returned the look and said:

“Why are you so good to us? I don’t understand it!”

“Don’t try to. Never exert your brain in needless ways. That’s a

fundamental law for the preservation of health. In this particular case

I’d be good to myself. You don’t know what it would be for me to have

two nice girls to take around. I’m a lonely old devil, you know.”

“Are you?” she said with a note of somewhat pensive incredulity.

“You’ve never been married, have you?”

“Nup,” said the Colonel.

“You’ll have to look upon us as your daughters,” she continued, “or

perhaps your nieces.” The path was narrow and she looked into his face

with the glance of demure coquetry he was beginning to know and watch

for. “Which would you prefer?”

“Daughters,” he said gruffly, looking into the bushes.

“But we’re already provided with a father,” she replied. “And it would

be such a pity to waste you. Wouldn’t you care to take the position of

uncle? That’s vacant.”

“All right, uncle--Uncle Jim.”

“Uncle Jim,” she repeated thoughtfully. “It seems funny to come into

possession of your first uncle when you’re twenty years old.”

There was a bend in the path and the bushes grew almost across it. She

suddenly quickened her speed, passed him, and ran on before.

“Come on,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m just hitting the trail

again.”

He followed her, turned the bend, and pushing the branches aside, saw

her a few feet ahead of him, standing on a flat stone about a foot

high, which directly intercepted the path.

“What are you mounted on that for?” he said, laughing. “You look as if

you were going to make a speech.”

“That’s what I’d like to do,” she answered, “but I was told not to, and

I’m very obedient. Come nearer--quite close.”

He approached, a little puzzled, for he saw that she was suddenly

grave. The stone raised her a few inches above him, and as he drew near

she leaned down, took him by the lapels of his coat, and drawing him

close, bent and kissed him softly on the forehead. Then she drew back,

and still holding him, looked with tender eyes into his.

“Uncle Jim,” she said, “that’s your christening.”

The next moment she was down and flitting on ahead of him.

“The path’s very narrow,” she called. “You must be content to follow

the oldest living inhabitant.”

At the gap in the fence he bade her good-by. To his great delight she

caught at his hesitating suggestion that she should occasionally write

to him and tell him of their life and her mother’s health. He told her

he would be up again, he thought, some time during the summer. The date

was uncertain. Then, with her hand in his, she said with a wilful shake

of her head:

“No, not _á Dios_. It’s _hasta mañana_, Uncle Jim. I won’t have it

anything but _hasta mañana_.”

“Well, then, _hasta mañana_,” he answered. “And God bless you, little

girl!”

That evening Colonel Parrish went to see Cusack. He brought with him

the title deeds and tax certificates of the Parrish tract. They lay

scattered on the office table on which the Colonel as he talked leaned

a supporting elbow. The interview was short, and there were moments

when it was heated, till Cusack realized, as he afterwards expressed it

to a friend, “there are certain kinds of fools there’s no good bucking

up against.” The Colonel had determined to recognize the squatter’s

claim, and to end all further litigation by making a legal transfer of

the property to Allen by means of a quit-claim deed. He talked down

argument and protest.

“Why the devil should I keep the place?” he vociferated. “I’m sick of

paying taxes on it and never getting a cent. I’ve sunk thousands in it

and not got a dollar back. It’s been a white elephant from the first.

Allen’s welcome to it. I’m glad to get it off my hands.”

“But the spring,” Cusack almost wailed in the acuteness of his

disappointment, “the spring and the hotel! They were going to raise

Foleys from the dead.”

“Spring!” said the Colonel, rising and taking from his pocket a fresh

cigar--“damned little picayune tea-cup! That spring hasn’t power to

raise a mosquito from the dead.”

“Did you expect to find a geyser?” the irritated lawyer retorted.

“I didn’t expect to find what I did find, you can bet on that,” said

his client, as he bent forward to apply the tip of his cigar to the

lamp chimney.

CHAPTER VIII

PRIZES OF ACCIDENT

It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from

the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the

hour on his face the Colonel passed along the hushed street and then

out into the red road between its clumps of dusty foliage.

As he skirted what yesterday had been his own land he looked on it with

a new eye. It could be made to support them well. No matter how low

Allen might sink they need never want again. The hilly part, where the

spring was, could be sold or leased to some of the enterprising city

hotel men. Or, if they objected to that, they could increase their

market gardening to the dimensions of a large agricultural enterprise.

They could rent to a rancher a portion of the rich, uncultivated

land now lying idle, and thus gain an income sufficient for them to

develop their own particular domain. To people of thrift and energy the

possibilities of the tract were large. Alice could die in peace. Her

girls were provided for.

As the cottage came into view the rider reined up and gazed at it. No

smoke issued from the chimney. They all still slept. In the crystal

stillness of the morning it looked peacefully picturesque, half veiled

in its greenery of shrubs and vines. The air about it was impregnated

with the delicate breath of the roses that lined the path from the gate

to the balcony.

He gave a slight shake to his rein, and Kit Carson, who had been

impatiently pawing with a proud forefoot, moved forward. The rider’s

glance wandered to a window under the sloping roof, veiled by a blue

curtain. Was that the girls’ room? The girls! The two faces rose before

his mental vision and he turned his eyes from the window and let them

pierce, far-seeing and steady--into the distance, into the future.

Before he came to Foleys he had not cared, he had not dared, to look

into the future. He had cowered before its emptiness. Now the faces of

the sisters rose softly bright in its melancholy obscurity, the faces

of Alice’s daughters--daughters that should have been his.

A week after he reached San Francisco he had a letter from June, a

childish, incoherent letter, full of impassioned terms of gratitude,

broken into by distressed comments on her mother’s health. Then, in

more sprightly vein, she told him of how Mr. Barclay was stopping over

at Foleys for a few days and came nearly every day and helped them in

the garden, and Mr. Rion Gracey, riding back from Foleys to the Buckeye

Belle one evening, had dropped in for a visit, and stayed to supper.

The Colonel seemed to see her as she wrote, laughing at one moment

and then stopping to dash the tears off her cheek as she had done at

the spring. He heard from no one else. Beauregard Allen had accepted

the transfer of the property as a business transaction, the manner in

which his adversary had desired him to accept it. To his friends in

San Francisco the Colonel explained his speedy return and the dropping

of the case as he had done to Cusack. It was not worth the time and

trouble. The land was remote, the spring a disappointment; he was glad

to be rid of it all.

Three weeks after this, sitting alone in his office, he received by the

afternoon mail a newspaper. It was the _Daily Clarion_, an organ which

molded public opinion and supported a precarious existence in Foleys.

Unfolding the flimsy sheet he found a marked paragraph, and turning to

it he saw it to be Alice’s death notice. She had died three days before

“at the residence of her husband, John Beauregard Allen.” The paper

slipped from his hand to the floor and his head sank. He sat thus till

the twilight fell, alone in the dim office where the golden letters

that spelled his name--the name of the successful man--shone faintly on

the window.

That same afternoon the dead woman’s husband and children returned to

the cottage after having committed all that remained of her to the

grave. Rosamund had succumbed to the strain and sorrow of the last few

days, and gone to bed prostrated with a headache. Allen, morose and

speechless, had flung himself in a chair in the living-room and there

sat, a heavy, inert figure. He had drunk heavily during the last few

days of his wife’s illness, for he had always loved her, and in his

weakness of heart had fled from the sight of her suffering, and tried

to find surcease for his own.

It was left to June to prepare their supper and accomplish the toilsome

domestic tasks that Rosamund shared with her. With a dead heart she set

out the meal, watered the garden, and finally set forth in a flare of

sunset to find Bloss and drive her home.

The cow had evidently strayed far. June’s search led her to the spots

which Bloss was known to frequent, but she could find no trace of

her. Sometimes the girl’s voice, broken and hoarse with weeping, rose

on the rich stillness of the hour, calling to the truant. She became

irritable, exasperated against the animal, who, on such a night as

this, while her heart was bursting with sorrow, ended the bitterness of

the day with so wearisome a hunt. Finally, exhausted by long hours of

watching and the fatigue of grief, she burst into unrestrained sobs.

With her face shining with tears, her breast convulsed, she tore her

way through thickets and scrambled over rocky spurs, every now and then

sending up a quavering cry for the strayed cow. At length, brushing

through a copse of bay and alder, she came on the torn face of the

hill where the landslide had taken place. The ground was covered with

a debris of stones and dead trees. Nature, to repair the damage, was

already hiding the rawness of the lacerated expanse under a veil of

small sprouting vegetation. Here, through a screen of leaves, she at

last caught sight of Bloss’ red and white side.

She cried to the cow, who gave a lazy flip of her tail but no other

sign of movement. June’s irritated misery gave way to a spasm of

rage, and stooping, she picked up a handful of the loose pieces of

stone strewn about her, and threw one at the runaway. It struck with

a thud. Bloss gave a surprised snort, and, wheeling, brushed through

the thicket. June followed her, the stones pressed in a clutching hand

against her breast, one now and then launched in the direction of the

cow. These missiles, combined with the thought of home, appeared to

animate Bloss’ leisurely movements, and she hastened forward through

brush and over rock at a lolloping, uncouth trot.

The dusk was settling into night when they reached the shed. June’s

tears had ceased, but the abstraction of grief held her. She fastened

the shed door on the cow, and still absently clasping three or four

pieces of stone, entered the house. The door from the balcony gave

directly into the living-room. Here, just as she had left him, she

found her father.

The daughters of Beauregard Allen did not love him with the same fond

blindness to his faults that had marked his wife. In the grinding

poverty of their later years they could not but see his apathy, the

selfishness of his heavy discouragement, the weakness of his tendency

to drink. Though the filial sense was strong in them and the example

of their mother’s uncomplaining devotion one that they obediently

followed, they realized that their father was more a tottering pillar

to support than a staff upon which to lean.

Now, a vague, dark bulk in the deserted room, so filled with memories

of the dead woman, he was a figure of heart-piercing desolation. His

daughter moved to the table and said gently:

“Why, father dear, are you still sitting in the dark? Why didn’t you

light the lamp?”

He answered with an inarticulate sound and did not move. Setting the

stones on the table June drew the lamp toward her and lit it. The

sudden flood of light seemed to rouse him. The chair creaked under his

weight as he turned. His haggard eyes absently traveled over the lamp

and the table near it and finally rested on the scattered fragments of

rock. June had bent down to look at the wick which she was carefully

adjusting, when she heard him give a suppressed exclamation, and his

long brown hand entered the circle of lamplight and gathered up the

stones. The wick satisfactorily arranged, she settled the shade and

turned away. Her father drew his chair closer to the slanting torrent

of light, and holding the stones directly under it, leaned forward,

scrutinizing them as he turned them about.

“Where did you get these?” he said without looking up.

She told him, turning again toward the table, absently watching him.

“Near the hillside? Just there where the piece of the hill came down?”

he queried.

“Yes, along the ground there. It’s all strewed with stones and earth

and roots. There’s quite a wall of rock left bare and these bits of it

are all over. New weeds are sprouting everywhere. I suppose that’s what

took Bloss there.”

He rose and going to a book-case took out a hand magnifying glass, and

returning to the light, studied the fragments through it. Something

in his face as he bent over them, struck through the lethargy of her

dejection.

“Father,” she said, drawing near, “what are they? What’s odd about

them?”

He lifted a face transfigured with excitement, and leaning forward,

laid a trembling hand on hers.

“It’s float,” he said, “undeniable float! If I’m not mistaken we’ve got

the ledge at last.”

END OF BOOK I

BOOK II

THE TOWN

CHAPTER I

DOWN IN THE CITY

In the darkness of the early November night Colonel Parrish rattled

across town in a hired carriage. It was half-past eight when he left

his rooms (they were a fine suite on a sunny corner of Kearney Street),

and now as he turned into Folsom Street he calculated that if the girls

were ready they could be _en route_ by nine o’clock. In the autumn of

1870 the hours for evening entertainments were still early, and the

particular entertainment to which the Colonel intended taking June

and Rosamund Allen was one of the regular receptions which united the

aristocracy of San Francisco at the house of Mrs. Ira Davenport.

The great detached bulks of the buildings that the carriage passed

gleamed with lights, for Folsom Street was still the home of the elect.

From the arch of lofty porches hall lamps cast a faint gleam into the

outer darkness of shrubberies and lawns. Through the scroll-work of

high iron gates the imbedded flags of the marble paths shone white

between darkly grassed borders. Here and there a black façade was cut

into by rows of long, lighted windows, uncurtained and unshuttered.

The street suggested seclusion, wealth and dignity. The fortunes,

which were later to erect huge piles on San Francisco’s wind-swept

hill-crests, had not yet arisen to blight the picturesqueness of the

gray, sea-girdled city.

His own house was one of the largest in the street. Now, in the

darkness, it loomed an irregular black mass, cut into with squares

and slits of light. Just a month before the lease of his tenants

had expired, and he was able to see one, at least, of his dreams

realized--Alice’s daughters quartered under his roof.

The revolution of Fortune’s wheel had been, where the Allens were

concerned, sudden and dizzying. The ledge, that man for years had

fruitlessly sought, in one night had been laid bare. Even for the time

and the country it was a startling reversal of conditions. In the

spring Beauregard Allen had been a beggar. In the summer he saw himself

a man of wealth. Experts pronounced the discovery one of moment. The

mine, called the Barranca, was regarded as richer in promise than the

Buckeye Belle. Distant portions of the tract, which had come into his

possession in so unlooked for a manner, were sold for large sums.

The whole region was shaken into astonished animation and Foleys was

more effectually wakened from the dead than it would have been by the

Colonel’s original scheme.

Allen’s sloth and despondency fell from him like a garment. With the

ready money from the land sales he at once began the development of the

prospect hole. In July a square tunnel mouth and a board shed intruded

on the sylvan landscape near the landslide. In September a fair-sized

hoisting works housed the throb of engines and the roll of cars.

The noise of Beauregard Allen’s strike went abroad through foot-hill

California and its echo rolled to San Francisco, where men who had

known him in the early days suddenly remembered him as “Beau” Allen,

the handsome Southerner, who had come to grief and dropped out of sight

in the fifties.

In September he came down to San Francisco and saw the Colonel. The

meeting at first was constrained, but as Allen spoke of his daughters

and the plans for their happiness and welfare that he had in view the

constraint wore away and the two men talked as beings united by a

mutual interest. The Colonel had recognized the fact that the breach

must be healed. He had had to struggle against his old repugnance, but

there was nothing else for it. No wrong, however deep, should stand

between him and Alice’s daughters, and he could not know the daughters

without accepting the father. And how he did want to know them! They

had already brought brightness and purpose into his life. In an effort

to treat the matter lightly he told himself that the harboring of old

resentments, when they blocked the way to the forming of new ties, was

too much like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Deep in his

heart lay the feeling that, apart from his affection for them, they

might need him. He knew Allen of old, and Alice was dead.

It was their father’s intention to have them make San Francisco their

home. In the larger city they would have the advantages of society and

chances to marry well. One of the objects of his visit was to look

about for a house whence they could be launched into the little world

in which he once had played his part. It was thus that the Colonel, the

lease of his old tenant having just expired, was able to offer them his

own house for as long a period of years as they might wish.

But Allen, swollen with the pride of his new fortunes, would rent no

house. He would buy one, a fitting home for two such girls as his.

When it came to that, the Colonel was as willing to sell as to rent.

The price of thirty thousand dollars was put upon the Folsom Street

mansion, and Allen, being much impressed by its size and old-fashioned

splendor, purchased it, paying down the sum of ten thousand dollars,

while the Colonel held a mortgage maturing in three years for the

other twenty thousand. Allen, despite his sudden accession to wealth,

claimed that his expenses just now were of the heaviest. In October he

contemplated the building of a twenty-stamp mill at the mine, and the

shaft house was to be enlarged. The winter outfits for his daughters

would be costly. It was his intention that June and Rosamund should

be as richly and modishly clad as any of the young women who cast a

glamour over the society of the city.

To-night they were to make their entrance into that society. Mrs.

Davenport was an old friend of the Colonel’s and he had asked for the

invitations, assuring her that she would find his protégées two of the

prettiest and sweetest girls in the world. Now as he sprang from the

carriage and pushed open the tall gate of scrolled iron-work he smiled

to himself, cheerfully confident that he had not overstated the charms

of the Misses Allen.

His ring brought one of the new Chinese servants to the door, a

quiet man, soft-footed as a cat, and clothed in freshly-laundered

white. Standing in the hall under the light he watched this spectral

figure flit noiselessly up the stairway. The hall, papered in a deep

reddish-purple on which here and there the gleam of gold arabesques

was faintly visible, was wide and dim. It would require a galaxy of

lamps thoroughly to dispel the gloom that lurked in its dusky corners.

A stately staircase, thickly carpeted and with a darkly-polished

hand-rail, ran up in front of him. There was a light again at the top

of this throwing faint glimmerings on receding stretches of wall, also

somberly papered.

Through the wide arch on his right he could look into a half-lighted

parlor, where a globe or two in the chandelier shone a translucent

yellow. To his left the doors into the reception-room were open, and

here by a table, a reading lamp at his elbow, sat Beauregard Allen

smoking a cigar. He was in evening dress, but a button or two of

unloosened waist-coat, and the air of sprawling ease that marked his

attitude, did not suggest the trim alertness of one garbed and tuned

for festival.

“Good evening, Parrish,” he said. “The girls will be down in a minute.

I’m going to beg off. Can’t drag me away from a good cigar and

comfortable chair on such a damned cold night.”

His face was flushed; he had evidently been drinking more than was

consistent with a strictly temperate standard, a condition which

often marked him after dinner. But the old tendency toward an open

and unabashed inebriety had been conquered. Well-dressed, his beard

trimmed, the sense of degradation and failure lifted from him, he

looked a stalwart, personable man, in whom the joy of life was still

buoyantly and coarsely alive.

The Colonel, leaning against the door frame, was about to launch into

the desultory conversation that fills gaps, when the rustle of skirts

on the stairs caught his ear. June and Rosamund were descending, their

cloaks on their arms that they might show themselves in their new

finery. Their mourning for their mother took the form of transparent

black gauze, through which the delicate whiteness of their youthful

arms and shoulders gleamed. They laughed as they met the Colonel’s eye,

both slightly abashed by the unwonted splendor of their attire.

Their sudden rise from poverty, their translation to the city, and

their short stay in its sophisticated atmosphere, had already worked

a marked change in them. Their air of naïvely blushing rusticity was

gone. They looked finer, more _mondaine_, than they had only six weeks

before. Rosamund, who was of an ample, gracious build, had already,

by the aid of the admirable dressmaker who had fashioned her gown,

achieved a figure of small-waisted, full-busted elegance, which,

combined with her naturally fine carriage, gave her an appearance of

metropolitan poise and distinction. She had that bounteous and blooming

type of looks which is peculiar to the women of California, and which

(as is the case with the character that accompanies it) is curiously

lacking in feminine subtility and romantic suggestion. By far the

handsomer of the two sisters she was not destined to cast the spell

over the hearts of men which was the prerogative of June.

She too had improved, but neither skilful dressmakers nor luxurious

surroundings would ever make her a radiantly good-looking or

particularly noticeable person. Her hair, which had been so unsightly

six months before, was now her one beauty. It hung round her head in a

drooping mass of brown curls, the longest just brushing the nape of her

neck. Through them was wound a ribbon of black velvet in the manner of

adornment sometimes seen in eighteenth century miniatures.

The girls grumbled a little at their father’s defection, but the truth

was that they were so excited by the evening’s prospect that their

regrets had a perfunctory tone. In the carriage they plied the Colonel

with questions as to the nature of the entertainment and the people

they were likely to meet. It amused and somewhat puzzled him to see

that the anticipation of what he had supposed would be a beguiling

and cheerful amusement was throwing them into nervous tremors. As the

large outline of the Davenport house rose before them, all attempt at

conversation died, and they sat, stiff and speechless, on the seat

opposite him.

The Davenport house, as all old Californians know, was at that time

and had been for ten years, the focus of the city’s social life. Mrs.

Davenport was a Southerner and had been a beauty, facts which had

weighed with the San Franciscans since the days when “the water came

up to Montgomery Street.” The Southern tradition still retained much

of its original power. The war had not broken it, and the overwhelming

eruption of money, which the Comstock was to disgorge, had not yet

submerged the once dominant “set.” At its head Mrs. Davenport ruled

with tact and determination. She appeared to the Allens as a graciously

cordial lady of more than middle age, whose sweeping robe of gray satin

matched the hair she wore parted on her forehead and drawn primly down

over the tips of her ears.

To the sisters it was the entrance into a new world, the world their

parents had strayed from and often described to them. Seated in

arm-chairs of yellow brocade they surveyed the length of the parlor, a

spacious, high-ceilinged apartment, of a prevailing paleness of tint

and overhung by crystal chandeliers. The black shoulders of men were

thrown out against the white walls delicately touched with a design in

gilding. Long mirrors reproduced the figures of women rising from the

curving sweep of bright-colored, beruffled trains. A Chinaman, carrying

a wide tray of plates and glasses, moved from group to group.

Soon several of the black coats had gathered round the chairs of June

and Rosamund. The Colonel had to give up his seat, and June could see

him talking to men in the doorways or dropping into vacant places

beside older women. He kept his eye on them, however. It delighted him

to see that their charm was so quickly recognized. Round about him

their name buzzed from a knot in a corner, or a group on a sofa. Many

of those present had known Beauregard Allen in his short heyday. Almost

everybody in the room had heard of his strike near Foleys and sudden

translation from poverty to riches.

When at length the Colonel saw the chair beside June vacant he crossed

the room and dropped into it. He was anxious to hear from her how she

was enjoying herself.

“Well,” he said, “the old man’s been frozen out for nearly an hour.

Didn’t it make you feel conscience-stricken to see me hanging round the

doorway looking hungrily at this chair?”

“I was dying for that man to go,” she answered. “I did everything but

ask him.”

“Oh, you sinner!” he said, looking into her dancing eyes. “Where will

you go to when you die?”

“Where do you think you will?” she asked, grave, but with her dimple

faintly suggested. “I’d like to know, because then I can arrange to

have just about the same sort of record, and we could go together.”

He could not restrain his laughter, and she added in her most caressing

tone,

“It would be so dreary for you to go to one place and me to be in

another.”

Before he could answer she had raised her eyes, glanced at the door,

and then suddenly flushed, her face disclosing a sort of sudden quick

snap into focused attention.

“Mr. Barclay,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t expect to see him

to-night.”

The Colonel turned his head and saw Jerry Barclay entering the room

in the company of a lady and gentleman. Many other people looked

at them as they moved to where Mrs. Davenport stood, for they were

unquestionably a noticeable trio.

The woman was in the middle, and between the proud and distinguished

figure of Barclay and the small, insignificant one of her other escort,

she presented a striking appearance. She was of a large, full build,

verging on embonpoint, but still showing a restrained luxuriance of

outline. A dress of white lace clothed her tightly and swept in creamy

billows over the carpet behind her. It was cut in a square at her neck,

and the sleeves ended at her elbows, revealing a throat and forearms of

milky whiteness. This ivory purity of skin was noticeable in her face,

which was firmly modeled, rather heavy in feature, and crowned with a

coronet of lusterless black hair. She was hardly handsome, but there

was something sensational, arresting, slightly repelling, in the sleepy

and yet vivid vitality that seemed to emanate from her.

“Who is it?” said June in a low voice. “What a curious looking woman!”

The Colonel, who had been surveying the new-comers, looked at his

companion with eyes in which there was a slight veiled coldness. The

same quality was noticeable in his voice:

“Her name’s Newbury, Mrs. William Newbury. Her husband’s a banker here.”

“Is that her husband with her, that little man?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s so old! He looks like her father. What did she marry him for?”

“I don’t know. I’m not her father-confessor. He’s got a good deal of

money, I believe.”

The Colonel did not seem interested in the subject. He picked up June’s

fan and said,

“How did you like the young fellow who had this chair just now, Stanley

Davenport? He’s the last unmarried child my old friend has left.”

The girl’s eyes, however, had followed the new-comers with avid,

staring curiosity, and she said,

“Very much. Are Mrs. Newbury and her husband great friends of Mr.

Barclay’s?”

“I believe they are. I don’t know much about her. I know her husband in

business. He’s a little dried up, but he’s a first-rate fellow in the

main.”

“Is she an American? She looks so queer and foreign.”

“Spanish, Spanish-Californian. She and her sister were two celebrated

beauties here about twelve years ago. Their name was Romero--Carmen

and Guadalupé Romero--and they were very poor. Their grandfather had

been a sort of a Shepherd King, owned a Spanish grant about as big

as a European principality, and when the Gringo came traded off big

chunks of it for lengths of calico and old firearms and books he

couldn’t read. The girls were friends of Mrs. Davenport’s only daughter

Annie, and she gave them a start. Carmen--she was the elder of the

two--married an Englishman, a man of position and means that she met in

this house. She lives over in England. This one--Lupé--married Newbury

about ten years ago.”

“Do you think she’s pretty?” asked June, anxious to have her

uncertainty on this point settled by what she regarded as expert

opinion.

“No. I don’t admire her at all. She was handsome when she married.

Those Spanish women all get too fat. You saw something of Barclay at

Foleys after I left, didn’t you?”

She dropped her eyes to the hands folded in her lap and said with a

nonchalant air,

“Yes, he was at Foleys for over a week. He came back from Thompson’s

Flat just after you left, and he used to come and see us every

afternoon. We had lots of fun. He helped us with the garden, and he

didn’t know how to do anything, and we had to teach him.”

“You saw a lot of Rion Gracey too, I suppose,” said her companion, with

a sidelong eye on her.

It pleased him to note that at this remark she looked suddenly

conscious.

The Colonel had for some time cherished a secret hope. It was one of

the subjects of mutual agreement which had made it easier for him and

Allen to bury the hatchet. The latter had told him of Rion Gracey’s

continued visits to the cottage throughout the summer, and both men had

agreed that no woman could find a better husband than the younger of

the Gracey boys.

June’s conscious air was encouraging, but her words were aggravatingly

non-committal.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “we saw Mr. Gracey often. He was always coming

into Foleys to buy supplies for the Buckeye Belle.”

At that moment Barclay, who had turned away from his companions, saw

her, and with a start of recognition followed by a smile of undisguised

pleasure, hurried toward her. The Colonel rose with some reluctance. He

was surprised and not entirely pleased at the open delight of the young

man’s countenance, the confident friendliness of his greeting. He gave

up his chair, however, and as he crossed the room to one of his elderly

cronies, he saw that Mrs. Newbury was watching Jerry Barclay and June

with a slight, lazy smile and attentive eyes.

“I came here to-night solely to see you,” said the young man, as soon

as the Colonel was out of earshot.

“But how did you know I was here?” asked the innocent June. “I never

told you.”

“No, you naughty girl, you never did. But I heard it.”

“Little birds?” she queried, tilting up her chin and looking at him out

of the ends of her eyes.

“Little birds,” he acquiesced. “And why didn’t you let me know? Don’t I

remember your making me a solemn promise at Foleys to tell me the first

thing if you ever came to San Francisco? You were doubtful then if you

ever would.”

“Yes, I think you do,” she agreed. “That is, if you’ve got a good

memory.”

“You evidently haven’t.”

“I remembered it perfectly and was waiting until we got settled in our

new house before I wrote you. I was going to give you a surprise.”

“Well, you’ve surprised me enough already.” He leaned a little nearer

to her, and looking at her with eyes that were at once soft and bold

said: “You’ve changed so; you’ve changed immensely since I saw you

last.”

She dropped her eyes and said demurely,

“I hope it’s for the better,” then looked up at him and their laughter

broke out in happy duet.

The Colonel heard it across the room, and glancing at them felt annoyed

that June should look so suddenly flushed and radiant. Evidently she

and Jerry Barclay, in the ten days he had spent at Foleys, had become

very good friends.

An hour later the Misses Allen were standing at the top of the steps

that led from the porch to the street. Guests were departing in all

directions, and the lanterns of carriages were sending tubes of opaque,

yellow light through the fog. The Colonel had gone in quest of theirs,

cautioning his charges to wait in the shelter of the porch for him.

Here they stood, close-wrapped against the damp, and peering into the

churning white currents. Just below them two men, the collars of their

coats up, paused to light their cigars. One accomplished the feat

without difficulty; the other stood with his hand curved round the

match, which many times flamed and went out.

Suddenly June heard his companion say between puffs,

“Queer, Mrs. Newbury being here!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the other, drawing a new match from his

pocket, “Mrs. Davenport knew the Romero girls long before they were

married. They were friends of Annie Davenport’s. Nobody’d ever breathed

a word against either of them then. She wouldn’t throw Lupé down on a

rumored scandal. I don’t see how she could.”

“Lots of people have. And you call it a ‘rumored scandal’ all you want;

everybody believes it. She owns him body and soul.”

The other man had at last induced the tip of his cigar to catch. He

threw back his head and drew a few quick inspirations.

“That’s the story. But a woman like Mrs. Davenport is not going to damn

her daughter’s friend on hearsay. Women have got a creed of their own;

they believe what they want to and they disbelieve what they want to.

She wants to believe that the affair’s purely platonic, and she does

it.”

“But Barclay! To hang round her that way in public--what a fool!”

“Oh, Barclay!”--a shrug went with the words--“he does what he’s told!”

The man turned as he spoke and saw the two girls above him on the

step. He threw a low-toned phrase at his companion, and without more

words they started out and were absorbed in the darkness. Almost

simultaneously a carriage rattled up and the Colonel’s voice bade June

and Rosamund descend.

A half-hour later, as they were mounting the stairs to their rooms,

June said suddenly,

“Did you hear what those men were saying on the steps as we stood there

waiting?”

They had both heard the entire conversation, and though they did not

understand the true purport of the ambiguous phrases, they realized

that they contained a veiled censure of Mrs. Newbury and Jerry Barclay.

Their secluded bringing up in an impoverished home where the coarseness

of the world never entered had kept them ignorant of the winked-at sins

of society. Yet the crude frankness of mining camps had paraded before

their eyes many things that girls brought up in the respectable areas

of large cities never see.

“Yes, I heard them,” said Rosamund.

“What did they mean? I didn’t understand them. They seemed to think

there was something wrong about Mrs. Newbury.”

“I don’t know what they meant. But I didn’t like her looks at all. I

wouldn’t want her for a friend.”

“They said something of Mr. Barclay too, didn’t they?”

“Yes; they said he was a fool and did as he was told.”

“Well,” said June, bristling, “those are just the two particular things

about him I should think were not true. But there was some one that

they said she--I suppose _that_ meant Mrs. Newbury--owned body and

soul. Whom do you suppose they meant?”

“Her husband,” said Rosamund promptly. “Whom else could they mean?”

June had felt depressed on the way home. At these words her depression

suddenly vanished and she became wreathed in smiles. Thrusting her

hand through Rosamund’s arm she gave it an affectionate squeeze,

exclaiming with a sudden sputter of laughter,

“Well, if his soul isn’t a better specimen than his body I don’t think

it’s much to own.”

Rosamund was shocked; she refused even to smile, as June, drooping

against her shoulder, filled the silence of the sleeping house with the

sound of her laughter.