TOMORROW’S
TANGLE
[Illustration: “THAT’S MY LIFE,--TO WORK IN WILD PLACES WITH MEN”]
TOMORROW’S
TANGLE
BY
GERALDINE BONNER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ARTHUR I. KELLER
[Illustration]
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1903
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
OCTOBER
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TOMORROW’S
TANGLE
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE DESERT 1
II STRIKING A BARGAIN 7
III HE RIDES AWAY 28
IV THE ENCHANTED WINTER 50
MARIPOSA LILY
I HIS SPLENDID DAUGHTER 71
II THE MILLIONAIRE 86
III RETROSPECT 100
IV A GALA NIGHT 119
V TRIAL FLIGHTS 130
VI THE VISION AND THE DREAM 147
VII THE REVELATION 157
VIII ITS EFFECT 172
IX HOW COULD HE 181
X THE PALE HORSE 194
XI BREAKS IN THE RAIN 214
XII DRIFT AND CROSSCUT 229
XIII THE SEED OF BANQUO 245
XIV VAIN PLEADINGS 260
XV THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY 276
XVI REBELLIOUS HEARTS 294
XVII FRIEND AND BROTHER 311
XVIII WITH ME TO HELP 331
XIX NOT MADE IN HEAVEN 350
XX THE WOMAN TALKS 366
XXI THE MEETING IN THE RAIN 382
XXII A NIGHT’S WORK 398
XXIII THE LOST VOICE 410
XXIV A BROKEN TOOL 426
XXV HAVE YOU COME AT LAST 435
EPILOGUE
I THE PRIMA DONNA 451
PROLOGUE
TOMORROW’S TANGLE
CHAPTER I
THE DESERT
“To every man a damsel or two.”
--JUDGES.
The vast, gray expanse of the desert lay still as a picture in the heat
of the early afternoon. The silence of waste places held it. It was
gaunt and sterile, clad with a drab growth of sage, flat as a table,
and with the white scurf of the alkali breaking through its parched
skin. It was the earth, lean, sapless, and marked with disease. A chain
of purple hills looked down on its dead level, over which a wagon road
passed like a scar across a haggard face. From the brazen arch of the
sky heat poured down and was thrown back from the scorched surface of
the land. It was August in the Utah Desert in the early fifties.
In the silence and deadness of the scene there was one point of life.
The canvas top of an emigrant wagon made a white spot on the monotone
of gray. At noon there had been but one shadow in the desert and this
was that beneath the wagon which was stationary in the road. Now the
sun was declining from the zenith and the shadow was broadening; first
a mere edge, then a substantial margin of shade.
In it two women were crouched watching a child that lay gasping. Some
distance away beside his two horses, a man sat on the ground, his hat
over his eyes.
One of the thousand tragedies the desert had seen was being enacted.
Crushed between that dead indifference of earth and sky, its
participators seemed to feel the hopelessness of movement or plaint and
sat dumb, all but the child, who was dying with that solemn aloofness
to surroundings, of which only those who are passing know the secret.
His loud breathing sounded like a defiance in the silence of that
savagely unsympathizing nature. The man, the women, the horses, were
like part of the picture in their mute immobility, only the dying child
dared defy it.
He was a pretty boy of three, and had succumbed to one of the slight,
juvenile ailments that during the rigors of the overland march
developed tragic powers of death. His mother sat beside him staring
at him. She was nineteen years of age and had been married four years
before to the man who sat in the shadow of the horses. She looked
forty, tanned, haggard, half clad. Dazed by hardship and the blow
that had just fallen, she had the air of a stupefied animal. She
said nothing and made no attempt to alleviate the sufferings of her
first-born.
The other woman was some ten years older, and was a buxom, handsome
creature, large-framed, capable, stalwart--a woman built for struggles
and endurance--the mate of the pioneer. She, too, was the wife of the
man who sat by the horses. He was of the Mormon faith, which he had
joined a year before for the purpose of marrying her.
The sun sloped its burning course across the pale sky. The edges of the
desert shimmered through veils of heat. Far on the horizon the mirage
of a blue lake, with little waves creeping up a crescent of sand,
painted itself on the quivering air. The shadow of the wagon stealthily
advanced. Suddenly the child moved, drew a fluttering breath or two,
and died. The two women leaned forward, the mother helplessly; the
other, with a certain prompt decision that marked all her movements,
felt of the pulse and heart.
“It’s all over, Lucy,” she said bruskly, but not unkindly; “I guess
you’d better get into the wagon; Jake and I’ll do everything.”
The girl rose slowly like a person accustomed to obey, moved to the
back of the wagon, and climbed in.
The man, who had seen this sudden flutter of activity, pushed back his
hat and looked at his wives, but did not move or speak. The second wife
covered the dead child with her apron, and approached him.
“He’s dead,” she said.
“Oh!” he answered.
“We must bury him,” was her next remark.
“Well, all right,” he assented.
He went to the wagon and detached from beneath it a spade. Then he
walked a few rods away and, clearing a space in the sage, began to dig.
The woman prepared the child for burial. The silence that had been
disturbed resettled, broken at intervals by the thud of the spade.
The heat began to lessen and a still serenity to possess the barren
landscape. The desert had received its tribute and was appeased.
The rites of the burial were nearly completed, when a sound from the
wagon attracted the attention of the man and the woman. They stopped,
listened and exchanged a glance of alarmed intelligence. The woman
walked to the wagon rapidly, and exchanged a few remarks with the
other wife. Her voice came to the man low and broken. He did not hear
what she said, but he thought he knew the purport of her words. As he
shoveled the earth into the grave his brow was contracted. He looked
angrily harassed. The second wife came toward him, her sunburnt face
set in an expression of frowning anxiety.
“Yes,” she said, in answer to his look, “she feels very bad. We got to
stop here. We can’t go on now.”
He made no answer, but went on building up the mound over the grave.
He was younger by a year or two than the woman with whom he spoke, but
it was easy to be seen that of her, as of all pertaining to him, he
was absolute master. She watched him for a moment as if waiting for an
order, then, receiving none, said:
“I’d better go back to her. I wish a train’d come by with a doctor. She
ain’t got much strength.”
He vouchsafed no answer, and she returned to the wagon, and this time
climbed in.
He continued to build up and shape the mound with sedulous and
evidently absent-minded care. The sweat poured off his forehead and his
bare, brown throat and breast. He was a lean but powerful man, worn
away by the journey to bone and muscle, but of an iron fiber. He had
no patience with those who hampered his forward march by sickness or
feebleness.
When he had finished the mound the sun was declining toward the tops
of the distant mountains. The first color of its setting was inflaming
the sky and painting the desert in tones of strange, hot brilliancy.
The vast, grim expanse took on a tropical aspect. Against the lurid
background the chain of hills turned a transparent amethyst, and the
livid earth, with its leprous eruption, was transformed into a pale
lilac-blue. Presently the thin, clear red of the sunset was pricked by
a white star-point. And in the midst of this vivid blending of limpid
primary colors, the fire the man had kindled sent a fine line of smoke
straight up into the air.
The second wife came out of the wagon to help him get the supper and to
eat hers. They talked a little in low voices as they ate, drawn away
from the heat of the fire. The man showed symptoms of fatigue; but the
powerful woman was unconquered in her stubborn, splendid vigor. When
she had left him, he lay down on the sand with his face on his arm and
was soon asleep. The sounds of dole that came from the wagon did not
wake him, nor disturb the deep dreamlessness of his exhausted rest.
The night was half spent, when he was wakened by the woman shaking his
shoulder. He looked up at her stupidly for a minute, seeing her head
against the deep blue sky with its large white stars.
“It’s over. It’s a little girl. But Lucy’s pretty bad.”
He sat up, fully awake now, and in the stillness of the night heard the
cat-like mew of the new-born. The canvas arch of the wagon glowed with
a fiery effect from the lighted lanterns within.
“Is she dying?” he said hurriedly.
“No--not’s bad as that. But she’s terribly low. We’ll have to stay here
with her till she pulls up some. We can’t move on with her this way.”
He rose and, going to the wagon, looked in through the opened flap.
His wife was lying with her eyes closed, waxen pale in the smoky
lantern-light. The sight of her shocked him into a sudden spasm of
feeling. She had been a fresh and pretty girl of fifteen when he had
married her, four years before at St. Louis. He wondered if her father,
who had given her to him then, would have known her now. In an excess
of careless pity he laid his hand on her and said:
“Well, Lucy, how d’ye feel?”
She shrank from his touch and tried to draw a corner of the blanket, on
which her head rested, over her face.
He turned away and walked back to the fire, saying to the second wife:
“I guess she’ll be able to go on to-morrow. She can stay in the wagon
all the time. I don’t want to run no risks ’er gittin’ caught in the
snows on the Sierra. I guess she’ll pull herself together all right in
a few days. I’ve seen her worse ’n that.”
CHAPTER II
STRIKING A BARGAIN
“How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moments’ product thus,
When a soul declares itself--to wit:
By its fruit, the thing it does!”
--BROWNING.
Where the foothills fold back upon one another in cool, blue shadows,
and the tops of the Sierra, brushed with snow, look down on a
rugged rampart of mountains falling away to a smiling plain, Dan
Moreau and his partner had been working a stream bed since June.
Placerville--still Hangtown--though already past the feverish days
of its first youth, was some twenty-five miles to the southwest. A
few miles to the south the emigrant trail from Carson crawled over
the shoulder of the Sierra. Small trails broke from the parent one
and trickled down from the summit, by “the line of least resistance,”
to the outposts of civilization that were planted here and there on
foothill and valley.
The cañon where Moreau and his “pard” were at work was California,
virgin and unconquered. The forty-niners had passed it by in their
eager rush for fortune. Yet the narrow gulch, that steamed at midday
with heated airs and was steeped in the pungent fragrance which
California exhales beneath the ardors of the sun, was yielding the two
miners a good supply of gold. Their pits had honeycombed the stream’s
banks far up and down. Now, in September, the water had dwindled to a
silver thread, and they had dammed it near the rocker into a miniature
lake, into which Fletcher--Moreau’s partner--plunged his dipper with
untiring regularity, at the same time moving the rocker which filled
the hot silence of the cañon with its lazy monotonous rattle.
They had been working with little cessation since early June. The
richness of their claim and the prospect that the first snows would put
an end to labors and profits had spurred them to unremitting exertion.
In a box under Moreau’s bunk there were six small buckskin sacks of
dust, joint profits of the summer’s toil.
Moreau, a muscular, fair-haired giant of a man, was that familiar
figure of the early days--the gentleman miner. He was a New Englander
of birth and education, who had come to California in the first rush,
with a little fortune wherewith to make a great one. Luck had not been
with him. This was his first taste of success. Five months before he
had picked up a “pard” in Sacramento, and after the careless fashion
of the time, when no one sought to inquire too closely into another’s
antecedents, joined forces with him and spent a wandering spring,
prospecting from bar to bar and camp to camp. The casual words of an
Indian had directed them to the cañon where now the creak of their
rocker filled the hot, drowsy days.
Of Harney Fletcher, Moreau knew nothing. He had met him in a
lodging-house in Sacramento, and the partnership proved to be a
successful one. What the New Englander furnished in money, the other
made up in practical experience and general handiness. It was Fletcher
who had constructed the rocker on an improved model of his own. His had
been the directing brain as well as the assisting hand which had built
the cabin of logs that surveyed the stream bed from a knoll above. The
last remnants of Moreau’s fortune had stocked it well, and there were
two good horses in the brush shed behind it.
It was now September, and the leaves of the aspens that grew along
the stream bed were yellowing. But the air was warm and golden with
sunshine. Above, in the high places of the Sierra, where the emigrant
trail crept along the edges of ravines and crawled up the mighty flank
of the wall that shuts the garden of California from the desert beyond,
the snow was already deep. Fletcher, who had gone into Hangtown the
week before for provisions, had come back full of stories of the swarms
of emigrants pouring down the main road and its branching trails,
higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell, hungry, gaunt, half clad, in their wild
rush to enter the land of promise.
There was no suggestion of winter here. The hot air was steeped in the
aromatic scents that the sun draws from the mighty pines which clothe
the foothills. At midday the little gulley where the men worked was
heavy with them. All about them was strangely silent. The pines rising
rank on rank stirred to no passing breezes. There was no bird note,
and the stream had shrunk so that its spring-time song had become a
whisper. Heat and silence held the long days, when the red dust lay
motionless on the trail above, and the noise made by the rocker sounded
strangely intrusive and loud in the enchanted stillness that held the
landscape.
On an afternoon like this the men were working in the stream
bed--Moreau in the pit, Fletcher at his place by the rocker. There
was no conversation between them. The picture-like dumbness of their
surroundings seemed to have communicated itself to them. Far above,
glittering against the blue, the white peaks of the Sierra looked down
on them from remote, aërial heights. The tiny thread of water gleamed
in its wide, unoccupied bed. Save the men, the only moving thing in
sight was a hawk that hung poised in the sky above, its winged shadow
floating forward and pausing on the slopes of the gulch.
Into this spellbound silence a sound suddenly broke--a sound unexpected
and unwished for--that of a human voice. It was a man’s, harsh and
loud, evidently addressing cattle. With it came the creak of wheels.
The two partners listened, amazed and irresolute. The trail that passed
their cabin was an almost unknown offshoot from the main highway. Then,
the sounds growing clearer, they scrambled up the bank. Coming down
the road they saw the curved top of a prairie schooner that formed a
background for the forms of two skeleton horses, beside which walked
a man who urged them on with shouts and blows. Wagon and horses were
enveloped in a cloud of red dust.
At the moment that the miners saw this unwelcome sight, one of the
wretched beasts stumbled, and pitching forward, fell with what sounded
like a human groan. The man, with an oath, went to it and gave it a
kick. But it was too far spent to rally, and settling on its side, lay
gasping. A woman, stout and sunburned, ran round from the back of the
cart, with a face of angry consternation. As Moreau approached, he
heard her say to the man who, with oaths and blows, was attempting to
drag the horse to its feet:
“Oh, it ain’t no use doing that. Don’t you see it’s dying?”
Moreau saw that she was right. The animal was in its death throes. As
he came up he said, without preliminaries:
“Take off its harness, the poor brute’s done for,” and began to
unbuckle the rags of harness which held it to the wagon.
The man and woman turned, startled, and saw him. Looking back they saw
Fletcher, who was coming slowly, and evidently not very willingly,
forward. The sight of the exhausted pioneers was a too familiar one to
interest him. The dying horse claimed a lazy cast of his indifferent
eye. Moreau and the man loosed the harness, lifted the pole, and let
the creature lie free from encumbrance. The other horse, freed, too,
stood drooping, too spent to move from where it had stopped. If other
testimony were needed of the terrible journey they were ending, one saw
it in the gaunt face of the man, scorched by sun, seamed with lines,
with a fringe of ragged beard, and long locks of unkempt hair hanging
from beneath his miserable hat.
This stoppage of his journey with the promised land in sight seemed to
exasperate him to a point where he evidently feared to speak. With eyes
full of savage despair he stood looking at the horse. Both he and the
woman seemed so overpowered by the calamity that they had no attention
to give to the two strangers, but stood side by side, staring morosely
at the animal.
“What’ll we do?” she said hopelessly. “Spotty,” indicating the other
horse, “ain’t no use alone.”
Moreau spoke up encouragingly.
“Why don’t you leave the wagon and the other horse here? You can walk
into Hangtown by easy stages. The Porter ranch is only twelve miles
from here and you can stay there all night. The poor beast can’t do
much more, and we’ll feed it and take care of your other things while
you’re gone.”
“Oh, damn it, we can’t!” said the man furiously.
As if in explanation of this remark, a woman suddenly appeared at the
open front of the wagon. She had evidently been lying within it, and
had not risen until now.
When Moreau looked at her he experienced a violent thrill of pity, that
the evident sufferings of the others had not evoked. He was a man of a
deeply tender and sympathetic nature toward all that was helpless and
weak. As his glance met the face of this woman, he thought she was the
most piteous object he had ever seen.
“You’d better come into the cabin,” he said, “and see what you can do.
You can’t go on now, and you look pretty well used up.”
The man gave a grunt of assent, and taking the other horse by the head
began to lead it toward the cabin, being noticeably careful to steer
it out of the way of all stumbling-blocks. The woman in the sunbonnet
called to her companion in the wagon:
“Come, Lucy, get a move on! We’re going to stop and rest.”
Thus addressed, the woman moved to the back of the cart, drew the flap
aside and slipped out. She came behind the others, and Moreau, looking
back, saw that she walked slowly, as if feeble, or in pain.
Advancing to the sunbonneted figure in front of him he said, with a
backward jerk of his head: “What’s the matter with her? Is she sick?”
The woman gave an indifferent glance backward. Like the man, she seemed
completely preoccupied by their disaster.
“Not now,” she answered, “but she has been. But good Lord!”--with a
sudden burst of angry bitterness--“women like her ain’t meant to take
them sort of journeys. If it weren’t for her, Jake and I could go on
all right.”
She relapsed into silence as the cabin revealed itself through the
trees. It appeared to interest her, and she went to the door and looked
in.
It was the typical miner’s cabin of the period, consisting of a single
room with two bunks. Opposite the doorway was the wide-mouthed chimney,
a slab of rock before it doing duty as hearthstone. There was an
armchair formed of a barrel, cushioned with red flannel and mounted
on rockers. Moreau’s bunk was covered with a miner’s blanket, and the
ineradicable habits of the gentleman spoke in the very simple but
sufficient toilet accessories that stood on a shelf under a tiny square
of looking-glass. Over the roof a great pine spread its boughs, and in
passing through these the slightest breaths of air made soft eolian
murmurings. To the pioneers, the wild, rough place looked the ideal of
comfort and luxury.
A small spring bubbled up near the roots of the pine and trickled
across the space in front of the cabin. To this, by common consent, the
party made its way. The exhausted horse plunged its nose in the cool
current and drank and snorted and drank again. The elder woman knelt
down and laved her face and neck and even the top of her head in the
water. The man stood looking with a moody eye at his broken animal, and
joined by Fletcher, they talked over its condition. The miner, versed
in this as in all practical matters, deemed the beast incapacitated for
journeys of any length for some time to come. Both animals had been
driven to the limit of their strength.
The pioneer asserted:
“I had to get acrost before the snows blocked us, and they’re heavy up
there now,” with a nod of his head toward the mountains above; “then I
wanted to get down into the settlements as soon’s I could. I knew there
weren’t two more days work in ’em, but I calk’lated they’d get me in.
After that it didn’t matter.”
“The only thing for you to do is to walk into Hangtown, buy a mule
there, and come back.”
The man made a despairing gesture.
“How the hell can I, with her?” he said, indicating the younger woman.
Fletcher turned round and surveyed her with a cold, exploring eye where
she had sunk down on the roots of the pine, with her back against its
trunk.
“She looks pretty well tuckered out,” he said. “Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And the other one’s your sister?” he continued with glib curiosity.
“She’s my wife, too.”
The inquirer, who was used to such plurality on the part of the Utah
emigrants, gave a whistle and said:
“Mormons, eh?”
The man nodded.
Meantime Moreau had entered the cabin to get some food and drink
to offer the sick woman. In a few moments he reappeared carrying a
tin cup containing whisky diluted with water from the spring, and
approached the woman sitting by the tree trunk. Her eyes were closed
and she presented a deathlike appearance. The shawl she had worn round
her shoulders had fallen back and disclosed a small bundle that she
held with a loose carefulness. The man noticed the way her arms were
disposed about it and wondered. Coming to a standstill before her, he
said:
“I’ve brought you something that’ll brace you up. Would you like to try
it?”
She raised her lids and looked at him, and then at the cup. As he met
her glance he noticed that her eyes were a clear brown like a dog’s,
and for the first time he realized that she might be young. She
stretched out her hand obediently and taking the cup drank a little,
then silently gave it back.
“You’ve had a pretty rough time I guess,” he said, holding the cup
which he intended to give her again in a minute.
She nodded. Then suddenly the tears began to well out of her eyes,
quantities of tears that ran in a flood over her cheeks. She did not
sob or attempt to hide her face, but leaning her head against the tree,
let the tears flow as though lost to everything but her sense of misery.
“Oh, poor thing! poor thing!” he exclaimed in a burst of sympathy,
“you’re half dead. Here take some more of this,” and he pressed the cup
into her hand, not knowing what else to do for her.
She took it, and then, through the tears, he saw her cast a look of
furtive alarm toward her husband. She was within his line of vision and
tried to shift herself behind Moreau.
With a sensation of angry disgust he understood that she feared this
unkempt and haggard creature to whom she belonged. He moved so that he
sheltered her and watched her try to drink again. But her tears blinded
her and she handed the cup back with a shaking hand.
“It’s been too much,” she gasped. “If I could only have died! My boy
did. Out there on them awful plains where there ain’t a tree and it’s
hot like a furnace. And they buried him there--Bessie and he.”
“Bessie and he?” he repeated vaguely, his pity entirely preoccupying
his mind for the moment.
“Yes, Bessie,--the second wife. I’m the first.”
“Oh,” he said, comprehending, “you’re from Utah?”
“Not me,” she answered quickly, “I’m from Indiana. I’m no Mormon. He
wasn’t neither till he married Bessie. He wanted her and he did it.”
Here she was suddenly interrupted by a weak whining cry from the bundle
that one arm still curved about. She bent her head and drew back the
covering, and Moreau saw a strange wizened face and a tiny, claw-like
hand feeling feebly about. He had never seen a very young infant before
and it seemed to him a weirdly hideous thing.
“Is it yours?” he said, amazed.
“Yes,” she answered, “it was born in the desert three weeks ago.”
Her tears were dry, and she bent over the feeble thing that squirmed
weakly and made small, cat-like noises, with something in her attitude
that changed her and made her still a woman who had a life above her
miseries.
“Wouldn’t you like to go into the cabin?” said the man, feeling
suddenly abashed by his ignorance of all pertaining to this
infinitesimal bit of life. “You might want to wash it or put it
to sleep or give it something to eat. There’s a basin and soap
and--er--some flour and bacon in there.”
The woman responded to the invitation with a slight show of alacrity.
She stumbled as she rose, and he took her arm and guided her. At the
cabin door he left her and as he passed to the back where the rest
of the party had gone, the baby’s feeble cry, weak, but insistent,
followed him.
The emigrant, Bessie and Fletcher, had repaired to the brush shed where
Moreau’s horses were stabled and had put the half-dead Spotty under
its shelter. Here the exhausted beast had lain down. The trio had then
betaken themselves to a bare spot on the shaded slope of the knoll
and were eating ship’s biscuits and drinking whisky and water from a
tin cup, that circulated from hand to hand. As Moreau approached he
could hear his partner volubly expatiating on the barrenness of the
stream-beds in the vicinity. The stranger was listening to him with a
cogitating eye, his seamed, weather-worn face set in an expression of
frowning attention. Her hunger appeased, Bessie had curled up on her
side, and with her sunbonnet still on, had fallen into a deep, healthy
sleep.
Moreau joined them, and listened with mingled surprise and amusement to
Fletcher’s glib lies. Then, when his partner’s fluency was exhausted,
he questioned the emigrant on his trip. The man’s answers were short
and non-committal. He seemed in a morose, savage state at his ill luck,
his mind still engrossed by the question of moving on.
“If I’d money,” he said, “I’d give you anything you’d ask for them two
horses ’er your’n in the shed. But I ain’t a thing to give--not a red.”
“Your wife, your other wife,” said Moreau, “doesn’t seem to me fit to
go on. She’s dead beat.”
The man gave an angry snort.
“She’s been like that pretty near the whole way,” he said.
“Everything’s been put back because of her.”
He relapsed into moody silence and then said suddenly: “We’re goin’ if
she’s got to walk.”
Moreau went back to the cabin. They had half killed the woman already;
now if they insisted on her walking the wretched creature might
collapse altogether. Would they leave her on the mountain roads, he
wondered?
He reached the cabin door, knocked and heard her answering “come in.”
She was sitting on an upturned box beside the bunk on which the baby
slept. Her sunbonnet was off, and he noticed that she had bright
hair, rippled and thick, and of the same reddish-brown color as her
eyes. She had washed away the traces of her tears, but her clothes,
hardly sufficient covering for her lean, toil-worn body, were dirty
and ragged. No beggar he had ever seen in the distant New England
town where he had spent his boyhood, had presented a more miserable
appearance. She looked timidly at him and rose from the box, pushing it
toward him.
“I put the baby on the bunk,” she said apologetically, “but I can hold
her.”
“Oh, don’t disturb her,” he said quickly. “It’s the only place you
could have put her.” Then, seeing her standing, he said, “Why don’t you
sit down?”
She sat charily and evidently ill at ease.
“They’ve been eating out there,” he said, “and I thought you might like
something, too. There’s some stuff over there in the corner if you’ll
wait a moment.”
He went to the corner where the supplies were stored and rifled them
for more ship’s biscuit and a wedge of cheese, a delicacy which
Fletcher had brought from Hangtown on his last visit, and which he
carefully refrained from offering to the hungry emigrants. Coming back
with these he drew out another box and spread them on it before her.
She looked on in heavy, silent surprise. When he had finished he said:
“Now--fall to. You want food as much as anything.”
She made no effort to eat, and he said, disappointed: “Don’t you want
it? Oh, make a try.”
She “made a try,” and bit off a piece of cracker, while he again
retired to the supply corner for the tin cup and the whisky. He tried
to step softly so as not to wake the child, and there was something
ludicrous in the sight of this vast, bearded man, with his mighty,
half-bared arms and muscular throat, trying to be noiseless, with as
much success as one might expect of a bear.
Suddenly, in the midst of her repast, the woman broke down completely;
and, with bowed head, she was shaken by a tempest of some violent
emotion. It was not like her tears of an hour before, which seemed
merely an indication of physical exhaustion. This was an expression
of spiritual tumult. Sobs rent her and she rocked back and forth
struggling with some fierce paroxysm.
Moreau, cup in hand, gazed at her in distracted helplessness.
“Come now, eat a little,” he said coaxingly, not knowing what else to
suggest, and then getting no response: “Suppose you lie down on the
bunk? Rest is what you want.”
“Oh, I can’t go on,” she groaned. “I can’t. How can I? Oh, it’s too
much! I can’t go on.”
He was silent before this ill for which he had no remedy, and she
wailed again in the agony of her spirit:
“I can’t, I can’t. If I could only die! But now there’s the baby, and I
can’t even die.”
He got up feeling sick at heart at sight of this hopeless despair. What
could he suggest to the unfortunate creature? He felt that anything he
could say would be an insult in the face of such a position.
“Oh God, why can’t we die?” she groaned--“why can’t we die?”
As she said the words the sound of approaching voices came through the
open door. Her husband’s struck through her agony and froze it. She
stiffened and lifted her face full of an animal look of listening.
Moreau noticed her blunt and knotted hands, pitiful in their record
of toil, as she held them up in the transfixed attitude of strained
attention.
“What now?” she said to herself.
The pioneer, Fletcher and Bessie came slowly round the corner of the
cabin. Bessie looked sleepily anxious, Fletcher lazily amused. As
Moreau stepped out of the doorway toward them he realized that they had
come to some decision.
“Well,” said the man, “we got to travel.”
“You’re going on?” said Moreau. “How about the wagon?”
“We’re goin’ to leave the wagon, and I’ll come back for it from
Hangtown. It’s the only thing to do.”
“And the horse?”
“He calk’lates,” said Fletcher, “to mount his wife--the peaked one--on
the horse and take her along till one or other of ’em drops.”
“Take your wife on that horse?” exclaimed Moreau. “Why, it can’t go two
miles.”
“Well, maybe it can’t,” returned the man with an immovable face.
There was a pause. Moreau was conscious that the woman was standing
behind him in the doorway. He could hear her breathing.
“Come on, Lucy,” said the husband. “We got to move on sometime.”
Here the second wife spoke up:
“I don’t see how the horse is goin’ to get Lucy twelve miles, and this
man says the first place we can stop is twelve miles farther along.”
“Don’t you begin with your everlasting objections,” said the husband,
furiously. “Get the horse.”
The woman evidently knew the time had passed for trifling and turned
away toward the brush shed. Fletcher followed her with a grin. The
situation appealed to his sense of humor, and he was curious as to the
outcome.
Moreau and the emigrant were left facing each other, with the first
wife in the doorway.
“Your wife’s not able to go on,” said the miner--his manner becoming
suddenly authoritative; “no more than your horse is.”
“Maybe not,” said the other, “but they’re both goin’ to try.”
“But can’t you see the horse can’t carry her? She certainly can’t walk
into Hangtown, or even to Porter’s Ranch.”
“No, I can’t see. And how’s it come to be your business--what they can
do or what they can’t?”
[Illustration: “YOUR WIFE’S NOT ABLE TO GO ON, NO MORE THAN YOUR HORSE
IS”]
“It’s any one’s business to prevent a woman from being half killed.”
“Since you seem to think so much about her, why don’t you keep her here
yourself?”
The man spoke with a savage sneer, his eyes full of steely defiance.
Before he had realized the full import of his words, burning with rage
against the brutal tyrant to whom the wife was of no more moment than
the horse, Moreau answered:
“I will--let her stay!”
There was a moment’s pause. The emigrant’s face, dark with rage, was
suddenly lightened by a curiously alert expression of intelligence. He
looked at the woman in the background and then at the miner.
“I’m not giving anything away just now,” he answered. “When she’s well
she’s of use. But I’ll swap her for your two horses.”
In the heat of his indignation and disgust Moreau turned and looked at
the woman. She was leaning against the door frame, chalk-white, and
staring at him. She made no sound, but her dog-like eyes seemed to
speak for his mercy more eloquently than her tongue ever could.
“All right,” he said quietly. “It’s a bargain.”
“Done,” said the emigrant. “You’ll find her a good worker when she
pulls herself together. You stay on here, Lucy. Bessie,” he sang out,
“bring around them horses.”
Under the phlegm of his manner there was a sudden expanding heat of
shame that he strove to hide. The woman neither stirred nor spoke, and
Moreau stood with his back to her, struggling with his passion against
the man who had been her owner. The impulse under which he had spoken
had full possession of him, and his main feeling was his desire to rid
himself of the emigrant and his other wife.
“Here,” he said, “go on and tell them that you’ll take the horses.
Hurry up!”
The man needed no second bidding and made off rapidly round the corner
of the cabin.
Moreau and the woman were silent. For the moment he had forgotten her
presence, engrossed by the rage that filled his warmly generous nature.
Instinctively he followed the man to the angle of the cabin whence he
could command the brush shed. The trio were standing there, Fletcher
and the woman listening amazed to the emigrant’s explanation. Moreau
turned back to the cabin and his eye fell on the woman in the doorway.
“Well,” he said--trying to speak easily--“you don’t mind staying on
here for a while, do you? I guess we can make you comfortable.”
She made no answer, and after waiting a moment he said:
“When you get stronger I’ll be able to find you something to do in
Hangtown. You know you couldn’t go on, feeling so bad. And this air
round here”--with a wave of his hand to the surrounding pines--“will
brace you up finely.”
She gave a murmured sound of assent, but more than this made no reply.
Only her dog-like eyes again seemed to speak. Their miserable look of
gratitude made Moreau uncomfortable and he could think of nothing more
to say.
The sound of the trio advancing from the shed came as a welcome
interruption. They appeared round the corner of the cabin, leading the
miner’s two powerful and well-fed horses. Evidently the situation had
been explained. Fletcher’s face was enigmatical. The humorousness of
the novel exchange had come a little too close to his own comfort to
be quite as full of zest as it had been earlier in the afternoon. He
had insisted that the emigrant leave his horse, which the man had no
objection to doing. Bessie looked flushed and excited. Moreau thought
he detected shame and disapproval under her agitated demeanor. But
to her work was a matter of second nature. She put the horses to the
tongue of the wagon and buckled the rags of harness together before she
turned for a last word to her companion. This was characteristically
brief:
“So long, Lucy,” she said, “let’s see the baby again.”
It was shown her and she kissed it on the forehead with some
tenderness. Then she climbed on the wheel of the wagon and took from
the interior a bundle tied up in printed calico and laid it on the
ground. It contained all the personal belongings and wardrobe of the
first wife. There were a few murmured sentences between them and then
she turned to ascend to her seat. But before she had fairly mounted a
sudden impulse seized her and whirled her back to give Lucy a good-by
kiss.
There was more feeling in this action than in anything that had passed
between the trio during the afternoon. The two wives had been women who
had mutually suffered. There were tears in Bessie’s eyes as she climbed
to her place. The husband never turned his head in the direction of his
first wife. But as he took the reins and prepared to start the team, he
called:
“Good by, Lucy.”
He clucked at the horses, and the wagon moved forward amid a stir of
red dust. The woman on the front seat drew her sunbonnet over her face.
The man beside her looked neither to the right nor the left, but stared
out over his newly-acquired team with an impassively set visage. His
long whip curled out with a hiss, the spirited animals gave a forward
bound, and the wagon went clattering and jolting down the trail.
Moreau stood watching its canvas arch go swinging downward under the
dark boughs of the pines and the flickering foliage of the aspens. He
watched until a bend in the road hid it. Then he turned toward the
cabin. Fletcher was standing behind him, surveying him with a cold and
sardonic eye:
“Well, you’ve done it!”
“I guess I have.”
“What the devil are you going to do with her?”
“Don’t know.”
“And the horses gone; nothin’ but that busted cayuse left!”
They stood looking at each other, Fletcher angrily incredulous, Moreau
smilingly deprecating and apologetic.
As they stood thus, neither knowing what to say, the emigrant’s wife
appeared at the doorway of the cabin.
“I’ll get your supper now if it’s the right time,” she said timidly.
CHAPTER III
HE RIDES AWAY
“Alas, my Lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts! ’Tis not a life,
’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”
--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
That night the two miners rolled themselves in their blankets and lay
down on the expanse of slippery grass under the pine. Moreau did not
sleep soon. The day’s incidents were the first interruption to the
monotony of their uneventful summer.
Now, the strong man, lying on his back, looking at the large white
stars between the pine boughs, thought of what he had done with
perplexity, but without regret. In the still peacefulness of the night
he turned over in his mind what he should do when the woman grew
stronger. Women were rare in the mining districts, and he knew that the
emigrant wife could earn high wages as a servant either in Hangtown or
the growing metropolis of Sacramento. The child might hamper her, but
he could help her to take care of the child until she got fairly on her
feet. He had nothing much to do with his “dust.” Strong and young and
in California, that always meant money enough.
So he thought, pushing uneasiness from his mind. Turning on his hard
bed he could see the dark bulk of the cabin with a glint of starlight
on its window. Above, the black boughs of the pine made a network
against the sky sown with stars of an extraordinary size and luster. He
could hear the river sleepily murmuring to itself. Once, far off, in
the higher mountains, the shrill, weird cry of a California lion tore
the silence. He rose on his elbow, looking toward the cabin. The sound
was a terrifying one, and he was prepared to see the woman come out,
frightened, and had the words of reassurance ready to call to her. But
there was no movement from the little hut. She was evidently wrapped in
the sleep of utter fatigue.
In the morning he was down at a basin scooped in the stream bed making
a hasty toilet, when Fletcher, sleepy-eyed and yawning, came slipping
over the bank.
“What are we goin’ to do for breakfast?” he said. “Is that purchase o’
your’n goin’ to git it? She’d oughter do something to show she’s worth
the two best horses this side er Hangtown.”
Moreau, with his hair and beard bedewed with his ducking, was about to
answer when a sound from above attracted them.
Lucy was standing on the bank. In the clear morning light she looked
white and pinched. Her wretched clothes of yesterday, a calico sack and
skirt, were augmented by a clean apron of blue check. Her skirt was
short and showed her feet in a pair of rusty shoes that were so large
they might have been her husband’s.
“Are you comin’ to breakfast?” she said; “it’s ready.” Then she
disappeared. The men looked at each other and Moreau shook the drops
from his beard and began to try to pat his hair into order. The
civilizing influence of woman--even such an unlovely woman as the
emigrant’s wife--was beginning its work.
Lucy had evidently been busy. The litter that had disfigured the ground
in front of the cabin was cleared away. Through the open door and
window a current of resinous mountain air passed which counteracted
the effect of the fire. Nevertheless she had evidently feared its heat
would be oppressive, and had brought two of the boxes to the rude bench
outside the doorway, and on these the breakfast was laid. It was of the
simplest--fried bacon, coffee and hot biscuits--but the scent of these,
hot and appetizing, was sweet in the nostrils of the hungry men.
Sitting on the bench, they fell to and were not disappointed. The
emigrant’s wife had evidently great skill in the preparation of the
simple food of the pioneer. With the scanty means at her hand she had
concocted a meal that to the men, used to their own primitive cooking,
seemed the most toothsome they had eaten since they left San Francisco.
As she retired into the cabin, Fletcher--his mouth full of
biscuit--said:
“Well, she can cook anyway. I wonder how she gets her biscuits so
all-fired light? They ain’t all saleratus, neither.”
Here she reappeared, carrying the coffee-pot, and, leaning over
Fletcher’s shoulder, prepared to refill his tin cup.
“Put it down on the table. He can do it himself,” commanded Moreau
suddenly.
She set it down instantly, with her invariable frightened obedience.
“We’re not used to being waited on,” he continued. “Now you sit down
here,”--he rose from his end of the bench and pointed to it,--“and next
thing we want I’ll go in and get it. You’ve had your own breakfast, of
course?”
“No--I ain’t had mine yet,” she answered meekly.
“Well, why ain’t you?” he almost shouted. “What d’ye mean by giving us
ours first?”
She looked terrified and shrank a little on the bench. Moreau had a
dreadful idea that for a moment she was afraid of being struck.
“Here, take this cup,” he said, giving her his,--“and this bacon,”
picking from the pan, which stood in the middle of the table, the
choicest pieces, and a biscuit. “There--now eat. I’m done.”
She tried to eat, but it was evidently difficult. Her hands, bent
and disfigured with work, shook. At intervals she cast a furtive,
questioning look at him where he sat on an overturned box, eying her
with good-humored interest. As he met the frightened dog-eyes he smiled
encouragingly, but she was grave and returned to her breakfast with
nervous haste.
As the men descended the bank to the stream bed, Fletcher said:
“Well, she’s some use in the world. That’s the first decent meal we’ve
had since we left Sacramento.”
“She didn’t eat much of it herself,” returned his pard as he began the
morning’s work.
“She is the gol-darnedest lookin’ woman I ever seen. Looks as if she’d
been fed on shavings. I’ll lay ten to one that emigrant cuss she
b’longs to has ’most beat the life out er her.”
Ascending to the cabin an hour later, Moreau came upon the woman,
washing the breakfast dishes in the stream that trickled from the
spring. She did not hear him approach, and, watching her, he saw that
she was slow and feeble in her movements. The sun spattered down
through the pine boughs on her thick, brilliant-colored hair, and on
the nape of her neck, where the skin was tanned to a coarse, russet
brown.
“What are you doing that for?” he said, coming to a standstill in front
of her. “You needn’t bother about the pans.”
“They’d oughter be cleaned,” she answered.
“You don’t want to feel,” he said, “that you’ve got to work all the
time. I wanted you to rest up a bit. It’s a good place to rest here.”
She made no answer, drying the tin cups on a piece of flour sack.
“I ain’t so awful tired,” she said presently in a low voice.
“Well, don’t you worry about having everything so clean; they’ll do
anyway. And the cabin’s pretty clean,--isn’t it?” he asked, somewhat
anxiously.
“Yes--awful clean,” she said. Then, after a moment, she continued:
“I hadn’t oughter have stayed in the cabin. It’s your’n. Me and the
baby’ll be all right in the brush shed with Spotty.”
“What nonsense!” retorted Moreau. “Do you suppose I’d let you and that
baby stay in the brush shed, the place where the horses have been kept
all summer? You’re going to keep the cabin, and if there’s anything you
want--anything that’s short, or that you might need for the baby--why,
Fletcher’ll go to Hangtown and get it. Just say what you want. Not
having women around, we’re probably short of all sorts of little
fixings.”
“I don’t want nothing,” she said with her head down--“I ain’t never
been so comfortable sence I was married.”
“Have you been married long?” he asked, less from curiosity than from
the desire to make her talk.
“Four years,” she replied; “I was married in St. Louis, just before
dad and I was startin’ to cross the plains. Dad was taken sick. He was
consumpted, and some one tol’ him to go to California, so we was goin’
to start along with a heap of other folks. We was all waitin’ ’round
St. Louis for the weather to settle and that’s how I met Jake.”
“Jake?” said Moreau, interrogatively; “who was Jake?”
“My husband--Jake Shackleton. He was one o’ the drivers of the train.
He drove McGinnes’ teams. He was there in camp with us, and up and
asked me, and dad was glad to get any one to take care of me, bein’ as
he was so consumpted. We was married a week afore the train started. I
didn’t favor it much, but dad thought it was a good thing. My father
was a Methodist preacher, and knowin’ as how he couldn’t last long, he
was powerful glad to get some one to look after me. I was pretty young
to be left--just fifteen.”
“Fifteen!” echoed Moreau--then piecing together her scant bits of
biography--“Then you’re only _nineteen_ now?”
“That’s my age,” she said with her laconic dryness.
He looked at her in incredulous amaze. Nineteen! A girl, almost a
child! A gush of pity and horror welled up in him, and for the moment
he could find no words. She went on, evidently desirous of telling him
of herself as in duty bound to her new master.
“Dad died before we got to Salt Lake. Then Jake and I settled there and
Willie was born, and for two years it wern’t so bad. Jake liked me and
was good to me. But he got to know the Mormons and kep’ sayin’ all the
time it weren’t no good doin’ anything not bein’ a Mormon. He said they
had no use for him, bein’ a Gentile. And then he seen Bessie,--she was
a waitress in the Sunset Hotel,--and got powerful set on her. She was a
big, strong woman, and could work. Not like me. I couldn’t never work
except in the house. I was no good for outdoor work. I was always a
sort er drag, he said. So he turned Mormon and married Bessie, and she
came to live with us.” She stopped and began rubbing a pan with a piece
of flour sack.
“Don’t tell any more if you don’t want to,” said the man, hearing his
voice slightly husky.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she answered with her colorless, unemotional
intonation; “I couldn’t ever come to feel she was his wife, too. I
hadn’t them notions. My father was a preacher. I hated it all, but I
couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do. I had to stay. There was
no one to go to. Dad was dead and he didn’t have no relations. Then we
started to come here, and on the way my little boy died. That was all I
had, and I didn’t care then what happened. And only for the other baby
I’d er crep’ out er the wagon some night and run away and got lost on
them plains. But--”
She stopped and made a gesture of extending her hands outward and
then letting them fall at her sides. It was tragic in its complete
hopelessness. Of gratitude to Moreau she seemed to have little. She
had been so beaten down by misfortune that nothing was left in her but
acquiescence. Her very service to him seemed an instinctive thing, the
result of rigorous training.
“Well,” he said after a pause, “you’ve had a hard time. But it’s over
now. Don’t you think about it any more. You’re going to rest up here,
and when you’re strong and well again we’ll think about something for
you to do. Time enough for that then. But you can always get work and
high pay in Hangtown or Sacramento. Or if you don’t fancy it at any of
those places I’ll see to it that you go down to San Francisco. Don’t
bother any more anyhow. You’d about got to the bottom of things and now
you’re coming up.”
She gathered up her pans and said dully: “Thank you, sir.”
The cry of the baby struck on her ear and she scrambled to her feet,
and without more words turned and walked to the cabin.
At dinner she again made her appearance on the bank and called the two
men. Again they were greeted by a meal that was singularly appetizing,
considering the limited resources. Obeying Moreau’s order, she sat
down with them, but ate nothing, at intervals starting to her feet to
return to the cabin, then restraining the impulse and sitting rigid and
uncomfortable on the upturned box. To wait on the men seemed the only
thing she knew how to do, or that gave her ease in the doing.
The child cried once or twice during dinner, and, in the afternoon,
working in the pit which was in the stream bed just below the cabin
window, Moreau heard it crying again. It seemed a louder and more
imperious cry than it had given previously. The miner, whose knowledge
of infancy and its ills was of the most limited, wondered if it could
be sick.
At sunset, the day’s work over, both men mounted the bank, their
takings of dust in two tin cups, from which it was transferred to the
buckskin sacks in the box under the bunk. Moreau entered the cabin to
get the sacks and found Lucy there curled on the end of the bunk where
the baby slept. As his great bulk darkened the door she started up,
with her invariable frightened look of apology.
“Don’t move--don’t move,” he said, kneeling by her; “I want to get the
box under the bunk.”
She started up, and being nearer the box than he, thrust her hand under
and tried to pull it out. It was heavy with the sacks of dust and
required a wrench. She rose from the effort, gave a gasp, and, reeling,
fell against him. He caught her in his arms, and as her head fell back
against his shoulder saw that she was death-white and unconscious.
With terrified care he laid her on Fletcher’s bunk, and, seizing a pan
of water, sprinkled her face and hands, then tore one of the tin cups
off its nail, and, pouring whisky into it, tried to force it between
her lips. A little entered her mouth, though most of it ran down her
chin. As he stood staring at her, Fletcher appeared in the doorway.
“Hullo!” he said; “what’s the matter with her? By gum, but she looks
bad!” And then, with a quick and practised hand, he pulled her up to a
sitting posture, and, prying her mouth open with a fork, poured some
of the whisky down. It revived her quickly. She sat up, felt for her
sunbonnet, and then said:
“I hadn’t oughter have done that, but it came so quick.”
She tried to get up, but Moreau pushed her back.
“Oh, I ain’t sick,” she said, trying to speak bravely; “I’ve been took
like that before. It’s just tiredness. I’m all right now.”
She again tried to rise, stood on her feet for a moment, then reeled
back on the bunk, with white lips.
“It’s such a weakness,” she whispered; “such a weakness!”
At this moment the baby woke up, and, lifting up its voice, began a
loud, violent wail. The woman looked in terror from one man to the
other.
“Oh, my poor baby!” she cried; “what’ll I do? Is that one goin’ to go,
too?”
“The baby’s all right,” said Moreau. “Don’t begin to worry about that.
All babies cry, don’t they?”
“Oh, my poor baby!” she wailed, unheeding, and suddenly beginning to
wring her hands. “It’ll die like Willie. It’ll die, too.”
“Why should it die? What’s the matter with it? It was all right this
morning, wasn’t it?” he answered, feeling that there were mysteries
here he did not grasp.
“It’ll die because it don’t get nothing to eat,” she cried desperately.
“I’ve nothing for it. I’m too sick! I’m too sick! And it’ll starve. Oh,
my poor baby!”
She burst into the wild, weak tears of exhaustion, her sobs mingling
with the now strident yells of the hungry baby.
The two men looked at each other, sheepishly, beginning to understand
the situation. The enfeebled condition of the mother made it impossible
for her to nourish the child. It was a predicament for which even the
resourceful mind of Fletcher had no remedy. He pushed back his cap,
and, scratching slowly at the front of his head, looked at his mate
with solemn perplexity, while the cabin echoed to sounds of misery
unlike any that had ever before resounded within its peaceful walls.
“Can--can--we get anything?” said Moreau at length--“any--any--sort of
food, meat, eggs--er--er any sort of stuff for it to eat?”
“Eat?” exclaimed Fletcher scornfully; “how can it eat? It hasn’t a
tooth.”
“How would it do if Fletcher went into Hangtown and brought the
doctor?” suggested Moreau, soothingly. “It’ll take twenty-four hours,
but he’s a good doctor.”
The woman shook her head.
“A goat,” she sobbed, the menace to her offspring having given her a
fictitious courage. “If you could get a goat.”
“A goat!”
The two men looked at each other, horror-stricken at the magnitude of
the suggestion.
“She might as well ask us to get an elephant,” muttered Fletcher
morosely. “There’s not a goat nearer than San Francisco.”
“And it would take us two weeks anyway to get one up from there and
across the mountains from Sacramento,” said Moreau.
“By the time you got it here it’d be the most expensive goat you ever
bucked up against,” said his partner disdainfully.
“A cow!” exclaimed Moreau. “Say, Lucy, would a cow do?”
“A cow!” came the muffled answer; “oh, it don’t need a whole cow.”
“But a cow would do? If I could get a cow the baby could be fed on the
milk, couldn’t it?”
“Oh, yes; it ’ud do first-rate.”
“Very well, I’ll get a cow. Don’t you bother any more; I’ll have a cow
here by to-morrow noon. The baby’ll have to hold out till then, for,
not having a decent horse, I can’t get it here any sooner.”
“And where do you calk’late to get a cow?” demanded Fletcher; “cows
ain’t much more common than goats round these parts.”
“On the Porter ranch. It’s twelve miles off. I can go in to-night, rest
there a bit, and by noon be here with the cow.”
“And is that baby goin’ to yell like this from now till to-morrow noon?
You might’s well have a mountain lion tied up in the bunk.”
The difficulty was indeed only half solved. The infant’s lusty cries
were unabated. The miserable mother, with tear-drenched face and
quivering chin, sat up in the bunk and tried to rise and go to it, but
was restrained by Moreau’s hand on her shoulder.
“You stay here and I’ll get it,” he said, then crossed to the other
bunk, and gingerly lifted with his huge, hairy hands the shrieking
bundle, from which protruded two tiny, red fists, jerking and clawing
about, and carried it to its mother. Her practised hand hushed it for a
moment, but its pangs were beyond temporary alleviation, and its cries
soon broke forth.
“If I could git up and mix it some flour and water,” she said, feebly
attempting to rise.
“What’s the matter with us doing that?” queried Moreau. “How do you do
it? Just give us the proportions and we’ll dish it up as if we were
born to it.”
Under her direction he put flour in one of the dippers, and handed
Fletcher a tin cup with the order to fill it with water at the spring.
Both men were deeply interested, and Fletcher rushed back from the
spring with a dripping cup, as if fearful that the infant would die
unless the work of feeding was promptly begun.
“Now go on,” said Moreau, armed with the dipper and a tin teaspoon;
“what’s next?”
“Sugar,” she said; “if you put a touch of sugar in it tastes better to
them.”
“Here, sugar. Hand it over quick. Now, there we are. How do you mix
’em, Lucy?”
She gave the directions, which the men carefully followed, compounding
a white, milky-looking liquid. The crucial moment came when they had to
feed this to the crimson and convulsively screaming baby.
To forward matters better they moved two boxes to the doorway, where
the glow of sunset streamed in, and seated themselves, Fletcher with
the dipper and spoon, Moreau with the baby. Both heads were lowered,
both faces eagerly earnest when the first spoonful was administered.
It was a tense moment till the tip of the spoon was inserted between
the infant’s lips. Her puckered face took on a look of rather annoyed
surprise; she caught at it, and then, with an audible smack, slowly
drew in the counterfeit. The men looked at each other with heated
triumph.
“Takes it like a little man, doesn’t she?” said Moreau proudly.
“She wasn’t hungry,” said Fletcher. “Oh-h, no! Listen to her smack.”
“Here, hold up the dipper. Don’t keep her waiting when she’s so blamed
hungry.”
“You’re spilling half of it. You’re getting it on her clothes.”
“Well, she don’t want to eat any faster. That’s the way she likes to
eat--just slowly suck it out of the spoon. Take your time, old girl,
even if you don’t swallow it all.”
“My! don’t she take it down nice! Look alive there, it’s running outer
the corner of her mouth.”
“Give us that bit of flour sack behind you. We ought to have put
something round her neck.”
The baby, its round eyes intent, one small red fist still fanning the
air, sucked noisily at the tip of the spoon. The mother, sitting up on
the bunk in the background, watched it with craned neck and jealous eye.
Finally, when the meal was over, it was triumphantly handed back to
her, sticky from end to end, but sleepy and satisfied.
A few hours later, in the star-sown darkness of the early night, Moreau
started on his twelve-mile walk to the Porter ranch. The next morning,
some time before midday, he reappeared, red and perspiring, but proudly
leading by a rope a lean and dejected-looking cow.
The problem of the baby’s nutriment was now satisfactorily solved. The
cow proved eminently fitted for the purpose of its purchase, and though
the two miners had several unsuccessful bouts in learning to milk it,
the handy Fletcher soon overcame this difficulty, and the stock of the
cabin was augmented by fresh milk.
The baby throve upon this nourishment. Its cries no longer disturbed
the serenity of the cañon. It slept and ate most of the time, but
kindly consented to keep awake in the late afternoon and be gentle
and patient when the men charily passed it from hand to hand during
the rest before supper. Fletcher regarded it tolerantly as an object
of amusement. But Moreau, especially since the feeding episode, had
developed a deep, delighted affection for it. Its helplessness appealed
to all that was tender in him, and the first faint indications of a
tiny formed character were miraculous to his fascinated and wondering
observation. He was secretly ashamed of letting the sneeringly
indifferent Fletcher guess his sudden attachment, and made foolish
excuses to account for the trips to the cabin which frequently
interrupted his morning’s work in the stream bed.
Lucy’s recovery was slow. The collapse from which she suffered was as
much mental as physical. The anguish of the last two years had preyed
on the bruised spirit as the hardships of the journey had broken the
feeble body. No particular form of ailment developed in her, but she
lay for days silent and almost motionless on the bunk, too feeble to
move or to speak beyond short sentences. The men watched and tended
her, Moreau with clumsy solicitude, Fletcher dutifully, but more
through fear of his powerful mate than especial interest in Lucy as a
woman or a human being.
In his heart he still violently resented Moreau’s action in acquiring
her and parting with the valuable horses. Had she possessed any of the
attractions of the human female, he could have understood and probably
condoned. But as she now was, plain, helpless, sick, unable even to
cook for them, demanding care which took from their work and lessened
their profits, his resentment grew instead of diminishing. Moreau saw
nothing of this, for Fletcher had long ago read the simple secrets of
that generous but impractical nature, and knew too much to bring down
on himself wrath which, once aroused, he felt would be implacable.
At the end of two weeks Lucy began to show signs of improvement. The
fragrant air that blew through the cabin, the soothing silence of the
foothills, broken only by the drowsy prattle of the river or the sad
murmuring of the great pine, began its work of healing. The autumn
was late that year. The days were still warm and dreamily brilliant,
especially in the little cañon, where the sun drew the aromatic odors
from the pines till at midday they exhaled a heavy, pungent fragrance
like incense rising to the worship of some sylvan god.
Sometimes now, on warm afternoons, Lucy crept out and sat at the root
of the pine where she had found her first place of refuge. There her
dulled eyes began to note the beauties that surrounded her, the pines
mounting in dark rows on the slopes, the blue distances where the cañon
folded on itself, the glimpses of chaste, white summits far above
against the blue. Her lungs breathed deep of the revivifying air, clean
and untainted as the water in the little spring at her feet. The peace
of it all entered her soul. Something in her forbade her to look back
on the terrible past. A new life was here, and her youth rose up and
whispered that it was not yet dead.
During the period of her illness Moreau had begun to see both himself
and the cabin through feminine eyes. Discrepancies revealed themselves.
He wanted many things heretofore regarded as luxuries. From the tin
cups of the table service to the towels made of ripped flour sacks,
his domestic arrangements seemed mean and inadequate. They were all
right for two prospectors, but not fitting for a woman and child.
Lucy’s illness also revealed wants in her equipment that struck him as
piteous. Her only boots were the ones he had seen her in on the morning
after her arrival. She had no shawl or covering for cold weather. The
baby’s clothes were a few torn pieces of calico and flannel. Moreau had
washed these many times himself, doing them up in an old flour sack,
which was attached to an aspen on the stream’s bank, and then placed in
one of the deepest parts of the current. Here it remained for two days,
the percolating water cleansing its contents as no washboard could.
One evening, smoking under the pine, he acquainted Fletcher with a
design he had been some days formulating. This was that Fletcher
should ride into Hangtown the next day and not only replenish the
commissariat, but buy all things needful for Lucy and the baby. Spotty
was now also recovered, and, though hardly a mettlesome steed, was at
least a useful pack horse. But the numerous list of articles suggested
by Moreau would have weighted Spotty to the ground. So Fletcher was
commissioned to buy a pack burro, and upon it to bring all needful food
stuffs for the cabin and the habiliments for Lucy and the baby.
“She’s got no shoes. You want to buy her some shoes, one useful pair
and one fancy pair with heels.”
“What size do I git? I ain’t never bought shoes for a woman before.”
This was a poser, and both men cogitated till Moreau suggested leaving
it to the shoe dealer, who should be told that Lucy was a woman of
average size.
“But her feet ain’t,” said Fletcher spitefully, never having been able
to forgive Lucy her lack of beauty.
“Never mind; you’ll have to make a bluff at it. Get the best you can.
Then I want a shawl for her. It’ll be cold soon, and she’s got nothing
to keep her warm.”
“What kind of a shawl? I don’t know no more about shawls than I do
about shoes.”
“A pink crochet shawl,” said Moreau slowly, and with evident sheepish
reluctance at having to make this exhibition of unexpected knowledge.
“And what’s that? I dunno what crochet is.”
“I don’t, either”--and then, with desperate courage--“well, anyway,
that’s what she said she’d like. I asked her yesterday and she said
that. You go into the store and ask for it. That’ll be enough.”
Fletcher grunted.
“And then I want some toys for the kid. Anything you can get that seems
the right kind. She’s a girl, so you don’t want a drum, or soldiers, or
guns, or things of that kind. Get a doll if you can, and a musical box,
or anything tasty and that’s likely to catch a baby’s eye.”
“Why, she can’t hardly see yet. She’s like a blind kitten. Lucy told me
herself yesterday she were only six weeks old.”
“Never you mind. She’s a smart kid; knows more now than most babies at
six months. You might get a rattle--a nice one with bells; she might
fancy that.”
“Silver or gold?” sneered Fletcher, whom this conversation was making
meditative.
“The best you can get. Don’t stint yourself for money; everything of
the best. Then clothes for her; she is going to be as well dressed as
any baby in California. I take it you’d better go to Mrs. Wingate, at
the Eldorado Hotel, and get her to make you out a list; then go to the
store and buy the list right down.”
“Seems to me you’ll want a pack train, not a burro, to carry it all.”
“Well, if you can’t get everything on Spotty and one burro, buy two.
I’ll give you a sack of dust and you can spend it all.”
Fletcher was silent after this, and as he lay rolled in his blanket
that night he looked at the stars for many hours, thinking.
Early in the morning he departed on the now brisk and rejuvenated
Spotty. Besides his instructions he carried one of Moreau’s buckskin
sacks, roughly estimated to contain twelve hundred dollars’ worth of
dust, and, he told Moreau, one of his own. He was due to return the
next morning. With a short word of farewell, he touched Spotty with
the single Mexican spur he wore, and darted away down the rough trail.
Moreau watched him out of sight.
The day passed as quietly as its predecessors. The main events that
marked their course had been the men’s clean-up, Lucy’s gain in
strength and the evidences of increasing intelligence in the child.
To-day Lucy had walked to a point a little distance up the cañon,
rested there, and in the afternoon came creeping back with the flush of
returning health on her face. It was still there when Moreau ascended
from the stream bed with his cup. He had had a good day’s work and was
joyful, showing the fine yellow grains in the bottom of the rusty tin.
Then he noticed her improved appearance and cried:
“Why, you look blooming. A fellow’d think you’d panned a good day’s
work, too.”
To himself he said with a sudden inward wonder:
“She looks almost pretty. And she _is_ only nineteen, I believe.”
The next morning he awaited the coming of Fletcher with impatience. He
had wanted to surprise Lucy, having only told her Fletcher had gone to
buy a burro and some supplies. But the morning passed away and he had
not returned. Then the afternoon slipped by, and Lucy and Moreau took
their supper without him, the latter rather taciturn. The delay wore on
his patience. His knowledge of Fletcher was limited. He had seen him
drunk once in Sacramento, and he wondered if he had gone on a spree and
was now lying senseless somewhere, the contents of the sacks squandered.
When the next morning had passed and Fletcher had still not come, his
suspicions strengthened and he began to think uneasily of his dust. One
sack full was a good deal to lose, now that he had a woman and child
on his hands. Lucy, he could see, was also uneasy. Twice he surprised
her standing by the trail, evidently listening. When evening drew in
and there were still no signs of him, both were frankly anxious and
oppressed. Suddenly, as they sat by the box that answered as dinner
table, she said:
“Did he have much dust?”
“Yes--one sack of mine and one of his own. They’re equal to about
twelve hundred dollars each.”
She gave a startled look at him and sat with her mouth a little open,
fear and amaze on her face.
“Where’s the rest?” she asked.
Moreau indicated the box under the bunk. At the same moment her
suspicion seized him and he pulled it out and threw up the lid. It was
empty of all save a few clothes. Every sack was gone.
Moreau shut down the lid quietly, a little pale. He was not a man of
quick mind, and he hardly could realize what had happened. It was
Lucy’s voice that explained it as she said:
“He did it while I was out in the morning. I went up the stream to that
pool to wash some things at sun-up. He took it then.”
CHAPTER IV
THE ENCHANTED WINTER
“I choose to be yours for my proper part,
Yours, leave me or take, or mar or make;
If I acquiesce, why should you be teased
With the conscience prick and the memory smart?”
--BROWNING.
Fletcher had gone silently and without leaving a trace, and with him
the money. It was a startling situation for Moreau. From comparative
affluence he suddenly found himself without a cent or an ounce of dust.
This, had he had only himself to look after, would not have affected
his free and jovial spirit, but now the woman and the child he had so
carelessly come into possession of loomed before him in their true
light of a heavy responsibility. Lucy, as far as supporting herself
went, was still a long way off from the state of health where that
would be possible. And at the thought of sending her forth, even though
she were cured of her infirmities, Moreau experienced a sensation of
depression. He felt that the cabin would be unbearably lonely when she
and the baby were gone.
That night under the pine he turned over the situation in his mind. The
conclusion he arrived at was that there was nothing better to be done
than stay by the stream bed and work it for all it was worth. Lucy
would continue to improve in the fine air and the child was thriving.
If the snows would hold off till late, as they had done in the open
winter of ’50, he could amass a fair share of dust before it would be
necessary to move Lucy and the baby to the superior accommodations
of Hangtown or Sacramento. It was now October. In November one might
expect the first snows.
He must do a good deal in the next six weeks. This he started to do.
The next day he spent in raising a brush shed against the back of the
cabin where the chimney would offer warmth on cold nights. Into this
he moved such few belongings as he had retained after Lucy and the
baby had taken possession of the cabin. Then the working of the stream
bed went on with renewed vigor. The water was low, hardly more than a
thread, rendering the washing of the dirt harder labor than during the
earlier summer when the watercourses were still full. But he toiled
mightily, rejoicing in the splendor of his man’s work, not with the
same knightly freedom that he felt when he had been that king of men,
the miner with his pick on his shoulder and all the world before him,
but with the soberer joy of the man into whose life others have entered
to lay hold upon it with light, clinging hands.
Against the complete and perfect loneliness of his life the woman
and child, who had started up from nowhere, stood out as figures of
vital significance. They had grown closer to him in that one month’s
isolation than they would have done in a year of city life. The child
became the object of his secret but deep devotion. He had been ashamed
to let Fletcher see it. Now that Fletcher was gone, Moreau often stole
up from his work in the creek to look at it as it slept in a box by the
open door. It was as fresh as a rosebud, its skin clean and satiny, its
tiny hands, crumpled, white and pink, like the petals of flowers. The
big man leaned on his shovel to watch it adoringly. The miracle of its
growth in beauty never lost its wonder for him.
Lucy, too, grew and bloomed in these quiet autumn days. Never
talkative, she became less laconic after the departure of Fletcher.
She seemed relieved by his absence. Moreau began to understand, as he
saw her daily increase in freshness and youthful charm, that she was
as young in nature as she was in years. Points of character that were
touchingly childish appeared in her. Her casting of all responsibility
on him was as absolute as if she had been ten years of age. She obeyed
him with trustful obedience and waited on him silently, her eyes always
on him to try to read his unexpressed wish. Sometimes he caught these
watching eyes and read in them something that vaguely disturbed him.
One day, coming up from the creek for one of his surreptitious views
of the baby, he found its cradle empty, and was about to return to his
work, when he heard a laugh rising from a small knoll among the aspens.
It was a laugh of the most infectious, fresh sweetness, and made
Moreau’s own lips part. He stole in its direction, and as he advanced
it sounded again, rippling deliciously on the crystal air. He brushed
through the aspens and came on Lucy and her baby. She was holding it in
her lap, one hand on the back of its head. Something had touched its
unknown sense of the ludicrous, and its lips were parting in a slow but
intensely amused smile over its toothless gums. Each smile was answered
by its mother with a run of the laughter Moreau had heard.
He looked at them for a moment, and then, advancing, his foot cracked a
dry branch, and Lucy turned. Her face was flushed, her eyes still full
of their past merriment, her smiling lips looked a coral red against
the whiteness of her small, even teeth. Her sunbonnet was off and her
rich hair glowed like copper in the sun. He had never seen her look
like this, and stopped, regarding her with a curious, sudden gravity.
The thought was in his heart:
“She’s only a girl, and--and--almost beautiful.”
Lucy looked confused.
“Oh, I was just laughing at the baby,” she said apologetically; “she
looked so sorter cute smiling that way.”
“I never heard you laugh like that before. Why don’t you do it oftener?”
She seemed embarrassed and murmured:
“I didn’t think you’d like to hear me.”
“I think you’re sometimes afraid of me,” he said; “is that true?”
She bent her face over the baby and said very low:
“I’m afraid as how you might get mad at me. I don’t know much and--I’m
different, and you’ve been more good to me than--”
She stopped, her face hidden over the child. Moreau felt a sudden sense
of embarrassed discomfort.
“Oh, don’t talk that way,” he said, hastily, “or I may get mad. That’s
the sort of talk that annoys me. Laugh and be happy--that’s the way I
want you to be. Enjoy yourself; that’s the way to please me.”
He swung himself down from the knoll into the creek bed and went back
to his rocker. He found it hard to collect his thoughts. The music of
Lucy’s laugh haunted him.
A week, and then two, passed away. The golden days slipped by, still
warm, still scented with the healing pine balsam. The nights were white
with great stars, which Moreau could see between the pine boughs, for
it was still warm enough to sleep on the knoll. His nights’ rests were
now often disturbed. A change had come over the situation in the cabin.
The peace and serenity of the first days after Fletcher’s departure
had gone, leaving a sense of constraint and uneasiness in their stead.
Moreau now looked up at the stars not with the calm content of the days
when Lucy had first come, but with the trouble of a man who begins to
realize menace in what he thought were harmless things.
Nearly a month had passed since Fletcher’s departure when one day,
walking down the stream with an idea of trying diggings farther down,
he came upon Lucy washing in a pool of water enlarged by a rough dam
she herself had constructed. She was kneeling on a flat stone on the
bank, her sunbonnet off, her sleeves rolled up, laving in the water the
few articles of dress that made up the baby’s wardrobe. Her arms above
the sunburned wrists shone snow-white, her roughened hair lay low on
her forehead in damp, curly strands. The sight of her engaged in this
menial toil irritated Moreau and he called:
“What are you doing there, Lucy? Get up.”
She started with one of her old nervous movements and sat back on the
stone. Then, seeing who it was, smiled confidently, and brushed the
hair back from her forehead with one wet hand.
“I was washing the baby’s things. That’s the dam I made.”
Moreau stood looking, not at the dam, but at the woman, flushed,
breathless and smiling, a blooming girl.
“No one would ever think you were the same woman who came here two
months ago,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“I don’t feel like the same,” she answered, beginning to wring her
clothes. “I don’t feel now as if that was me.”
“I thought you were quite an old woman then. Do you know that? I’d no
idea you were young.”
“I felt old. Oh, God--!” she said, suddenly dropping her hands and
looking across the pool with darkly reminiscent eyes--“how awful I
felt!”
“But you’re quite well now? You’re really well, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, returning to her tone of gaiety. “I
ain’t never been like this before. Not sence I was married, anyway.”
The allusion to her marriage made Moreau wince. Of late the subject had
become hateful to him. Standing, leaning on his shovel, he said:
“You know it’ll be winter here soon, so it’s a good thing we’ve got you
well and nicely rested up.”
“Yes, I guess ’twill be winter soon,” she said, looking vaguely round;
“does it snow?”
“Sometimes tons of it, if it’s a hard winter. But we’ve got to get out
before that. Or you have, anyhow. Can’t run any risks with the baby.
Got to get her out and into some decent shelter before the snow falls.”
For a moment Lucy made no answer. She had stopped wringing the clothes
and was kneeling on the stone, her eyes on the water, a faint line
drawn between her brows.
“Where to--? What sort o’ place?” she said slowly.
Moreau shifted his eyes from her face to the earth in which the point
of his shovel had imbedded itself.
“I told you as soon as you got well I’d take you to Hangtown or
Sacramento, or even ’Frisco if they didn’t suit. Now I haven’t got dust
enough to do that. Fletcher put that spoke in my wheel. But I’ll take
you and the baby into Hangtown.”
“Hangtown?” she repeated faintly.
“Yes; it’s quite a ways off. I’ll have to go in myself and get a horse
first, and then I’ll take you both in on that. I thought I’d go to Mrs.
Wingate. Her husband runs the Eldorado Hotel, and she isn’t strong,
and told me last time I was there she’d give a fancy salary if she
could get a housekeeper. How’d you like to try that? It would be a
first-class home for you and the baby.”
Lucy had bent her face over the wet clothes.
“Ain’t it all right here?” she said in a scarcely audible voice.
“No,” said Moreau irritably; “I just told you there was danger of being
snowed in after the first of November. You don’t want to be snowed in
here with the baby, do you?”
“I don’t care,” said Lucy.
“If you don’t feel strong enough to do work like that,” he continued,
“you can stay on in the hotel. I can make the dust for that easily.
Then in the spring, when the streams are full, I’ll have enough to send
you to Sacramento or San Francisco, and you can look about you and see
how you’d like it there.”
“Why can’t I stay here?” she said suddenly, her voice quavering, but
full of protest.
Its note thrilled Moreau.
“I’ve just told you why,” he said quietly.
“Well, I’m not afraid. I don’t mind snow. You can get things to eat
from Hangtown. Oh, let me stay.”
She turned toward him, still kneeling on the stone. Her face was
quivering with the most violent emotions he had ever seen on it. The
dead apathy was gone forever, at least as far as he was concerned.
“Oh, let me stay,” she implored; “don’t send me away from you.”
“Oh, Lucy,” he almost groaned, “don’t you see that won’t do?”
“Let me stay,” she reiterated, and stretched out her hands toward
him. The tears began to pour down her cheeks, and suddenly with the
outstretched hands she seized him, and burst forth into a stream of
impassioned words:
“Let me stay. Let me be with you. Don’t send me away. There ain’t no
use in anything if I’m not with you. Let me work for you. Let me be
where I can see you--that’s all I want. I don’t want no money nor
clothes. If you’ll just let me be near by! And I kin always work and
cook, and you know you like things clean, and I kin keep ’em clean. Oh,
you can’t mean to send me off. I ain’t never been happy before. I ain’t
never had no one treat me so kind before. I ain’t never known what it
was like to be treated decent. I can’t leave you--I can’t--I can’t--”
She sank down at his feet in a quivering heap.
Moreau raised her and held her in his arms, pressed against his breast,
his cheek against her hair. He had no thought for the moment but an
ecstasy of pity and joy. Clinging close to him, she reiterated between
broken breaths:
“I kin stay? Oh! I kin stay?”
“Lucy,” he said, “how can you? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“But I kin stay?” she repeated.
She slid one arm round his neck, and he felt her wet cheek against his.
“Let me just stay and work,” she whispered, “just where I can see you.”
“Do you forget that you’re married?” he said huskily.
“I’ll not be in your way. I’ll not ask for anything or be any trouble,”
was her whispered answer, “so long’s you let me be near you.”
They walked back to the cabin silently. Lucy knew that she had gained
her point and would stay. Her childish nature invaded and possessed
by a great passion built on gratitude and reverence, asked no more
than to be allowed to work for and worship the man who was to her a
god. She did not look into the future, nor demand its secrets. The
perfect joy of the present filled her. In the days that followed she
grew in beauty, and in some subtile way acquired a new girlishness.
Her past seemed wiped out. The blighting effects of the four previous
years fell away from her and she seemed to revert to the sweet and
simple youthfulness that had been hers when Jake Shackleton had married
her at St. Louis. Silent and gentle as ever, it was plain to be seen
that whatever Moreau asked for--service, friendship, love--she would
unquestioningly give.
Early in November a cold evening came with a red sunset and a
sharpening of every outline. For the first time they were driven into
the cabin for supper. A fire of boughs and dried cones burned in the
chimney and before this, supper being over, they sat, Lucy in the
rocker made of a barrel, Moreau on the end of an upturned box, staring
at the flames.
Finally the man broke the silence by telling her that he was going to
take his dust and walk into Hangtown the next day, remaining there over
night and returning in the morning with fresh supplies and a burro.
“Lucy,” he said, drawing his box nearer to her, “I want to talk to you
of something.”
She looked up, saw that the moment both had been dreading had come, and
paled.
“Lucy, the winter’s coming. The snow may be here now at any moment.
Have you thought of what we’re to do?”
She shook her head and began to tremble. His words called up the
specter of separation--what she feared most in the world.
“You know we can’t live on this way. Will you, if I go into Hangtown
and bring back a mule, ride there with me the day after to-morrow and
marry me? There are two or three preachers there who will do it.”
She looked at him with surprised eyes.
“I’m married already to Jake,” she said. “How kin I get married again?”
“I know it, and it’s no good trying to break that marriage. But in your
eyes and mine that was none. You and your baby are mine to take care
of and support and love for the rest of our lives. Though you can’t be
my lawful wife, I can protect you from scandal and insult by making
you what all the world will think is my lawful wife. Only you, and I
and Jake and his second wife will know that there has been a previous
marriage and not one of that four will ever tell.”
She put her rough hand out and felt his great fist close over it, like
a symbol of the protection he was offering her.
“We can be married in Hangtown by your maiden name. If any one asks I
can say I am marrying a young widow whose husband died on the Sierra.
Your husband _did_ die there when he sold you to me for a pair of
horses.”
She nodded, not quite understanding his meaning.
“Kin Jake ever come and claim me?” she asked in a frightened voice.
“How could he? How could he dare tell the world how he left you and
his child sick, almost dying, in the hut of an unknown miner in the
foothills? This is California, where men don’t forgive that sort of
thing.”
She was silent, and then said: “Yes, let’s go to Hangtown and be
married.”
“Was your first marriage perfectly legal? Have you got the marriage
certificate?”
She rose, dragged out the bundle she had brought with her, and from it
drew a long dirty envelope which she handed to him.
He opened it and found the certificate. It was accurate in every
detail. His eye ran over the ages and names of the contracting
parties--Lucy Fraser, fifteen, to Jacob Shackleton, twenty-four, at St.
Louis.
Twisting the paper in his hands he sat moodily eying the fire. The
second marriage was the only way he could think of by which he could
lend a semblance of right to the impossible position in which his
generous action had placed him. Divorce, in that remote locality and at
that early day of laws, half administered and chaotic, was impossible,
and even had it been easily obtained he shrank from dragging into
publicity the piteous story of how the woman he loved had been sold to
him.
That a marriage with Jake Shackleton’s wife was a legal offense he
knew, but with one of those strange whimsies of character which mark
mankind, he felt that the reading of the marriage service over Lucy
and himself would in some way sanctify what could never be a lawful tie.
In a spasm of rage and disgust he held out the paper to the flames,
when Lucy, with a smothered cry sprang forward and seized it. It was
the first violent action into which he had ever seen her betrayed. He
looked in surprise into her flushed and alarmed face.
“Why not? Why not destroy everything that could connect you with such a
past?” he said, almost angrily.
She hesitated, smoothing out the paper with trembling hands. Then she
said falteringly:
“I don’t know--but--but--he was her father,” indicating the sleeping
baby. “I was married to him all right.”
He understood the instinct that made her wish to keep the paper as a
record of her child’s legitimacy, and made no further comment.
The next morning at dawn he started for his long walk into Hangtown,
taking with him all the dust he had accumulated since Fletcher’s
departure. He was absent till the afternoon of the following day, when
he reappeared leading a small pack-mule, laden with supplies, among
which were several articles of dress for Lucy and the baby, so that
they might make a fitting appearance when they rode into camp for the
wedding. Lucy was overjoyed at her finery, and arrayed in it looked so
pretty and so girlish that Moreau, for the first time since the scene
by the creek, took her in his arms and kissed her. It was the kiss of
the bridegroom and the master.
The next morning when she woke the cabin was curiously dark. Going to
the door to open it, she found it resisted, and went to the window. The
world was wrapped in a blinding fall of snow. When Moreau came in for
breakfast, he reported a blizzard outside. The cold was intense, the
wind high, and the snow so fine and so torn by the gale that it was
like a mist of whiteness enveloping the cabin. Already it was piled
high about the walls and had to be shoveled from the door to permit of
its opening. Fortunately they had collected a large amount of fire wood
which was piled in the brush shed in which the man lived. During the
morning Moreau took the animals from their shelter and stabled them in
his. There was fodder for them and a bed of leaves, and the heat of the
chimney warmed the fragile hut.
All day the storm raged, and in the evening, as he and Lucy sat before
the fire, they could hear the turmoil of the tempest outside, moaning
through the ranks of the sentinel pines. They were silent, listening to
this shouting of the unloosed elements, and feeling an indescribably
sweet sense of home and shelter in their rugged cabin and each other’s
society.
The storm was one of those unexpected blizzards which sometimes visit
the Sierras in the early winter. With brief intervals of sunshine,
the snow fell off and on for nearly a month. Moreau had to exercise
almost superhuman effort to keep the cabin from being buried, and, as
it was, the drifts nearly covered the window. It was impossible to
travel any distance, as the snow was of a fine, feathery texture which
did not pack tight, and into which the wanderer sank to the arm-pits.
Fortunately the last trip into Hangtown had stocked the cabin well
with provisions. No cares menaced its inmates, who, warm and happy
in the vast snow-buried solitudes of the mountains, led an enchanted
existence, forgetting and forgotten by the world.
When the storm ended the miner attempted to get into the settlements
with the mule. But the beast, exhausted by the insufficient food, as
the best part of the fodder had to be given to the cow, fell by the
way, dying in one of the drifts. This seemed to sever their last link
with the world. Nature had drawn an unbroken circle of loneliness
around them. Under its spell they were drawn closer together till their
lives merged--the primitive man and woman living for and by love in the
primitive wilderness.
So the enchanted winter passed. The man, at intervals, making his way
into the settlements for food and the few articles of clothing that
they needed. It was a terrible winter, nearly as fierce as that of ’46,
but between the storms Moreau fitfully worked the stream, obtaining
enough dust to pay for their provisions. The outside world seemed to
fade from their lives, which were bounded by the walls of the cabin.
Here, in the long fire-lit evenings, Moreau read to Lucy, taught her
from his few books, strove to develop the mind that misfortune had
almost crushed. She responded to his teachings with the quickness of
love. Without much mental ability she improved because she lived only
for what he desired. She smoothed the roughness of her speech and
studied to correct her grammatical errors. She made him set her little
tasks such as a child studies, and in the evenings he watched her with
surreptitious amusement, as she conned over her spelling, or traced
letters in her copy-book. She was passionately desirous of being worthy
of him, and of leaving her old chrysalis behind her when she issued
from the cabin.
This was not to be until the early spring. It was nearly six months
from the time the emigrant wagon had stopped at his door, that Moreau,
having accumulated enough dust to buy another mule and another
outfit--took Lucy and the child into Hangtown for the marriage. This
ceremony, about which in the beginning she had been somewhat apathetic,
she now earnestly desired. It was accomplished without publicity or
difficulty, Lucy assuming her maiden name of Fraser, and passing as a
young widow. In the afternoon they started back for the cabin, Moreau
on foot, with his wife and baby on the mule. They had decided to stay
by their claim during the spring and early summer when the streams were
high.
Thus the spring passed and the summer came. During this season Lucy,
for the first time, saw that most lovely of Californian wild-flowers,
the mariposa lily, and called her baby after it. As time went on and
no other child was born, Moreau came to regard the little Mariposa as
more and more his own. His affection for her became a paternal passion.
It was decided between himself and Lucy that she should never know the
secret of her parentage, but be called by his name and be brought up
as his child. As the happiness of the union grew in depth and strength
both the man and woman desired more ardently to forget beyond all
recall the terrible past from which she had entered his life. It grew
to be a subject to which Moreau could bear no allusion, and their life
was purposely quiet and secluded, for fear of a chance encounter with
some disturbing reminder.
So the time passed. In the course of the next few years Moreau moved
from the smaller camps into Sacramento. Though a man of little
commercial ability, he was always able, in those halcyon days, to
make a good living for the woman and child to whom he had given his
life. Years of prosperity made it possible to give to Mariposa every
educational advantage the period and town offered. The child showed
musical talent, and for the development of this he was keenly ambitious.
Across their tranquil life, now and then, came a lurid gleam from the
career of the man who was Lucy Moreau’s lawful husband. Jake Shackleton
was soon a marked figure in the new state. But his rise to sensational
fortune began with the booming days of the Comstock. Then his star rose
blazing above the horizon. He was one of the original exploiters of the
great lode and was one of those who owned that solid cone of silver
which has gone down to history as the Reydel Monte. Ten years from his
entrance into the state he was a rich man. In twenty, he was one of
that group of millionaires, whose names were sounded from end to end of
an astonished country.
A quarter of a century from the time when he had crossed the desert
in an emigrant wagon, with his two wives, he read in the paper he had
recently bought as an occupation and investment, a notice of the death
of Daniel Moreau in Santa Barbara. It was brief, as befitted a pioneer
who had sunk so completely out of sight and memory, leaving neither
vast wealth nor picturesque record. The paragraph stated that “the
pioneer’s devoted wife and daughter attended his last hours, which were
tranquil and free from pain. It is understood that the deceased leaves
but little fortune, having during the last two or three years been
incapacitated for work by enfeebled health.”
MARIPOSA LILY
CHAPTER I
HIS SPLENDID DAUGHTER
“Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”
--KINGS.
Four months after the death of Dan Moreau his adopted daughter,
Mariposa, sat at the piano, in a small cottage on Pine Street, in San
Francisco, singing. Her performance was less melodious than remarkable,
for she was engaged in “trying her voice.” This was Mariposa’s greatest
claim to distinction, and, she hoped, to fortune. With it she dreamed
of conquering fame and bringing riches to her mother and herself.
She was so far from either of these goals that she permitted herself to
speculate on them as one does on impossible glories. The merits of her
voice were as unknown in San Francisco as she was. Its cultivation had
been a short and exciting episode, relinquished for lack of means. Now
it was not only given up, but Mariposa was teaching piano herself, and
was feverishly exalted when, the week before, her three pupils had been
augmented by a fourth. Four pupils, at fifty cents a lesson, brought in
four dollars a week--sixteen a month.
“If I make sixteen dollars a week after four months’ work,” Mariposa
had said to her mother, on the acquisition of this fourth pupil, “then
in one year I ought to make thirty-two dollars a month. Don’t you
think that’s a reasonable way of reckoning?”
From which it will be seen that Mariposa was not only young in years,
but a novice at the work of wage-earning.
She was in reality twenty-five years of age, but passed as, and
believed herself to be, twenty-four. She had developed into one of
those lordly women, stately of carriage, wide of shoulder and deep of
breast, that California grows so triumphantly. She had her mother’s
thick, red-brown hair, with its flat loose ripple and the dog’s brown
eyes to match, a skin as white as a blanched almond with a slight
powdering of freckles over her nose, and lips that were freshly red
and delicately defined against the warm pallor surrounding them. She
was, in fact, a beautified likeness of the Lucy that Moreau saw come
gropingly back to youth and desirableness in the cabin on the flank
of the Sierra. Only happiness and refinement and a youth passed in an
atmosphere of love, had given her all that richness of girlhood, that
effervescent confidence and joy of youth that poor Lucy had never known.
Despite her air of a young princess, her proudly-held head, her almost
Spanish dignity, where only her brown eyes looked full of alertness
and laughter, she was in character and knowledge of life foolishly
young--in reality, a little girl masquerading in the guise of a
triumphantly maturing womanhood. Her life had been one of quietude
and seclusion. Her parents had been agreed in their desire for this;
the father in the fear of a reëncounter with some phantom from the
past. Lucy’s ostensible reason was her own delicate health; but
her dread was that Shackleton might see his child and claim her. It
seemed impossible to the adoring mother that any father could see this
splendid daughter and not rise up and call her his before all men.
The afternoon was cold and Mariposa wore a jacket as she sang. The
cottage in Pine Street was all that a cottage ought not to be,--on
the wrong side of the street, “too far out,” cold, badly built, and
with only one window to catch the western sun. It had one advantage
which went a long way with the widow and her daughter--the rent was
twenty dollars a month. Mariposa had paid ten dollars of this with
her earnings, and kept the other six for pocket-money. But the happy
day was dawning, so she thought, when she could pay the whole twenty.
She cogitated on this and the affluence it would indicate, as her
real father might have cogitated when he and the inner ring of his
associates began to realize that the Reydel Monte was not a pocket, but
a solid mound of mineral.
On this gray afternoon the cold little parlor, with its bulge of bay
window looking out on the dreariness of the street, seemed impregnated
with an air of dejection. In common with many poor dwellings in that
city of extravagant reverses, it was full of the costly relics of
better days. San Francisco has more of such parlors than any city in
the country. The pieces of buhl and marquetry hiding their shame in
twenty-dollar cottages and eighteen-dollar flats furnish pathetic
commentary on many a story of fallen fortunes. The furniture looks
abashed and humbled. Sometimes its rich designs have found a grateful
seclusion under the dust of a quarter century, which finally will be
removed by the restoring processes of the second-hand dealer, who will
eventually become its owner.
There was a beautiful marquetry sideboard in the gray front parlor and
a fine scarlet lacquer Chinese cabinet facing it. Moreau had had the
tall, gilt-framed mirror and console brought round The Horn from New
York when he had been in the flush of good times in Sacramento. The
piano Mariposa was playing dated from a second period of prosperity,
and had cost what would have now kept them for a year. It had been
considered cheap at the time, and had been bought when the little
Mariposa began to show musical tastes. She had played her first
“pieces” on it, and in that halcyon period when she had had the singing
lessons, had heard the big voice in her chest slowly shaking itself
loose to the accompaniment of its encouraging notes.
Now she was singing in single tones, from note to note, higher and
higher, then lower and lower. Her voice was a mezzo, with a “break” in
the middle, below which it had a haunting, bell-like depth. As it went
down it gained a peculiar emotional quality which seemed to thrill with
passion and tears. As it began to ascend it was noticeable that her
upper tones, though full, were harsh. There was astounding volume in
them. It was evidently a big voice, a thing of noble promise, but now
crude and unmanageable.
She emitted a loud vibrant note that rolled restlessly between the four
walls, as if in an effort to find more space wherein to expand, and her
hands fell upon the keys. In the room opening off the parlor there was
an uncertain play of light from an unseen fire, and a muffled shape
lying on the sofa. To this she now addressed a query in a voice in
which dejection was veiled by uneasy inquiry:
“Well, does it seem to improve? Or is it still like a cow when she’s
lost her calf?”
“It’s wonderfully improved,” came the answer from the room beyond; “I
don’t think any one sings like you. Anyway, no one has such a powerful
voice.”
“No one howls so, you mean! Oh, mother, do you suppose I _ever_ shall
be able to take any more lessons?”
“Oh, yes, of course. We are in a large city now. Even if you don’t make
enough money yourself, there are often people who become interested
in fine voices and educate them. Perhaps you’ll meet one of them some
day. And anyway--” with cheerfulness caught on the upward breath of a
sigh--“you’ll make money enough soon yourself.”
Mariposa’s head bent over the keys. When she came to view it this way,
her sixteen dollars a month did not seem so big with promise as it did
when ten dollars for rent was all it had to yield up.
“I’ve heard about those rich people who are looking for prima donnas
to develop, but I don’t know where to find them, and I don’t see how
they’re to find me. The only way I can ever attract their notice is to
sing on the street corner with a guitar, like Rachel. And then I’d have
to have a license, and I’ve got no money for that.”
She rose, and swept with the gait of a queen into the next room. Her
mother was lying on a sofa drawn closely to a tiny grate, in which a
handful of fire flickered.
Lucy was still a pretty woman, with a thin, faded delicacy of aspect.
Her skin was singularly white, especially on her hands, which were
waxen. Though love and happiness had given her back her youth, her
health had never recovered her child’s rude birth in the desert and the
subsequent journey across the Sierra. She had twined round and clung
to the man whom she had called her husband, and with his loss she was
slowly sinking out of the world his presence had made sweet for her.
Her daughter--next in adoration to the hero who had succored her in her
hour of extremity--had no power to hold her. Lucy was slowly fading
out of life. The girl had no knowledge of this. Her mother had been a
semi-invalid for several years, and her own youth was so rich in its
superb vigor, that she did not notice the elder woman’s gradual decline
of vitality. But the mother knew, and her nights were wakeful and
agonized with the thought of her child, left alone, poor and unfriended.
Mariposa sat down on the end of the sofa at the invalid’s feet and took
one of her hands. She had loved both parents deeply, but the fragile
mother, so simple and unworldly, so dependent on affection for her
being, was the object of her special devotion. They were silent, the
girl with an abstracted glance fixed on the fire, meditating on the
future of her voice; the mother regarding her with pensive admiration.
As they sat thus, a footfall on the steps outside broke upon their
thoughts. The cottage was so built that one of its conveniences was,
that one could always hear the caller or the man with the bill mounting
the steps before he rang. The former were rarer than the latter, and
Mariposa, in whose eventless life a visit from any one was a thing of
value, pricked up her ears expectantly.
The bell pealed stridently and the servant could be heard rattling
pans in the kitchen, evidently preparatory to emerging. Presently she
came creaking down the hall, the door opened and a female voice was
heard asking for the ladies. It _was_ a visitor. Mariposa was glad she
had stayed in that afternoon, and with her hand still clasping her
mother’s, craned her neck toward the door.
The visitor was a tall, thin woman of forty years, her cheaply
fashionable dress telling of many a wrestle between love of personal
adornment and a lean purse. She was one of those slightly known and
unquestioningly accepted people that women, in the friendless and
unknown condition of the Moreaus, constantly meet in the free and easy
social life of western cities.
She was a Mrs. Willers, long divorced from a worthless husband, and
supporting, with a desperate and gallant courage, herself and her
child, who was one of Mariposa’s piano pupils. Her appearance gave
no clue to the real force and indomitable bravery of the woman, who,
against blows and rebuffs, had fought her way with a smile on her
lips. Her appearance and manner, especially in this, her society pose,
were against her. The former was flashy and over-dressed, the latter
loud-voiced and effusive. A large hat, flaunting with funeral plumes,
was set jauntily on one side of her head, and a spotted veil was drawn
over a complexion that was carelessly made up. Her corsets were so long
and so tight that she could hardly bend, and when she did they emitted
protesting creaks. No one would have thought from her flamboyantly
stylish get-up that she was a reporter and “special” writer on Jake
Shackleton’s newly-acquired paper, _The Morning Trumpet_! But in
reality she was an energetic and able journalist. It was only when
adorned with her best clothes and her “society” manners that she
affected a sort of gushing silliness.
“Well,” she said, rustling in, “here’s the lady! How’s everybody? Just
as cozy and cute as a doll’s house.”
She pressed Mrs. Moreau’s hand and then sent an eagle glance--the
glance of the reporter that is trained to take in every salient object
in one sweep--about the room. She could have written a good description
of it from that moment’s survey.
“Better? Of course you’re better,” she interrupted Lucy, who had been
speaking of improved health. “Don’t San Francisco cure everybody?
And daughter there?” her bright tired eye rested on Mariposa for one
inspecting moment. “She looks nice enough to eat.”
“Mariposa’s always well,” said Lucy, pressing the hand she still held.
“She was always a prize child ever since she was a baby.”
Mrs. Willers leaned back and folded her white-gloved hands over her
creaking waist.
“You know she’s the handsomest thing I’ve seen in a coon’s age,” she
said, nodding her head at Mariposa. “There ain’t a girl in society that
compares to her.”
Lucy smiled indulgently at her daughter. Mariposa, though embarrassed,
was not displeased by these sledge-hammer compliments. They were
a novelty to her, and she regarded Mrs. Willers--despite a few
peculiarities of style--as a woman of vast knowledge and experience in
that wonderful world of gaiety and fashion, of which she herself knew
so little.
“I go to most of the big balls here,” continued the visitor. “It’s
always the same thing on _The Trumpet_--‘Send up Mrs. Willers to the
Cotillion Club to-night; we don’t want any other reporter but her.
If you send up any of those other jay women we’ll turn ’em down.’ So
up I have to hop. The other night at the Lorley’s big blow-out, when
Genevieve Lorley had her début, it was the same old war-cry--‘We want
Mrs. Willers to-night to do the Society, and don’t try and work off any
incompetents on us. Send her up early so’s Mrs. Lorley can give her the
dresses herself.’ So up I went, and was in the dressing-room for an
hour and saw ’em all, black and white and brown, heiresses and beggars,
and not one of ’em, Mrs. Moreau, to touch daughter here--not one.”
“But there are so many beautiful girls in San Francisco. Mariposa has
seen them on the cars and down town. She often tells me of them.”
“Beauties--yes, lots of ’em; dead loads of ’em. But there’s a lot that
get their beauty out of boxes and bottles. There’s a lot--I don’t say
who, I’m not one to mention names--but there’s a lot that when they go
to bed the beauty all comes off and lies in layers on the floor. Not
that I blame them--make yourself as good-looking as you can, that’s my
motto. It’s every woman’s duty. But you don’t want to begin so young.
I rouge myself,” said Mrs. Willers, with the careless truthfulness of
one whose reputation is beyond attack, “but I don’t like it in a young
girl.”
“Who was the prettiest girl at the ball?” said Mariposa,
deeply interested. She had the curiosity of seventeen on such
subjects--subjects of which her girlhood had been unusually barren.
“My dear, I’ll tell you all that later--talk for an hour if you can
stand it. But that’s not what I came to say to-day. It’s business
to-day--real business, and I don’t know but what all your future hangs
on it.”
She gave a triumphant look at the startled mother and daughter. With
the introduction of serious matter her worn face took on a certain
sharp intelligence and her language grew more masculine and less
slovenly.
“It’s this,” she said, leaning forward impressively: “I’m not sure that
I haven’t found Mariposa’s backer.”
“Backer,” said Lucy, faintly, finding the word objectionable. “What’s
that?”
“The person who’s to hear her sing and offer to educate the finest
voice he’s likely to hear in the next ten years.”
Mariposa gave a suppressed exclamation and looked at her mother. Lucy
had paled. She was trembling at what she felt she was to hear.
“It’s Jake Shackleton,” said Mrs. Willers, proudly launching her
bombshell.
“Jake Shackleton,” breathed Mariposa, to whom the name meant only
vaguely fabulous wealth. “The Bonanza Man?”
Lucy was sitting up, deadly pale, but she said nothing.
“The Bonanza Man,” said Mrs. Willers. “My chief.”
“But what does he know of me?” said Mariposa. “He’s never even heard of
me.”
“That’s where you’re off, my dear. Jake Shackleton’s heard of
everybody. He has every one ticketed and put away in some little cell
in his brain. He never forgets a face. Some people say that’s one of
the secrets of his success; that, and the way he knows the man or
woman who’s going to get on and the one who’s going to fall out of the
procession and quit at the first obstacle. He’s got no use for those
people. Get up and hustle, or get out--that’s his motto.”
“But about me?” Mariposa entreated. “Go on.”
“Well, it’s a queer story, anyhow. The other morning I was sent for to
the sanctum. There was a little talk about work and then he says to
me, ‘Didn’t you tell me your daughter was taking piano lessons, Mrs.
Willers?’ Never forgets a word you say. I told him yes; and he says:
‘Isn’t her teacher that Miss Moreau, whose father died a few months ago
in Santa Barbara?’ I told him yes again, and then he wheels round on
the swivel chair, looks at me so, from under his eyebrows, and says: ‘I
knew her father once; a fine man!’”
“Oh, how odd,” breathed Mariposa, quivering with interest. “I never
heard father speak of him.”
“It was a long time ago. He knew your father up in the mines some time
in the fifties, and he said he admired him considerably. Then he went
on and asked me a lot of questions about you, your circumstances,
where you lived and if you were as good-looking as your father. He
said he’d heard you were an accomplished young lady. Then I saw my cue
and I said, as carelessly as you please, that Miss Moreau had a fine
voice and plenty of musical ability, but unfortunately was not able to
cultivate either, because her means were small, and it was a great pity
some one with money didn’t help her. I says--just as casual as could
be--it’s a great shame to see a voice like that lying idle for want of
tuition.”
“What did he say then?” said Mariposa.
“Well, that’s the point I’m working up to. He thought a while, asked a
few more questions, and then said: ‘I’d like to meet the young lady and
hear her sing. It goes against me to have Dan Moreau’s daughter lack
for anything. Her father’d have left a fortune if he hadn’t been a man
that thought of every one else before himself.’”
“That was father exactly. He must have known him well. Mother, isn’t it
odd he never spoke of him? What did you say then?”
“I? Why, of course, I saw my opening and jumped in. I said, ‘Well, I
guess I can arrange for you to meet Miss Moreau at my rooms. I see her
twice a week when she comes to give Edna her piano lesson. I’ll ask her
when she can come, and let you know and then she’ll sing for you.’ He
was pleased, he was real pleased, and said he’d come whenever I said.
And now, young woman,” laying a large white-gloved hand on Mariposa’s
knee, “that ought to be the beginning of a career for you!”
“Good gracious!” said Mariposa, whose cheeks were crimson, “I never
heard anything so exciting in my life, and we were just talking about
it. I’ll probably sing like a dog baying the moon.”
“Don’t you talk that way. You’ll sing your best. And he’s not a man
that you wouldn’t like Mariposa to meet”--turning to the pale and
silent Lucy. “Whatever other faults he’s had he’s always been a
straight man with women. There’s never been that sort of scandal about
Jake Shackleton. There’s a story you’ve probably heard, that he was
originally a Mormon. I don’t believe much in that myself. He had,
anyway, only one wife when he entered California, and she’s been his
wife ever since, and she ain’t the kind to have stood any nonsense of
the Mormon sort.”
Lucy gave a sudden gasping breath and sat up. The light of the gray
afternoon was dying outside, and by the glow of the fire her unusual
pallor was not noticeable.
“It was very good of you,” she said. “Mariposa will be glad to go.”
“And you’ll come, too?” said Mrs. Willers. “He asked about you.”
“Did he say he’d ever known me?” said Lucy, quietly.
“No--not exactly that. No, I don’t believe he said that. But he was
interested in you as the wife of the man he’d known so long ago.”
“Of course it would be only in that way,” murmured Lucy, sinking back.
“No, I can’t come. It wouldn’t be possible. I’m not well enough.”
“Oh, mother, do. You know you go out on the cars sometimes, and the
Sutter Street line is only two blocks from here. I know you’d enjoy it
when you got there.”
“No, dearest. No, Mrs. Willers. Don’t, please, urge me. I am not able
to meet new people. No-- Oh, please don’t talk any more about my going.”
Something of pain and protest in her voice made them desist. She was
silent again, while Mariposa and Mrs. Willers arranged the details of
the party. This was to be small and choice. Only one other person,
a man referred to as Essex, was to come. At the name of Essex, Mrs.
Willers shot a side look of inspection at Mariposa, who did what was
expected of her in displaying a fine blush.
It was decided that Mrs. Willers’ hospitality should take the form of
wine and cake. There was a consultation about other and lesser viands,
and finally an animated discussion as to the proper garb in which
Mariposa should present herself to the first truly distinguished person
she had ever met. During the conversation over these varied questions
Lucy lay back among her cushions, sunk in the same pale silence.
Darkness had fallen when the guest, having threshed out the subject
to the last grain, took herself off. Mariposa looked from the opened
doorway into a black street, dotted with the yellow blurs of lighted
lamps. The air was cold with that penetrating, marrow-searching
coldness of a foggy evening in San Francisco. As the night swallowed
Mrs. Willers, Mariposa shut the door and came rushing back.
“Mother!” she cried, before she got into her room, “isn’t that the most
thrilling thing? Oh, did you ever know of anything so unexpected and
wonderful and exciting. _Do_ you think he’ll like my voice? _Do_ you
think he really could be interested in me because he knew father? And
he can’t have known him so very well, or father would have said more of
him. Did _you_ ever hear father speak about him?”
The mother gave no answer, and the girl bent over her. Lucy, motionless
and white, was lying among her cushions, unconscious.