Eagle's Court, one of the highest canyons of the Sierras, was in reality
a plateau of table-land, embayed like a green lake in a semi-circular
sweep of granite, that, lifting itself three thousand feet higher,
became a foundation for the eternal snows. The mountain genii of space
and atmosphere jealously guarded its seclusion and surrounded it with
illusions; it never looked to be exactly what it was: the traveller who
saw it from the North Ridge apparently at his feet in descending found
himself separated from it by a mile-long abyss and a rushing river;
those who sought it by a seeming direct trail at the end of an hour lost
sight of it completely, or, abandoning the quest and retracing their
steps, suddenly came upon the gap through which it was entered. That
which from the Ridge appeared to be a copse of bushes beside the tiny
dwelling were trees three hundred feet high; the cultivated lawn before
it, which might have been covered by the traveller's handkerchief, was a
field of a thousand acres.
The house itself was a long, low, irregular structure, chiefly of roof
and veranda, picturesquely upheld by rustic pillars of pine, with the
bark still adhering, and covered with vines and trailing roses. Yet it
was evident that the coolness produced by this vast extent of cover was
more than the architect, who had planned it under the influence of a
staring and bewildering sky, had trustfully conceived, for it had to be
mitigated by blazing fires in open hearths when the thermometer marked
a hundred degrees in the field beyond. The dry, restless wind that
continually rocked the tall masts of the pines with a sound like the
distant sea, while it stimulated out-door physical exertion and defied
fatigue, left the sedentary dwellers in these altitudes chilled in the
shade they courted, or scorched them with heat when they ventured to
bask supinely in the sun. White muslin curtains at the French windows,
and rugs, skins, and heavy furs dispersed in the interior, with
certain other charming but incongruous details of furniture, marked the
inconsistencies of the climate.
There was a coquettish indication of this in the costume of Miss
Kate Scott as she stepped out on the veranda that morning. A man's
broad-brimmed Panama hat, partly unsexed by a twisted gayly-colored
scarf, but retaining enough character to give piquancy to the pretty
curves of the face beneath, protected her from the sun; a red flannel
shirt--another spoil from the enemy--and a thick jacket shielded her
from the austerities of the morning breeze. But the next inconsistency
was peculiarly her own. Miss Kate always wore the freshest and lightest
of white cambric skirts, without the least reference to the temperature.
To the practical sanatory remonstrances of her brother-in-law, and to
the conventional criticism of her sister, she opposed the same defence:
“How else is one to tell when it is summer in this ridiculous climate?
And then, woollen is stuffy, color draws the sun, and one at least
knows when one is clean or dirty.” Artistically the result was far from
unsatisfactory. It was a pretty figure under the sombre pines, against
the gray granite and the steely sky, and seemed to lend the yellowing
fields from which the flowers had already fled a floral relief of color.
I do not think the few masculine wayfarers of that locality objected
to it; indeed, some had betrayed an indiscreet admiration, and had
curiously followed the invitation of Miss Kate's warmly-colored figure
until they had encountered the invincible indifference of Miss Kate's
cold gray eyes. With these manifestations her brother-in-law did
not concern himself; he had perfect confidence in her unqualified
disinterest in the neighboring humanity, and permitted her to wander in
her solitary picturesqueness, or accompanied her when she rode in her
dark green habit, with equal freedom from anxiety.
For Miss Scott, although only twenty, had already subjected most of
her maidenly illusions to mature critical analyses. She had voluntarily
accompanied her sister and mother to California, in the earnest
hope that nature contained something worth saying to her, and was
disappointed to find she had already discounted its value in the pages
of books. She hoped to find a vague freedom in this unconventional
life thus opened to her, or rather to show others that she knew how
intelligently to appreciate it, but as yet she was only able to express
it in the one detail of dress already alluded to. Some of the men, and
nearly all the women, she had met thus far, she was amazed to find,
valued the conventionalities she believed she despised, and were
voluntarily assuming the chains she thought she had thrown off. Instead
of learning anything from them, these children of nature had bored her
with eager questionings regarding the civilization she had abandoned, or
irritated her with crude imitations of it for her benefit. “Fancy,”
she had written to a friend in Boston, “my calling on Sue Murphy, who
remembered the Donner tragedy, and who once shot a grizzly that was
prowling round her cabin, and think of her begging me to lend her my
sack for a pattern, and wanting to know if 'polonays' were still worn.”
She remembered more bitterly the romance that had tickled her earlier
fancy, told of two college friends of her brother-in-law's who were
living the “perfect life” in the mines, laboring in the ditches with
a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest
philosophy under the free air of the pines. How, coming unexpectedly on
them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt,
and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had
filled their Arcadian cabin with half-breed children.
Much of this disillusion she had kept within her own heart, from a
feeling of pride, or only lightly touched upon it in her relations with
her mother and sister. For Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Scott had no idols to
shatter, no enthusiasm to subdue. Firmly and unalterably conscious
of their own superiority to the life they led and the community that
surrounded them, they accepted their duties cheerfully, and performed
them conscientiously. Those duties were loyalty to Hale's interests and
a vague missionary work among the neighbors, which, like most missionary
work, consisted rather in making their own ideas understood than in
understanding the ideas of their audience. Old Mrs. Scott's zeal was
partly religious, an inheritance from her Puritan ancestry; Mrs. Hale's
was the affability of a gentlewoman and the obligation of her position.
To this was added the slight languor of the cultivated American wife,
whose health has been affected by the birth of her first child, and
whose views of marriage and maternity were slightly tinged with gentle
scepticism. She was sincerely attached to her husband, “who dominated
the household” like the rest of his “women folk,” with the faint
consciousness of that division of service which renders the position
of the sultan of a seraglio at once so prominent and so precarious. The
attitude of John Hale in his family circle was dominant because it had
never been subjected to criticism or comparison; and perilous for the
same reason.
Mrs. Hale presently joined her sister in the veranda, and, shading her
eyes with a narrow white hand, glanced on the prospect with a polite
interest and ladylike urbanity. The searching sun, which, as Miss Kate
once intimated, was “vulgarity itself,” stared at her in return, but
could not call a blush to her somewhat sallow cheek. Neither could it
detract, however, from the delicate prettiness of her refined face with
its soft gray shadows, or the dark gentle eyes, whose blue-veined lids
were just then wrinkled into coquettishly mischievous lines by the
strong light. She was taller and thinner than Kate, and had at times a
certain shy, coy sinuosity of movement which gave her a more virginal
suggestion than her unmarried sister. For Miss Kate, from her earliest
youth, had been distinguished by that matronly sedateness of voice and
step, and completeness of figure, which indicates some members of the
gallinaceous tribe from their callow infancy.
“I suppose John must have stopped at the Summit on some business,” said
Mrs. Hale, “or he would have been here already. It's scarcely worth
while waiting for him, unless you choose to ride over and meet him. You
might change your dress,” she continued, looking doubtfully at Kate's
costume. “Put on your riding-habit, and take Manuel with you.”
“And take the only man we have, and leave you alone?” returned Kate
slowly. “No!”
“There are the Chinese field hands,” said Mrs. Hale; “you must correct
your ideas, and really allow them some humanity, Kate. John says they
have a very good compulsory school system in their own country, and can
read and write.”
“That would be of little use to you here alone if--if--” Kate hesitated.
“If what?” said Mrs. Hale smiling. “Are you thinking of Manuel's
dreadful story of the grizzly tracks across the fields this morning? I
promise you that neither I, nor mother, nor Minnie shall stir out of the
house until you return, if you wish it.”
“I wasn't thinking of that,” said Kate; “though I don't believe the
beating of a gong and the using of strong language is the best way to
frighten a grizzly from the house. Besides, the Chinese are going
down the river to-day to a funeral, or a wedding, or a feast of stolen
chickens--they're all the same--and won't be here.”
“Then take Manuel,” repeated Mrs. Hale. “We have the Chinese servants
and Indian Molly in the house to protect us from Heaven knows what! I
have the greatest confidence in Chy-Lee as a warrior, and in Chinese
warfare generally. One has only to hear him pipe in time of peace to
imagine what a terror he might become in war time. Indeed, anything more
deadly and soul-harrowing than that love song he sang for us last night
I cannot conceive. But really, Kate, I am not afraid to stay alone. You
know what John says: we ought to be always prepared for anything that
might happen.
“My dear Josie,” returned Kate, putting her arm around her sister's
waist, “I am perfectly convinced that if three-fingered Jack,
or two-toed Bill, or even Joaquim Murietta himself, should step,
red-handed, on that veranda, you would gently invite him to take a cup
of tea, inquire about the state of the road, and refrain delicately
from any allusions to the sheriff. But I shan't take Manuel from you.
I really cannot undertake to look after his morals at the station, and
keep him from drinking aguardiente with suspicious characters at the
bar. It is true he 'kisses my hand' in his speech, even when it is
thickest, and offers his back to me for a horse-block, but I think
I prefer the sober and honest familiarity of even that Pike County
landlord who is satisfied to say, 'Jump, girl, and I'll ketch ye!'”
“I hope you didn't change your manner to either of them for that,” said
Mrs. Hale with a faint sigh. “John wants to be good friends with them,
and they are behaving quite decently lately, considering that they can't
speak a grammatical sentence nor know the use of a fork.”
“And now the man puts on gloves and a tall hat to come here on Sundays,
and the woman won't call until you've called first,” retorted Kate;
“perhaps you call that improvement. The fact is, Josephine,” continued
the young girl, folding her arms demurely, “we might as well admit it at
once--these people don't like us.”
“That's impossible!” said Mrs. Hale, with sublime simplicity. “You don't
like them, you mean.”
“I like them better than you do, Josie, and that's the reason why I feel
it and YOU don't.” She checked herself, and after a pause resumed in a
lighter tone: “No; I sha'n't go to the station; I'll commune with nature
to-day, and won't 'take any humanity in mine, thank you,' as Bill the
driver says. Adios.”
“I wish Kate would not use that dreadful slang, even in jest,” said
Mrs. Scott, in her rocking-chair at the French window, when Josephine
reentered the parlor as her sister walked briskly away. “I am afraid
she is being infected by the people at the station. She ought to have a
change.”
“I was just thinking,” said Josephine, looking abstractedly at her
mother, “that I would try to get John to take her to San Francisco this
winter. The Careys are expected, you know; she might visit them.”
“I'm afraid, if she stays here much longer, she won't care to see them
at all. She seems to care for nothing now that she ever liked before,”
returned the old lady ominously.
Meantime the subject of these criticisms was carrying away her own
reflections tightly buttoned up in her short jacket. She had driven back
her dog Spot--another one of her disillusions, who, giving way to
his lower nature, had once killed a sheep--as she did not wish her
Jacques-like contemplation of any wounded deer to be inconsistently
interrupted by a fresh outrage from her companion. The air was really
very chilly, and for the first time in her mountain experience the
direct rays of the sun seemed to be shorn of their power. This compelled
her to walk more briskly than she was conscious of, for in less than an
hour she came suddenly and breathlessly upon the mouth of the canyon, or
natural gateway to Eagle's Court.
To her always a profound spectacle of mountain magnificence, it seemed
to-day almost terrible in its cold, strong grandeur. The narrowing pass
was choked for a moment between two gigantic buttresses of granite,
approaching each other so closely at their towering summits that trees
growing in opposite clefts of the rock intermingled their branches and
pointed the soaring Gothic arch of a stupendous gateway. She raised her
eyes with a quickly beating heart. She knew that the interlacing trees
above her were as large as those she had just quitted; she knew also
that the point where they met was only half-way up the cliff, for she
had once gazed down upon them, dwindled to shrubs from the airy summit;
she knew that their shaken cones fell a thousand feet perpendicularly,
or bounded like shot from the scarred walls they bombarded. She
remembered that one of these pines, dislodged from its high foundations,
had once dropped like a portcullis in the archway, blocking the pass,
and was only carried afterwards by assault of steel and fire. Bending
her head mechanically, she ran swiftly through the shadowy passage, and
halted only at the beginning of the ascent on the other side.
It was here that the actual position of the plateau, so indefinite
of approach, began to be realized. It now appeared an independent
elevation, surrounded on three sides by gorges and watercourses, so
narrow as to be overlooked from the principal mountain range, with which
it was connected by a long canyon that led to the ridge. At the outlet
of this canyon--in bygone ages a mighty river--it had the appearance of
having been slowly raised by the diluvium of that river, and the debris
washed down from above--a suggestion repeated in miniature by the
artificial plateaus of excavated soil raised before the mouths of mining
tunnels in the lower flanks of the mountain. It was the realization of a
fact--often forgotten by the dwellers in Eagle's Court--that the valley
below them, which was their connecting link with the surrounding world,
was only reached by ascending the mountain, and the nearest road was
over the higher mountain ridge. Never before had this impressed itself
so strongly upon the young girl as when she turned that morning to look
upon the plateau below her. It seemed to illustrate the conviction
that had been slowly shaping itself out of her reflections on the
conversation of that morning. It was possible that the perfect
understanding of a higher life was only reached from a height still
greater, and that to those half-way up the mountain the summit was never
as truthfully revealed as to the humbler dwellers in the valley.
I do not know that these profound truths prevented her from gathering
some quaint ferns and berries, or from keeping her calm gray eyes open
to certain practical changes that were taking place around her. She had
noticed a singular thickening in the atmosphere that seemed to prevent
the passage of the sun's rays, yet without diminishing the transparent
quality of the air. The distant snow-peaks were as plainly seen, though
they appeared as if in moonlight. This seemed due to no cloud or mist,
but rather to a fading of the sun itself. The occasional flurry of wings
overhead, the whirring of larger birds in the cover, and a frequent
rustling in the undergrowth, as of the passage of some stealthy animal,
began equally to attract her attention. It was so different from the
habitual silence of these sedate solitudes. Kate had no vague fear of
wild beasts; she had been long enough a mountaineer to understand the
general immunity enjoyed by the unmolesting wayfarer, and kept her way
undismayed. She was descending an abrupt trail when she was stopped by a
sudden crash in the bushes. It seemed to come from the opposite incline,
directly in a line with her, and apparently on the very trail that she
was pursuing. The crash was then repeated again and again lower down, as
of a descending body. Expecting the apparition of some fallen tree, or
detached boulder bursting through the thicket, in its way to the bottom
of the gulch, she waited. The foliage was suddenly brushed aside, and
a large grizzly bear half rolled, half waddled, into the trail on the
opposite side of the hill. A few moments more would have brought them
face to face at the foot of the gulch; when she stopped there were not
fifty yards between them.
She did not scream; she did not faint; she was not even frightened.
There did not seem to be anything terrifying in this huge, stupid beast,
who, arrested by the rustle of a stone displaced by her descending feet,
rose slowly on his haunches and gazed at her with small, wondering eyes.
Nor did it seem strange to her, seeing that he was in her way, to pick
up a stone, throw it in his direction, and say simply, “Sho! get away!”
as she would have done to an intruding cow. Nor did it seem odd that
he should actually “go away” as he did, scrambling back into the bushes
again, and disappearing like some grotesque figure in a transformation
scene. It was not until after he had gone that she was taken with
a slight nervousness and giddiness, and retraced her steps somewhat
hurriedly, shying a little at every rustle in the thicket. By the time
she had reached the great gateway she was doubtful whether to be pleased
or frightened at the incident, but she concluded to keep it to herself.
It was still intensely cold. The light of the midday sun had decreased
still more, and on reaching the plateau again she saw that a dark cloud,
not unlike the precursor of a thunder-storm, was brooding over the snowy
peaks beyond. In spite of the cold this singular suggestion of summer
phenomena was still borne out by the distant smiling valley, and even
in the soft grasses at her feet. It seemed to her the crowning
inconsistency of the climate, and with a half-serious, half-playful
protest on her lips she hurried forward to seek the shelter of the
house.