and shook her head. “White chief was sick--how can know? Olooya made
witch-fire.”
He cast a hurried glance at his watch hanging on the wall beside him.
It had RUN DOWN, although he had wound it the last thing before going to
bed. He had evidently been lying there helpless beyond the twenty-four
hours!
He groaned and turned to rise, but she gently forced him down again, and
gave him some herbal infusion, in which he recognized the taste of the
Yerba Buena vine which grew by the river. Then she made him comprehend
in her own tongue that Jim had been decoyed, while drunk, aboard a
certain schooner lying off the shore at a spot where she had seen some
men digging in the sands. She had not gone there, for she was afraid
of the bad men, and a slight return of her former terror came into her
changeful eyes. She knew how to light the witch-light; she reminded him
she had been in the tower before.
“You have saved my light, and perhaps my life,” he said weakly, taking
her hand.
Possibly she did not understand him, for her only answer was a vague
smile. But the next instant she started up, listening intently, and then
with a frightened cry drew away her hand and suddenly dashed out of
the building. In the midst of his amazement the door was darkened by a
figure--a stranger dressed like an ordinary miner. Pausing a moment
to look after the flying Olooya, the man turned and glanced around the
room, and then with a coarse, familiar smile approached Pomfrey.
“Hope I ain't disturbin' ye, but I allowed I'd just be neighborly and
drop in--seein' as this is gov'nment property, and me and my pardners,
as American citizens and tax-payers, helps to support it. We're coastin'
from Trinidad down here and prospectin' along the beach for gold in the
sand. Ye seem to hev a mighty soft berth of it here--nothing to do--and
lots of purty half-breeds hangin' round!”
The man's effrontery was too much for Pomfrey's self-control, weakened
by illness. “It IS government property,” he answered hotly, “and you
have no more right to intrude upon it than you have to decoy away my
servant, a government employee, during my illness, and jeopardize that
property.”
The unexpectedness of this attack, and the sudden revelation of the fact
of Pomfrey's illness in his flushed face and hollow voice apparently
frightened and confused the stranger. He stammered a surly excuse,
backed out of the doorway, and disappeared. An hour later Jim appeared,
crestfallen, remorseful, and extravagantly penitent. Pomfrey was too
weak for reproaches or inquiry, and he was thinking only of Olooya.
She did not return. His recovery in that keen air, aided, as he
sometimes thought, by the herbs she had given him, was almost as rapid
as his illness. The miners did not again intrude upon the lighthouse nor
trouble his seclusion. When he was able to sun himself on the sands, he
could see them in the distance at work on the beach. He reflected that
she would not come back while they were there, and was reconciled.
But one morning Jim appeared, awkward and embarrassed, leading another
Indian, whom he introduced as Olooya's brother. Pomfrey's suspicions
were aroused. Except that the stranger had something of the girl's
superiority of manner, there was no likeness whatever to his fair-haired
acquaintance. But a fury of indignation was added to his suspicions when
he learned the amazing purport of their visit. It was nothing less than
an offer from the alleged brother to SELL his sister to Pomfrey for
forty dollars and a jug of whiskey! Unfortunately, Pomfrey's temper once
more got the better of his judgment. With a scathing exposition of the
laws under which the Indian and white man equally lived, and the legal
punishment of kidnaping, he swept what he believed was the impostor from
his presence. He was scarcely alone again before he remembered that his
imprudence might affect the girl's future access to him, but it was too
late now.
Still he clung to the belief that he should see her when the prospectors
had departed, and he hailed with delight the breaking up of the camp
near the “sweat-house” and the disappearance of the schooner. It seemed
that their gold-seeking was unsuccessful; but Pomfrey was struck, on
visiting the locality, to find that in their excavations in the sand at
the estuary they had uncovered the decaying timbers of a ship's small
boat of some ancient and obsolete construction. This made him think
of his strange dream, with a vague sense of warning which he could not
shake off, and on his return to the lighthouse he took from his shelves
a copy of the old voyages to see how far his fancy had been affected
by his reading. In the account of Drake's visit to the coast he found a
footnote which he had overlooked before, and which ran as follows: “The
Admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion, who were
supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the inhospitable
interior or by the hands of savages. But later voyagers have suggested
that the deserters married Indian wives, and there is a legend that a
hundred years later a singular race of half-breeds, bearing unmistakable
Anglo-Saxon characteristics, was found in that locality.” Pomfrey fell
into a reverie of strange hypotheses and fancies. He resolved that,
when he again saw Olooya, he would question her; her terror of these men
might be simply racial or some hereditary transmission.
But his intention was never fulfilled. For when days and weeks had
elapsed, and he had vainly haunted the river estuary and the rocky
reef before the lighthouse without a sign of her, he overcame his
pride sufficiently to question Jim. The man looked at him with dull
astonishment.
“Olooya gone,” he said.
“Gone!--where?”
The Indian made a gesture to seaward which seemed to encompass the whole
Pacific.
“How? With whom?” repeated his angry yet half-frightened master.
“With white man in ship. You say YOU no want Olooya--forty dollars too
much. White man give fifty dollars--takee Olooya all same.”
UNDER THE EAVES
The assistant editor of the San Francisco “Daily Informer” was going
home. So much of his time was spent in the office of the “Informer” that
no one ever cared to know where he passed those six hours of sleep which
presumably suggested a domicile. His business appointments outside the
office were generally kept at the restaurant where he breakfasted and
dined, or of evenings in the lobbies of theatres or the anterooms of
public meetings. Yet he had a home and an interval of seclusion of which
he was jealously mindful, and it was to this he was going to-night at
his usual hour.
His room was in a new building on one of the larger and busier
thoroughfares. The lower floor was occupied by a bank, but as it was
closed before he came home, and not yet opened when he left, it did not
disturb his domestic sensibilities. The same may be said of the next
floor, which was devoted to stockbrokers' and companies offices, and was
equally tomb-like and silent when he passed; the floor above that was a
desert of empty rooms, which echoed to his footsteps night and morning,
with here and there an oasis in the green sign of a mining secretary's
office, with, however, the desolating announcement that it would only
be “open for transfers from two to four on Saturdays.” The top floor
had been frankly abandoned in an unfinished state by the builder, whose
ambition had “o'erleaped itself” in that sanguine era of the city's
growth. There was a smell of plaster and the first coat of paint about
it still, but the whole front of the building was occupied by a long
room with odd “bull's-eye” windows looking out through the heavy
ornamentations of the cornice over the adjacent roofs.
It had been originally intended for a club-room, but after the ill
fortune which attended the letting of the floor below, and possibly
because the earthquake-fearing San Franciscans had their doubts of
successful hilarity at the top of so tall a building, it remained
unfinished, with the two smaller rooms at its side. Its incomplete and
lonely grandeur had once struck the editor during a visit of inspection,
and the landlord, whom he knew, had offered to make it habitable for him
at a nominal rent. It had a lavatory with a marble basin and a tap of
cold water. The offer was a novel one, but he accepted it, and fitted up
the apartment with some cheap second-hand furniture, quite inconsistent
with the carved mantels and decorations, and made a fair sitting-room
and bedroom of it. Here, on a Sunday, when its stillness was
intensified, and even a passing footstep on the pavement fifty feet
below was quite startling, he would sit and work by one of the quaint
open windows. In the rainy season, through the filmed panes he sometimes
caught a glimpse of the distant, white-capped bay, but never of the
street below him.
The lights were out, but, groping his way up to the first landing, he
took from a cup-boarded niche in the wall his candlestick and matches
and continued the ascent to his room. The humble candlelight flickered
on the ostentatious gold letters displayed on the ground-glass doors
of opulent companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where
millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his
sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own
floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem
less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms
below, and it was only this recollection of past human occupancy that
was depressing.
He opened his door, lit the solitary gas jet that only half illuminated
the long room, and, it being already past midnight, began to undress
himself. This process presently brought him to that corner of his room
where his bed stood, when he suddenly stopped, and his sleepy yawn
changed to a gape of surprise. For, lying in the bed, its head upon
the pillow, and its rigid arms accurately stretched down over the
turned-back sheet, was a child's doll! It was a small doll--a banged and
battered doll, that had seen service, but it had evidently been “tucked
in” with maternal tenderness, and lay there with its staring eyes turned
to the ceiling, the very genius of insomnia!
His first start of surprise was followed by a natural resentment of
what might have been an impertinent intrusion on his privacy by some
practical-joking adult, for he knew there was no child in the house.
His room was kept in order by the wife of the night watchman employed
by the bank, and no one else had a right of access to it. But the woman
might have brought a child there and not noticed its disposal of its
plaything. He smiled. It might have been worse! It might have been a
real baby!
The idea tickled him with a promise of future “copy”--of a story with
farcical complications, or even a dramatic ending, in which the baby,
adopted by him, should turn out to be somebody's stolen offspring. He
lifted the little image that had suggested these fancies, carefully laid
it on his table, went to bed, and presently forgot it all in slumber.
In the morning his good-humor and interest in it revived to the extent
of writing on a slip of paper, “Good-morning! Thank you--I've slept very
well,” putting the slip in the doll's jointed arms, and leaving it in a
sitting posture outside his door when he left his room. When he returned
late at night it was gone.
But it so chanced that, a few days later, owing to press of work on the
“Informer,” he was obliged to forego his usual Sunday holiday out of
town, and that morning found him, while the bells were ringing for
church, in his room with a pile of manuscript and proof before him.
For these were troublous days in San Francisco; the great Vigilance
Committee of '56 was in session, and the offices of the daily papers
were thronged with eager seekers of news. Such affairs, indeed, were not
in the functions of the assistant editor, nor exactly to his taste; he
was neither a partisan of the so-called Law and Order Party, nor yet
an enthusiastic admirer of the citizen Revolutionists known as the
Vigilance Committee, both extremes being incompatible with his habits of
thought. Consequently he was not displeased at this opportunity of doing
his work away from the office and the “heady talk” of controversy.
He worked on until the bells ceased and a more than Sabbath stillness
fell upon the streets. So quiet was it that once or twice the
conversation of passing pedestrians floated up and into his window, as
of voices at his elbow.
Presently he heard the sound of a child's voice singing in subdued tone,
as if fearful of being overheard. This time he laid aside his pen--it
certainly was no delusion! The sound did not come from the open
window, but from some space on a level with his room. Yet there was no
contiguous building as high.
He rose and tried to open his door softly, but it creaked, and the
singing instantly ceased. There was nothing before him but the bare,
empty hall, with its lathed and plastered partitions, and the two
smaller rooms, unfinished like his own, on either side of him. Their
doors were shut; the one at his right hand was locked, the other yielded
to his touch.
For the first moment he saw only the bare walls of the apparently empty
room. But a second glance showed him two children--a boy of seven and
a girl of five--sitting on the floor, which was further littered by
a mattress, pillow, and blanket. There was a cheap tray on one of the
trunks containing two soiled plates and cups and fragments of a meal.
But there was neither a chair nor table nor any other article of
furniture in the room. Yet he was struck by the fact that, in spite of
this poverty of surrounding, the children were decently dressed, and the
few scattered pieces of luggage in quality bespoke a superior condition.
The children met his astonished stare with an equal wonder and, he
fancied, some little fright. The boy's lips trembled a little as he said
apologetically--
“I told Jinny not to sing. But she didn't make MUCH noise.”
“Mamma said I could play with my dolly. But I fordot and singed,” said
the little girl penitently.
“Where's your mamma?” asked the young man. The fancy of their being
near relatives of the night watchman had vanished at the sound of their
voices.
“Dorn out,” said the girl.
“When did she go out?”
“Last night.”
“Were you all alone here last night?”
“Yes!”
Perhaps they saw the look of indignation and pity in the editor's face,
for the boy said quickly--
“She don't go out EVERY night; last night she went to”--
He stopped suddenly, and both children looked at each other with a half
laugh and half cry, and then repeated in hopeless unison, “She's dorn
out.”
“When is she coming back again?”
“To-night. But we won't make any more noise.”
“Who brings you your food?” continued the editor, looking at the tray.
“Woberts.”
Evidently Roberts, the night watchman! The editor felt relieved; here
was a clue to some explanation. He instantly sat down on the floor
between them.
“So that was the dolly that slept in my bed,” he said gayly, taking it
up.
God gives helplessness a wonderful intuition of its friends. The
children looked up at the face of their grown-up companion, giggled, and
then burst into a shrill fit of laughter. He felt that it was the first
one they had really indulged in for many days. Nevertheless he said,
“Hush!” confidentially; why he scarcely knew, except to intimate to them
that he had taken in their situation thoroughly. “Make no noise,” he
added softly, “and come into my big room.”
They hung back, however, with frightened yet longing eyes. “Mamma said
we mussent do out of this room,” said the girl.
“Not ALONE,” responded the editor quickly, “but with ME, you know;
that's different.”
The logic sufficed them, poor as it was. Their hands slid quite
naturally into his. But at the door he stopped, and motioning to the
locked door of the other room, asked:--
“And is that mamma's room, too?”
Their little hands slipped from his and they were silent. Presently the
boy, as if acted upon by some occult influence of the girl, said in a
half whisper, “Yes.”
The editor did not question further, but led them into his room. Here
they lost the slight restraint they had shown, and began, child fashion,
to become questioners themselves.
In a few moments they were in possession of his name, his business, the
kind of restaurant he frequented, where he went when he left his room
all day, the meaning of those funny slips of paper, and the written
manuscripts, and why he was so quiet. But any attempt of his to
retaliate by counter questions was met by a sudden reserve so
unchildlike and painful to him--as it was evidently to themselves--that
he desisted, wisely postponing his inquiries until he could meet
Roberts.
He was glad when they fell to playing games with each other quite
naturally, yet not entirely forgetting his propinquity, as their
occasional furtive glances at his movements showed him. He, too, became
presently absorbed in his work, until it was finished and it was time
for him to take it to the office of the “Informer.” The wild idea seized
him of also taking the children afterwards for a holiday to the Mission
Dolores, but he prudently remembered that even this negligent mother of
theirs might have some rights over her offspring that he was bound to
respect.
He took leave of them gayly, suggesting that the doll be replaced in his
bed while he was away, and even assisted in “tucking it up.” But during
the afternoon the recollection of these lonely playfellows in the
deserted house obtruded itself upon his work and the talk of his
companions. Sunday night was his busiest night, and he could not,
therefore, hope to get away in time to assure himself of their mother's
return.
It was nearly two in the morning when he returned to his room. He paused
for a moment on the threshold to listen for any sound from the adjoining
room. But all was hushed.
His intention of speaking to the night watchman was, however,
anticipated the next morning by that guardian himself. A tap upon his
door while he was dressing caused him to open it somewhat hurriedly
in the hope of finding one of the children there, but he met only the
embarrassed face of Roberts. Inviting him into the room, the editor
continued dressing. Carefully closing the door behind him, the man
began, with evident hesitation,--
“I oughter hev told ye suthin' afore, Mr. Breeze; but I kalkilated, so
to speak, that you wouldn't be bothered one way or another, and so ye
hadn't any call to know that there was folks here”--
“Oh, I see,” interrupted Breeze cheerfully; “you're speaking of the
family next door--the landlord's new tenants.”
“They ain't exactly THAT,” said Roberts, still with embarrassment. “The
fact is--ye see--the thing points THIS way: they ain't no right to be
here, and it's as much as my place is worth if it leaks out that they
are.”
Mr. Breeze suspended his collar-buttoning, and stared at Roberts.
“You see, sir, they're mighty poor, and they've nowhere else to go--and
I reckoned to take 'em in here for a spell and say nothing about it.”
“But the landlord wouldn't object, surely? I'll speak to him myself,”
said Breeze impulsively.
“Oh, no; don't!” said Roberts in alarm; “he wouldn't like it. You see,
Mr. Breeze, it's just this way: the mother, she's a born lady, and did
my old woman a good turn in old times when the family was rich; but now
she's obliged--just to support herself, you know--to take up with what
she gets, and she acts in the bally in the theatre, you see, and hez
to come in late o' nights. In them cheap boarding-houses, you know, the
folks looks down upon her for that, and won't hev her, and in the cheap
hotels the men are--you know--a darned sight wuss, and that's how I took
her and her kids in here, where no one knows 'em.”
“I see,” nodded the editor sympathetically; “and very good it was of
you, my man.”
Roberts looked still more confused, and stammered with a forced laugh,
“And--so--I'm just keeping her on here, unbeknownst, until her husband
gets”--He stopped suddenly.
“So she has a husband living, then?” said Breeze in surprise.
“In the mines, yes--in the mines!” repeated Roberts with a monotonous
deliberation quite distinct from his previous hesitation, “and she's
only waitin' until he gets money enough--to--to take her away.” He
stopped and breathed hard.
“But couldn't you--couldn't WE--get her some more furniture? There's
nothing in that room, you know, not a chair or table; and unless the
other room is better furnished”--
“Eh? Oh, yes!” said Roberts quickly, yet still with a certain
embarrassment; “of course THAT'S better furnished, and she's quite
satisfied, and so are the kids, with anything. And now, Mr. Breeze, I
reckon you'll say nothin' o' this, and you'll never go back on me?”
“My dear Mr. Roberts,” said the editor gravely, “from this moment I am
not only blind, but deaf to the fact that ANYBODY occupies this floor
but myself.”
“I knew you was white all through, Mr. Breeze,” said the night watchman,
grasping the young man's hand with a grip of iron, “and I telled my wife
so. I sez, 'Jest you let me tell him EVERYTHIN',' but she”--He stopped
again and became confused.
“And she was quite right, I dare say,” said Breeze, with a laugh; “and I
do not want to know anything. And that poor woman must never know that
I ever knew anything, either. But you may tell your wife that when
the mother is away she can bring the little ones in here whenever she
likes.”
“Thank ye--thank ye, sir!--and I'll just run down and tell the old woman
now, and won't intrude upon your dressin' any longer.”
He grasped Breeze's hand again, went out and closed the door behind
him. It might have been the editor's fancy, but he thought there was a
certain interval of silence outside the door before the night watchman's
heavy tread was heard along the hall again.
For several evenings after this Mr. Breeze paid some attention to the
ballet in his usual round of the theatres. Although he had never seen
his fair neighbor, he had a vague idea that he might recognize her
through some likeness to her children. But in vain. In the opulent
charms of certain nymphs, and in the angular austerities of others,
he failed equally to discern any of those refinements which might have
distinguished the “born lady” of Roberts's story, or which he himself
had seen in her children.
These he did not meet again during the week, as his duties kept him
late at the office; but from certain signs in his room he knew that Mrs.
Roberts had availed herself of his invitation to bring them in with her,
and he regularly found “Jinny's” doll tucked up in his bed at night, and
he as regularly disposed of it outside his door in the morning, with a
few sweets, like an offering, tucked under its rigid arms.
But another circumstance touched him more delicately; his room
was arranged with greater care than before, and with an occasional
exhibition of taste that certainly had not distinguished Mrs. Roberts's
previous ministrations. One evening on his return he found a small
bouquet of inexpensive flowers in a glass on his writing-table. He loved
flowers too well not to detect that they were quite fresh, and could
have been put there only an hour or two before he arrived.
The next evening was Saturday, and, as he usually left the office
earlier on that day, it occurred to him, as he walked home, that it was
about the time his fair neighbor would be leaving the theatre, and that
it was possible he might meet her.
At the front door, however, he found Roberts, who returned his greeting
with a certain awkwardness which struck him as singular. When he reached
the niche on the landing he found his candle was gone, but he proceeded
on, groping his way up the stairs, with an odd conviction that both
these incidents pointed to the fact that the woman had just returned or
was expected.