CHAPTER I

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

by

BRET HARTE

CONTENTS

THE MAN ON THE BEACH

TWO SAINTS OF THE FOOT-HILLS

"JINNY"

ROGER CATRON'S FRIEND

"WHO WAS MY QUIET FRIEND?"

A GHOST OF THE SIERRAS

THE HOODLUM BAND

THE MAN WHOSE YOKE WAS NOT EASY

MY FRIEND, THE TRAMP

THE MAN FROM SOLANO

THE OFFICE SEEKER

A SLEEPING-CAR EXPERIENCE

MORNING ON THE AVENUE

WITH THE ENTREES

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

THE MAN ON THE BEACH

I

He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow

strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high

tide by a shining film of water, at low tide with the cast-up offerings

of sea and shore. Logs yet green, and saplings washed away from inland

banks, battered fragments of wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken

into tiny rafts yet odorous with their lost freight, lay in long

successive curves,--the fringes and overlappings of the sea. At high

noon the shadow of a seagull's wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall

of sandpipers, themselves but shadows, was all that broke the

monotonous glare of the level sands.

He had lived there alone for a twelvemonth. Although but a few miles

from a thriving settlement, during that time his retirement had never

been intruded upon, his seclusion remained unbroken. In any other

community he might have been the subject of rumor or criticism, but the

miners at Camp Rogue and the traders at Trinidad Head, themselves

individual and eccentric, were profoundly indifferent to all other

forms of eccentricity or heterodoxy that did not come in contact with

their own. And certainly there was no form of eccentricity less

aggressive than that of a hermit, had they chosen to give him that

appellation. But they did not even do that, probably from lack of

interest or perception. To the various traders who supplied his small

wants he was known as "Kernel," "Judge," and "Boss." To the general

public "The Man on the Beach" was considered a sufficiently

distinguishing title. His name, his occupation, rank, or antecedents,

nobody cared to inquire. Whether this arose from a fear of reciprocal

inquiry and interest, or from the profound indifference before referred

to, I cannot say.

He did not look like a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well-dressed,

clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half

cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His

dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe

exterior simplicity of frontier architecture, but within it was

comfortable and wholesome. Three rooms--a kitchen, a living room, and

a bedroom--were all it contained.

He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one season

lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak northwest

trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight and nights of

fog and silence. The warmer southwest trades had brought him clouds,

rain, and the transient glories of quick grasses and odorous beach

blossoms. But summer or winter, wet or dry season, on one side rose

always the sharply defined hills with their changeless background of

evergreens; on the other side stretched always the illimitable ocean as

sharply defined against the horizon, and as unchanging in its hue. The

onset of spring and autumn tides, some changes among his feathered

neighbors, the footprints of certain wild animals along the river's

bank, and the hanging out of party-colored signals from the wooded

hillside far inland, helped him to record the slow months. On summer

afternoons, when the sun sank behind a bank of fog that, moving

solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him and blotted out sea and

sky, his isolation was complete. The damp gray sea that flowed above

and around and about him always seemed to shut out an intangible world

beyond, and to be the only real presence. The booming of breakers

scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a vague and

unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever. Every

morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed and

bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over,

he came to love at last this subtle spirit of oblivion; and at night,

when its cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone

with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions

he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for

what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond?

Perhaps even SHE,--for this strange solitary was not insane nor

visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping

or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a

woman's face was always before him,--the face for whose sake and for

cause of whom he sat there alone. He saw it in the morning sunlight;

it was her white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it

was the rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach

grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long waves

sank and died among the sedge and rushes. She was as omnipresent as

sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the fog wiped them away, she

seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness. On one or two more

gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence of the fervid noonday

sun was still felt on the heated sands, the warm breath of the fog

touched his cheek as if it had been hers, and the tears started to his

eyes.

Before the fogs came--for he arrived there in winter--he had found

surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the little

promontory a league below his habitation. Even on the darkest nights,

and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a patience that was

enduring and a steadfastness that was immutable. Later on he found a

certain dumb companionship in an uprooted tree, which, floating down

the river, had stranded hopelessly upon his beach, but in the evening

had again drifted away. Rowing across the estuary a day or two

afterward, he recognized the tree again from a "blaze" of the settler's

axe still upon its trunk. He was not surprised a week later to find

the same tree in the sands before his dwelling, or that the next

morning it should be again launched on its purposeless wanderings. And

so, impelled by wind or tide, but always haunting his seclusion, he

would meet it voyaging up the river at the flood, or see it tossing

among the breakers on the bar, but always with the confidence of its

returning sooner or later to an anchorage beside him. After the third

month of his self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more human

companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to have

menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow"

carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the

occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and

materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he

could not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to

die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the only alternative,

he chose the latter. An Indian woman, so hideous as to scarcely

suggest humanity, at stated times performed for him these offices.

When she did not come, which was not infrequent, he did not eat.

Such was the mental and physical condition of the Man on the Beach on

the 1st of January, 1869.

It was a still, bright day, following a week of rain and wind. Low

down the horizon still lingered a few white flecks--the flying

squadrons of the storm--as vague as distant sails. Southward the

harbor bar whitened occasionally but lazily; even the turbulent Pacific

swell stretched its length wearily upon the shore. And toiling from

the settlement over the low sand dunes, a carriage at last halted half

a mile from the solitary's dwelling.

"I reckon ye'll hev to git out here," said the driver, pulling up to

breathe his panting horses. "Ye can't git any nigher."

There was a groan of execration from the interior of the vehicle, a

hysterical little shriek, and one or two shrill expressions of feminine

disapprobation, but the driver moved not. At last a masculine head

expostulated from the window: "Look here; you agreed to take us to the

house. Why, it's a mile away at least!"

"Thar, or tharabouts, I reckon," said the driver, coolly crossing his

legs on the box.

"It's no use talking; I can never walk through this sand and horrid

glare," said a female voice quickly and imperatively. Then,

apprehensively, "Well, of all the places!"

"Well, I never!"

"This DOES exceed everything."

"It's really TOO idiotic for anything."

It was noticeable that while the voices betrayed the difference of age

and sex, they bore a singular resemblance to each other, and a certain

querulousness of pitch that was dominant.

"I reckon I've gone about as fur as I allow to go with them hosses,"

continued the driver suggestively, "and as time's vallyble, ye'd better

unload."

"The wretch does not mean to leave us here alone?" said a female voice

in shrill indignation. "You'll wait for us, driver?" said a masculine

voice, confidently.

"How long?" asked the driver.

There was a hurried consultation within. The words "Might send us

packing!" "May take all night to get him to listen to reason," "Bother!

whole thing over in ten minutes," came from the window. The driver

meanwhile had settled himself back in his seat, and whistled in patient

contempt of a fashionable fare that didn't know its own mind nor

destination. Finally, the masculine head was thrust out, and, with a

certain potential air of judicially ending a difficulty, said:--

"You're to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable or

barn until we want you."

An ironical laugh burst from the driver. "Oh, yes--in the stable or

barn--in course. But, my eyes sorter failin' me, mebbee, now, some ev

you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn of the

Kernel's. Woa!--will ye?--woa! Give me a chance to pick out that

there barn or stable to put ye in!" This in arch confidence to the

horses, who had not moved.

Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted

indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies and

a gentleman. One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion,

of youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and

well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady,

evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the

aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain

piquancy and a dash that was charming. The gentleman was young, thin,

with the family characteristics, but otherwise indistinctive.

With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated by

the driver's whip. Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular outlines

of the cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes. All else was a

desolate expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher than the tussocks

of scant beach grass that clothed it. They were so utterly helpless

that the driver's derisive laughter gave way at last to good humor and

suggestion. "Look yer," he said finally, "I don't know ez it's your

fault you don't know this kentry ez well ez you do Yurup; so I'll drag

this yer team over to Robinson's on the river, give the horses a bite,

and then meander down this yer ridge, and wait for ye. Ye'll see me

from the Kernel's." And without waiting for a reply, he swung his

horses' heads toward the river, and rolled away.

The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose from

the group, but vainly. Then followed accusations and recrimination.

"It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him meet us at the

settlement." "You wanted to take him by surprise!" "I didn't. You

know if I'd written that we were coming, he'd have taken good care to

run away from us." "Yes, to some more inaccessible place." "There can

be none worse than this," etc., etc. But it was so clearly evident

that nothing was to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst

of their wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant

cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their

verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from the

elder lady.

"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so

incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a

ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.

It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general

conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after

scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to

grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As

they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on

her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and

lisped:--

"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English

shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in

their Sunday clothes!"

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine

feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea

breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and

shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon,

arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in

obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the

justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and retaliated with simple

directness:--

"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half off

your head, and your shoes--in Heaven's name, Maria! what HAVE you done

with your shoes?"

Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt. It was

scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as her nose.

"Somewhere between here and the carriage," she answered; "Dick can run

back and find it, while he is looking for your brooch, mamma. Dick's

so obliging."

The robust voice of Dick thundered, but the wasted figure of Dick

feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.

"I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at Saumur,

for we have got to wade soon," said Miss Maria, sinking her own terrors

in the delightful contemplation of the horror in her parent's face, as

she pointed to a shining film of water slowly deepening in a narrow

swale in the sands between them and the cabin.

"It's the tide," said the elder gentleman. "If we intend to go on we

must hasten; permit me, my dear madam," and before she could reply he

had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made gallantly for the

ford. The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on her brother, who, with

manifest reluctance, performed for her the same office. But that acute

young lady kept her eyes upon the preceding figure of the elder

gentleman, and seeing him suddenly and mysteriously disappear to his

armpits, unhesitatingly threw herself from her brother's protecting

arms,--an action which instantly precipitated him into the water,--and

paddled hastily to the opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in

pulling the elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had

fallen, and in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the

surface, upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated

water-lily. Dick followed with a single gaiter. In another minute they

were safe on the opposite bank.

The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick

mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman,

whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity seemed

to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he thought it

was a quicksand.

"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should have

followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."

They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the

Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one, the

single exclamation, "James!" The elder gentleman said "Mr. North,"

and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity, buttoned his coat

over his damp shirt front.

There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely down

upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any suggestion of a

gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their own persons, they

had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as they had always been to

external prepossession, they felt that they looked forlorn and

ludicrous, and that the situation lay in his hands. The elderly lady

again burst into tears of genuine distress, Maria colored over her

cheek-bones, and Dick stared at the ground in sullen disquiet.

"You had better get up," said the Man on the Beach, after a moment's

thought, "and come up to the cabin. I cannot offer you a change of

garments, but you can dry them by the fire."

They all rose together, and again said in chorus, "James!" but this

time with an evident effort to recall some speech or action previously

resolved upon and committed to memory. The elder lady got so far as to

clasp her hands and add, "You have not forgotten us--James, oh,

James!"; the younger gentleman to attempt a brusque "Why, Jim, old

boy," that ended in querulous incoherence; the young lady to cast a

half-searching, half-coquettish look at him; and the old gentleman to

begin, "Our desire, Mr. North"--but the effort was futile. Mr. James

North, standing before them with folded arms, looked from the one to

the other.

"I have not thought much of you for a twelvemonth," he said, quietly,

"but I have not forgotten you. Come!"

He led the way a few steps in advance, they following silently. In

this brief interview they felt he had resumed the old dominance and

independence, against which they had rebelled; more than that, in this

half failure of their first concerted action they had changed their

querulous bickerings to a sullen distrust of each other, and walked

moodily apart as they followed James North into his house. A fire

blazed brightly on the hearth; a few extra seats were quickly

extemporized from boxes and chests, and the elder lady, with the skirt

of her dress folded over her knees,--looking not unlike an exceedingly

overdressed jointed doll,--dried her flounces and her tears together.

Miss Maria took in the scant appointments of the house in one single

glance, and then fixed her eyes upon James North, who, the least

concerned of the party, stood before them, grave and patiently

expectant.

"Well," began the elder lady in a high key, "after all this worry and

trouble you have given us, James, haven't you anything to say? Do you

know--have you the least idea what you are doing? what egregious folly

you are committing? what everybody is saying? Eh? Heavens and

earth!--do you know who I am?"

"You are my father's brother's widow, Aunt Mary," returned James,

quietly. "If I am committing any folly it only concerns myself; if I

cared for what people said I should not be here; if I loved society

enough to appreciate its good report I should stay with it."

"But they say you have run away from society to pine alone for a

worthless creature--a woman who has used you, as she has used and

thrown away others--a--"

"A woman," chimed in Dick, who had thrown himself on James's bed while

his patent leathers were drying, "a woman that all the fellers know

never intended"--here, however, he met James North's eye, and muttering

something about "whole thing being too idiotic to talk about," relapsed

into silence.

"You know," continued Mrs. North, "that while we and all our set shut

our eyes to your very obvious relations with that woman, and while I

myself often spoke of it to others as a simple flirtation, and averted

a scandal for your sake, and when the climax was reached, and she

herself gave you an opportunity to sever your relations, and nobody

need have been wiser--and she'd have had all the blame--and it's only

what she's accustomed to--you--you! you, James North!--you must

nonsensically go, and, by this extravagant piece of idiocy and

sentimental tomfoolery, let everybody see how serious the whole affair

was, and how deep it hurt you! and here in this awful place,

alone--where you're half drowned to get to it and are willing to be

wholly drowned to get away! Oh, don't talk to me! I won't hear

it--it's just too idiotic for anything!"

The subject of this outburst neither spoke nor moved a single muscle.

"Your aunt, Mr. North, speaks excitedly," said the elder gentleman;

"yet I think she does not overestimate the unfortunate position in

which your odd fancy places you. I know nothing of the reasons that

have impelled you to this step; I only know that the popular opinion is

that the cause is utterly inadequate. You are still young, with a

future before you. I need not say how your present conduct may imperil

that. If you expected to achieve any good--even to your own

satisfaction--but this conduct--"

"Yes--if there was anything to be gained by it!" broke in Mrs. North.

"If you ever thought she'd come back!--but that kind of woman don't.

They must have change. Why"--began Dick suddenly, and as suddenly

lying down again.

"Is this all you have come to say?" asked James North, after a moment's

patient silence, looking from one to the other.

"All?" screamed Mrs. North; "is it not enough?"

"Not to change my mind nor my residence at present," replied North,

coolly.

"Do you mean to continue this folly all your life?"

"And have a coroner's inquest, and advertisements and all the facts in

the papers?"

"And have HER read the melancholy details, and know that you were

faithful and she was not?"

This last shot was from the gentle Maria, who bit her lips as it

glanced from the immovable man.

"I believe there is nothing more to say," continued North, quietly. "I

am willing to believe your intentions are as worthy as your zeal. Let

us say no more," he added, with grave weariness; "the tide is rising,

and your coachman is signaling you from the bank."

There was no mistaking the unshaken positiveness of the man, which was

all the more noticeable from its gentle but utter indifference to the

wishes of the party. He turned his back upon them as they gathered

hurriedly around the elder gentleman, while the words, "He cannot be in

his right mind," "It's your duty to do it," "It's sheer insanity,"

"Look at his eye!" all fell unconsciously upon his ear.

"One word more, Mr. North," said the elder gentleman, a little

portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment. "It may be that

your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own the

existence of some aberration of the intellect--some temporary

mania--that might force your best friends into a quasi-legal attitude

of--"

"Declaring me insane," interrupted James North, with the slight

impatience of a man more anxious to end a prolix interview than to

combat an argument. "I think differently. As my aunt's lawyer, you

know that within the last year I have deeded most of my property to her

and her family. I cannot believe that so shrewd an adviser as Mr.

Edmund Carter would ever permit proceedings that would invalidate that

conveyance."

Maria burst into a laugh of such wicked gratification that James North,

for the first time, raised his eyes with something of interest to her

face. She colored under them, but returned his glance with another

like a bayonet flash. The party slowly moved toward the door, James

North following.

"Then this is your final answer?" asked Mrs. North, stopping

imperiously on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon?" queried North, half abstractedly.

"Your final answer?"

"Oh, certainly."

Mrs. North flounced away a dozen rods in rage. This was unfortunate

for North. It gave them the final attack in detail. Dick began: "Come

along! You know you can advertise for her with a personal down there

and the old woman wouldn't object as long as you were careful and put

in an appearance now and then!"

As Dick limped away, Mr. Carter thought, in confidence, that the whole

matter--even to suit Mr. North's sensitive nature--might be settled

there. "SHE evidently expects you to return. My opinion is that she

never left San Francisco. You can't tell anything about these women."

With this last sentence on his indifferent ear, James North seemed to

be left free. Maria had rejoined her mother; but as they crossed the

ford, and an intervening sand-hill hid the others from sight, that

piquant young lady suddenly appeared on the hill and stood before him.

"And you're not coming back?" she said directly.

"No."

"Never?"

"I cannot say."

"Tell me! what is there about some women to make men love them so?"

"Love," replied North, quietly.

"No, it cannot be--it is not THAT!"

North looked over the hill and round the hill, and looked bored.

"Oh, I'm going now. But one moment, Jem! I didn't want to come. They

dragged me here. Good-by."

She raised a burning face and eyes to his. He leaned forward and

imprinted the perfunctory cousinly kiss of the period upon her cheek.

"Not that way," she said angrily, clutching his wrists with her long,

thin fingers; "you shan't kiss me in that way, James North."

With the faintest, ghost-like passing of a twinkle in the corners of

his sad eyes, he touched his lips to hers. With the contact, she

caught him round the neck, pressed her burning lips and face to his

forehead, his cheeks, the very curves of his chin and throat, and--with

a laugh was gone.

II

Had the kinsfolk of James North any hope that their visit might revive

some lingering desire he still combated to enter once more the world

they represented, that hope would have soon died. Whatever effect this

episode had upon the solitary,--and he had become so self-indulgent of

his sorrow, and so careless of all that came between him and it, as to

meet opposition with profound indifference,--the only appreciable

result was a greater attraction for the solitude that protected him,

and he grew even to love the bleak shore and barren sands that had

proved so inhospitable to others. There was a new meaning to the roar

of the surges, an honest, loyal sturdiness in the unchanging

persistency of the uncouth and blustering trade-winds, and a mute

fidelity in the shining sands, treacherous to all but him. With such

bandogs to lie in wait for trespassers, should he not be grateful?

If no bitterness was awakened by the repeated avowal of the

unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made

the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of

his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief

or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled

by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity,

which was but another form of his egotism, was so complete as to baffle

ordinary malicious cunning, and so he was spared the experience and

knowledge that come to a lower nature, and help debase it.

Exercise and the stimulus of the few wants that sent him hunting or

fishing kept up his physical health. Never a lover of rude freedom or

outdoor life his sedentary predilections and nice tastes kept him from

lapsing into barbarian excess; never a sportsman he followed the chase

with no feverish exaltation. Even dumb creatures found out his secret,

and at times, stalking moodily over the upland, the brown deer and elk

would cross his path without fear or molestation, or, idly lounging in

his canoe within the river bar, flocks of wild fowl would settle within

stroke of his listless oar. And so the second winter of his hermitage

drew near its close, and with it came a storm that passed into local

history, and is still remembered. It uprooted giant trees along the

river, and with them the tiny rootlets of the life he was idly

fostering.

The morning had been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several

points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady onset

of the regular southwest trades. High overhead the long manes of

racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and hurrying

water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, and a flock of timorous

sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a wrecking crew of

curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that tossed wearily beyond the

bar. By noon the flying clouds huddled together in masses, and then

were suddenly exploded in one vast opaque sheet over the heavens. The

sea became gray, and suddenly wrinkled and old. There was a dumb,

half-articulate cry in the air,--rather a confusion of many sounds, as

of the booming of distant guns, the clangor of a bell, the trampling of

many waves, the creaking of timbers and soughing of leaves, that sank

and fell ere you could yet distinguish them. And then it came on to

blow. For two hours it blew strongly. At the time the sun should have

set the wind had increased; in fifteen minutes darkness shut down, even

the white sands lost their outlines, and sea and shore and sky lay in

the grip of a relentless and aggressive power.

Within his cabin, by the leaping light of his gusty fire, North sat

alone. His first curiosity passed, the turmoil without no longer

carried his thought beyond its one converging centre. SHE had come to

him on the wings of the storm, even as she had been borne to him on the

summer fog-cloud. Now and then the wind shook the cabin, but he heeded

it not. He had no fears for its safety; it presented its low gable to

the full fury of the wind that year by year had piled, and even now was

piling, protecting buttresses of sand against it. With each succeeding

gust it seemed to nestle more closely to its foundations, in the whirl

of flying sand that rattled against its roof and windows. It was

nearly midnight when a sudden thought brought him to his feet. What if

SHE were exposed to the fury of such a night as this? What could he do

to help her? Perhaps even now, as he sat there idle, she--Hark! was not

that a gun--No? Yes, surely!

He hurriedly unbolted the door, but the strength of the wind and the

impact of drifted sand resisted his efforts. With a new and feverish

strength possessing him he forced it open wide enough to permit his

egress when the wind caught him as a feather, rolled him over and over,

and then, grappling him again, held him down hard and fast against the

drift. Unharmed, but unable to move, he lay there, hearing the

multitudinous roar of the storm, but unable to distinguish one familiar

sound in the savage medley. At last he managed to crawl flat on his

face to the cabin, and refastening the door, threw himself upon his bed.

He was awakened from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria. She with a

supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some

unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw itself

in despairing force against the cabin. He could see the lithe

undulations of her form as she alternately yielded to its power, and

again drew the door against it, coiling herself around the log-hewn

doorpost with a hideous, snake-like suggestion. And then a struggle

and a heavy blow, which shook the very foundations of the structure,

awoke him. He leaped to his feet, and into an inch of water! By the

flickering firelight he could see it oozing and dripping from the

crevices of the logs and broadening into a pool by the chimney. A

scrap of paper torn from an envelope was floating idly on its current.

Was it the overflow of the backed-up waters of the river? He was not

left long in doubt. Another blow upon the gable of the house, and a

torrent of spray leaped down the chimney, scattered the embers far and

wide, and left him in utter darkness. Some of the spray clung to his

lips. It was salt. The great ocean had beaten down the river bar and

was upon him!

Was there aught to fly to? No! The cabin stood upon the highest point

of the sand spit, and the low swale on one side crossed by his late

visitors was a seething mass of breakers, while the estuary behind him

was now the ocean itself. There was nothing to do but to wait.

The very helplessness of his situation was, to a man of his peculiar

temperament, an element of patient strength. The instinct of

self-preservation was still strong in him, but he had no fear of death,

nor, indeed, any presentiment of it; yet if it came, it was an easy

solution of the problem that had been troubling him, and it wiped off

the slate! He thought of the sarcastic prediction of his cousin, and

death in the form that threatened him was the obliteration of his home

and even the ground upon which it stood. There would be nothing to

record, no stain could come upon the living. The instinct that kept

him true to HER would tell her how he died; if it did not, it was

equally well. And with this simple fatalism his only belief, this

strange man groped his way to his bed, lay down, and in a few moments

was asleep. The storm still roared without. Once again the surges

leaped against the cabin, but it was evident that the wind was abating

with the tide.

When he awoke it was high noon, and the sun was shining brightly. For

some time he lay in a delicious languor, doubting if he was alive or

dead, but feeling through every nerve and fibre an exquisite sense of

peace--a rest he had not known since his boyhood--a relief he scarcely

knew from what. He felt that he was smiling, and yet his pillow was

wet with the tears that glittered still on his lashes. The sand

blocking up his doorway, he leaped lightly from his window. A few

clouds were still sailing slowly in the heavens, the trailing plumes of

a great benediction that lay on sea and shore. He scarcely recognized

the familiar landscape; a new bar had been formed in the river, and a

narrow causeway of sand that crossed the lagoon and marshes to the

river bank and the upland trail seemed to bring him nearer to humanity

again. He was conscious of a fresh, childlike delight in all this, and

when, a moment later, he saw the old uprooted tree, now apparently

forever moored and imbedded in the sand beside his cabin, he ran to it

with a sense of joy.

Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the long,

snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between two

crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact. As he walked

toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren sands had

borne before. Thinking it might be some strange sea bird caught in the

meshes of the sea-weed, he ran to the crate and looked within. It was

half filled with sea-moss and feathery algae. The cry was repeated.

He brushed aside the weeds with his hands. It was not a wounded sea

bird, but a living human child!

As he lifted it from its damp enwrappings he saw that it was an infant

eight or nine months old. How and when it had been brought there, or

what force had guided that elfish cradle to his very door, he could not

determine; but it must have been left early, for it was quite warm, and

its clothing almost dried by the blazing morning sun. To wrap his coat

about it, to run to his cabin with it, to start out again with the

appalling conviction that nothing could be done for it there, occupied

some moments. His nearest neighbor was Trinidad Joe, a "logger," three

miles up the river. He remembered to have heard vaguely that he was a

man of family. To half strangle the child with a few drops from his

whisky flask, to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out

into the river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an

hour he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and

from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence, and

a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his surmise as

to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.

The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished

room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five. With an

awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of his

finding the infant, and the object of his visit. Before he had

finished, the woman, by some feminine trick, had taken the child from

his hands ere he knew it; and when he paused, out of breath, burst into

a fit of laughter. North tried to laugh too, but failed.

When the woman had wiped the tears from a pair of very frank blue eyes,

and hidden two rows of very strong white teeth again, she said:--

"Look yar! You're that looney sort a' chap that lives alone over on

the spit yonder, ain't ye?"

North hastened to admit all that the statement might imply.

"And so ye've had a baby left ye to keep you company? Lordy!" Here she

looked as if dangerously near a relapse, and then added, as if in

explanation of her conduct,--

"When I saw ye paddlin' down here,--you thet ez shy as elk in

summer,--I sez, 'He's sick.' But a baby,--Oh, Lordy!"

For a moment North almost hated her. A woman who, in this pathetic,

perhaps almost tragic, picture saw only a ludicrous image, and that

image himself, was of another race than that he had ever mingled with.

Profoundly indifferent as he had always been to the criticism of his

equals in station, the mischievous laughter of this illiterate woman

jarred upon him worse than his cousin's sarcasm. It was with a little

dignity that he pointed out the fact that at present the child needed

nourishment. "It's very young," he added. "I'm afraid it wants its

natural nourishment."

"Whar is it to get it?" asked the woman.

James North hesitated, and looked around. There should be a baby

somewhere! there MUST be a baby somewhere! "I thought that you," he

stammered, conscious of an awkward coloring,--"I--that is--I--" He

stopped short, for she was already cramming her apron into her mouth,

too late, however, to stop the laugh that overflowed it. When she found

her breath again, she said,--

"Look yar! I don't wonder they said you was looney! I'm Trinidad

Joe's onmarried darter, and the only woman in this house. Any fool

could have told you that. Now, ef you can rig us up a baby out o' them

facts, I'd like to see it done."

Inwardly furious but outwardly polite, James North begged her pardon,

deplored his ignorance, and, with a courtly bow, made a movement to

take the child. But the woman as quickly drew it away.

"Not much," she said, hastily. "What! trust that poor critter to you?

No, sir! Thar's more ways of feeding a baby, young man, than you knows

on, with all your 'nat'ral nourishment.' But it looks kinder logy and

stupid."

North freezingly admitted that he had given the infant whisky as a

stimulant.

"You did? Come, now, that ain't so looney after all. Well, I'll take

the baby, and when Dad comes home we'll see what can be done."

North hesitated. His dislike of the woman was intense, and yet he knew

no one else and the baby needed instant care. Besides, he began to see

the ludicrousness of his making a first call on his neighbors with a

foundling to dispose of. She saw his hesitation, and said,--

"Ye don't know me, in course. Well, I'm Bessy Robinson, Trinidad Joe

Robinson's daughter. I reckon Dad will give me a character if you want

references, or any of the boys on the river."

"I'm only thinking of the trouble I'm giving you, Miss Robinson, I

assure you. Any expense you may incur--"

"Young man," said Bessy Robinson, turning sharply on her heel, and

facing him with her black brows a little contracted, "if it comes to

expenses, I reckon I'll pay you for that baby, or not take it at all.

But I don't know you well enough to quarrel with you on sight. So

leave the child to me, and, if you choose, paddle down here to-morrow,

after sun up--the ride will do you good--and see it, and Dad thrown in.

Good by!" and with one powerful but well-shaped arm thrown around the

child, and the other crooked at the dimpled elbow a little

aggressively, she swept by James North and entered a bedroom, closing

the door behind her.

When Mr. James North reached his cabin it was dark. As he rebuilt his

fire, and tried to rearrange the scattered and disordered furniture,

and remove the debris of last night's storm, he was conscious for the

first time of feeling lonely. He did not miss the child. Beyond the

instincts of humanity and duty he had really no interest in its welfare

or future. He was rather glad to get rid of it, he would have

preferred to some one else, and yet SHE looked as if she were

competent. And then came the reflection that since the morning he had

not once thought of the woman he loved. The like had never occurred in

his twelvemonth solitude. So he set to work, thinking of her and of

his sorrows, until the word "Looney," in connection with his suffering,

flashed across his memory. "Looney!" It was not a nice word. It

suggested something less than insanity; something that might happen to

a common, unintellectual sort of person. He remembered the loon, an

ungainly feathered neighbor, that was popularly supposed to have lent

its name to the adjective. Could it be possible that people looked

upon him as one too hopelessly and uninterestingly afflicted for

sympathy or companionship, too unimportant and common for even

ridicule; or was this but the coarse interpretation of that vulgar girl?

Nevertheless, the next morning "after sun up" James North was at

Trinidad Joe's cabin. That worthy proprietor himself--a long, lank

man, with even more than the ordinary rural Western characteristics of

ill health, ill feeding, and melancholy--met him on the bank, clothed

in a manner and costume that was a singular combination of the

frontiersman and the sailor. When North had again related the story of

his finding the child, Trinidad Joe pondered.

"It mout hev been stowed away in one of them crates for safe-keeping,"

he said, musingly, "and washed off the deck o' one o' them Tahiti brigs

goin' down fer oranges. Least-ways, it never got thar from these

parts."

"But it's a miracle its life was saved at all. It must have been some

hours in the water."

"Them brigs lays their course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a

toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all! And ez to the child

keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o' things,"

continued Joe, in sententious cynicism. "Ef an able seaman had fallen

from the yard-arm that night he'd been sunk in sight o' the ship, and

thet baby ez can't swim a stroke sails ashore, sound asleep, with the

waves for a baby-jumper."

North, who was half relieved, yet half awkwardly disappointed at not

seeing Bessy, ventured to ask how the child was doing.

"She'll do all right now," said a frank voice above, and, looking up,

North discerned the round arms, blue eyes, and white teeth of the

daughter at the window. "She's all hunky, and has an appetite--ef she

hezn't got her 'nat'ral nourishment.' Come, Dad! heave ahead, and tell

the stranger what you and me allow we'll do, and don't stand there

swappin' lies with him."

"Weel," said Trinidad Joe, dejectedly, "Bess allows she can rar that

baby and do justice to it. And I don't say--though I'm her

father--that she can't. But when Bess wants anything she wants it all,

clean down; no half-ways nor leavin's for her."

"That's me! go on, Dad--you're chippin' in the same notch every time,"

said Miss Robinson, with cheerful directness.

"Well, we agree to put the job up this way. We'll take the child and

you'll give us a paper or writin' makin' over all your right and title.

How's that?"

Without knowing exactly why he did, Mr. North objected decidedly.

"Do you think we won't take good care of it?" asked Miss Bessy, sharply.

"That is not the question," said North, a little hotly. "In the first

place, the child is not mine to give. It has fallen into my hands as a

trust,--the first hands that received it from its parents. I do not

think it right to allow any other hands to come between theirs and

mine."

Miss Bessy left the window. In another moment she appeared from the

house, and, walking directly towards North, held out a somewhat

substantial hand. "Good!" she said, as she gave his fingers an honest

squeeze. "You ain't so looney after all. Dad, he's right! He shan't

gin it up, but we'll go halves in it, he and me. He'll be father and

I'll be mother 'til death do us part, or the reg'lar family turns up.

Well--what do you say?"

More pleased than he dared confess to himself with the praise of this

common girl, Mr. James North assented. Then would he see the baby? He

would, and Trinidad Joe having already seen the baby, and talked of the

baby, and felt the baby, and indeed had the baby offered to him in

every way during the past night, concluded to give some of his valuable

time to logging, and left them together.

Mr. North was obliged to admit that the baby was thriving. He moreover

listened with polite interest to the statement that the baby's eyes

were hazel, like his own; that it had five teeth; that she was, for a

girl of that probable age, a robust child; and yet Mr. North lingered.

Finally, with his hand on the door-lock, he turned to Bessy and said,--

"May I ask you an odd question, Miss Robinson?"

"Go on."

"Why did you think I was--'looney'?"

The frank Miss Robinson bent her head over the baby.

"Why?"

"Yes, why?"

"Because you WERE looney."

"Oh!"

"But--"

"Yes--"

"You'll get over it."

And under the shallow pretext of getting the baby's food, she retired

to the kitchen, where Mr. North had the supreme satisfaction of seeing

her, as he passed the window, sitting on a chair with her apron over

her head, shaking with laughter.

For the next two or three days he did not visit the Robinsons, but gave

himself up to past memories. On the third day he had--it must be

confessed not without some effort--brought himself into that condition

of patient sorrow which had been his habit. The episode of the storm

and the finding of the baby began to fade, as had faded the visit of

his relatives. It had been a dull, wet day and he was sitting by his

fire, when there came a tap at his door. "Flora;" by which juvenescent

name his aged Indian handmaid was known, usually announced her presence

with an imitation of a curlew's cry: it could not be her. He fancied

he heard the trailing of a woman's dress against the boards, and

started to his feet, deathly pale, with a name upon his lips. But the

door was impatiently thrown open, and showed Bessy Robinson! And the

baby!

With a feeling of relief he could not understand he offered her a seat.

She turned her frank eyes on him curiously.

"You look skeert!"

"I was startled. You know I see nobody here!"

"Thet's so. But look yar, do you ever use a doctor?"

Not clearly understanding her, he in turn asked, "Why?"

"Cause you must rise up and get one now--thet's why. This yer baby of

ours is sick. We don't use a doctor at our house, we don't beleeve in

'em, hain't no call for 'em--but this yer baby's parents mebbee did.

So rise up out o' that cheer and get one."

James North looked at Miss Robinson and rose, albeit a little in doubt,

and hesitating.

Miss Robinson saw it. "I shouldn't hev troubled ye, nor ridden three

mile to do it, if ther hed been any one else to send. But Dad's over

at Eureka, buying logs, and I'm alone. Hello--wher yer goin'?"

North had seized his hat and opened the door. "For a doctor," he

replied amazedly.

"Did ye kalkilate to walk six miles and back?"

"Certainly--I have no horse."

"But I have, and you'll find her tethered outside. She ain't much to

look at, but when you strike the trail she'll go."

"But YOU--how will YOU return?"

"Well," said Miss Robinson, drawing her chair to the fire, taking off

her hat and shawl, and warming her knees by the blaze, "I didn't reckon

to return. You'll find me here when you come back with the doctor.

Go! Skedaddle quick!"

She did not have to repeat the command. In another instant James North

was in Miss Bessy's seat--a man's dragoon saddle,--and pounding away

through the sand. Two facts were in his mind: one was that he, the

"looney," was about to open communication with the wisdom and

contemporary criticism of the settlement, by going for a doctor to

administer to a sick and anonymous infant in his possession; the other

was that his solitary house was in the hands of a self-invited,

large-limbed, illiterate, but rather comely young woman. These facts

he could not gallop away from, but to his credit be it recorded that he

fulfilled his mission zealously, if not coherently, to the doctor, who

during the rapid ride gathered the idea that North had rescued a young

married woman from drowning, who had since given birth to a child.

The few words that set the doctor right when he arrived at the cabin

might in any other community have required further explanation, but Dr.

Duchesne, an old army surgeon, was prepared for everything and

indifferent to all. "The infant," he said, "was threatened with

inflammation of the lungs; at present there was no danger, but the

greatest care and caution must be exercised. Particularly exposure

should be avoided." "That settles the whole matter, then," said Bessy

potentially. Both gentlemen looked their surprise. "It means," she

condescended to further explain, "that YOU must ride that filly home,

wait for the old man to come to-morrow, and then ride back here with

some of my duds, for thar's no 'day-days' nor picknicking for that baby

ontil she's better. And I reckon to stay with her ontil she is."

"She certainly is unable to bear any exposure at present," said the

doctor, with an amused side glance at North's perplexed face. "Miss

Robinson is right. I'll ride with you over the sands as far as the

trail."

"I'm afraid," said North, feeling it incumbent upon him to say

something, "that you'll hardly find it as comfortable here as--"

"I reckon not," she said simply, "but I didn't expect much."

North turned a little wearily away. "Good night," she said suddenly,

extending her hand, with a gentler smile of lip and eye than he had

ever before noticed, "good night--take good care of Dad."

The doctor and North rode together some moments in silence. North had

another fact presented to him, i. e. that he was going a-visiting, and

that he had virtually abandoned his former life; also that it would be

profanation to think of his sacred woe in the house of a stranger.

"I dare say," said the doctor, suddenly, "you are not familiar with the

type of woman Miss Bessy presents so perfectly. Your life has been

spent among the conventional class."

North froze instantly at what seemed to be a probing of his secret.

Disregarding the last suggestion, he made answer simply and truthfully

that he had never met any Western girl like Bessy.

"That's your bad luck," said the doctor. "You think her coarse and

illiterate?"

Mr. North had been so much struck with her kindness that really he had

not thought of it.

"That's not so," said the doctor, curtly; "although even if you told

her so she would not think any the less of you--nor of herself. If she

spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus in place

of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she was a goddess. There's your

trail. Good night."

III

James North did not sleep well that night. He had taken Miss Bessy's

bedroom, at her suggestion, there being but two, and "Dad never using

sheets and not bein' keerful in his habits." It was neat, but that was

all. The scant ornamentation was atrocious; two or three highly

colored prints, a shell work-box, a ghastly winter bouquet of skeleton

leaves and mosses, a star-fish, and two china vases hideous enough to

have been worshiped as Buddhist idols, exhibited the gentle recreation

of the fair occupant, and the possible future education of the child.

In the morning he was met by Joe, who received the message of his

daughter with his usual dejection, and suggested that North stay with

him until the child was better. That event was still remote; North

found, on his return to his cabin, that the child had been worse; but

he did not know, until Miss Bessy dropped a casual remark, that she had

not closed her own eyes that night. It was a week before he regained

his own quarters, but an active week--indeed, on the whole, a rather

pleasant week. For there was a delicate flattery in being domineered

by a wholesome and handsome woman, and Mr. James North had by this time

made up his mind that she was both. Once or twice he found himself

contemplating her splendid figure with a recollection of the doctor's

compliment, and later, emulating her own frankness, told her of it.

"And what did YOU say?" she asked.

"Oh, I laughed and said--nothing."

And so did she.

A month after this interchange of frankness, she asked him if he could

spend the next evening at her house. "You see," she said, "there's to

be a dance down at the hall at Eureka, and I haven't kicked a fut since

last spring. Hank Fisher's comin' up to take me over, and I'm goin' to

let the shanty slide for the night."

"But what's to become of the baby?" asked North, a little testily.

"Well," said Miss Robinson, facing him somewhat aggressively, "I reckon

it won't hurt ye to take care of it for a night. Dad can't--and if he

could, he don't know how. Liked to have pizened me after mar died.

No, young man, I don't propose to ask Hank Fisher to tote thet child

over to Eureka and back, and spile his fun."

"Then I suppose I must make way for Mr. Hank--Hank--Fisher?" said

North, with the least tinge of sarcasm in his speech.

"Of course. You've got nothing else to do, you know."

North would have given worlds to have pleaded a previous engagement on

business of importance, but he knew that Bessy spoke truly. He had

nothing to do. "And Fisher has, I suppose?" he asked.

"Of course--to look after ME!"

A more unpleasant evening James North had not spent since the first day

of his solitude. He almost began to hate the unconscious cause of his

absurd position, as he paced up and down the floor with it. "Was there

ever such egregious folly?" he began, but remembering he was quoting

Maria North's favorite resume of his own conduct, he stopped. The

child cried, missing, no doubt, the full rounded curves and plump arm

of its nurse. North danced it violently, with an inward accompaniment

that was not musical, and thought of the other dancers. "Doubtless,"

he mused, "she has told this beau of hers that she has left the baby

with the 'looney' Man on the Beach. Perhaps I may be offered a

permanent engagement as a harmless simpleton accustomed to the care of

children. Mothers may cry for me. The doctor is at Eureka. Of

course, he will be there to see his untranslated goddess, and condole

with her over the imbecility of the Man on the Beach." Once he

carelessly asked Joe who the company were.

"Well," said Joe, mournfully, "thar's Widder Higsby and darter; the

four Stubbs gals; in course Polly Doble will be on hand with that

feller that's clerking over at the Head for Jones, and Jones's wife.

Then thar's French Pete, and Whisky Ben, and that chap that shot

Archer,--I disremember his name,--and the barber--what's that little

mulatto's name--that 'ar Kanaka? I swow!" continued Joe, drearily,

"I'll be forgettin' my own next--and--"

"That will do," interrupted North, only half concealing his disgust as

he rose and carried the baby to the other room, beyond the reach of

names that might shock its ladylike ears. The next morning he met the

from-dance-returning Bessy abstractedly, and soon took his leave, full

of a disloyal plan, conceived in the sleeplessness of her own

bedchamber. He was satisfied that he owed a duty to its unknown

parents to remove the child from the degrading influences of the barber

Kanaka, and Hank Fisher especially, and he resolved to write to his

relatives, stating the case, asking a home for the waif and assistance

to find its parents. He addressed this letter to his cousin Maria,

partly in consideration of the dramatic farewell of that young lady,

and its possible influence in turning her susceptible heart towards his

protege. He then quietly settled back to his old solitary habits, and

for a week left the Robinsons unvisited. The result was a morning call

by Trinidad Joe on the hermit. "It's a whim of my gal's, Mr. North,"

he said, dejectedly, "and ez I told you before and warned ye, when that

gal hez an idee, fower yoke of oxen and seving men can't drag it outer

her. She's got a idee o' larnin'--never hevin' hed much schoolin', and

we ony takin' the papers, permiskiss like--and she says YOU can teach

her--not hevin' anythin' else to do. Do ye folly me?"

"Yes," said North, "certainly."

"Well, she allows ez mebbee you're proud, and didn't like her takin'

care of the baby for nowt; and she reckons that ef you'll gin her some

book larnin', and get her to sling some fancy talk in fash'n'ble

style--why, she'll call it squar."

"You can tell her," said North, very honestly, "that I shall be only

too glad to help her in any way, without ever hoping to cancel my debt

of obligation to her."

"Then it's a go?" said the mystified Joe, with a desperate attempt to

convey the foregoing statement to his own intellect in three Saxon

words.

"It's a go," replied North, cheerfully.

And he felt relieved. For he was not quite satisfied with his own want

of frankness to her. But here was a way to pay off the debt he owed

her, and yet retain his own dignity. And now he could tell her what he

had done, and he trusted to the ambitious instinct that prompted her to

seek a better education to explain his reasons for it.

He saw her that evening and confessed all to her frankly. She kept her

head averted, but when she turned her blue eyes to him they were wet

with honest tears. North had a man's horror of a ready feminine

lachrymal gland; but it was not like Bessy to cry, and it meant

something; and then she did it in a large, goddess-like way, without

sniffling, or chocking, or getting her nose red, but rather with a

gentle deliquescence, a harmonious melting, so that he was fain to

comfort her with nearer contact, gentleness in his own sad eyes, and a

pressure of her large hand.

"It's all right, I s'pose," she said, sadly; "but I didn't reckon on

yer havin' any relations, but thought you was alone, like me."

James North, thinking of Hank Fisher and the "mullater," could not help

intimating that his relations were very wealthy and fashionable people,

and had visited him last summer. A recollection of the manner in which

they had so visited him and his own reception of them prevented his

saying more. But Miss Bessy could not forego a certain feminine

curiosity, and asked,--

"Did they come with Sam Baker's team?"

"Yes."

"Last July?"

"Yes."

"And Sam drove the horses here for a bite?"

"I believe so."

"And them's your relations?"

"They are."

Miss Robinson reached over the cradle and enfolded the sleeping infant

in her powerful arms. Then she lifted her eyes, wrathful through her

still glittering tears, and said, slowly, "They

don't--have--this--child--then!"

"But why?"

"Oh, why? I saw them! That's why, and enough! You can't play any

such gay and festive skeletons on this poor baby for flesh and blood

parents. No, sir!"

"I think you judge them hastily, Miss Bessy," said North, secretly

amused; "my aunt may not, at first, favorably impress strangers, yet

she has many friends. But surely you do not object to my cousin Maria,

the young lady?"

"What! that dried cuttle-fish, with nothing livin' about her but her

eyes? James North, ye may be a fool like the old woman,--perhaps it's

in the family,--but ye ain't a devil, like that gal! That ends it."

And it did. North dispatched a second letter to Maria saying that he

had already made other arrangements for the baby. Pleased with her

easy victory, Miss Bessy became more than usually gracious, and the

next day bowed her shapely neck meekly to the yoke of her teacher, and

became a docile pupil. James North could not have helped noticing her

ready intelligence, even had he been less prejudiced in her favor than

he was fast becoming now. If he had found it pleasant before to be

admonished by her there was still more delicious flattery in her

perfect trust in his omniscient skill as a pilot over this unknown sea.

There was a certain enjoyment in guiding her hand over the

writing-book, that I fear he could not have obtained from an intellect

less graciously sustained by its physical nature. The weeks flew

quickly by on gossamer wings, and when she placed a bunch of larkspurs

and poppies in his hand one morning, he remembered for the first that

it was spring.

I cannot say that there was more to record of Miss Bessy's education

than this. Once North, half jestingly, remarked that he had never yet

seen her admirer, Mr. Hank Fisher. Miss Bessy (coloring but

cool)--"You never will!" North (white but hot)--"Why?" Miss Bessy

(faintly)--"I'd rather not." North (resolutely)--"I insist." Bessy

(yielding)--"As my teacher?" North (hesitatingly, at the limitation of

the epithet)--"Y-e-e-s!" Bessy--"And you'll promise never to speak of

it again?" North--"Never." Bessy (slowly)--"Well, he said I did an

awful thing to go over to your cabin and stay." North (in the genuine

simplicity of a refined nature)--"But how?" Miss Bessy (half piqued,

but absolutely admiring that nature)--"Quit! and keep your promise!"

They were so happy in these new relations that it occurred to Miss

Bessy one day to take James North to task for obliging her to ask to be

his pupil. "You knew how ignorant I was," she added; and Mr. North

retorted by relating to her the doctor's criticism on her independence.

"To tell you the truth," he added, "I was afraid you would not take it

as kindly as he thought."

"That is, you thought me as vain as yourself. It seems to me you and

the doctor had a great deal to say to each other."

"On the contrary," laughed North, "that was all we said."

"And you didn't make fun of me?"

Perhaps it was not necessary for North to take her hand to emphasize

his denial, but he did.

Miss Bessy, being still reminiscent, perhaps, did not notice it. "If it

hadn't been for that ar--I mean that thar--no, that baby--I wouldn't

have known you!" she said dreamily.

"No," returned North, mischievously, "but you still would have known

Hank Fisher."

No woman is perfect. Miss Bessy looked at him with a sudden--her first

and last--flash of coquetry. Then stooped and kissed--the baby.

James North was a simple gentleman, but not altogether a fool. He

returned the kiss, but not vicariously.

There was a footstep on the porch. These two turned the hues of a

dying dolphin, and then laughed. It was Joe. He held a newspaper in

his hand. "I reckon ye woz right, Mr. North, about my takin' these yar

papers reg'lar. For I allow here's suthin' that may clar up the

mystery o' that baby's parents." With the hesitation of a slowly

grappling intellect, Joe sat down on the table and read from the San

Francisco "Herald" as follows: "'It is now ascertained beyond doubt

that the wreck reported by the Aeolus was the American brig Pomare

bound hence to Tahiti. The worst surmises are found correct. The body

of the woman has been since identified as that of the beau-ti-ful

daughter of--of--of--Terp--Terp--Terpish'--Well! I swow that name just

tackles me."

"Gin it to me, Dad," said Bessy pertly. "You never had any education,

any way. Hear your accomplished daughter." With a mock bow to the new

schoolmaster, and a capital burlesque of a confident school girl, she

strode to the middle of the room the paper held and folded book-wise in

her hands. "Ahem! Where did you leave off? Oh, 'the beautiful

daughter of Terpsichore--whose name was prom-i-nently connected with a

mysterious social scandal of last year--the gifted but unfortunate

Grace Chatterton'--No--don't stop me--there's some more! 'The body of

her child, a lovely infant of six months, has not been recovered, and

it is supposed was washed overboard.' There! may be that's the child,

Mr. North. Why, Dad! Look, O my God! He's falling. Catch him, Dad!

Quick!"

But her strong arm had anticipated her father's. She caught him,

lifted him to the bed, on which he lay henceforth for many days

unconscious. Then fever supervened, and delirium, and Dr. Duchesne

telegraphed for his friends; but at the end of a week and the opening

of a summer day the storm passed, as the other storm had passed, and he

awoke, enfeebled, but at peace. Bessy was at his side--he was glad to

see--alone.

"Bessy, dear," he said hesitatingly, "when I am stronger I have

something to tell you."

"I know it all, Jem," she said with a trembling lip; "I heard it

all--no, not from THEM, but from your own lips in your delirium. I'm

glad it came from YOU--even then."

"Do you forgive me, Bessy?"

She pressed her lips to his forehead and said hastily, and then

falteringly, as if afraid of her impulse:--

"Yes. Yes."

"And you will still be mother to the child?"

"HER child?"

"No dear, not hers, but MINE!"

She started, cried a little, and then putting her arms around him,

said: "Yes."

And as there was but one way of fulfilling that sacred promise, they

were married in the autumn.

TWO SAINTS OF THE FOOT-HILLS

It never was clearly ascertained how long they had been there. The

first settler of Rough-and-Ready--one Low, playfully known to his

familiars as "The Poor Indian"--declared that the Saints were afore his

time, and occupied a cabin in the brush when he "blazed" his way to the

North Fork. It is certain that the two were present when the water was

first turned on the Union Ditch and then and there received the

designation of Daddy Downey and Mammy Downey, which they kept to the

last. As they tottered toward the refreshment tent, they were welcomed

with the greatest enthusiasm by the boys; or, to borrow the more

refined language of the "Union Recorder,"--"Their gray hairs and bent

figures, recalling as they did the happy paternal eastern homes of the

spectators, and the blessings that fell from venerable lips when they

left those homes to journey in quest of the Golden Fleece on Occidental

Slopes, caused many to burst into tears." The nearer facts, that many

of these spectators were orphans, that a few were unable to establish

any legal parentage whatever, that others had enjoyed a State's

guardianship and discipline, and that a majority had left their

paternal roofs without any embarrassing preliminary formula, were mere

passing clouds that did not dim the golden imagery of the writer. From

that day the Saints were adopted as historical lay figures, and entered

at once into possession of uninterrupted gratuities and endowment.

It was not strange that, in a country largely made up of ambitious and

reckless youth, these two--types of conservative and settled

forms--should be thus celebrated. Apart from any sentiment or

veneration, they were admirable foils to the community's youthful

progress and energy. They were put forward at every social gathering,

occupied prominent seats on the platform at every public meeting,

walked first in every procession, were conspicuous at the frequent

funeral and rarer wedding, and were godfather and godmother to the

first baby born in Rough-and-Ready. At the first poll opened in that

precinct, Daddy Downey cast the first vote, and, as was his custom on

all momentous occasions, became volubly reminiscent. "The first vote I

ever cast," said Daddy, "was for Andrew Jackson; the father o' some on

your peart young chaps wasn't born then; he! he! that was 'way long in

'33, wasn't it? I disremember now, but if Mammy was here, she bein' a

school-gal at the time, she could say. But my memory's failin' me.

I'm an old man, boys; yet I likes to see the young ones go ahead. I

recklect that thar vote from a suckumstance. Squire Adams was present,

and seein' it was my first vote, he put a goold piece into my hand,

and, sez he, sez Squire Adams, 'Let that always be a reminder of the

exercise of a glorious freeman's privilege!' He did; he! he! Lord,

boys! I feel so proud of ye, that I wish I had a hundred votes to cast

for ye all."

It was hardly necessary to say that the memorial tribute of Squire

Adams was increased tenfold by the judges, inspectors, and clerks, and

that the old man tottered back to Mammy, considerably heavier than he

came. As both of the rival candidates were equally sure of his vote,

and each had called upon him and offered a conveyance, it is but fair

to presume they were equally beneficent. But Daddy insisted upon

walking to the polls,--a distance of two miles,--as a moral example,

and a text for the California paragraphers, who hastened to record that

such was the influence of the foot-hill climate, that "a citizen of

Rough-and-Ready, aged eighty-four, rose at six o'clock, and, after

milking two cows, walked a distance of twelve miles to the polls, and

returned in time to chop a cord of wood before dinner."

Slightly exaggerated as this statement may have been, the fact that

Daddy was always found by the visitor to be engaged at his wood-pile,

which seemed neither to increase nor diminish under his axe, a fact,

doubtless, owing to the activity of Mammy, who was always at the same

time making pies, seemed to give some credence to the story. Indeed,

the wood-pile of Daddy Downey was a standing reproof to the indolent

and sluggish miner.

"Ole Daddy must use up a pow'ful sight of wood; every time I've passed

by his shanty he's been makin' the chips fly. But what gets me is,

that the pile don't seem to come down," said Whisky Dick to his

neighbor.

"Well, you derned fool!" growled his neighbor, "spose some chap happens

to pass by thar, and sees the old man doin' a man's work at eighty, and

slouches like you and me lying round drunk, and that chap, feelin'

kinder humped, goes up some dark night and heaves a load of cut pine

over his fence, who's got anything to say about it? Say?" Certainly

not the speaker, who had done the act suggested, nor the penitent and

remorseful hearer, who repeated it next day.

The pies and cakes made by the old woman were, I think, remarkable

rather for their inducing the same loyal and generous spirit than for

their intrinsic excellence, and it may be said appealed more strongly

to the nobler aspirations of humanity than its vulgar appetite.

Howbeit, everybody ate Mammy Downey's pies, and thought of his

childhood. "Take 'em, dear boys," the old lady would say; "it does me

good to see you eat 'em; reminds me kinder of my poor Sammy, that, ef

he'd lived, would hev been ez strong and beg ez you be, but was taken

down with lung fever, at Sweetwater. I kin see him yet; that's forty

year ago, dear! comin' out o' the lot to the bake-house, and smilin'

such a beautiful smile, like yours, dear boy, as I handed him a mince

or a lemming turnover. Dear, dear, how I do run on! and those days is

past! but I seems to live in you again!" The wife of the hotel-keeper,

actuated by a low jealousy, had suggested that she "seemed to live OFF

them;" but as that person tried to demonstrate the truth of her

statement by reference to the cost of the raw material used by the old

lady, it was considered by the camp as too practical and economical for

consideration. "Besides," added Cy Perkins, "ef old Mammy wants to

turn an honest penny in her old age, let her do it. How would you like

your old mother to make pies on grub wages? eh?" A suggestion that so

affected his hearer (who had no mother) that he bought three on the

spot. The quality of these pies had never been discussed but once. It

is related that a young lawyer from San Francisco, dining at the

Palmetto restaurant, pushed away one of Mammy Downey's pies with every

expression of disgust and dissatisfaction. At this juncture, Whisky

Dick, considerably affected by his favorite stimulant, approached the

stranger's table, and, drawing up a chair, sat uninvited before him.

"Mebbee, young man," he began gravely, "ye don't like Mammy Downey's

pies?"

The stranger replied curtly, and in some astonishment, that he did not,

as a rule, "eat pie."

"Young man," continued Dick, with drunken gravity, "mebbee you're

accustomed to Charlotte rusks and blue mange; mebbee ye can't eat

unless your grub is got up by one o' them French cooks'? Yet WE--us

boys yar in this camp--calls that pie--a good--a com-pe-tent pie!"

The stranger again disclaimed anything but a general dislike of that

form of pastry.

"Young man," continued Dick, utterly unheeding the explanation,--"young

man, mebbee you onst had an ole--a very ole mother, who, tottering down

the vale o' years, made pies. Mebbee, and it's like your blank

epicurean soul, ye turned up your nose on the ole woman, and went back

on the pies, and on her! She that dandled ye when ye woz a baby,--a

little baby! Mebbee ye went back on her, and shook her, and played off

on her, and gave her away--dead away! And now, mebbee, young man--I

wouldn't hurt ye for the world, but mebbee, afore ye leave this yar

table, YE'LL EAT THAT PIE!"

The stranger rose to his feet, but the muzzle of a dragoon revolver in

the unsteady hands of Whisky Dick, caused him to sit down again. He ate

the pie, and lost his case likewise, before a Rough-and-Ready jury.

Indeed, far from exhibiting the cynical doubts and distrusts of age,

Daddy Downey received always with childlike delight the progress of

modern improvement and energy. "In my day, long back in the twenties,

it took us nigh a week--a week, boys--to get up a barn, and all the

young ones--I was one then--for miles 'round at the raisin'; and yer's

you boys--rascals ye are, too--runs up this yer shanty for Mammy and me

'twixt sun-up and dark! Eh, eh, you're teachin' the old folks new

tricks, are ye? Ah, get along, you!" and in playful simulation of

anger he would shake his white hair and his hickory staff at the

"rascals." The only indication of the conservative tendencies of age

was visible in his continual protest against the extravagance of the

boys. "Why," he would say, "a family, a hull family,--leavin' alone me

and the old woman,--might be supported on what you young rascals throw

away in a single spree. Ah, you young dogs, didn't I hear about your

scattering half-dollars on the stage the other night when that

Eyetalian Papist was singin'? And that money goes out of Ameriky--ivry

cent!"

There was little doubt that the old couple were saving, if not

avaricious. But when it was known, through the indiscreet volubility

of Mammy Downey, that Daddy Downey sent the bulk of their savings,

gratuities, and gifts to a dissipated and prodigal son in the

East,--whose photograph the old man always carried with him,--it rather

elevated him in their regard. "When ye write to that gay and festive

son o' yourn, Daddy," said Joe Robinson, "send him this yer specimen.

Give him my compliments, and tell him, ef he kin spend money faster

than I can, I call him! Tell him, ef he wants a first-class jamboree,

to kem out here, and me and the boys will show him what a square drunk

is!" In vain would the old man continue to protest against the spirit

of the gift; the miner generally returned with his pockets that much

the lighter, and it is not improbable a little less intoxicated than he

otherwise might have been. It may be premised that Daddy Downey was

strictly temperate. The only way he managed to avoid hurting the

feelings of the camp was by accepting the frequent donations of whisky

to be used for the purposes of liniment.

"Next to snake-oil, my son," he would say, "and dilberry-juice,--and ye

don't seem to pro-duce 'em hereabouts,--whisky is good for rubbin' onto

old bones to make 'em limber. But pure cold water, 'sparklin' and

bright in its liquid light,' and, so to speak, reflectin' of God's own

linyments on its surfiss, is the best, onless, like poor ol' Mammy and

me, ye gets the dumb-agur from over-use."

The fame of the Downey couple was not confined to the foot-hills. The

Rev. Henry Gushington, D.D., of Boston, making a bronchial tour of

California, wrote to the "Christian Pathfinder" an affecting account of

his visit to them, placed Daddy Downey's age at 102, and attributed the

recent conversions in Rough-and-Ready to their influence. That gifted

literary Hessian, Bill Smith, traveling in the interests of various

capitalists, and the trustworthy correspondent of four "only

independent American journals," quoted him as an evidence of the

longevity superinduced by the climate, offered him as an example of the

security of helpless life and property in the mountains, used him as an

advertisement of the Union Ditch, and it is said in some vague way

cited him as proving the collateral facts of a timber and ore-producing

region existing in the foot-hills worthy the attention of Eastern

capitalists.

Praised thus by the lips of distinguished report, fostered by the care

and sustained by the pecuniary offerings of their fellow-citizens, the

Saints led for two years a peaceful life of gentle absorption. To

relieve them from the embarrassing appearance of eleemosynary

receipts,--an embarrassment felt more by the givers than the

recipients,--the postmastership of Rough-and-Ready was procured for

Daddy, and the duty of receiving and delivering the United States mails

performed by him, with the advice and assistance of the boys. If a few

letters went astray at this time, it was easily attributed to this

undisciplined aid, and the boys themselves were always ready to make up

the value of a missing money-letter and "keep the old man's accounts

square." To these functions presently were added the treasurerships of

the Masons' and Odd Fellows' charitable funds,--the old man being far

advanced in their respective degrees,--and even the position of almoner

of their bounties was super-added. Here, unfortunately, Daddy's habits

of economy and avaricious propensity came near making him unpopular,

and very often needy brothers were forced to object to the quantity and

quality of the help extended. They always met with more generous

relief from the private hands of the brothers themselves, and the

remark, "that the ol' man was trying to set an example,--that he meant

well,"--and that they would yet be thankful for his zealous care and

economy. A few, I think, suffered in noble silence, rather than bring

the old man's infirmity to the public notice.

And so with this honor of Daddy and Mammy, the days of the miners were

long and profitable in the land of the foot-hills. The mines yielded

their abundance, the winters were singularly open and yet there was no

drouth nor lack of water, and peace and plenty smiled on the Sierrean

foothills, from their highest sunny upland to the trailing falda of

wild oats and poppies. If a certain superstition got abroad among the

other camps, connecting the fortunes of Rough-and-Ready with Daddy and

Mammy, it was a gentle, harmless fancy, and was not, I think,

altogether rejected by the old people. A certain large, patriarchal,

bountiful manner, of late visible in Daddy, and the increase of much

white hair and beard, kept up the poetic illusion, while Mammy, day by

day, grew more and more like somebody's fairy godmother. An attempt

was made by a rival camp to emulate these paying virtues of reverence,

and an aged mariner was procured from the Sailor's Snug Harbor in San

Francisco, on trial. But the unfortunate seaman was more or less

diseased, was not always presentable, through a weakness for ardent

spirits, and finally, to use the powerful idiom of one of his

disappointed foster-children, "up and died in a week, without slinging

ary blessin'."

But vicissitude reaches young and old alike. Youthful Rough-and-Ready

and the Saints had climbed to their meridian together, and it seemed

fit that they should together decline. The first shadow fell with the

immigration to Rough-and-Ready of a second aged pair. The landlady of

the Independence Hotel had not abated her malevolence towards the

Saints, and had imported at considerable expense her grand-aunt and

grand-uncle, who had been enjoying for some years a sequestered

retirement in the poorhouse at East Machias. They were indeed very

old. By what miracle, even as anatomical specimens, they had been

preserved during their long journey was a mystery to the camp. In some

respects they had superior memories and reminiscences. The old

man--Abner Trix--had shouldered a musket in the war of 1812; his wife,

Abigail, had seen Lady Washington. She could sing hymns; he knew every

text between "the leds" of a Bible. There is little doubt but that in

many respects, to the superficial and giddy crowd of youthful

spectators, they were the more interesting spectacle.

Whether it was jealousy, distrust, or timidity that overcame the

Saints, was never known, but they studiously declined to meet the

strangers. When directly approached upon the subject, Daddy Downey

pleaded illness, kept himself in close seclusion, and the Sunday that

the Trixes attended church in the school-house on the hill, the triumph

of the Trix party was mitigated by the fact that the Downeys were not

in their accustomed pew. "You bet that Daddy and Mammy is lying low

jest to ketch them old mummies yet," explained a Downeyite. For by

this time schism and division had crept into the camp; the younger and

later members of the settlement adhering to the Trixes, while the older

pioneers stood not only loyal to their own favorites, but even, in the

true spirit of partisanship, began to seek for a principle underlying

their personal feelings. "I tell ye what, boys," observed Sweetwater

Joe, "if this yer camp is goin' to be run by greenhorns, and old

pioneers, like Daddy and the rest of us, must take back seats, it's

time we emigrated and shoved out, and tuk Daddy with us. Why, they're

talkin' of rotation in offiss, and of putting that skeleton that Ma'am

Decker sets up at the table, to take her boarders' appetites away, into

the post-office in place o' Daddy." And, indeed, there were some fears

of such a conclusion; the newer men of Rough-and-Ready were in the

majority, and wielded a more than equal influence of wealth and outside

enterprise. "Frisco," as a Downeyite bitterly remarked, "already owned

half the town." The old friends that rallied around Daddy and Mammy

were, like most loyal friends in adversity, in bad case themselves, and

were beginning to look and act, it was observed, not unlike their old

favorites.

At this juncture Mammy died.

The sudden blow for a few days seemed to reunite dissevered

Rough-and-Ready. Both factions hastened to the bereaved Daddy with

condolements, and offers of aid and assistance. But the old man

received them sternly. A change had come over the weak and yielding

octogenarian. Those who expected to find him maudlin, helpless,

disconsolate, shrank from the cold, hard eyes and truculent voice that

bade them "begone," and "leave him with his dead." Even his own

friends failed to make him respond to their sympathy, and were fain to

content themselves with his cold intimation that both the wishes of his

dead wife and his own instincts were against any display, or the

reception of any favor from the camp that might tend to keep up the

divisions they had innocently created. The refusal of Daddy to accept

any service offered was so unlike him as to have but one dreadful

meaning! The sudden shock had turned his brain! Yet so impressed were

they with his resolution that they permitted him to perform the last

sad offices himself, and only a select few of his nearer neighbors

assisted him in carrying the plain deal coffin from his lonely cabin in

the woods to the still lonelier cemetery on the hill-top.

When the shallow grave was filled, he dismissed even these curtly, shut

himself up in his cabin, and for days remained unseen. It was evident

that he was no longer in his right mind.

His harmless aberration was accepted and treated with a degree of

intelligent delicacy hardly to be believed of so rough a community.

During his wife's sudden and severe illness, the safe containing the

funds intrusted to his care by the various benevolent associations was

broken into and robbed, and although the act was clearly attributable

to his carelessness and preoccupation, all allusion to the fact was

withheld from him in his severe affliction. When he appeared again

before the camp, and the circumstances were considerately explained to

him, with the remark that "the boys had made it all right," the vacant,

hopeless, unintelligent eye that he turned upon the speaker showed too

plainly that he had forgotten all about it. "Don't trouble the old

man," said Whisky Dick, with a burst of honest poetry. "Don't ye see

his memory's dead, and lying there in the coffin with Mammy?" Perhaps

the speaker was nearer right than he imagined.

Failing in religious consolation, they took various means of diverting

his mind with worldly amusements, and one was a visit to a traveling

variety troupe, then performing in the town. The result of the visit

was briefly told by Whisky Dick. "Well, sir, we went in, and I sot the

old man down in a front seat, and kinder propped him up with some other

of the fellers round him, and there he sot as silent and awful ez the

grave. And then that fancy dancer, Miss Grace Somerset, comes in, and

dern my skin, ef the old man didn't get to trembling and fidgeting all

over, as she cut them pidgin wings. I tell ye what, boys, men is men,

way down to their boots,--whether they're crazy or not! Well, he took

on so, that I'm blamed if at last that gal HERSELF didn't notice him!

and she ups, suddenly, and blows him a kiss--so! with her fingers!"

Whether this narration were exaggerated or not, it is certain that the

old man Downey every succeeding night of the performance was a

spectator. That he may have aspired to more than that was suggested a

day or two later in the following incident: A number of the boys were

sitting around the stove in the Magnolia saloon, listening to the onset

of a winter storm against the windows, when Whisky Dick, tremulous,

excited, and bristling with rain-drops and information, broke in upon

them.

"Well, boys, I've got just the biggest thing out. Ef I hadn't seed it

myself, I wouldn't hev believed it!"

"It ain't thet ghost ag'in?" growled Robinson, from the depths of his

arm-chair; "thet ghost's about played."

"Wot ghost?" asked a new-comer.

"Why, ole Mammy's ghost, that every feller about yer sees when he's

half full and out late o' nights."

"Where?"

"Where? Why, where should a ghost be? Meanderin' round her grave on

the hill, yander, in course."

"It's suthin bigger nor thet, pard," said Dick confidently; "no ghost

kin rake down the pot ag'in the keerds I've got here. This ain't no

bluff!"

"Well, go on!" said a dozen excited voices.

Dick paused a moment, diffidently, with the hesitation of an artistic

raconteur.

"Well," he said, with affected deliberation, "let's see! It's nigh

onto an hour ago ez I was down thar at the variety show. When the

curtain was down betwixt the ax, I looks round fer Daddy. No Daddy

thar! I goes out and asks some o' the boys. 'Daddy WAS there a minnit

ago,' they say; 'must hev gone home.' Bein' kinder responsible for the

old man, I hangs around, and goes out in the hall and sees a passage

leadin' behind the scenes. Now the queer thing about this, boys, ez

that suthin in my bones tells me the old man is THAR. I pushes in,

and, sure as a gun, I hears his voice. Kinder pathetic, kinder

pleadin', kinder--"

"Love-makin'!" broke in the impatient Robinson.

"You've hit it, pard,--you've rung the bell every time! But she says,

'wants thet money down, or I'll--' and here I couldn't get to hear the

rest. And then he kinder coaxes, and she says, sorter sassy, but

listenin' all the time,--woman like, ye know, Eve and the sarpint!--and

she says, 'I'll see to-morrow.' And he says, 'You won't blow on me?'

and I gets excited and peeps in, and may I be teetotally durned ef I

didn't see--"

"What?" yelled the crowd.

"Why, DADDY ON HIS KNEES TO THAT THERE FANCY DANCER, Grace Somerset!

Now, if Mammy's ghost is meanderin' round, why, et's about time she

left the cemetery and put in an appearance in Jackson's Hall. Thet's

all!"

"Look yar, boys," said Robinson, rising, "I don't know ez it's the

square thing to spile Daddy's fun. I don't object to it, provided she

ain't takin' in the old man, and givin' him dead away. But ez we're

his guardeens, I propose that we go down thar and see the lady, and

find out ef her intentions is honorable. If she means marry, and the

old man persists, why, I reckon we kin give the young couple a send-off

thet won't disgrace this yer camp! Hey, boys?"

It is unnecessary to say that the proposition was received with

acclamation, and that the crowd at once departed on their discreet

mission. But the result was never known, for the next morning brought

a shock to Rough-and-Ready before which all other interest paled to

nothingness.

The grave of Mammy Downey was found violated and despoiled; the coffin

opened, and half filled with the papers and accounts of the robbed

benevolent associations; but the body of Mammy was gone! Nor, on

examination, did it appear that the sacred and ancient form of that

female had ever reposed in its recesses!

Daddy Downey was not to be found, nor is it necessary to say that the

ingenuous Grace Somerset was also missing.

For three days the reason of Rough-and-Ready trembled in the balance.

No work was done in the ditches, in the flume, nor in the mills.

Groups of men stood by the grave of the lamented relict of Daddy

Downey, as open-mouthed and vacant as that sepulchre. Never since the

great earthquake of '52 had Rough-and-Ready been so stirred to its

deepest foundations.

On the third day the sheriff of Calaveras--a quiet, gentle, thoughtful

man--arrived in town, and passed from one to the other of excited

groups, dropping here and there detached but concise and practical

information.

"Yes, gentlemen, you are right, Mrs. Downey is not dead, because there

wasn't any Mrs. Downey! Her part was played by George F. Fenwick, of

Sydney,--a 'ticket-of-leave-man,' who was, they say, a good actor.

Downey? Oh, yes Downey was Jem Flanigan, who, in '52, used to run the

variety troupe in Australia, where Miss Somerset made her debut. Stand

back a little, boys. Steady! 'The money?' Oh, yes, they've got away

with that, sure! How are ye, Joe? Why, you're looking well and

hearty! I rather expected ye court week. How's things your way?"

"Then they were only play-actors, Joe Hall?" broke in a dozen voices.

"I reckon!" returned the sheriff, coolly.

"And for a matter o' five blank years," said Whisky Dick, sadly, "they

played this camp!"

"JINNY"

I think that the few who were permitted to know and love the object of

this sketch spent the rest of their days not only in an attitude of

apology for having at first failed to recognize her higher nature, but

of remorse that they should have ever lent a credulous ear to a priori

tradition concerning her family characteristics. She had not escaped

that calumny which she shared with the rest of her sex for those

youthful follies, levities, and indiscretions which belong to

immaturity. It is very probable that the firmness that distinguished

her maturer will in youth might have been taken for obstinacy, that her

nice discrimination might at the same period have been taken for

adolescent caprice, and that the positive expression of her quick

intellect might have been thought youthful impertinence before her

years had won respect for her judgment.

She was foaled at Indian Creek, and one month later, when she was

brought over to Sawyer's Bar, was considered the smallest donkey ever

seen in the foot-hills. The legend that she was brought over in one of

"Dan the Quartz Crusher's" boots required corroboration from that

gentleman; but his denial being evidently based upon a masculine vanity

regarding the size of his foot rather than a desire to be historically

accurate, it went for nothing. It is certain that for the next two

months she occupied the cabin of Dan, until, perhaps incensed at this

and other scandals, she one night made her way out. "I hadn't the

least idee wot woz comin'," said Dan, "but about midnight I seemed to

hear hail onto the roof, and a shower of rocks and stones like to a

blast started in the canyon. When I got up and struck a light, thar was

suthin' like onto a cord o' kindlin' wood and splinters whar she'd

stood asleep, and a hole in the side o' the shanty, and--no Jinny!

Lookin' at them hoofs o' hern--and mighty porty they is to look at,

too--you would allow she could do it!" I fear that this performance

laid the foundation of her later infelicitous reputation, and perhaps

awakened in her youthful breast a misplaced ambition, and an emulation

which might at that time have been diverted into a nobler channel. For

the fame of this juvenile performance--and its possible promise in the

future--brought at once upon her the dangerous flattery and attention

of the whole camp. Under intelligently directed provocation she would

repeat her misguided exercise, until most of the scanty furniture of

the cabin was reduced to a hopeless wreck, and sprains and callosities

were developed upon the limbs of her admirers. Yet even at this early

stage of her history, that penetrating intellect which was in after

years her dominant quality was evident to all. She could not be made

to kick at quartz tailings, at a barrel of Boston crackers, or at the

head or shin of "Nigger Pete." An artistic discrimination economized

her surplus energy. "Ef you'll notiss," said Dan, with a large

parental softness, "she never lets herself out to onst like them mules

or any jackass ez I've heerd of, but kinder holds herself in, and, so

to speak, takes her bearings--sorter feels round gently with that off

foot, takes her distance and her rest, and then with that ar' foot

hoverin' round in the air softly, like an angel's wing, and a gentle,

dreamy kind o' look in them eyes, she lites out! Don't ye, Jinny?

Thar! jist ez I told ye," continued Dan, with an artist's noble

forgetfulness of self, as he slowly crawled from the splintered ruin of

the barrel on which he had been sitting. "Thur! did ye ever see the

like! Did ye dream that all the while I was talkin' she was a

meditatin' that?"

The same artistic perception and noble reticence distinguished her

bray. It was one of which a less sagacious animal would have been

foolishly vain or ostentatiously prodigal. It was a contralto of great

compass and profundity--reaching from low G to high C--perhaps a trifle

stronger in the lower register, and not altogether free from a nasal

falsetto in the upper. Daring and brilliant as it was in the middle

notes, it was perhaps more musically remarkable for its great

sustaining power. The element of surprise always entered into the

hearer's enjoyment; long after any ordinary strain of human origin

would have ceased, faint echoes of Jinny's last note were perpetually

recurring. But it was as an intellectual and moral expression that her

bray was perfect. As far beyond her size as were her aspirations, it

was a free and running commentary of scorn at all created things

extant, with ironical and sardonic additions that were terrible. It

reviled all human endeavor, it quenched all sentiment, it suspended

frivolity, it scattered reverie, it paralyzed action. It was

omnipotent. More wonderful and characteristic than all, the very

existence of this tremendous organ was unknown to the camp for six

months after the arrival of its modest owner, and only revealed to them

under circumstances that seemed to point more conclusively than ever to

her rare discretion.

It was the beginning of a warm night and the middle of a heated

political discussion. Sawyer's Bar had gathered in force at the

Crossing, and by the light of flaring pine torches, cheered and

applauded the rival speakers who from a rude platform addressed the

excited multitude. Partisan spirit at that time ran high in the

foot-hills; crimination and recrimination, challenge, reply,

accusation, and retort had already inflamed the meeting, and Colonel

Bungstarter, after a withering review of his opponent's policy,

culminated with a personal attack upon the career and private character

of the eloquent and chivalrous Colonel Culpepper Starbottle of

Siskiyou. That eloquent and chivalrous gentleman was known to be

present; it was rumored that the attack was expected to provoke a

challenge from Colonel Starbottle which would give Bungstarter the

choice of weapons, and deprive Starbottle of his advantage as a dead

shot. It was whispered also that the sagacious Starbottle, aware of

this fact, would retaliate in kind so outrageously as to leave

Bungstarter no recourse but to demand satisfaction on the spot. As

Colonel Starbottle rose, the eager crowd drew together, elbowing each

other in rapt and ecstatic expectancy. "He can't get even on

Bungstarter, onless he allows his sister ran off with a nigger, or that

he put up his grandmother at draw poker and lost her," whispered the

Quartz Crusher; "kin he?" All ears were alert, particularly the very

long and hairy ones just rising above the railing of the speaker's

platform; for Jinny, having a feminine distrust of solitude and a

fondness for show, had followed her master to the meeting and had

insinuated herself upon the platform, where way was made for her with

that frontier courtesy always extended to her age and sex.

Colonel Starbottle, stertorous and purple, advanced to the railing.

There he unbuttoned his collar and laid his neckcloth aside, then with

his eye fixed on his antagonist he drew off his blue frock coat, and

thrusting one hand into his ruffled shirt front, and raising the other

to the dark canopy above him, he opened his vindictive lips. The

action, the attitude, were Starbottle's. But the voice was not. For

at that supreme moment, a bray--so profound, so appalling, so utterly

soul-subduing, so paralyzing that everything else sank to mere

insignificance beside it--filled woods, and sky, and air. For a moment

only the multitude gasped in speechless astonishment--it was a moment

only--and then the welkin roared with their shouts. In vain silence

was commanded, in vain Colonel Starbottle, with a ghastly smile,

remarked that he recognized in the interruption the voice and the

intellect of the opposition; the laugh continued, the more as it was

discovered that Jinny had not yet finished, and was still recurring to

her original theme. "Gentlemen," gasped Starbottle, "any attempt by

[Hee-haw! from Jinny] brutal buffoonery to restrict the right of free

speech to all [a prolonged assent from Jinny] is worthy only the

dastardly"--but here a diminuendo so long drawn as to appear a striking

imitation of the Colonel's own apoplectic sentences drowned his voice

with shrieks of laughter.

It must not be supposed that during this performance a vigorous attempt

was not made to oust Jinny from the platform. But all in vain.

Equally demoralizing in either extremity, Jinny speedily cleared a

circle with her flying hoofs, smashed the speaker's table and water

pitcher, sent the railing flying in fragments over the cheering crowd,

and only succumbed to two blankets, in which, with her head concealed,

she was finally dragged, half captive, half victor, from the field.

Even then a muffled and supplemental bray that came from the woods at

intervals drew half the crowd away and reduced the other half to mere

perfunctory hearers. The demoralized meeting was adjourned; Colonel

Starbottle's withering reply remained unuttered, and the Bungstarter

party were triumphant.

For the rest of the evening Jinny was the heroine of the hour, but no

cajolery nor flattery could induce her to again exhibit her powers. In

vain did Dean of Angel's extemporize a short harangue in the hope that

Jinny would be tempted to reply; in vain was every provocation offered

that might sting her sensitive nature to eloquent revolt. She replied

only with her heels. Whether or not this was simple caprice, or

whether she was satisfied with her maiden effort, or indignant at her

subsequent treatment, she remained silent. "She made her little game,"

said Dan, who was a political adherent of Starbottle's, and who yet

from that day enjoyed the great speaker's undying hatred, "and even if

me and her don't agree on politics--YOU let her alone." Alas, it would

have been well for Dan if he could have been true to his instincts, but

the offer of one hundred dollars from the Bungstarter party proved too

tempting. She passed irrevocably from his hands into those of the

enemy. But any reader of these lines will, I trust, rejoice to hear

that this attempt to restrain free political expression in the

foot-hills failed signally. For, although she was again covertly

introduced on the platform by the Bungstarters, and placed face to face

with Colonel Starbottle at Murphy's Camp, she was dumb. Even a brass

band failed to excite her emulation. Either she had become disgusted

with politics or the higher prices paid by the party to other and less

effective speakers aroused her jealousy and shocked her self-esteem,

but she remained a passive spectator. When the Hon. Sylvester

Rourback, who received, for the use of his political faculties for a

single night, double the sum for which she was purchased outright,

appeared on the same platform with herself, she forsook it hurriedly

and took to the woods. Here she might have starved but for the

intervention of one McCarty, a poor market gardener, who found her, and

gave her food and shelter under the implied contract that she should

forsake politics and go to work. The latter she for a long time

resisted, but as she was considered large enough by this time to draw a

cart, McCarty broke her to single harness, with a severe fracture of

his leg and the loss of four teeth and a small spring wagon. At

length, when she could be trusted to carry his wares to Murphy's Camp,

and could be checked from entering a shop with the cart attached to

her,--a fact of which she always affected perfect disbelief,--her

education was considered as complete as that of the average California

donkey. It was still unsafe to leave her alone, as she disliked

solitude, and always made it a point to join any group of loungers with

her unnecessary cart, and even to follow some good-looking miner to his

cabin. The first time this peculiarity was discovered by her owner was

on his return to the street after driving a bargain within the walls of

the Temperance Hotel. Jinny was nowhere to be seen. Her devious

course, however, was pleasingly indicated by vegetables that strewed

the road until she was at last tracked to the veranda of the Arcade

saloon, where she was found looking through the window at a game of

euchre, and only deterred by the impeding cart from entering the

building. A visit one Sunday to the little Catholic chapel at French

Camp, where she attempted to introduce an antiphonal service and the

cart, brought shame and disgrace upon her unlucky master. For the cart

contained freshly-gathered vegetables, and the fact that McCarty had

been Sabbath-breaking was painfully evident. Father Sullivan was quick

to turn an incident that provoked only the risibilities of his audience

into a moral lesson. "It's the poor dumb beast that has a more

Christian sowl than Michael," he commented; but here Jinny assented so

positively that they were fain to drag her away by main force.

To her eccentric and thoughtless youth succeeded a calm maturity in

which her conservative sagacity was steadily developed. She now worked

for her living, subject, however, to a nice discrimination by which she

limited herself to a certain amount of work, beyond which neither

threats, beatings, nor cajoleries would force her. At certain hours she

would start for the stable with or without the incumbrances of the cart

or Michael, turning two long and deaf ears on all expostulation or

entreaty. "Now, God be good to me," said Michael, one day picking

himself out from a ditch as he gazed sorrowfully after the flying heels

of Jinny, "but it's only the second load of cabbages I'm bringin' the

day, and if she's shtruck NOW, it's ruined I am entoirely." But he was

mistaken; after two hours of rumination Jinny returned of her own free

will, having evidently mistaken the time, and it is said even consented

to draw an extra load to make up the deficiency. It may be imagined

from this and other circumstances that Michael stood a little in awe of

Jinny's superior intellect, and that Jinny occasionally, with the

instinct of her sex, presumed upon it. After the Sunday episode,

already referred to, she was given her liberty on that day, a privilege

she gracefully recognized by somewhat unbending her usual austerity in

the indulgence of a saturnine humor. She would visit the mining camps,

and, grazing lazily and thoughtfully before the cabins, would, by

various artifices and coquetries known to the female heart, induce some

credulous stranger to approach her with the intention of taking a ride.

She would submit hesitatingly to a halter, allow him to mount her back,

and, with every expression of timid and fearful reluctance, at last

permit him to guide her in a laborious trot out of sight of human

habitation. What happened then was never clearly known. In a few

moments the camp would be aroused by shouts and execrations, and the

spectacle of Jinny tearing by at a frightful pace, with the stranger

clinging with his arms around her neck, afraid to slip off, from terror

of her circumvolving heels, and vainly imploring assistance. Again and

again she would dash by the applauding groups, adding the aggravation

of her voice to the danger of her heels, until suddenly wheeling, she

would gallop to Carter's Pond, and deposit her luckless freight in the

muddy ditch. This practical joke was repeated until one Sunday she was

approached by Juan Ramirez, a Mexican vaquero, booted and spurred, and

carrying a riata. A crowd was assembled to see her discomfiture. But,

to the intense disappointment of the camp, Jinny, after quietly

surveying the stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the

little cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually

prevented all pursuit by her skilled antagonist. From that day she

forsook the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among

the pine head-boards and cold "hic jacets" of the dead.

Happy would it have been if this circumstance, which resulted in the

one poetic episode of her life, had occurred earlier; for the cemetery

was the favorite resort of Miss Jessie Lawton, a gentle invalid from

San Francisco, who had sought the foot-hills for the balsam of pine and

fir, and in the faint hope that the freshness of the wild roses might

call back her own. The extended views from the cemetery satisfied Miss

Lawton's artistic taste, and here frequently, with her sketch-book in

hand, she indulged that taste and a certain shy reserve which kept her

from contact with strangers. On one of the leaves of that sketch-book

appears a study of a donkey's head, being none other than the grave

features of Jinny, as once projected timidly over the artist's

shoulder. The preliminaries of this intimacy have never transpired, nor

is it a settled fact if Jinny made the first advances. The result was

only known to the men of Sawyer's Bar by a vision which remained fresh

in their memories long after the gentle lady and her four-footed friend

had passed beyond their voices. As two of the tunnel-men were

returning from work one evening, they chanced to look up the little

trail, kept sacred from secular intrusion, that led from the cemetery

to the settlement. In the dim twilight, against a sunset sky, they

beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly toward them. With a delicate

instinct, new to those rough men, they drew closer in the shadow of the

bushes until she passed. There was no mistaking the familiar

grotesqueness of Jinny; there was no mistaking the languid grace of

Miss Lawton. But a wreath of wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from

her long ears floated Miss Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous,

girlish smile was upon Miss Jessie's face, as fresh as the azaleas in

her hair. By the next day the story of this gentle apparition was

known to a dozen miners in camp, and all were sworn to secrecy. But

the next evening, and the next, from the safe shadows of the woods they

watched and drank in the beauty of that fanciful and all unconscious

procession. They kept their secret, and never a whisper or footfall

from these rough men broke its charm or betrayed their presence. The

man who could have shocked the sensitive reserve of the young girl

would have paid for it with his life.

And then one day the character of the procession changed, and this

little incident having been told, it was permitted that Jinny should

follow her friend, caparisoned even as before, but this time by the

rougher but no less loving hands of men. When the cortege reached the

ferry where the gentle girl was to begin her silent journey to the sea,

Jinny broke from those who held her, and after a frantic effort to

mount the barge fell into the swiftly rushing Stanislaus. A dozen

stout arms were stretched to save her, and a rope skilfully thrown was

caught around her feet. For an instant she was passive, and, as it

seemed, saved. But the next moment her dominant instinct returned, and

with one stroke of her powerful heel she snapped the rope in twain and

so drifted with her mistress to the sea.

ROGER CATRON'S FRIEND

I think that, from the beginning, we all knew how it would end. He had

always been so quiet and conventional, although by nature an impulsive

man; always so temperate and abstemious, although a man with a quick

appreciation of pleasure; always so cautious and practical, although an

imaginative man, that when, at last, one by one he loosed these bands,

and gave himself up to a life, perhaps not worse than other lives which

the world has accepted as the natural expression of their various

owners, we at once decided that the case was a hopeless one. And when

one night we picked him up out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and

weather-worn drunkard, a hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift,

and a half-conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come.

The wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had

misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her

reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used and

abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even amusement, and

clearly there was nothing left to do but to hand him over to the state,

and we took him to the nearest penitential asylum. Conscious of the

Samaritan deed, we went back to our respective wives, and told his

story. It is only just to say that these sympathetic creatures were

more interested in the philanthropy of their respective husbands than

in its miserable object. "It was good and kind in you, dear," said

loving Mrs. Maston to her spouse, as returning home that night he flung

his coat on a chair with an air of fatigued righteousness; "it was like

your kind heart to care for that beast; but after he left that good

wife of his--that perfect saint--to take up with that awful woman, I

think I'd have left him to die in the ditch. Only to think of it,

dear, a woman that you wouldn't speak to!" Here Mr. Maston coughed

slightly, colored a little, mumbled something about "women not

understanding some things," "that men were men," etc., and then went

comfortably to sleep, leaving the outcast, happily oblivious of all

things, and especially this criticism, locked up in Hangtown Jail.

For the next twelve hours he lay there, apathetic and half-conscious.

Recovering from this after a while, he became furious, vengeful, and

unmanageable, filling the cell and corridor with maledictions of friend

and enemy; and again sullen, morose, and watchful. Then he refused

food, and did not sleep, pacing his limits with the incessant, feverish

tread of a caged tiger. Two physicians, diagnosing his case from the

scant facts, pronounced him insane, and he was accordingly transported

to Sacramento. But on the way thither he managed to elude the

vigilance of his guards, and escaped. The alarm was given, a hue and

cry followed him, the best detectives of San Francisco were on his

track, and finally recovered his dead body--emaciated and wasted by

exhaustion and fever--in the Stanislaus Marshes, identified it, and,

receiving the reward of $1,000 offered by his surviving relatives and

family, assisted in legally establishing the end we had predicted.

Unfortunately for the moral, the facts were somewhat inconsistent with

the theory. A day or two after the remains were discovered and

identified, the real body of "Roger Catron, aged 52 years, slight,

iron-gray hair, and shabby in apparel," as the advertisement read,

dragged itself, travel-worn, trembling, and disheveled, up the steep

slope of Deadwood Hill. How he should do it, he had long since

determined,--ever since he had hidden his Derringer, a mere baby

pistol, from the vigilance of his keepers. Where he should do it, he

had settled within his mind only within the last few moments. Deadwood

Hill was seldom frequented; his body might lie there for months before

it was discovered. He had once thought of the river, but he remembered

it had an ugly way of exposing its secrets on sandbar and shallow, and

that the body of Whisky Jim, bloated and disfigured almost beyond

recognition, had been once delivered to the eyes of Sandy Bar, before

breakfast, on the left bank of the Stanislaus. He toiled up through

the chimisal that clothed the southern slope of the hill until he

reached the bald, storm-scarred cap of the mountain, ironically decked

with the picked, featherless plumes of a few dying pines. One,

stripped of all but two lateral branches, brought a boyish recollection

to his fevered brain. Against a background of dull sunset fire, it

extended two gaunt arms--black, rigid, and pathetic. Calvary!

With the very word upon his lips, he threw himself, face downwards, on

the ground beneath it, and, with his fingers clutched in the soil, lay

there for some moments, silent and still. In this attitude, albeit a

skeptic and unorthodox man, he prayed. I cannot say--indeed I DARE not

say--that his prayer was heard, or that God visited him thus. Let us

rather hope that all there was of God in him, in this crucial moment of

agony and shame, strove outward and upward. Howbeit, when the moon

rose he rose too, perhaps a trifle less steady than the planet, and

began to descend the hill with feverish haste, yet with this marked

difference between his present haste and his former recklessness, that

it seemed to have a well-defined purpose. When he reached the road

again, he struck into a well-worn trail, where, in the distance, a

light faintly twinkled. Following this beacon, he kept on, and at last

flung himself heavily against the door of the little cabin from whose

window the light had shone. As he did so, it opened upon the figure of

a square, thickset man, who, in the impetuosity of Catron's onset,

received him, literally, in his arms.

"Captain Dick," said Roger Catron, hoarsely, "Captain Dick, save me!

For God's sake, save me!"

Captain Dick, without a word, placed a large, protecting hand upon

Catron's shoulder, allowed it to slip to his waist, and then drew his

visitor quietly, but firmly, within the cabin. Yet, in the very

movement, he had managed to gently and unobtrusively possess himself of

Catron's pistol.

"Save ye! From which?" asked Captain Dick, as quietly and

unobtrusively dropping the Derringer in a flour sack.

"From everything," gasped Catron, "from the men that are hounding me,

from my family, from my friends, but most of all--from, from--myself!"

He had, in turn, grasped Captain Dick, and forced him frenziedly

against the wall. The captain released himself, and, taking the hands

of his excited visitor, said slowly,--

"Ye wan some blue mass--suthin' to unload your liver. I'll get it up

for ye."

"But, Captain Dick, I'm an outcast, shamed, disgraced--"

"Two on them pills taken now, and two in the morning," continued the

captain, gravely, rolling a bolus in his fingers, "will bring yer head

to the wind again. Yer fallin' to leeward all the time, and ye want to

brace up."

"But, Captain," continued the agonized man, again clutching the sinewy

arms of his host, and forcing his livid face and fixed eyes within a

few inches of Captain Dick's, "hear me! You must and shall hear me.

I've been in jail--do you hear?--in jail, like a common felon. I've

been sent to the asylum, like a demented pauper. I've--"

"Two now, and two in the morning," continued the captain, quietly

releasing one hand only to place two enormous pills in the mouth of the

excited Catron, "thar now--a drink o' whisky--thar, that'll do--just

enough to take the taste out of yer mouth, wash it down, and belay it,

so to speak. And how are the mills running, gin'rally, over at the

Bar?"

"Captain Dick, hear me--if you ARE my friend, for God's sake hear me!

An hour ago I should have been a dead man--"

"They say that Sam Bolin hez sold out of the Excelsior--"

"Captain Dick! Listen, for God's sake; I have suffered--"

But Captain Dick was engaged in critically examining his man. "I guess

I'll ladle ye out some o' that soothin' mixture I bought down at

Simpson's t' other day," he said, reflectively. "And I onderstand the

boys up on the Bar think the rains will set in airly."

But here Nature was omnipotent. Worn by exhaustion, excitement, and

fever, and possibly a little affected by Captain Dick's later potion,

Roger Catron turned white, and lapsed against the wall. In an instant

Captain Dick had caught him, as a child, lifted him in his stalwart

arms, wrapped a blanket around him, and deposited him in his bunk.

Yet, even in his prostration, Catron made one more despairing appeal

for mental sympathy from his host.

"I know I'm sick--dying, perhaps," he gasped, from under the blankets;

"but promise me, whatever comes, tell my wife--say to--"

"It has been lookin' consid'ble like rain, lately, hereabouts,"

continued the captain, coolly, in a kind of amphibious slang,

characteristic of the man, "but in these yer latitudes no man kin set

up to be a weather sharp."

"Captain! will you hear me?"

"Yer goin' to sleep, now," said the captain, potentially.

"But, Captain, they are pursuing me! If they should track me here?"

"Thar is a rifle over thar, and yer's my navy revolver. When I've

emptied them, and want you to bear a hand, I'll call ye. Just now your

lay is to turn in. It's my watch."

There was something so positive, strong, assuring, and a little awesome

in the captain's manner, that the trembling, nervously-prostrated man

beneath the blankets forbore to question further. In a few moments his

breathing, albeit hurried and irregular, announced that he slept. The

captain then arose, for a moment critically examined the sleeping man,

holding his head a little on one side, whistling softly, and stepping

backwards to get a good perspective, but always with contemplative good

humor, as if Catron were a work of art, which he (the captain) had

created, yet one that he was not yet entirely satisfied with. Then he

put a large pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican

serape from the corner, and putting it over his shoulders, opened the

cabin door, sat down on the doorstep, and leaning back against the

door-post, composed himself to meditation. The moon lifted herself

slowly over the crest of Deadwood Hill, and looked down, not unkindly,

on his broad, white, shaven face, round and smooth as her own disc,

encircled with a thin fringe of white hair and whiskers. Indeed, he

looked so like the prevailing caricatures in a comic almanac of

planets, with dimly outlined features, that the moon would have been

quite justified in flirting with him, as she clearly did, insinuating a

twinkle into his keen, gray eyes, making the shadow of a dimple on his

broad, fat chin, and otherwise idealizing him after the fashion of her

hero-worshiping sex. Touched by these benign influences, Captain Dick

presently broke forth in melody. His song was various, but chiefly, I

think, confined to the recital of the exploits of one "Lorenzo," who,

as related by himself,--

"Shipped on board of a Liner,

'Renzo, boys, Renzo,"--

a fact that seemed to have deprived him at once of all metre, grammar,

or even the power of coherent narration. At times a groan or a

half-articulate cry would come from the "bunk" whereon Roger Catron

lay, a circumstance that always seemed to excite Captain Dick to

greater effort and more rapid vocalization. Toward morning, in the

midst of a prolonged howl from the captain, who was finishing the

"Starboard Watch, ahoy!" in three different keys, Roger Catron's voice

broke suddenly and sharply from his enwrappings:--

"Dry up, you d--d old fool, will you?"

Captain Dick stopped instantly. Rising to his feet, and looking over

the landscape, he took all nature into his confidence in one

inconceivably arch and crafty wink. "He's coming up to the wind," he

said softly, rubbing his hands. "The pills is fetchin' him. Steady

now, boys, steady. Steady as she goes on her course," and with another

wink of ineffable wisdom, he entered the cabin and locked the door.

Meanwhile, the best society of Sandy Bar was kind to the newly-made

widow. Without being definitely expressed, it was generally felt that

sympathy with her was now safe, and carried no moral responsibility

with it. Even practical and pecuniary aid, which before had been

withheld, lest it should be diverted from its proper intent, and,

perhaps through the weakness of the wife, made to minister to the

wickedness of the husband,--even that was now openly suggested.

Everybody felt that somebody should do something for the widow. A few

did it. Her own sex rallied to her side, generally with large

sympathy, but, unfortunately, small pecuniary or practical result. At

last, when the feasibility of her taking a boarding-house in San

Francisco, and identifying herself with that large class of American

gentlewomen who have seen better days, but clearly are on the road

never to see them again, was suggested, a few of her own and her

husband's rich relatives came to the front to rehabilitate her. It was

easier to take her into their homes as an equal than to refuse to call

upon her as the mistress of a lodging-house in the adjoining street.

And upon inspection it was found that she was still quite an eligible

partie, prepossessing, and withal, in her widow's weeds, a kind of

poetical and sentimental presence, as necessary in a wealthy and

fashionable American family as a work of art. "Yes, poor Caroline has

had a sad, sad history," the languid Mrs. Walker Catron would say, "and

we all sympathize with her deeply; Walker always regards her as a

sister." What was this dark history never came out, but its very

mystery always thrilled the visitor, and seemed to indicate plainly the

respectability of the hostess. An American family without a genteel

skeleton in its closet could scarcely add to that gossip which keeps

society from forgetting its members. Nor was it altogether unnatural

that presently Mrs. Roger Catron lent herself to this sentimental

deception, and began to think that she really was a more exquisitely

aggrieved woman than she had imagined. At times, when this vague load

of iniquity put upon her dead husband assumed, through the mystery of

her friends, the rumor of murder and highway robbery, and even an

attempt upon her own life, she went to her room, a little frightened,

and had "a good cry," reappearing more mournful and pathetic than ever,

and corroborating the suspicions of her friends. Indeed, one or two

impulsive gentlemen, fired by her pathetic eyelids, openly regretted

that the deceased had not been hanged, to which Mrs. Walker Catron

responded that, "Thank Heaven, they were spared at least that

disgrace!" and so sent conviction into the minds of her hearers.

It was scarcely two months after this painful close of her matrimonial

life that one rainy February morning the servant brought a card to Mrs.

Roger Catron, bearing the following inscription:--

"Richard Graeme Macleod."

Women are more readily affected by names than we are, and there was a

certain Highland respectability about this that, albeit, not knowing

its possessor, impelled Mrs. Catron to send word that she "would be

down in a few moments." At the end of this femininely indefinite

period,--a quarter of an hour by the French clock on the

mantel-piece,--Mrs. Roger Catron made her appearance in the

reception-room. It was a dull, wet day, as I have said before, but on

the Contra Costa hills the greens and a few flowers were already

showing a promise of rejuvenescence and an early spring. There was

something of this, I think, in Mrs. Catron's presence, shown perhaps in

the coquettish bow of a ribbon, in a larger and more delicate ruche, in

a tighter belting of her black cashmere gown; but still there was a

suggestion of recent rain in the eyes, and threatening weather. As she

entered the room, the sun came out, too, and revealed the prettiness

and delicacy of her figure, and I regret to state, also, the somewhat

obtrusive plainness of her visitor.

"I knew ye'd be sorter disapp'inted at first, not gettin' the regular

bearings o' my name, but I'm 'Captain Dick.' Mebbe ye've heard your

husband--that is, your husband ez waz, Roger Catron--speak o' me?"

Mrs. Catron, feeling herself outraged and deceived in belt, ruche, and

ribbon, freezingly admitted that she had heard of him before.

"In course," said the captain; "why, Lord love ye, Mrs. Catron,--ez

waz,--he used to be all the time talkin' of ye. And allers in a free,

easy, confidential way. Why, one night--don't ye remember?--when he

came home, carryin', mebbee, more canvas than was seamanlike, and you

shet him out the house, and laid for him with a broomstick, or one o'

them crokay mallets, I disremember which, and he kem over to me, ole

Captain Dick, and I sez to him, sez I, 'Why, Roger, them's only love

pats, and yer condishun is such ez to make any woman mad-like.' Why,

Lord bless ye! there ain't enny of them mootool differences you and him

hed ez I doesn't knows on, and didn't always stand by, and lend ye a

hand, and heave in a word or two of advice when called on."

Mrs. Catron, ice everywhere but in her pink cheeks, was glad that Mr.

Catron seemed to have always a friend to whom he confided EVERYTHING,

even the base falsehoods he had invented.

"Mebbe now they WAZ falsehoods," said the captain, thoughtfully. "But

don't ye go to think," he added conscientiously, "that he kept on that

tack all the time. Why, that day he made a raise, gambling, I think,

over at Dutch Flat, and give ye them bracelets,--regular solid

gold,--why, it would have done your heart good to have heard him talk

about you--said you had the prettiest arm in Californy. Well," said

the captain, looking around for a suitable climax, "well, you'd have

thought that he was sorter proud of ye! Why, I woz with him in 'Frisco

when he bought that A1 prize bonnet for ye for $75, and not hevin' over

$50 in his pocket, borryed the other $25 outer me. Mebbe it was a

little fancy for a bonnet; but I allers thought he took it a little too

much to heart when you swopped it off for that Dollar Varden dress,

just because that Lawyer Maxwell said the Dollar Vardens was becomin'

to ye. Ye know, I reckon, he was always sorter jealous of that thar

shark--"

"May I venture to ask what your business is with me?" interrupted Mrs.

Catron, sharply.

"In course," said the captain, rising. "Ye see," he said,

apologetically, "we got to talking o' Roger and ole times, and I got a

little out o' my course. It's a matter of--" he began to fumble in his

pockets, and finally produced a small memorandum-book, which he glanced

over--"it's a matter of $250."

"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Catron, in indignant astonishment.

"On the 15th of July," said the captain, consulting his

memorandum-book, "Roger sold his claim at Nye's Ford for $1,500. Now,

le's see. Thar was nigh on $350 ez he admitted to me he lost at poker,

and we'll add $50 to that for treating, suppers, and drinks

gin'rally--put Roger down for $400. Then there was YOU. Now you spent

$250 on your trip to 'Frisco thet summer; then $200 went for them

presents you sent your Aunt Jane, and thar was $400 for house expenses.

Well, thet foots up $1,250. Now, what's become of thet other $250?"

Mrs. Catron's woman's impulse to retaliate sharply overcame her first

natural indignation at her visitor's impudence.

Therein she lost, woman-like, her ground of vantage.

"Perhaps the woman he fled with can tell you," she said savagely.

"Thet," said the captain, slowly, "is a good, a reasonable idee. But it

ain't true; from all I can gather SHE lent HIM money. It didn't go

THAR."

"Roger Catron left me penniless," said Mrs. Catron, hotly.

"Thet's jist what gets me. You oughter have $250 somewhar lying round."

Mrs. Catron saw her error. "May I ask what right you have to question

me? If you have any, I must refer you to my lawyer or my

brother-in-law; if you have none, I hope you will not oblige me to call

the servants to put you from the house."

"Thet sounds reasonable and square, too," said the captain,

thoughtfully; "I've a power of attorney from Roger Catron to settle up

his affairs and pay his debts, given a week afore them detectives

handed ye over his dead body. But I thought that you and me might save

lawyer's fees and all fuss and feathers, ef, in a sociable, sad-like

way,--lookin' back sorter on Roger ez you and me once knew him,--we had

a quiet talk together."

"Good morning, sir," said Mrs. Catron, rising stiffly. The captain

hesitated a moment, a slight flush of color came in his face as he at

last rose as the lady backed out of the room. "Good morning, ma'am,"

said the captain, and departed.

Very little was known of this interview except the general impression

in the family that Mrs. Catron had successfully resisted a vague

attempt at blackmail from one of her husband's former dissolute

companions. Yet it is only fair to say that Mrs. Catron snapped up,

quite savagely, two male sympathizers on this subject, and cried a good

deal for two days afterward, and once, in the hearing of her

sister-in-law, to that lady's great horror, "wished she was dead."

A week after this interview, as Lawyer Phillips sat in his office, he

was visited by Macleod. Recognizing, possibly, some practical

difference between the widow and the lawyer, Captain Dick this time

first produced his credentials,--a "power of attorney." "I need not

tell you," said Phillips, "that the death of your principal renders

this instrument invalid, and I suppose you know that, leaving no will,

and no property, his estate has not been administered upon."

"Mebbe it is, and mebbe it isn't. But I hain't askin' for anythin' but

information. There was a bit o' prop'ty and a mill onto it, over at

Heavytree, ez sold for $10,000. I don't see," said the captain,

consulting his memorandum-book, "ez HE got anything out of it."

"It was mortgaged for $7,000," said the lawyer, quickly, "and the

interest and fees amount to about $3,000 more."

"The mortgage was given as security for a note?"

"Yes, a gambling debt," said the lawyer, sharply.

"Thet's so, and my belief ez that it wasn't a square game. He

shouldn't hev given no note. Why, don't ye mind, 'way back in '60,

when you and me waz in Marysville, that night that you bucked agin

faro, and lost seving hundred dollars, and then refoosed to take up

your checks, saying it was fraud and a gambling debt? And don't ye

mind when that chap kicked ye, and I helped to drag him off ye--and--"

"I'm busy now, Mr. Macleod," said Phillips, hastily; "my clerk will

give you all the information you require. Good morning."

"It's mighty queer," said the captain, thoughtfully, as he descended

the stairs, "but the moment the conversation gets limber and

sociable-like, and I gets to runnin' free under easy sail, it's always

'Good morning, Captain,' and we're becalmed."

By some occult influence, all the foregoing conversation, slightly

exaggerated, and the whole interview of the captain with the widow with

sundry additions, became the common property of Sandy Bar, to the great

delight of the boys. There was scarcely a person who had ever had

business or social relations with Roger Catron, whom "The Frozen

Truth," as Sandy Bar delighted to designate the captain, had not

"interviewed," as simply and directly. It is said that he closed a

conversation with one of the San Francisco detectives, who had found

Roger Catron's body, in these words: "And now hevin' got throo'

bizness, I was goin' to ask ye what's gone of Matt. Jones, who was with

ye in the bush in Austraily. Lord, how he got me quite interested in

ye, telling me how you and him got out on a ticket-of-leave, and was

chased by them milishy guards, and at last swam out to a San Francisco

bark and escaped;" but here the inevitable pressure of previous

business always stopped the captain's conversational flow. The natural

result of this was a singular reaction in favor of the late Roger

Catron in the public sentiment of Sandy Bar, so strong, indeed, as to

induce the Rev. Mr. Joshua McSnagly, the next Sunday, to combat it with

the moral of Catron's life. After the service, he was approached in

the vestibule, and in the hearing of some of his audience, by Captain

Dick, with the following compliment: "In many pints ye hed jess got

Roger Catron down to a hair. I knew ye'd do it: why, Lord love ye, you

and him had pints in common; and when he giv' ye that hundred dollars

arter the fire in Sacramento, to help ye rebuild the parsonage, he said

to me,--me not likin' ye on account o' my being on the committee that

invited ye to resign from Marysville all along o' that affair with

Deacon Pursell's darter; and a piece she was, parson! eh?--well, Roger,

he ups and sez to me, 'Every man hez his faults,' sez he; and sez he,

'there's no reason why a parson ain't a human being like us, and that

gal o' Pursell's is pizen, ez I know.' So ye see, I seed that ye was

hittin' yourself over Catron's shoulder, like them early martyrs." But

here, as Captain Dick was clearly blocking up all egress from the

church, the sexton obliged him to move on, and again he was stopped in

his conversational career.

But only for a time. Before long, it was whispered that Captain Dick

had ordered a meeting of the creditors, debtors, and friends of Roger

Catron at Robinson's Hall. It was suggested, with some show of reason,

that this had been done at the instigation of various practical jokers

of Sandy Bar, who had imposed on the simple directness of the captain,

and the attendance that night certainly indicated something more than a

mere business meeting. All of Sandy Bar crowded into Robinson's Hall,

and long before Captain Dick made his appearance on the platform, with

his inevitable memorandum-book, every inch of floor was crowded.

The captain began to read the expenditures of Roger Catron with

relentless fidelity of detail. The several losses by poker, the whisky

bills, and the record of a "jamboree" at Tooley's, the vague expenses

whereof footed up $275, were received with enthusiastic cheers by the

audience. A single milliner's bill for $125 was hailed with delight;

$100 expended in treating the Vestal Virgin Combination Troupe almost

canonized his memory; $50 for a simple buggy ride with Deacon Fisk

brought down the house; $500 advanced, without security, and unpaid,

for the electioneering expenses of Assemblyman Jones, who had recently

introduced a bill to prevent gambling and the sale of lager beer on

Sundays, was received with an ominous groan. One or two other items of

money loaned occasioned the withdrawal of several gentlemen from the

audience amidst the hisses or ironical cheers of the others.

At last Captain Dick stopped and advanced to the footlights.

"Gentlemen and friends," he said, slowly. "I foots up $25,000 as Roger

Catron hez MADE, fair and square, in this yer county. I foots up

$27,000 ez he has SPENT in this yer county. I puts it to you ez

men,--far-minded men,--ef this man was a pauper and debtor? I put it to

you ez far-minded men,--ez free and easy men,--ez political

economists,--ez this the kind of men to impoverish a county?"

An overwhelming and instantaneous "No!" almost drowned the last

utterance of the speaker.

"Thar is only one item," said Captain Dick, slowly, "only one item,

that ez men,--ez far-minded men,--ez political economists,--it seems to

me we hez the right to question. It's this: Thar is an item, read to

you by me, of $2,000 paid to certing San Francisco detectives, paid out

o' the assets o' Roger Catron, for the finding of Roger Catron's body.

Gentlemen of Sandy Bar and friends, I found that body, and yer it is!"

And Roger Catron, a little pale and nervous, but palpably in the flesh,

stepped upon the platform.

Of course the newspapers were full of it the next day. Of course, in

due time, it appeared as a garbled and romantic item in the San

Francisco press. Of course Mrs. Catron, on reading it, fainted, and

for two days said that this last cruel blow ended all relations between

her husband and herself. On the third day she expressed her belief

that, if he had had the slightest feeling for her, he would, long

since, for the sake of mere decency, have communicated with her. On

the fourth day she thought she had been, perhaps, badly advised, had an

open quarrel with her relatives, and intimated that a wife had certain

obligations, etc. On the sixth day, still not hearing from him, she

quoted Scripture, spoke of a seventy-times-seven forgiveness, and went

generally into mild hysterics. On the seventh, she left in the morning

train for Sandy Bar.

And really I don't know as I have anything more to tell. I dined with

them recently, and, upon my word, a more decorous, correct,

conventional, and dull dinner I never ate in my life.

"WHO WAS MY QUIET FRIEND?"

"Stranger!"

The voice was not loud, but clear and penetrating. I looked vainly up

and down the narrow, darkening trail. No one in the fringe of alder

ahead; no one on the gullied slope behind.

"O! stranger!"

This time a little impatiently. The California classical vocative,

"O," always meant business.

I looked up, and perceived for the first time on the ledge, thirty feet

above me, another trail parallel with my own, and looking down upon me

through the buckeye bushes a small man on a black horse.

Five things to be here noted by the circumspect mountaineer. FIRST, the

locality,--lonely and inaccessible, and away from the regular faring of

teamsters and miners. SECONDLY, the stranger's superior knowledge of

the road, from the fact that the other trail was unknown to the

ordinary traveler. THIRDLY, that he was well armed and equipped.

FOURTHLY, that he was better mounted. FIFTHLY, that any distrust or

timidity arising from the contemplation of these facts had better be

kept to one's self.

All this passed rapidly through my mind as I returned his salutation.

"Got any tobacco?" he asked.

I had, and signified the fact, holding up the pouch inquiringly.

"All right, I'll come down. Ride on, and I'll jine ye on the slide."

"The slide!" Here was a new geographical discovery as odd as the

second trail. I had ridden over the trail a dozen times, and seen no

communication between the ledge and trail. Nevertheless, I went on a

hundred yards or so, when there was a sharp crackling in the

underbrush, a shower of stones on the trail, and my friend plunged

through the bushes to my side, down a grade that I should scarcely have

dared to lead my horse. There was no doubt he was an accomplished

rider,--another fact to be noted.

As he ranged beside me, I found I was not mistaken as to his size; he

was quite under the medium height, and but for a pair of cold, gray

eyes, was rather commonplace in feature.

"You've got a good horse there," I suggested.

He was filling his pipe from my pouch, but looked up a little

surprised, and said, "Of course." He then puffed away with the nervous

eagerness of a man long deprived of that sedative. Finally, between the

puffs, he asked me whence I came.

I replied, "From Lagrange."

He looked at me a few moments curiously, but on my adding that I had

only halted there for a few hours, he said: "I thought I knew every man

between Lagrange and Indian Spring, but somehow I sorter disremember

your face and your name."

Not particularly caring that he should remember either, I replied half

laughingly, that, as I lived the other side of Indian Spring, it was

quite natural. He took the rebuff, if such it was, so quietly that as

an act of mere perfunctory politeness I asked him where he came from.

"Lagrange."

"And you are going to--"

"Well! that depends pretty much on how things pan out, and whether I

can make the riffle." He let his hand rest quite unconsciously on the

leathern holster of his dragoon revolver, yet with a strong suggestion

to me of his ability "to make the riffle" if he wanted to, and added:

"But just now I was reck'nin' on taking a little pasear with you."

There was nothing offensive in his speech save its familiarity, and the

reflection, perhaps, that whether I objected or not, he was quite able

to do as he said. I only replied that if our pasear was prolonged

beyond Heavytree Hill, I should have to borrow his beast. To my

surprise he replied quietly, "That's so," adding that the horse was at

my disposal when he wasn't using it, and HALF of it when he was. "Dick

has carried double many a time before this," he continued, "and kin do

it again; when your mustang gives out I'll give you a lift and room to

spare."

I could not help smiling at the idea of appearing before the boys at

Red Gulch en croupe with the stranger; but neither could I help being

oddly affected by the suggestion that his horse had done double duty

before. "On what occasion, and why?" was a question I kept to myself.

We were ascending the long, rocky flank of the divide; the narrowness

of the trail obliged us to proceed slowly, and in file, so that there

was little chance for conversation, had he been disposed to satisfy my

curiosity.

We toiled on in silence, the buckeye giving way to chimisal, the

westering sun, reflected again from the blank walls beside us, blinding

our eyes with its glare. The pines in the canyon below were olive

gulfs of heat, over which a hawk here and there drifted lazily, or,

rising to our level, cast a weird and gigantic shadow of slowly moving

wings on the mountain side. The superiority of the stranger's horse

led him often far in advance, and made me hope that he might forget me

entirely, or push on, growing weary of waiting. But regularly he would

halt by a bowlder, or reappear from some chimisal, where he had

patiently halted. I was beginning to hate him mildly, when at one of

those reappearances he drew up to my side, and asked me how I liked

Dickens!

Had he asked my opinion of Huxley or Darwin, I could not have been more

astonished. Thinking it were possible that he referred to some local

celebrity of Lagrange, I said, hesitatingly:--

"You mean--"

"Charles Dickens. Of course you've read him? Which of his books do

you like best?"

I replied with considerable embarrassment that I liked them all,--as I

certainly did.

He grasped my hand for a moment with a fervor quite unlike his usual

phlegm, and said, "That's me, old man. Dickens ain't no slouch. You

can count on him pretty much all the time."

With this rough preface, he launched into a criticism of the novelist,

which for intelligent sympathy and hearty appreciation I had rarely

heard equaled. Not only did he dwell upon the exuberance of his humor,

but upon the power of his pathos and the all-pervading element of his

poetry. I looked at the man in astonishment. I had considered myself

a rather diligent student of the great master of fiction, but the

stranger's felicity of quotation and illustration staggered me. It is

true, that his thought was not always clothed in the best language, and

often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and

period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me

with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I

tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the

lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and

enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened considerably;

offered to change horses with me, readjusted my saddle with

professional skill, transferred my pack to his own horse, insisted upon

my sharing the contents of his whisky flask, and, noticing that I was

unarmed, pressed upon me a silver-mounted Derringer, which he assured

me he could "warrant." These various offices of good will and the

diversion of his talk beguiled me from noticing the fact that the trail

was beginning to become obscure and unrecognizable. We were evidently

pursuing a route unknown before to me. I pointed out the fact to my

companion, a little impatiently. He instantly resumed his old manner

and dialect.

"Well, I reckon one trail's as good as another, and what hev ye got to

say about it?"

I pointed out, with some dignity, that I preferred the old trail.

"Mebbe you did. But you're jiss now takin' a pasear with ME. This yer

trail will bring you right into Indian Spring, and ONNOTICED, and no

questions asked. Don't you mind now, I'll see you through."

It was necessary here to make some stand against my strange companion.

I said firmly, yet as politely as I could, that I had proposed stopping

over night with a friend.

"Whar?"

I hesitated. The friend was an eccentric Eastern man, well known in

the locality for his fastidiousness and his habits as a recluse. A

misanthrope, of ample family and ample means, he had chosen a secluded

but picturesque valley in the Sierras where he could rail against the

world without opposition. "Lone Valley," or "Boston Ranch," as it was

familiarly called, was the one spot that the average miner both

respected and feared. Mr. Sylvester, its proprietor, had never

affiliated with "the boys," nor had he ever lost their respect by any

active opposition to their ideas. If seclusion had been his object, he

certainly was gratified. Nevertheless, in the darkening shadows of the

night, and on a lonely and unknown trail, I hesitated a little at

repeating his name to a stranger of whom I knew so little. But my

mysterious companion took the matter out of my hands.

"Look yar," he said, suddenly, "thar ain't but one place twixt yer and

Indian Spring whar ye can stop, and that is Sylvester's."

I assented, a little sullenly.

"Well," said the stranger, quietly, and with a slight suggestion of

conferring a favor on me, "ef yer pointed for Sylvester's--why--I DON'T

MIND STOPPING THAR WITH YE. It's a little off the road--I'll lose some

time--but taking it by and large, I don't much mind."

I stated, as rapidly and as strongly as I could, that my acquaintance

with Mr. Sylvester did not justify the introduction of a stranger to

his hospitality; that he was unlike most of the people here,--in short,

that he was a queer man, etc., etc.

To my surprise my companion answered quietly: "Oh, that's all right.

I've heerd of him. Ef you don't feel like checking me through, or if

you'd rather put 'C. O. D.' on my back, why it's all the same to me.

I'll play it alone. Only you just count me in. Say 'Sylvester' all the

time. That's me!"

What could I oppose to this man's quiet assurance? I felt myself

growing red with anger and nervous with embarrassment. What would the

correct Sylvester say to me? What would the girls,--I was a young man

then, and had won an entree to their domestic circle by my

reserve,--known by a less complimentary adjective among "the

boys,"--what would they say to my new acquaintance? Yet I certainly

could not object to his assuming all risks on his own personal

recognizances, nor could I resist a certain feeling of shame at my

embarrassment.

We were beginning to descend. In the distance below us already

twinkled the lights in the solitary rancho of Lone Valley. I turned to

my companion. "But you have forgotten that I don't even know your

name. What am I to call you?"

"That's so," he said, musingly. "Now, let's see. 'Kearney' would be a

good name. It's short and easy like. Thar's a street in 'Frisco the

same title; Kearney it is."

"But--" I began impatiently.

"Now you leave all that to me," he interrupted, with a superb

self-confidence that I could not but admire. "The name ain't no

account. It's the man that's responsible. Ef I was to lay for a man

that I reckoned was named Jones, and after I fetched him I found out on

the inquest that his real name was Smith, that wouldn't make no matter,

as long as I got the man."

The illustration, forcible as it was, did not strike me as offering a

prepossessing introduction, but we were already at the rancho. The

barking of dogs brought Sylvester to the door of the pretty little

cottage which his taste had adorned.

I briefly introduced Mr. Kearney. "Kearney will do--Kearney's good

enough for me," commented the soi-disant Kearney half-aloud, to my own

horror and Sylvester's evident mystification, and then he blandly

excused himself for a moment that he might personally supervise the

care of his own beast. When he was out of ear-shot I drew the puzzled

Sylvester aside.

"I have picked up--I mean I have been picked up on the road by a gentle

maniac, whose name is not Kearney. He is well armed and quotes

Dickens. With care, acquiescence in his views on all subjects, and

general submission to his commands, he may be placated. Doubtless the

spectacle of your helpless family, the contemplation of your daughter's

beauty and innocence, may touch his fine sense of humor and pathos.

Meanwhile, Heaven help you, and forgive me."

I ran upstairs to the little den that my hospitable host had kept

always reserved for me in my wanderings. I lingered some time over my

ablutions, hearing the languid, gentlemanly drawl of Sylvester below,

mingled with the equally cool, easy slang of my mysterious

acquaintance. When I came down to the sitting-room I was surprised,

however, to find the self-styled Kearney quietly seated on the sofa,

the gentle May Sylvester, the "Lily of Lone Valley," sitting with

maidenly awe and unaffected interest on one side of him, while on the

other that arrant flirt, her cousin Kate, was practicing the pitiless

archery of her eyes, with an excitement that seemed almost real.

"Who is your deliciously cool friend?" she managed to whisper to me at

supper, as I sat utterly dazed and bewildered between the enrapt May

Sylvester, who seemed to hang upon his words, and this giddy girl of

the period, who was emptying the battery of her charms in active

rivalry upon him. "Of course we know his name isn't Kearney. But how

romantic! And isn't he perfectly lovely? And who is he?"

I replied with severe irony that I was not aware what foreign potentate

was then traveling incognito in the Sierras of California, but that

when his royal highness was pleased to inform me, I should be glad to

introduce him properly. "Until then," I added, "I fear the

acquaintance must be Morganatic."

"You're only jealous of him," she said pertly. "Look at May--she is

completely fascinated. And her father, too." And actually, the

languid, world-sick, cynical Sylvester was regarding him with a boyish

interest and enthusiasm almost incompatible with his nature. Yet I

submit honestly to the clear-headed reason of my own sex, that I could

see nothing more in the man than I have already delivered to the reader.

In the middle of an exciting story of adventure, of which he, to the

already prejudiced mind of his fair auditors, was evidently the hero,

he stopped suddenly.

"It's only some pack train passing the bridge on the lower trail,"

explained Sylvester; "go on."

"It may be my horse is a trifle oneasy in the stable," said the alleged

Kearney; "he ain't used to boards and covering." Heaven only knows

what wild and delicious revelation lay in the statement of this fact,

but the girls looked at each other with cheeks pink with excitement as

Kearney arose, and, with quiet absence of ceremony, quitted the table.

"Ain't he just lovely?" said Kate, gasping for breath, "and so witty."

"Witty!" said the gentle May, with just the slightest trace of defiance

in her sweet voice; "witty, my dear? why, don't you see that his heart

is just breaking with pathos? Witty, indeed; why, when he was speaking

of that poor Mexican woman that was hung, I saw the tears gather in his

eyes. Witty, indeed!"

"Tears," laughed the cynical Sylvester, "tears, idle tears. Why, you

silly children, the man is a man of the world, a philosopher, quiet,

observant, unassuming."

"Unassuming!" Was Sylvester intoxicated, or had the mysterious

stranger mixed the "insane verb" with the family pottage? He returned

before I could answer this self-asked inquiry, and resumed coolly his

broken narrative. Finding myself forgotten in the man I had so long

hesitated to introduce to my friends, I retired to rest early, only to

hear, through the thin partitions, two hours later, enthusiastic

praises of the new guest from the voluble lips of the girls, as they

chatted in the next room before retiring.

At midnight I was startled by the sound of horses' hoofs and the

jingling of spurs below. A conversation between my host and some

mysterious personage in the darkness was carried on in such a low tone

that I could not learn its import. As the cavalcade rode away I raised

the window.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Sylvester, coolly, "only another one of those playful

homicidal freaks peculiar to the country. A man was shot by Cherokee

Jack over at Lagrange this morning, and that was the sheriff of

Calaveras and his posse hunting him. I told him I'd seen nobody but

you and your friend. By the way, I hope the cursed noise hasn't

disturbed him. The poor fellow looked as if he wanted rest."

I thought so, too. Nevertheless, I went softly to his room. It was

empty. My impression was that he had distanced the sheriff of

Calaveras about two hours.

A GHOST OF THE SIERRAS

It was a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and

muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our

backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken

interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy

above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose active persecution

we had just escaped, searched for us through the woods, but its keen

blade was dulled and turned aside by intercostal boughs, and its

brightness dissipated in nebulous mists throughout the roofing of the

dim, brown aisles around us. We were in another atmosphere, under

another sky; indeed, in another world than the dazzling one we had just

quitted. The grave silence seemed so much a part of the grateful

coolness, that we hesitated to speak, and for some moments lay quietly

outstretched on the pine tassels where we had first thrown ourselves.

Finally, a voice broke the silence:--

"Ask the old Major; he knows all about it!"

The person here alluded to under that military title was myself. I

hardly need explain to any Californian that it by no means followed

that I was a "Major," or that I was "old," or that I knew anything

about "it," or indeed what "it" referred to. The whole remark was

merely one of the usual conventional feelers to conversation,--a kind

of social preamble, quite common to our slangy camp intercourse.

Nevertheless, as I was always known as the Major, perhaps for no better

reason than that the speaker, an old journalist, was always called

Doctor, I recognized the fact so far as to kick aside an intervening

saddle, so that I could see the speaker's face on a level with my own,

and said nothing.

"About ghosts!" said the Doctor, after a pause, which nobody broke or

was expected to break. "Ghosts, sir! That's what we want to know.

What are we doing here in this blanked old mausoleum of Calaveras

County, if it isn't to find out something about 'em, eh?"

Nobody replied.

"Thar's that haunted house at Cave City. Can't be more than a mile or

two away, anyhow. Used to be just off the trail."

A dead silence.

The Doctor (addressing space generally) "Yes, sir; it WAS a mighty

queer story."

Still the same reposeful indifference. We all knew the Doctor's skill

as a raconteur; we all knew that a story was coming, and we all knew

that any interruption would be fatal. Time and time again, in our

prospecting experience, had a word of polite encouragement, a rash

expression of interest, even a too eager attitude of silent expectancy,

brought the Doctor to a sudden change of subject. Time and time again

have we seen the unwary stranger stand amazed and bewildered between

our own indifference and the sudden termination of a promising

anecdote, through his own unlucky interference. So we said nothing.

"The Judge"--another instance of arbitrary nomenclature--pretended to

sleep. Jack began to twist a cigarrito. Thornton bit off the ends of

pine needles reflectively.

"Yes, sir," continued the Doctor, coolly resting the back of his head

on the palms of his hands, "it WAS rather curious. All except the

murder. THAT'S what gets me, for the murder had no new points, no

fancy touches, no sentiment, no mystery. Was just one of the old

style, 'sub-head' paragraphs. Old-fashioned miner scrubs along on

hardtack and beans, and saves up a little money to go home and see

relations. Old-fashioned assassin sharpens up knife, old style; loads

old flint-lock, brass-mounted pistol; walks in on old-fashioned miner

one dark night, sends him home to his relations away back to several

generations, and walks off with the swag. No mystery THERE; nothing to

clear up; subsequent revelations only impertinence. Nothing for any

ghost to do--who meant business. More than that, over forty murders,

same old kind, committed every year in Calaveras, and no spiritual post

obits coming due every anniversary; no assessments made on the peace

and quiet of the surviving community. I tell you what, boys, I've

always been inclined to throw off on the Cave City ghost for that

alone. It's a bad precedent, sir. If that kind o' thing is going to

obtain in the foot-hills, we'll have the trails full of chaps formerly

knocked over by Mexicans and road agents; every little camp and grocery

will have stock enough on hand to go into business, and where's there

any security for surviving life and property, eh? What's your opinion,

Judge, as a fair-minded legislator?"

Of course there was no response. Yet it was part of the Doctor's

system of aggravation to become discursive at these moments, in the

hope of interruption, and he continued for some moments to dwell on the

terrible possibility of a state of affairs in which a gentleman could

no longer settle a dispute with an enemy without being subjected to

succeeding spiritual embarrassment. But all this digression fell upon

apparently inattentive ears.

"Well, sir, after the murder, the cabin stood for a long time deserted

and tenantless. Popular opinion was against it. One day a ragged

prospector, savage with hard labor and harder luck, came to the camp,

looking for a place to live and a chance to prospect. After the boys

had taken his measure, they concluded that he'd already tackled so much

in the way of difficulties that a ghost more or less wouldn't be of

much account. So they sent him to the haunted cabin. He had a big

yellow dog with him, about as ugly and as savage as himself; and the

boys sort o' congratulated themselves, from a practical view-point,

that while they were giving the old ruffian a shelter, they were

helping in the cause of Christianity against ghosts and goblins. They

had little faith in the old man, but went their whole pile on that dog.

That's where they were mistaken.

"The house stood almost three hundred feet from the nearest cave, and

on dark nights, being in a hollow, was as lonely as if it had been on

the top of Shasta. If you ever saw the spot when there was just moon

enough to bring out the little surrounding clumps of chapparal until

they looked like crouching figures, and make the bits of broken quartz

glisten like skulls, you'd begin to understand how big a contract that

man and that yellow dog undertook.

"They went into possession that afternoon, and old Hard Times set out

to cook his supper. When it was over he sat down by the embers and lit

his pipe, the yellow dog lying at his feet. Suddenly 'Rap! rap!' comes

from the door. 'Come in,' says the man, gruffly. 'Rap!' again. 'Come

in and be d--d to you,' says the man, who has no idea of getting up to

open the door. But no one responded, and the next moment smash goes

the only sound pane in the only window. Seeing this, old Hard Times

gets up, with the devil in his eye, and a revolver in his hand,

followed by the yellow dog, with every tooth showing, and swings open

the door. No one there! But as the man opened the door, that yellow

dog, that had been so chipper before, suddenly begins to crouch and

step backward, step by step, trembling and shivering, and at last

crouches down in the chimney, without even so much as looking at his

master. The man slams the door shut again, but there comes another

smash.

"This time it seems to come from inside the cabin, and it isn't until

the man looks around and sees everything quiet that he gets up, without

speaking, and makes a dash for the door, and tears round outside the

cabin like mad, but finds nothing but silence and darkness. Then he

comes back swearing and calls the dog. But that great yellow dog that

the boys would have staked all their money on is crouching under the

bunk, and has to be dragged out like a coon from a hollow tree, and

lies there, his eyes starting from their sockets; every limb and muscle

quivering with fear, and his very hair drawn up in bristling ridges.

The man calls him to the door. He drags himself a few steps, stops,

sniffs, and refuses to go further. The man calls him again, with an

oath and a threat. Then, what does that yellow dog do? He crawls

edgewise towards the door, crouching himself against the bunk till he's

flatter than a knife blade; then, half way, he stops. Then that d--d

yellow dog begins to walk gingerly--lifting each foot up in the air,

one after the other, still trembling in every limb. Then he stops

again. Then he crouches. Then he gives one little shuddering leap--not

straight forward, but up,--clearing the floor about six inches, as if--"

"Over something," interrupted the Judge, hastily, lifting himself on

his elbow.

The Doctor stopped instantly. "Juan," he said coolly, to one of the

Mexican packers, "quit foolin' with that riata. You'll have that stake

out and that mule loose in another minute. Come over this way!"

The Mexican turned a scared, white face to the Doctor, muttering

something, and let go the deer-skin hide. We all up-raised our voices

with one accord, the Judge most penitently and apologetically, and

implored the Doctor to go on. "I'll shoot the first man who interrupts

you again," added Thornton; persuasively.

But the Doctor, with his hands languidly under his head, had lost his

interest. "Well, the dog ran off to the hills, and neither the threats

nor cajoleries of his master could ever make him enter the cabin again.

The next day the man left the camp. What time is it? Getting on to

sundown, ain't it? Keep off my leg, will you, you d--d Greaser, and

stop stumbling round there! Lie down."

But we knew that the Doctor had not completely finished his story, and

we waited patiently for the conclusion. Meanwhile the old, gray

silence of the woods again asserted itself, but shadows were now

beginning to gather in the heavy beams of the roof above, and the dim

aisles seemed to be narrowing and closing in around us. Presently the

Doctor recommenced lazily, as if no interruption had occurred.

"As I said before, I never put much faith in that story, and shouldn't

have told it, but for a rather curious experience of my own. It was in

the spring of '62, and I was one of a party of four, coming up from

O'Neill's, when we had been snowed up. It was awful weather; the snow

had changed to sleet and rain after we crossed the divide, and the

water was out everywhere; every ditch was a creek, every creek a river.

We had lost two horses on the North Fork, we were dead beat, off the

trail, and sloshing round, with night coming on, and the level hail

like shot in our faces. Things were looking bleak and scary when,

riding a little ahead of the party, I saw a light twinkling in a hollow

beyond. My horse was still fresh, and calling out to the boys to

follow me and bear for the light, I struck out for it. In another

moment I was before a little cabin that half burrowed in the black

chapparal; I dismounted and rapped at the door. There was no response.

I then tried to force the door, but it was fastened securely from

within. I was all the more surprised when one of the boys, who had

overtaken me, told me that he had just seen through a window a man

reading by the fire. Indignant at this inhospitality, we both made a

resolute onset against the door, at the same time raising our angry

voices to a yell. Suddenly there was a quick response, the hurried

withdrawing of a bolt, and the door opened.

"The occupant was a short, thick-set man, with a pale, careworn face,

whose prevailing expression was one of gentle good humor and patient

suffering. When we entered, he asked us hastily why we had not 'sung

out' before.

"'But we KNOCKED!' I said, impatiently, 'and almost drove your door in.'

"'That's nothing,' he said, patiently. 'I'm used to THAT.'

"I looked again at the man's patient, fateful face, and then around the

cabin. In an instant the whole situation flashed before me. 'Are we

not near Cave City?' I asked.

"'Yes,' he replied, 'it's just below. You must have passed it in the

storm.'

"'I see.' I again looked around the cabin. 'Isn't this what they call

the haunted house?'

"He looked at me curiously. 'It is,' he said, simply.

"You can imagine my delight! Here was an opportunity to test the whole

story, to work down to the bed rock, and see how it would pan out! We

were too many and too well armed to fear tricks or dangers from

outsiders. If--as one theory had been held--the disturbance was kept

up by a band of concealed marauders or road agents, whose purpose was

to preserve their haunts from intrusion, we were quite able to pay them

back in kind for any assault. I need not say that the boys were

delighted with this prospect when the fact was revealed to them. The

only one doubtful or apathetic spirit there was our host, who quietly

resumed his seat and his book, with his old expression of patient

martyrdom. It would have been easy for me to have drawn him out, but I

felt that I did not want to corroborate anybody else's experience; only

to record my own. And I thought it better to keep the boys from any

predisposing terrors.

"We ate our supper, and then sat, patiently and expectant, around the

fire. An hour slipped away, but no disturbance; another hour passed as

monotonously. Our host read his book; only the dash of hail against

the roof broke the silence. But--"

The Doctor stopped. Since the last interruption, I noticed he had

changed the easy slangy style of his story to a more perfect, artistic,

and even studied manner. He dropped now suddenly into his old

colloquial speech, and quietly said: "If you don't quit stumbling over

those riatas, Juan, I'll hobble YOU. Come here, there; lie down, will

you?"

We all turned fiercely on the cause of this second dangerous

interruption, but a sight of the poor fellow's pale and frightened face

withheld our vindictive tongues. And the Doctor, happily, of his own

accord, went on:--

"But I had forgotten that it was no easy matter to keep these

high-spirited boys, bent on a row, in decent subjection; and after the

third hour passed without a supernatural exhibition, I observed, from

certain winks and whispers, that they were determined to get up

indications of their own. In a few moments violent rappings were heard

from all parts of the cabin; large stones (adroitly thrown up the

chimney) fell with a heavy thud on the roof. Strange groans and

ominous yells seemed to come from the outside (where the interstices

between the logs were wide enough). Yet, through all this uproar, our

host sat still and patient, with no sign of indignation or reproach

upon his good-humored but haggard features. Before long it became

evident that this exhibition was exclusively for HIS benefit. Under

the thin disguise of asking him to assist them in discovering the

disturbers OUTSIDE the cabin, those inside took advantage of his

absence to turn the cabin topsy-turvy.

"'You see what the spirits have done, old man,' said the arch leader of

this mischief. 'They've upset that there flour barrel while we wasn't

looking, and then kicked over the water jug and spilled all the water!'

"The patient man lifted his head and looked at the flour-strewn walls.

Then he glanced down at the floor, but drew back with a slight tremor.

"'It ain't water!' he said, quietly.

"'What is it, then?'

"'It's BLOOD! Look!'

"The nearest man gave a sudden start and sank back white as a sheet.

"For there, gentlemen, on the floor, just before the door, where the

old man had seen the dog hesitate and lift his feet, there!

there!--gentlemen--upon my honor, slowly widened and broadened a dark

red pool of human blood! Stop him! Quick! Stop him, I say!"

There was a blinding flash that lit up the dark woods, and a sharp

report! When we reached the Doctor's side he was holding the smoking

pistol, just discharged, in one hand, while with the other he was

pointing to the rapidly disappearing figure of Juan, our Mexican

vaquero!

"Missed him! by G-d!" said the Doctor. "But did you hear him? Did you

see his livid face as he rose up at the name of blood? Did you see his

guilty conscience in his face. Eh? Why don't you speak? What are you

staring at?"

"Was it the murdered man's ghost, Doctor?" we all panted in one quick

breath.

"Ghost be d--d! No! But in that Mexican vaquero--that cursed Juan

Ramirez!--I saw and shot at his murderer!"

THE HOODLUM BAND

OR

THE BOY CHIEF, THE INFANT POLITICIAN, AND THE PIRATE PRODIGY

BY JACK WHACKAWAY

Author of "The Boy Slaver," "The Immature Incendiary," "The Precocious

Pugilist," etc., etc.

CHAPTER I

It was a quiet New England village. Nowhere in the valley of the

Connecticut the autumn sun shone upon a more peaceful, pastoral,

manufacturing community. The wooden nutmegs were slowly ripening on

the trees, and the white pine hams for Western consumption were

gradually rounding into form under the deft manipulation of the hardy

American artisan. The honest Connecticut farmer was quietly gathering

from his threshing floor the shoe-pegs, which, when intermixed with a

fair proportion of oats, offered a pleasing substitute for fodder to

the effete civilizations of Europe. An almost Sabbath-like stillness

prevailed. Doemville was only seven miles from Hartford, and the

surrounding landscape smiled with the conviction of being fully insured.

Few would have thought that this peaceful village was the home of the

three young heroes whose exploits would hereafter--but we anticipate.

Doemville Academy was the principal seat of learning in the county.

Under the grave and gentle administration of the venerable Doctor

Context, it had attained just popularity. Yet the increasing

infirmities of age obliged the doctor to relinquish much of his trust

to his assistants, who, it is needless to say, abused his confidence.

Before long their brutal tyranny and deep-laid malevolence became

apparent. Boys were absolutely forced to study their lessons. The

sickening fact will hardly be believed, but during school hours they

were obliged to remain in their seats with the appearance at least of

discipline. It is stated by good authority that the rolling of croquet

balls across the floor during recitation was objected to, under the

fiendish excuse of its interfering with their studies. The breaking of

windows by base balls, and the beating of small scholars with bats,

were declared against. At last, bloated and arrogant with success, the

under-teachers threw aside all disguise and revealed themselves in

their true colors. A cigar was actually taken out of a day scholar's

mouth during prayers! A flask of whisky was dragged from another's

desk, and then thrown out of the window. And finally, Profanity,

Hazing, Theft, and Lying were almost discouraged!

Could the youth of America, conscious of their power and a literature

of their own, tamely submit to this tyranny? Never! We repeat it

firmly. Never! We repeat it to parents and guardians. Never! But the

fiendish tutors, chuckling in their glee, little knew what was passing

through the cold, haughty intellect of Charles Fanuel Hall Golightly,

aged ten; what curled the lip of Benjamin Franklin Jenkins, aged seven;

or what shone in the bold blue eyes of Bromley Chitterlings, aged six

and a half, as they sat in the corner of the playground at recess.

Their only other companion and confidant was the negro porter and

janitor of the school, known as "Pirate Jim."

Fitly, indeed, was he named, as the secrets of his early wild

career--confessed freely to his noble young friends--plainly showed. A

slaver at the age of seventeen, the ringleader of a mutiny on the

African Coast at the age of twenty, a privateersman during the last war

with England, the commander of a fire-ship and its sole survivor at

twenty-five, with a wild intermediate career of unmixed piracy, until

the Rebellion called him to civil service again as a blockade-runner,

and peace and a desire for rural repose led him to seek the janitorship

of the Doemville Academy, where no questions were asked and references

not exchanged: he was, indeed, a fit mentor for our daring youth.

Although a man whose days had exceeded the usual space allotted to

humanity, the various episodes of his career footing his age up to

nearly one hundred and fifty-nine years, he scarcely looked it, and was

still hale and vigorous.

"Yes," continued Pirate Jim, critically, "I don't think he was any

bigger nor you, Master Chitterlings, if as big, when he stood on the

fork'stle of my ship, and shot the captain o' that East Injymen dead.

We used to call him little Weevils, he was so young-like. But, bless

your hearts, boys! he wa'n't anything to little Sammy Barlow, ez once

crep' up inter the captain's stateroom on a Rooshin frigate, stabbed

him to the heart with a jack-knife, then put on the captain's uniform

and his cocked hat, took command of the ship and fout her hisself."

"Wasn't the captain's clothes big for him?" asked B. Franklin Jenkins,

anxiously.

The janitor eyed young Jenkins with pained dignity.

"Didn't I say the Rooshin captain was a small, a very small man?

Rooshins is small, likewise Greeks."

A noble enthusiasm beamed in the faces of the youthful heroes.

"Was Barlow as large as me?" asked C. F. Hall Golightly, lifting his

curls from his Jove-like brow.

"Yes; but then he hed hed, so to speak, experiences. It was allowed

that he had pizened his schoolmaster afore he went to sea. But it's dry

talking, boys."

Golightly drew a flask from his jacket and handed it to the janitor.

It was his father's best brandy. The heart of the honest old seaman

was touched.

"Bless ye, my own pirate boy!" he said, in a voice suffocating with

emotion.

"I've got some tobacco," said the youthful Jenkins, "but it's fine-cut;

I use only that now."

"I kin buy some plug at the corner grocery," said Pirate Jim, "only I

left my port-money at home."

"Take this watch," said young Golightly; "it is my father's. Since he

became a tyrant and usurper, and forced me to join a corsair's band,

I've began by dividing the property."

"This is idle trifling," said young Chitterlings, mildly. "Every

moment is precious. Is this an hour to give to wine and wassail? Ha,

we want action--action! We must strike the blow for freedom

to-night--aye, this very night. The scow is already anchored in the

mill-dam, freighted with provisions for a three months' voyage. I have

a black flag in my pocket. Why, then, this cowardly delay?"

The two elder youths turned with a slight feeling of awe and shame to

gaze on the glowing cheeks, and high, haughty crest of their youngest

comrade--the bright, the beautiful Bromley Chitterlings. Alas! that

very moment of forgetfulness and mutual admiration was fraught with

danger. A thin, dyspeptic, half-starved tutor approached.

"It is time to resume your studies, young gentlemen," he said, with

fiendish politeness.

They were his last words on earth.

"Down, tyrant!" screamed Chitterlings.

"Sic him--I mean, Sic semper tyrannis!" said the classical Golightly.

A heavy blow on the head from a base-ball bat, and the rapid projection

of a base ball against his empty stomach, brought the tutor a limp and

lifeless mass to the ground. Golightly shuddered. Let not my young

readers blame him too rashly. It was his first homicide.

"Search his pockets," said the practical Jenkins.

They did so, and found nothing but a Harvard Triennial Catalogue.

"Let us fly," said Jenkins.

"Forward to the boats!" cried the enthusiastic Chitterlings.

But C. F. Hall Golightly stood gazing thoughtfully at the prostrate

tutor.

"This," he said calmly, "is the result of a too free government and the

common school system. What the country needs is reform. I cannot go

with you, boys."

"Traitor!" screamed the others.

C. F. H. Golightly smiled sadly.

"You know me not. I shall not become a pirate--but a Congressman!"

Jenkins and Chitterlings turned pale.

"I have already organized two caucuses in a base ball club, and bribed

the delegates of another. Nay, turn not away. Let us be friends,

pursuing through various ways one common end. Farewell!" They shook

hands.

"But where is Pirate Jim?" asked Jenkins.

"He left us but for a moment to raise money on the watch to purchase

armament for the scow. Farewell!"

And so the gallant, youthful spirits parted, bright with the sunrise of

hope.

That night a conflagration raged in Doemville. The Doemville Academy,

mysteriously fired, first fell a victim to the devouring element. The

candy shop and cigar store, both holding heavy liabilities against the

academy, quickly followed. By the lurid gleams of the flames, a long,

low, sloop-rigged scow, with every mast gone except one, slowly worked

her way out of the mill-dam towards the Sound. The next day three boys

were missing--C. F. Hall Golightly, B. F. Jenkins, and Bromley

Chitterlings. Had they perished in the flames who shall say? Enough

that never more under these names did they again appear in the homes of

their ancestors.

Happy, indeed, would it have been for Doemville had the mystery ended

here. But a darker interest and scandal rested upon the peaceful

village. During that awful night the boarding-school of Madam

Brimborion was visited stealthily, and two of the fairest heiresses of

Connecticut--daughters of the president of a savings bank, and

insurance director--were the next morning found to have eloped. With

them also disappeared the entire contents of the Savings Bank, and on

the following day the Flamingo Fire Insurance Company failed.