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From Sand Hill to Pine

by Bret Harte · English · Gutenberg #2544 · 364,983 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: From Sand Hill to Pine

Author: Bret Harte


        
Release date: May 18, 2006 [eBook #2544]
                Most recently updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2544

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM SAND HILL TO PINE ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





FROM SAND HILL TO PINE


By Bret Harte




CONTENTS


FROM SAND HILL TO PINE


     A NIECE OF SNAPSHOT HARRY'S

     A TREASURE OF THE REDWOODS

     A BELLE OF CANADA CITY

     WHAT HAPPENED AT THE FONDA

     A JACK AND JILL OF THE SIERRAS

     MR. BILSON'S HOUSEKEEPER




FROM SAND HILL TO PINE




A NIECE OF SNAPSHOT HARRY'S


I

There was a slight jarring though the whole frame of the coach, a
grinding and hissing from the brakes, and then a sudden jolt as the
vehicle ran upon and recoiled from the taut pole-straps of the now
arrested horses. The murmur of a voice in the road was heard, followed
by the impatient accents of Yuba Bill, the driver.

“Wha-a-t? Speak up, can't ye?”

Here the voice uttered something in a louder key, but equally
unintelligible to the now interested and fully awakened passengers.

One of them dropped the window nearest him and looked out. He could see
the faint glistening of a rain-washed lantern near the wheelers' heads,
mingling with the stronger coach lights, and the glow of a distant open
cabin door through the leaves and branches of the roadside. The sound
of falling rain on the roof, a soft swaying of wind-tossed trees, and an
impatient movement on the box-seat were all they heard. Then Yuba Bill's
voice rose again, apparently in answer to the other.

“Why, that's half a mile away!”

“Yes, but ye might have dropped onto it in the dark, and it's all on the
down grade,” responded the strange voice more audibly.

The passengers were now thoroughly aroused.

“What's up, Ned?” asked the one at the window of the nearest of two
figures that had descended from the box.

“Tree fallen across the road,” said Ned, the expressman, briefly.

“I don't see no tree,” responded the passenger, leaning out of the
window towards the obscurity ahead.

“Now, that's onfortnit!” said Yuba Bill grimly; “but ef any gentleman
will only lend him an opery glass, mebbe he can see round the curve and
over the other side o' the hill where it is. Now, then,” addressing the
stranger with the lantern, “bring along your axes, can't ye?”

“Here's one, Bill,” said an officious outside passenger, producing
the instrument he had taken from its strap in the boot. It was the
“regulation” axe, beautifully shaped, highly polished, and utterly
ineffective, as Bill well knew.

“We ain't cuttin' no kindlin's,” he said scornfully; then he added
brusquely to the stranger: “Fetch out your biggest wood axe--you've got
one, ye know--and look sharp.”

“I don't think Bill need be so d----d rough with the stranger,
considering he's saved the coach a very bad smash,” suggested a
reflective young journalist in the next seat. “He talks as if the man
was responsible.”

“He ain't quite sure if that isn't the fact,” said the express
messenger, in a lowered voice.

“Why? What do you mean?” clamored the others excitedly.

“Well--THIS is about the spot where the up coach was robbed six months
ago,” returned the messenger.

“Dear me!” said the lady in the back seat, rising with a half hysterical
laugh, “hadn't we better get out before they come?”

“There is not the slightest danger, madam,” said a quiet, observant man,
who had scarcely spoken before, “or the expressman would not have told
us; nor would he, I fancy, have left his post beside the treasure on the
box.”

The slight sarcasm implied in this was enough to redden the expressman's
cheek in the light of the coach lamp which Yuba Bill had just unshipped
and brought to the window. He would have made some tart rejoinder, but
was prevented by Yuba Bill addressing the passengers: “Ye'll have to put
up with ONE light, I reckon, until we've got this job finished.”

“How long will it last, Bill?” asked the man nearest the window.

“Well,” said Bill, with a contemptuous glance at the elegant coach axe
he was carrying in his hand, “considerin' these purty first-class highly
expensive hash choppers that the kempany furnishes us, I reckon it may
take an hour.”

“But is there no place where we can wait?” asked the lady anxiously. “I
see a light in that house yonder.”

“Ye might try it, though the kempany, as a rule, ain't in the habit
o' makin' social calls there,” returned Bill, with a certain grim
significance. Then, turning to some outside passengers, he added, “Now,
then! them ez is goin' to help me tackle that tree, trot down! I
reckon that blitherin' idiot” (the stranger with the lantern, who had
disappeared) “will have sense enough to fetch us some ropes with his
darned axe.”

The passengers thus addressed, apparently miners and workingmen, good
humoredly descended, all except one, who seemed disinclined to leave the
much coveted seat on the box beside the driver.

“I'll look after your places and keep my own,” he said, with a laugh,
as the others followed Bill through the dripping rain. When they had
disappeared, the young journalist turned to the lady.

“If you would really like to go to that house, I will gladly accompany
you.” It was possible that in addition to his youthful chivalry there
was a little youthful resentment of Yuba Bill's domineering prejudices
in his attitude. However, the quiet, observant passenger lifted a look
of approval to him, and added, in his previous level, half contemptuous
tone:--

“You'll be quite as well there as here, madam, and there is certainly no
reason for your stopping in the coach when the driver chooses to leave
it.”

The passengers looked at each other. The stranger spoke with authority,
and Bill had certainly been a little arbitrary!

“I'll go too,” said the passenger by the window. “And you'll come, won't
you, Ned?” he added to the express messenger. The young man hesitated;
he was recently appointed, and as yet fresh to the business--but he
was not to be taught his duty by an officious stranger! He resented the
interference youthfully by doing the very thing he would have preferred
NOT to do, and with assumed carelessness--yet feeling in his pocket to
assure himself that the key of the treasure compartment was safe--turned
to follow them.

“Won't YOU come too?” said the journalist, politely addressing the
cynical passenger.

“No, I thank you! I'll take charge of the coach,” was the smiling
rejoinder, as he settled himself more comfortably in his seat.

The little procession moved away in silence. Oddly enough, no one,
except the lady, really cared to go, and two--the expressman and
journalist--would have preferred to remain on the coach. But the
national instinct of questioning any purely arbitrary authority probably
was a sufficient impulse. As they neared the opened door of what
appeared to be a four-roomed, unpainted, redwood boarded cabin, the
passenger who had occupied the seat near the window said,--

“I'll go first and sample the shanty.”

He was not, however, so far in advance of them but that the others could
hear quite distinctly his offhand introduction of their party on the
threshold, and the somewhat lukewarm response of the inmates. “We
thought we'd just drop in and be sociable until the coach was ready to
start again,” he continued, as the other passengers entered. “This yer
gentleman is Ned Brice, Adams & Co.'s expressman; this yer is Frank
Frenshaw, editor of the 'Mountain Banner;' this yer's a lady, so it
ain't necessary to give HER name, I reckon--even if we knowed it! Mine's
Sam Hexshill, of Hexshill & Dobbs's Flour Mills, of Stockton, whar,
ef you ever come that way, I'll be happy to return the compliment and
hospitality.”

The room they had entered had little of comfort and brightness in it
except the fire of pine logs which roared and crackled in the adobe
chimney. The air would have been too warm but for the strong west wind
and rain which entered the open door freely. There was no other light
than the fire, and its tremulous and ever-changing brilliancy gave a
spasmodic mobility to the faces of those turned towards it, or threw
into stronger shadow the features that were turned away. Yet, by this
uncertain light, they could see the figures of a man and two women. The
man rose and, with a certain apathetic gesture that seemed to partake
more of weariness and long suffering than positive discourtesy, tendered
seats on chairs, boxes, and even logs to the self-invited guests. The
stage party were surprised to see that this man was the stranger who had
held the lantern in the road.

“Ah! then you didn't go with Bill to help clear the road?” said the
expressman surprisedly.

The man slowly drew up his tall, shambling figure before the fire, and
then facing them, with his hands behind him, as slowly lowered himself
again as if to bring his speech to the level of his hearers and give a
lazier and more deliberate effect to his long-drawn utterance.

“Well--no!” he said slowly.
“I--didn't--go--with--no--Bill--to--help--clear--the road!
I--don't--reckon--TO go--with--no--Bill--to--clear--ANY road! I've just
whittled this thing down to a pint, and it's this--I ain't no stage
kempany's nigger! So far as turnin' out and warnin' 'em agin goin' to
smash over a fallen tree, and slap down into the canyon with a passel of
innercent passengers, I'm that much a white man, but I ain't no NIGGER
to work clearing things away for 'em, nor I ain't no scrub to work
beside 'em.” He slowly straightened himself up again, and, with his
former apathetic air, looking down upon one of the women who was setting
a coffee-pot on the coals, added, “But I reckon my old woman here kin
give you some coffee and whiskey--of you keer for it.”

Unfortunately the young expressman was more loyal to Bill than
diplomatic. “If Bill's a little rough,” he said, with a heightened
color, “perhaps he has some excuse for it. You forget it's only six
months ago that this coach was 'held up' not a hundred yards from this
spot.”

The woman with the coffee-pot here faced about, stood up, and, either
from design or some odd coincidence, fell into the same dogged attitude
that her husband had previously taken, except that she rested her hands
on her hips. She was prematurely aged, like many of her class, and her
black, snake-like locks, twisting loose from her comb as she lifted her
head, showed threads of white against the firelight. Then with slow and
implacable deliberation she said:

“We 'forget'! Well! not much, sonny! We ain't forgot it, and we ain't
goin' to forget it, neither! We ain't bin likely to forget it for
any time the last six months. What with visitations from the county
constables, snoopin's round from 'Frisco detectives, droppin's-in from
newspaper men, and yawpin's and starin's from tramps and strangers on
the road--we haven't had a chance to disremember MUCH! And when at last
Hiram tackled the head stage agent at Marysville, and allowed that this
yer pesterin' and persecutin' had got ter stop--what did that yer head
agent tell him? Told him to 'shet his head,' and be thankful that his
'thievin' old shanty wasn't burnt down around his ears!' Forget that six
months ago the coach was held up near here? Not much, sonny--not much!”

The situation was embarrassing to the guests, as ordinary politeness
called for some expression of sympathy with their gloomy hostess, and
yet a selfish instinct of humanity warned them that there must be some
foundation for this general distrust of the public. The journalist was
troubled in his conscience; the expressman took refuge in an official
reticence; the lady coughed slightly, and drew nearer to the fire with
a vague but safe compliment to its brightness and comfort. It devolved
upon Mr. Heckshill, who felt the responsibility of his late airy
introduction of the party, to boldly keep up his role, with an equally
non-committal, light-hearted philosophy.

“Well, ma'am,” he said, addressing his hostess, “it's a queer world,
and no man's got sabe enough to say what's the rights and wrongs o'
anything. Some folks believe one thing and act upon it, and other folks
think differently and act upon THAT! The only thing ye kin safely say is
that THINGS IS EZ THEY BE! My rule here and at the mill is jest to take
things ez I find 'em!”

It occurred to the journalist that Mr. Heckshill had the reputation,
in his earlier career, of “taking” such things as unoccupied lands
and timber “as he found them,” without much reference to their actual
owners. Apparently he was acting upon the same principle now, as he
reached for the demijohn of whiskey with the ingenuous pleasantry, “Did
somebody say whiskey, or did I dream it?”

But this did not satisfy Frenshaw. “I suppose,” he said, ignoring
Heckshill's diplomatic philosophy, “that you may have been the victim
of some misunderstanding or some unfortunate coincidence. Perhaps the
company may have confounded you with your neighbors, who are believed
to be friendly to the gang; or you may have made some injudicious
acquaintances. Perhaps”--

He was stopped by a suppressed but not unmusical giggle, which appeared
to come from the woman in the corner who had not yet spoken, and whose
face and figure in the shadow he had previously overlooked. But he could
now see that her outline was slim and graceful, and the contour of her
head charming,--facts that had evidently not escaped the observation of
the expressman and Mr. Heckshill, and that might have accounted for
the cautious reticence of the one and the comfortable moralizing of the
other.

The old woman cast an uneasy glance on the fair giggler, but replied to
Frenshaw:

“That's it! 'injerdishus acquaintances!' But just because we might
happen to have friends, or even be sorter related to folks in another
line o' business that ain't none o' ours, the kempany hain't no call to
persecute US for it! S'pose we do happen to know some one like”--

“Spit it out, aunty, now you've started in! I don't mind,” said the
fair giggler, now apparently casting off all restraint in an outburst of
laughter.

“Well,” said the old woman, with dogged desperation, “suppose, then,
that that young girl thar is the niece of Snapshot Harry, who stopped
the coach the last time”--

“And ain't ashamed of it, either!” interrupted the young girl, rising
and disclosing in the firelight an audacious but wonderfully pretty
face; “and supposing he IS my uncle, that ain't any cause for their
bedevilin' my poor old cousins Hiram and Sophy thar!” For all the
indignation of her words, her little white teeth flashed mischievously
in the dancing light, as if she rather enjoyed the embarrassment of
her audience, not excluding her own relatives. Evidently cousin Sophy
thought so too.

“It's all very well for you to laugh, Flo, you limb!” she retorted
querulously, yet with an admiring glance at the girl, “for ye know thar
ain't a man dare touch ye even with a word; but it's mighty hard on me
and Hiram, all the same.”

“Never you mind, Sophy dear,” said the girl, placing her hand half
affectionately, half humorously on the old woman's shoulder; “mebbe
I won't always be a discredit and a bother to you. Jest you hold
your hosses, and wait until uncle Harry 'holds up' the next Pioneer
Coach,”--the dancing devil in her eyes glanced as if accidentally on
the young expressman,--“and he'll make a big enough pile to send me to
Europe, and you'll be quit o' me.”

The embarrassment, suspiciousness, and uneasiness of the coach party
here found relief in a half hysteric explosion of laughter, in which
even the dogged Hiram and Sophy joined. It seemed as impossible to
withstand the girl's invincible audacity as her beauty. She was quick to
perceive her advantage, and, with a responsive laugh and a picturesque
gesture of invitation, said:--

“Now that's all settled, ye'd better waltz in and have your whiskey and
coffee afore the stage starts. Ye kin comfort yourselves that it ain't
stolen or pizoned, even if it is served up to ye by Snapshot Harry's
niece!” With another easy gesture she swung the demijohn over her arm,
and, offering a tin cup to each of the men, filled them in turn.

The ice thus broken, or perhaps thus perilously skated over, the
passengers were as profuse in their thanks and apologies as they had
been constrained and artificial before. Heckshill and Frenshaw vied with
each other for a glance from the audacious Flo. If their compliments
partook of an extravagance that was at times ironical, the girl was
evidently not deceived by it, but replied in kind. Only the expressman
who seemed to have fallen under the spell of her audacious glances, was
uneasy at the license of the others, yet himself dumb towards her. The
lady discreetly drew nearer to the fire, the old woman, and her coffee;
Hiram subsided into his apathetic attitude by the fire.

A shout from the road at last proclaimed the return of Yuba Bill and his
helpers. It had the singular effect of startling the party into a vague
and uneasy consciousness of indiscretion, as if it had been the voice
of the outer world of law and order, and their manner again became
constrained. The leave-taking was hurried and perfunctory; the
diplomatic Heckshill again lapsed into glittering generalities about
“the best of friends parting.” Only the expressman lingered for a moment
on the doorstep in the light of the fire and the girl's dancing eyes.

“I hope,” he stammered, with a very youthful blush, “to come the next
time--with--with--a better introduction.”

“Uncle Harry's,” she said, with a quick laugh and a mock curtsey, as she
turned away.

Once out of hearing, the party broke into hurried comment and criticism
of the scene they had just witnessed, and particularly of the fair
actress who had played so important a part, averring their emphatic
intention of wresting the facts from Yuba Bill at once, and
cross-examining him closely; but oddly enough, reaching the coach and
that redoubted individual, no one seemed to care to take the initiative,
and they all scrambled hurriedly to their seats without a word. How far
Yuba Bill's irritability and imperious haste contributed to this, or a
fear that he might in turn catechise them kept them silent, no one
knew. The cynically observant passenger was not there; he and the sole
occupant of the box-seat, they were told, had joined the clearing party
some moments before, and would be picked up by Yuba Bill later on.

Five minutes after Bill had gathered up the reins, they reached the
scene of obstruction. The great pine-tree which had fallen from the
steep bank above and stretched across the road had been partly lopped
of its branches, divided in two lengths, which were now rolled to either
side of the track, leaving barely space for the coach to pass. The
huge vehicle “slowed up” as Yuba Bill skillfully guided his six horses
through this narrow alley, whose tassels of pine, glistening with wet,
brushed the panels and sides of the coach, and effectually excluded any
view from its windows. Seen from the coach top, the horses appeared to
be cleaving their way through a dark, shining olive sea, that parted
before and closed behind them, as they slowly passed. The leaders were
just emerging from it, and Bill was gathering up his slackened reins,
when a peremptory voice called, “Halt!” At the same moment the coach
lights flashed upon a masked and motionless horseman in the road. Bill
made an impulsive reach for his whip, but in the same instant checked
himself, reined in his horses with a suppressed oath, and sat perfectly
rigid. Not so the expressman, who caught up his rifle, but it was
arrested by Bill's arm, and his voice in his ear!

“Too late!--we're covered!--don't be a d----d fool!”

The inside passengers, still encompassed by obscurity, knew only that
the stage had stopped. The “outsiders” knew, by experience, that they
were covered by unseen guns in the wayside branches, and scarcely moved.

“I didn't think it was the square thing to stop you, Bill, till you'd
got through your work,” said a masterful but not unpleasant voice, “and
if you'll just hand down the express box, I'll pass you and the rest of
your load through free. But as we're both in a hurry, you'd better look
lively about it.”

“Hand it down,” said Bill gruffly to the expressman.

The expressman turned with a white check but blazing eyes to the
compartment below his seat. He lingered, apparently in some difficulty
with the lock of the compartment, but finally brought out the box and
handed it to another armed and masked figure that appeared mysteriously
from the branches beside the wheels.

“Thank you!” said the voice; “you can slide on now.”

“And thank you for nothing,” said Bill, gathering up his reins. “It's
the first time any of your kind had to throw down a tree to hold me up!”

“You're lying, Bill!--though you don't know it,” said the voice
cheerfully. “Far from throwing down a tree to stop you, it was I sent
word along the road to warn you from crashing down upon it, and sending
you and your load to h-ll before your time! Drive on!”

The angry Bill waited for no second comment, but laying his whip over
the backs of his team, drove furiously forward. So rapidly had the whole
scene passed that the inside passengers knew nothing of it, and even
those on the top of the coach roused from their stupor and inglorious
inaction only to cling desperately to the terribly swaying coach as it
thundered down the grade and try to keep their equilibrium. Yet,
furious as was their speed, Yuba Bill could not help noticing that the
expressman from time to time cast a hurried glance behind him. Bill knew
that the young man had shown readiness and nerve in the attack, although
both were hopeless; yet he was so much concerned at his set white face
and compressed lips that when, at the end of three miles' unabated
speed, they galloped up to the first station, he seized the young man
by the arm, and, as the clamor of the news they had brought rose around
them, dragged him past the wondering crowd, caught a decanter from the
bar, and, opening the door of a side room, pushed him into it and closed
the door behind them.

“Look yar, Brice! Stop it! Quit it right thar!” he said emphatically,
laying his large hand on the young fellow's shoulder. “Be a man! You've
shown you are one, green ez you are, for you had the sand in ye--the
clear grit to-night, yet you'd have been a dead man now, if I hadn't
stopped ye! Man! you had no show from the beginning! You've done your
level best to save your treasure, and I'm your witness to the kempany,
and proud of it, too! So shet your head and--and,” pouring out a glass
of whiskey, “swaller that!”

But Brice waved him aside with burning eyes and dry lips.

“You don't know it all, Bill!” he said, with a half choked voice.

“All what?”

“Swear that you'll keep it a secret,” he said feverishly, gripping
Bill's arm in turn, “and I'll tell you.”

“Go on!”

“THE COACH WAS ROBBED BEFORE THAT!”

“Wot yer say?” ejaculated Bill.

“The treasure--a packet of greenbacks--had been taken from the box
before the gang stopped us!”

“The h-ll, you say!”

“Listen! When you told me to hand down the box, I had an idea--a d----d
fool one, perhaps--of taking that package out and jumping from the coach
with it. I knew they would fire at me only; I might get away, but if
they killed me, I'd have done only my duty, and nobody else would have
got hurt. But when I got to the box I found that the lock had been
forced and the money was gone. I managed to snap the lock again before
I handed it down. I thought they might discover it at once and chase us,
but they didn't.”

“And then thar war no greenbacks in the box that they took?” gasped
Bill, with staring eyes.

“No!”

Bill raised his hand in the air as if in solemn adjuration, and then
brought it down on his knee, doubling up in a fit of uncontrollable but
perfectly noiseless laughter. “Oh, Lord!” he gasped, “hol' me afore I
bust right open! Hush,” he went on, with a jerk of his fingers towards
the next room, “not a word o' this to any one! It's too much to keep,
I know; it's nearly killing me! but we must swaller it ourselves! Oh,
Jerusalem the Golden! Oh, Brice! Think o' that face o' Snapshot Harry's
ez he opened that treasure box afore his gang in the brush! And he
allers so keen and so easy and so cock sure! Created snakes! I'd go
through this every trip for one sight of him as he just riz up from that
box and cussed!” He again shook with inward convulsions till his face
grew purple, and even the red came back to the younger man's cheek.

“But this don't bring the money back, Bill,” said Brice gloomily.

Yuba Bill swallowed the glass of whiskey at a gulp, wiped his mouth and
eyes, smothered a second explosion, and then gravely confronted Brice.

“When do you think it was taken, and how?”

“It must have been taken when I left the coach on the road and went
over to that settler's cabin,” said Brice bitterly. “Yet I believed
everything was safe, and I left two men--both passengers--one inside and
one on the box, that man who sat the other side of you.”

“Jee whillikins!” ejaculated Bill, with his hand to his forehead, “the
men I clean forgot to pick up in the road, and now I reckon they never
intended to be picked up, either.”

“No doubt a part of the gang,” said Brice, with increased bitterness; “I
see it all now.”

“No!” said Bill decisively, “that ain't Snapshot Harry's style; he's a
clean fighter, with no underhand tricks. And I don't believe he threw
down that tree, either. Look yer, sonny!” he added, suddenly laying his
hand on Brice's shoulder, “a hundred to one that that was the work of
a couple o' d----d sneaks or traitors in that gang who kem along as
passengers. I never took any stock in that coyote who paid extra for his
box-seat.”

Brice knew that Bill never looked kindly on any passenger who, by
bribing the ticket agent, secured this favorite seat, which Bill felt
was due to his personal friends and was in his own selection. He only
returned gloomily:--

“I don't see what difference it makes to us which robber got the money.

“Ye don't,” said Bill, raising his head, with a sudden twinkle in his
eyes. “Then ye don't know Snapshot Harry. Do ye suppose he's goin' to
sit down and twiddle his thumbs with that skin game played on him? No,
sir,” he continued, with a thoughtful deliberation, drawing his fingers
slowly through his long beard, “he spotted it--and smelt out the whole
trick ez soon ez he opened that box, and that's why he didn't foller us!
He'll hunt those sneak thieves into h-ll but what he'll get 'em, and,”
 he went on still more slowly, “by the livin' hokey! I reckon, sonny,
that's jest how ye'll get your chance to chip in!”

“I don't understand,” said Brice impatiently.

“Well,” said Bill, with more provoking slowness, as if he were communing
with himself rather than Brice, “Harry's mighty proud and high toned,
and to be given away like this has cut down into his heart, you bet. It
ain't the money he's thinkin' of; it's this split in the gang--the loss
of his power ez boss, ye see--and ef he could get hold o' them chaps
he'd let the money slide ez long ez they didn't get it. So you've got a
detective on your side that's worth the whole police force of Californy!
Ye never heard anything about Snapshot Harry, did ye?” asked Bill
carelessly, raising his eyes to Brice's eager face.

The young man flushed slightly. “Very little,” he said. At the same time
a vision of the pretty girl in the settler's cabin flashed upon him with
a new significance.

“He's more than half white, in some ways,” said Bill thoughtfully, “and
they say he lives somewhere about here in a cabin in the bush, with a
crippled sister and her darter, who both swear by him. It mightn't be
hard to find him--ef a man was dead set on it.”

Brice faced about with determined eyes. “I'LL DO IT,” he said quietly.

“Ye might,” said Bill, still more deliberately stroking his beard,
“mention my name, ef ye ever get to see him.”

“Your name,” ejaculated the astonished Brice.

“My name,” repeated Bill calmly. “He knows it's my bounden duty to kill
him ef I get the chance, and I know that he'd plug me full o' holes in
a minit ef thar war a necessity for it. But in these yer affairs, sonny,
it seems to be the understood thing by the kempany that I'm to keep
fiery young squirts like you, and chuckle-headed passengers like
them”--jerking his thumb towards the other room--“from gettin'
themselves killed by their rashness. So ontil the kempany fill the top
o' that coach with men who ain't got any business to do BUT fightin'
other men who ain't got any other business to do BUT to fight them--the
odds are agin us! Harry has always acted square to me--that's how I
know he ain't in this sneak-thief business, and why he didn't foller us,
suspectin' suthin', and I've always acted square to him. All the same,
I'd like ter hev seen his face when that box was opened! Lordy!” Here
Bill again collapsed in his silent paroxysm of mirth. “Ye might tell him
how I laughed!”

“I would hardly do that, Bill,” said the young man, smiling in spite of
himself. “But you've given me an idea, and I'll work it out.”

Bill glanced at the young fellow's kindling eyes and flushing cheek, and
nodded. “Well, rastle with that idea later on, sonny. I'll fix you all
right in my report to the kempany, but the rest you must work alone.
I've started out the usual posse, circus-ridin' down the road after
Harry. He'd be a rough customer to meet just now,” continued Bill, with
a chuckle, “ef thar was the ghost of a chance o' them comin' up with
him, for him and his gang is scattered miles away by this.” He paused,
tossed off another glass of whiskey, wiped his mouth, and saying
to Brice, with a wink, “It's about time to go and comfort them thar
passengers,” led the way through the crowded barroom into the stage
office.

The spectacle of Bill's humorously satisfied face and Brice's bright
eyes and heightened color was singularly effective. The “inside”
 passengers, who had experienced neither the excitement nor the danger of
the robbery, yet had been obliged to listen to the hairbreadth escapes
of the others, pooh-poohed the whole affair, and even the “outsides”
 themselves were at last convinced that the robbery was a slight one,
with little or no loss to the company. The clamor subsided almost as
suddenly as it had arisen; the wiser passengers fashioned their attitude
on the sang-froid of Yuba Bill, and the whole coach load presently
rolled away as complacently as if nothing had happened.


II

The robbery furnished the usual amount of copy for the local press.
There was the inevitable compliment to Yuba Bill for his well-known
coolness; the conduct of the young expressman, “who, though new to the
service, displayed an intrepidity that only succumbed to numbers,” was
highly commended, and even the passengers received their meed of
praise, not forgetting the lady, “who accepted the incident with the
light-hearted pleasantry characteristic of the Californian woman.” There
was the usual allusion to the necessity of a Vigilance Committee to
cope with this “organized lawlessness” but it is to be feared that the
readers of “The Red Dog Clarion,” however ready to lynch a horse thief,
were of the opinion that rich stage express companies were quite able to
take care of their own property.

It was with full cognizance of these facts and their uselessness to him
that the next morning Mr. Ned Brice turned from the road where the
coach had just halted on the previous night and approached the settler's
cabin. If a little less sanguine than he was in Yuba Bill's presence,
he was still doggedly inflexible in his design, whatever it might have
been, for he had not revealed it even to Yuba Bill. It was his own; it
was probably crude and youthful in its directness, but for that reason
it was probably more convincing than the vacillations of older counsel.

He paused a moment at the closed door, conscious, however, of some
hurried movement within which signified that his approach had been
observed. The door was opened, and disclosed only the old woman. The
same dogged expression was on her face as when he had last seen it,
with the addition of querulous expectancy. In reply to his polite
“Good-morning,” she abruptly faced him with her hands still on the door.

“Ye kin stop right there! Ef yer want ter make any talk about this yar
robbery, ye might ez well skedaddle to oncet, for we ain't 'takin' any'
to-day!”

“I have no wish to talk about the robbery,” said Brice quietly, “and as
far as I can prevent it, you will not be troubled by any questions. If
you doubt my word or the intentions of the company, perhaps you will
kindly read that.”

He drew from his pocket a still damp copy of “The Red Dog Clarion” and
pointed to a paragraph.

“Wot's that?” she said querulously, feeling for her spectacles.

“Shall I read it?”

“Go on.”

He read it slowly aloud. I grieve to say it had been jointly concocted
the night before at the office of the “Clarion” by himself and the young
journalist--the latter's assistance being his own personal tribute to
the graces of Miss Flo. It read as follows:--

“The greatest assistance was rendered by Hiram Tarbox, Esq., a resident
of the vicinity, in removing the obstruction, which was, no doubt,
the preliminary work of some of the robber gang, and in providing
hospitality for the delayed passengers. In fact, but for the timely
warning of Yuba Bill by Mr. Tarbox, the coach might have crashed into
the tree at that dangerous point, and an accident ensued more disastrous
to life and limb than the robbery itself.”

The sudden and unmistakable delight that expanded the old woman's mouth
was so convincing that it might have given Brice a tinge of remorse over
the success of his stratagem, had he not been utterly absorbed in his
purpose. “Hiram!” she shouted suddenly.

The old man appeared from some back door with a promptness that proved
his near proximity, and glanced angrily at Brice until he caught sight
of his wife's face. Then his anger changed to wonder.

“Read that again, young feller,” she said exultingly.

Brice re-read the paragraph aloud for Mr. Tarbox's benefit.

“That 'ar 'Hiram Tarbox, Esquire,' means YOU, Hiram,” she gasped, in
delighted explanation.

Hiram seized the paper, read the paragraph himself, spread out the whole
page, examined it carefully, and then a fatuous grin began slowly to
extend itself over his whole face, invading his eyes and ears, until
the heavy, harsh, dogged lines of his nostrils and jaws had utterly
disappeared.

“B'gosh!” he said, “that's square! Kin I keep it?”

“Certainly,” said Brice. “I brought it for you.”

“Is that all ye came for?” said Hiram, with sudden suspicion.

“No,” said the young man frankly. Yet he hesitated a moment as he added,
“I would like to see Miss Flora.”

His hesitation and heightened color were more disarming to suspicion
than the most elaborate and carefully prepared indifference. With their
knowledge and pride in their relative's fascinations they felt it could
have but one meaning! Hiram wiped his mouth with his hand, assumed a
demure expression, glanced at his wife, and answered:--

“She ain't here now.”

Mr. Brice's face displayed his disappointment. But the true lover
holds a talisman potent with old and young. Mrs. Tarbox felt a sneaking
maternal pity for this suddenly stricken Strephon.

“She's gone home,” she added more gently--“went at sun-up this mornin'.”

“Home,” repeated Brice. “Where's that?”

Mrs. Tarbox looked at her husband and hesitated. Then she said--a little
in her old manner--“Her uncle's.”

“Can you direct me the way there?” asked Brice simply.

The astonishment in their faces presently darkened into suspicion again.
“Ef that's your little game,” began Hiram, with a lowering brow--

“I have no little game but to see her and speak with her,” said Brice
boldly. “I am alone and unarmed, as you see,” he continued, pointing
to his empty belt and small dispatch bag slung on his shoulder, “and
certainly unable to do any one any harm. I am willing to take what risks
there are. And as no one knows of my intention, nor of my coming here,
whatever might happen to me, no one need know it. You would be safe from
questioning.”

There was that hopeful determination in his manner that overrode their
resigned doggedness. “Ef we knew how to direct you thar,” said the old
woman cautiously, “ye'd be killed outer hand afore ye even set eyes on
the girl. The house is in a holler with hills kept by spies; ye'd be a
dead man as soon as ye crossed its boundary.”

“Wot do YOU know about it?” interrupted her husband quickly, in
querulous warning. “Wot are ye talkin' about?”

“You leave me alone, Hiram! I ain't goin' to let that young feller
get popped off without a show, or without knowin' jest wot he's got to
tackle, nohow ye kin fix it! And can't ye see he's bound to go, whatever
ye says?”

Mr. Tarbox saw this fact plainly in Brice's eyes, and hesitated.

“The most that I kin tell ye,” he said gloomily, “is the way the gal
takes when she goes from here, but how far it is, or if it ain't a
blind, I can't swar, for I hevn't bin thar myself, and Harry never comes
here but on an off night, when the coach ain't runnin' and thar's no
travel.” He stopped suddenly and uneasily, as if he had said too much.

“Thar ye go, Hiram, and ye talk of others gabblin'! So ye might as well
tell the young feller how that thar ain't but one way, and that's the
way Harry takes, too, when he comes yer oncet in an age to talk to his
own flesh and blood, and see a Christian face that ain't agin him!”

Mr. Tarbox was silent. “Ye know whar the tree was thrown down on the
road,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“The mountain rises straight up on the right side of the road, all hazel
brush and thorn--whar a goat couldn't climb.”

“Yes.”

“But that's a lie! for thar's a little trail, not a foot wide, runs up
from the road for a mile, keepin' it in view all the while, but bein'
hidden by the brush. Ye kin see everything from thar, and hear a
teamster spit on the road.”

“Go on,” said Brice impatiently.

“Then it goes up and over the ridge, and down the other side into a
little gulch until it comes to the canyon of the North Fork, where the
stage road crosses over the bridge high up. The trail winds round the
bank of the Fork and comes out on the LEFT side of the stage road about
a thousand feet below it. That's the valley and hollow whar Harry lives,
and that's the only way it can be found. For all along the LEFT of the
stage road is a sheer pitch down that thousand feet, whar no one kin git
up or down.”

“I understand,” said Brice, with sparkling eyes. “I'll find my way all
right.”

“And when ye git thar, look out for yourself!” put in the woman
earnestly. “Ye may have regular greenhorn's luck and pick up Flo afore
ye cross the boundary, for she's that bold that when she gets lonesome
o' stayin' thar she goes wanderin' out o' bounds.”

“Hev ye any weppin,--any shootin'-iron about ye?” asked Tarbox, with a
latent suspicion.

The young man smiled, and again showed his empty belt. “None!” he said
truthfully.

“I ain't sure ef that ain't the safest thing arter all with a shot like
Harry,” remarked the old man grimly. “Well, so long!” he added, and
turned away.

It was clearly a leave-taking, and Brice, warmly thanking them both,
returned to the road.

It was not far to the scene of the obstruction, yet but for Tarbox's
timely hint, the little trail up the mountain side would have escaped
his observation. Ascending, he soon found himself creeping along a
narrow ledge of rock, hidden from the road that ran fifty yards below by
a thick network growth of thorn and bramble, which still enabled him to
see its whole parallel length. Perilous in the extreme to any hesitating
foot, at one point, directly above the obstruction, the ledge itself
was missing--broken away by the fall of the tree from the forest crest
higher up. For an instant Brice stood dizzy and irresolute before the
gap. Looking down for a foothold, his eye caught the faint imprint of
a woman's shoe on a clayey rock projecting midway of the chasm. It must
have been the young girl's footprint made that morning, for the narrow
toe was pointed in the direction she would go! Where SHE could pass
should he shrink from going? Without further hesitation he twined his
fingers around the roots above him, and half swung, half pulled himself
along until he once more felt the ledge below him.

From time to time, as he went on along the difficult track, the narrow
little toe-print pointed the way to him, like an arrow through the
wilds. It was a pleasant thought, and yet a perplexing one. Would he
have undertaken this quest just to see her? Would he be content with
that if his other motive failed? For as he made his way up to the ridge
he was more than once assailed by doubts of the practical success of his
enterprise. In the excitement of last night, and even the hopefulness
of the early morning, it seemed an easy thing to persuade the vain and
eccentric highwayman that their interests might be identical, and
to convince him that his, Brice's, assistance to recover the stolen
greenbacks and insure the punishment of the robber, with the possible
addition of a reward from the express company, would be an inducement
for them to work together. The risks that he was running seemed to his
youthful fancy to atone for any defects in his logic or his plans. Yet
as he crossed the ridge, leaving the civilized highway behind him,
and descended the narrow trail, which grew wilder at each step, his
arguments seemed no longer so convincing. He now hurried forward,
however, with a feverish haste to anticipate the worst that might befall
him.

The trail grew more intricate in the deep ferns; the friendly little
footprint had vanished in this primeval wilderness. As he pushed through
the gorge, he could hear at last the roar of the North Fork forcing its
way through the canyon that crossed the gorge at right angles. At last
he reached its current, shut in by two narrow precipitous walls that
were spanned five hundred feet above by the stage road over a perilous
bridge. As he approached the gloomy canyon, he remembered that the
river, seen from above, seemed to have no banks, but to have cut its way
through the solid rock.

He found, however, a faint ledge made by caught driftwood from the
current and the debris of the overhanging cliffs. Again the narrow
footprint on the ooze was his guide. At last, emerging from the canyon,
a strange view burst upon his sight. The river turned abruptly to the
right, and, following the mountain side, left a small hollow completely
walled in by the surrounding heights. To his left was the ridge he had
descended from on the other side, and he now understood the singular
detour he had made. He was on the other side of the stage road also,
which ran along the mountain shelf a thousand feet above him. The wall,
a sheer cliff, made the hollow inaccessible from that side. Little hills
covered with buckeye encompassed it. It looked like a sylvan retreat,
and yet was as secure in its isolation and approaches as the outlaw's
den that it was.

He was gazing at the singular prospect when a shot rang in the air. It
seemed to come from a distance, and he interpreted it as a signal. But
it was followed presently by another; and putting his hand to his hat to
keep it from falling, he found that the upturned brim had been pierced
by a bullet. He stopped at this evident hint, and, taking his dispatch
bag from his shoulder, placed it significantly upon a boulder, and
looked around as if to await the appearance of the unseen marksman.
The rifle shot rang out again, the bag quivered, and turned over with a
bullet hole through it!

He took out his white handkerchief and waved it. Another shot followed,
and the handkerchief was snapped from his fingers, torn from corner
to corner. A feeling of desperation and fury seized him; he was being
played with by a masked and skillful assassin, who only waited until
it pleased him to fire the deadly shot! But this time he could see the
rifle smoke drifting from under a sycamore not a hundred yards away. He
set his white lips together, but with a determined face and unfaltering
step walked directly towards it. In another moment he believed and
almost hoped that all would be over. With such a marksman he would not
be maimed, but killed outright.

He had not covered half the distance before a man lounged out from
behind the tree carelessly shouldering his rifle. He was tall but
slightly built, with an amused, critical manner, and nothing about him
to suggest the bloodthirsty assassin. He met Brice halfway, dropping his
rifle slantingly across his breast with his hands lightly grasping the
lock, and gazed at the young man curiously.

“You look as if you'd had a big scare, old man, but you've clear grit
for all that!” he said, with a critical and reassuring smile. “Now,
what are you doing here? Stay,” he continued, as Brice's parched lips
prevented him from replying immediately. “I ought to know your face.
Hello! you're the expressman!” His glance suddenly shifted, and swept
past Brice over the ground beyond him to the entrance of the hollow, but
his smile returned as he apparently satisfied himself that the young man
was alone. “Well, what do you want?”

“I want to see Snapshot Harry,” said Brice, with an effort. His voice
came back more slowly than his color, but that was perhaps hurried by a
sense of shame at his physical weakness.

“What you want is a drop o' whiskey,” said the stranger good humoredly,
taking his arm, “and we'll find it in that shanty just behind the tree.”
 To Brice's surprise, a few steps in that direction revealed a fair-sized
cabin, with a slight pretentiousness about it of neatness, comfort, and
picturesque effect, far superior to the Tarbox shanty. A few flowers
were in boxes on the window--signs, as Brice fancied, of feminine taste.
When they reached the threshold, somewhat of this quality was also
visible in the interior. When Brice had partaken of the whiskey,
the stranger, who had kept silence, pointed to a chair, and said
smilingly:--

“I am Henry Dimwood, alias Snapshot Harry, and this is my house.”

“I came to speak with you about the robbery of greenbacks from the coach
last night,” began Brice hurriedly, with a sudden access of hope at his
reception. “I mean, of course,”--he stopped and hesitated,--“the actual
robbery before YOU stopped us.”

“What!” said Harry, springing to his feet, “do you mean to say YOU knew
it?”

Brice's heart sank, but he remained steadfast and truthful. “Yes,” he
said, “I knew it when I handed down the box. I saw that the lock had
been forced, but I snapped it together again. It was my fault. Perhaps I
should have warned you, but I am solely to blame.”

“Did Yuba Bill know of it?” asked the highwayman, with singular
excitement.

“Not at the time, I give you my word!” replied Brice quickly, thinking
only of loyalty to his old comrade. “I never told him till we reached
the station.”

“And he knew it then?” repeated Harry eagerly.

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything? Did he do anything? Did he look astonished?”

Brice remembered Bill's uncontrollable merriment, but replied vaguely
and diplomatically, “He was certainly astonished.”

A laugh gathered in Snapshot Harry's eyes which at last overspread his
whole face, and finally shook his frame as he sat helplessly down again.
Then, wiping his eyes, he said in a shaky voice:--

“It would have been sure death to have trusted myself near that station,
but I think I'd have risked it just to have seen Bill's face when you
told him! Just think of it! Bill, who was a match for anybody! Bill,
who was never caught napping! Bill, who only wanted supreme control
of things to wipe me off the face of the earth! Bill, who knew how
everything was done, and could stop it if he chose, and then to have
been ROBBED TWICE IN ONE EVENING BY MY GANG! Yes, sir! Yuba Bill and
his rotten old coach were GONE THROUGH TWICE INSIDE HALF AN HOUR by the
gang!”

“Then you knew of it too?” said Brice, in uneasy astonishment.

“Afterwards, my young friend--like Yuba Bill--afterwards.” He stopped;
his whole expression changed. “It was done by two sneaking hounds,” he
said sharply; “one whom I suspected before, and one, a new hand, a pal
of his. They were detached to watch the coach and be satisfied that the
greenbacks were aboard, for it isn't my style to 'hold up' except
for something special. They were to take seats on the coach as far as
Ringwood Station, three miles below where we held you up, and to get out
there and pass the word to us that it was all right. They didn't; that
made us a little extra careful, seeing something was wrong, but never
suspecting THEM. We found out afterwards that they got one of my scouts
to cut down that tree, saying it was my orders and a part of our game,
calculating in the stoppage and confusion to collar the swag and get off
with it. Without knowing it, YOU played into their hands by going into
Tarbox's cabin.”

“But how did you know this?” interrupted Brice, in wonder.

“They forgot one thing,” continued Snapshot Harry grimly. “They forgot
that half an hour before and half an hour after a stage is stopped we
have that road patrolled, every foot of it. While I was opening the box
in the brush, the two fools, sneaking along the road, came slap upon one
of my patrols, and then tried to run for it. One was dropped, but before
he was plugged full of holes and hung up on a tree, he confessed, and
said the other man who escaped had the greenbacks.”

Brice's face fell. “Then they are lost,” he said bitterly.

“Not unless he eats them--as he may want to do before I'm done on him,
for he must either starve or come out. That road is still watched by my
men from Tarbox's cabin to the bridge. He's there somewhere, and can't
get forward or backward. Look!” he said, rising and going to the door.
“That road,” he pointed to the stage road,--a narrow ledge flanked on
one side by a precipitous mountain wall, and on the other by an equally
precipitate descent,--“is his limit and tether, and he can't escape on
either side.”

“But the trail?”

“There is but one entrance to it,--the way you came, and that is guarded
too. From the time you entered it until you reached the bottom, you were
signaled here from point to point! HE would have been dropped! I merely
gave YOU a hint of what might have happened to you, if you were up to
any little game! You took it like a white man. Come, now! What is your
business?”

Thus challenged, Brice plunged with youthful hopefulness into his plan;
if, as he voiced it, it seemed to him a little extravagant, he was
buoyed up by the frankness of the highwayman, who also had treated
the double robbery with a levity that seemed almost as extravagant. He
suggested that they should work together to recover the money; that the
express company should know that the unprecedented stealthy introduction
of robbers in the guise of passengers was not Snapshot Harry's method,
and he repudiated it as unmanly and unsportsmanlike; and that, by using
his superior skill and knowledge of the locality to recover the money
and deliver the culprit into the company's hands, he would not only earn
the reward that they should offer, but that he would evoke a sentiment
that all Californians would understand and respect. The highwayman
listened with a tolerant smile, but, to Brice's surprise, this appeal
to his vanity touched him less than the prospective punishment of the
thief.

“It would serve the d----d hound right,” he muttered, “if, instead of
being shot like a man, he was made to 'do time' in prison, like the
ordinary sneak thief that he is.” When Brice had concluded, he said
briefly, “The only trouble with your plans, my young friend, is that
about twenty-five men have got to consider them, and have THEIR say
about it. Every man in my gang is a shareholder in these greenbacks, for
I work on the square; and it's for him to say whether he'll give them up
for a reward and the good opinion of the express company. Perhaps,” he
went on, with a peculiar smile, “it's just as well that you tried it on
me first! However, I'll sound the boys, and see what comes of it, but
not until you're safe off the premises.”

“And you'll let me assist you?” said Brice eagerly.

Snapshot Harry smiled again. “Well, if you come across the d----d thief,
and you recognize him and can get the greenbacks from him, I'll pass
over the game to you.” He rose and added, apparently by way of farewell,
“Perhaps it's just as well that I should give you a guide part of the
way to prevent accidents.” He went to a door leading to an adjoining
room, and called “Flo!”

Brice's heart leaped! If he had forgotten her in the excitement of his
interview, he atoned for it by a vivid blush. Her own color was a little
heightened as she slipped into the room, but the two managed to look
demurely at each other, without a word of recognition.

“This is my niece, Flora,” said Snapshot Harry, with a slight wave of
the hand that was by no means uncourtly, “and her company will keep you
from any impertinent questioning as well as if I were with you. This is
Mr. Brice, Flo, who came to see me on business, and has quite forgotten
my practical joking.”

The girl acknowledged Brice's bow with a shyness very different from
her manner of the evening before. Brice felt embarrassed and evidently
showed it, for his host, with a smile, put an end to the constraint
by shaking the young man's hand heartily, bidding him good-by, and
accompanying him to the door.

Once on their way, Mr. Brice's spirits returned. “I told you last
night,” he said, “that I hoped to meet you the next time with a better
introduction. You suggested your uncle's. Well, are you satisfied?”

“But you didn't come to see ME,” said the girl mischievously.

“How do you know what my intentions were?” returned the young man
gayly, gazing at the girl's charming face with a serious doubt as to the
singleness of his own intentions.

“Oh, because I know,” she answered, with a toss of her brown head. “I
heard what you said to uncle Harry.”

Mr. Brice's brow contracted. “Perhaps you saw me, too, when I came,” he
said, with a slight touch of bitterness as he thought of his reception.

Miss Flo laughed. Brice walked on silently; the girl was heartless and
worthy of her education. After a pause she said demurely, “I knew he
wouldn't hurt you--but YOU didn't. That's where you showed your grit in
walking straight on.”

“And I suppose you were greatly amused,” he replied scornfully.

The girl lifted her arms a little wearily, as with a half sigh she
readjusted her brown braids under her uncle's gray slouch hat, which she
had caught up as she passed out. “Thar ain't much to laugh at here!” she
said. “But it was mighty funny when you tried to put your hat straight,
and then found thur was that bullet hole right through the brim! And the
way you stared at it--Lordy!”

Her musical laugh was infectious, and swept away his outraged dignity.
He laughed too. At last she said, gazing at his hat, “It won't do for
you to go back to your folks wearin' that sort o' thing. Here! Take
mine!” With a saucy movement she audaciously lifted his hat from his
head, and placed her own upon it.

“But this is your uncle's hat,” he remonstrated.

“All the same; he spoiled yours,” she laughed, adjusting his hat upon
her own head. “But I'll keep yours to remember you by. I'll loop it up
by this hole, and it'll look mighty purty. Jes' see!” She plucked a
wild rose from a bush by the wayside, and, passing the stalk through the
bullet hole, pinned the brim against the crown by a thorn. “There,” she
said, putting on the hat again with a little affectation of coquetry,
“how's that?”

Mr. Brice thought it very picturesque and becoming to the graceful head
and laughing eyes beneath it, and said so. Then, becoming in his turn
audacious, he drew nearer to her side.

“I suppose you know the forfeit of putting on a gentleman's hat?”

Apparently she did, for she suddenly made a warning gesture, and said,
“Not here! It would be a bigger forfeit than you'd keer fo'.” Before he
could reply she turned aside as if quite innocently, and passed into
the shade of a fringe of buckeyes. He followed quickly. “I didn't mean
that,” she said; but in the mean time he had kissed the pink tip of her
ear under its brown coils. He was, nevertheless, somewhat discomfited
by her undisturbed manner and serene face. “Ye don't seem to mind bein'
shot at,” she said, with an odd smile, “but it won't do for you to
kalkilate that EVERYBODY shoots as keerfully as uncle Harry.”

“I don't understand,” he replied, struck by her manner.

“Ye ain't very complimentary, or you'd allow that other folks might be
wantin' what you took just now, and might consider you was poachin',”
 she returned gravely. “My best and strongest holt among those men is
that uncle Harry would kill the first one who tried anything like that
on--and they know it. That's how I get all the liberty I want here, and
can come and go alone as I like.”

Brice's face flushed quickly with genuine shame and remorse. “Do forgive
me,” he said hurriedly. “I didn't think--I'm a brute and a fool!”

“Uncle Harry allowed you was either drunk or a born idiot when you was
promenadin' into the valley just now,” she said, with a smile.

“And what did you think?” he asked a little uneasily.

“I thought you didn't look like a drinkin' man,” she answered
audaciously.

Brice bit his lip and walked on silently, at which she cast a sidelong
glance under her widely spaced heavy lashes and said demurely, “I
thought last night it was mighty good for you to stand up for your
frien' Yuba Bill, and then, after ye knew who I was, to let the folks
see you kinder cottoned to me too. Not in the style o' that land-grabber
Heckshill, nor that peart newspaper man, neither. Of course I gave them
as good as they sent,” she went on, with a little laugh, but Brice could
see that her sensitive lip in profile had the tremulous and resentful
curve of one who was accustomed to slight and annoyance. Was it possible
that this reckless, self-contained girl felt her position keenly?

“I am proud to have your good opinion,” he said, with a certain respect
mingled with his admiring glance, “even if I have not your uncle's.”

“Oh, he likes you well enough, or he wouldn't have hearkened to you a
minute,” she said quickly. “When you opened out about them greenbacks, I
jes' clutched my cheer SO,” she illustrated her words with a gesture
of her hands, and her face actually seemed to grow pale at the
recollection,--“and I nigh started up to stop ye; but that idea of Yuba
Bill bein' robbed TWICE I think tickled him awful. But it was lucky none
o' the gang heard ye or suspected anything. I reckon that's why he sent
me with you,--to keep them from doggin' you and askin' questions that
a straight man like you would be sure to answer. But they daren't
come nigh ye as long as I'm with you!” She threw back her head and
rose-crested hat with a mock air of protection that, however, had a
certain real pride in it.

“I am very glad of that, if it gives me the chance of having your
company alone,” returned Brice, smiling, “and very grateful to your
uncle, whatever were his reasons for making you my guide. But you have
already been that to me,” and he told her of the footprints. “But for
you,” he added, with gentle significance, “I should not have been here.”

She was silent for a moment, and he could only see the back of her head
and its heavy brown coils. After a pause she asked abruptly, “Where's
your handkerchief?”

He took it from his pocket; her ingenious uncle's bullet had torn rather
than pierced the cambric.

“I thought so,” she said, gravely examining it, “but I kin mend it as
good as new. I reckon you allow I can't sew,” she continued, “but I do
heaps of mendin', as the digger squaw and Chinamen we have here do only
the coarser work. I'll send it back to you, and meanwhiles you keep
mine.”

She drew a handkerchief from her pocket and handed it to him. To his
great surprise it was a delicate one, beautifully embroidered, and
utterly incongruous to her station. The idea that flashed upon him,
it is to be feared, showed itself momentarily in his hesitation and
embarrassment.

She gave a quick laugh. “Don't be frightened. It's bought and paid for.
Uncle Harry don't touch passengers' fixin's; that ain't his style.
You oughter know that.” Yet in spite of her laugh, he could see the
sensitive pout of her lower lip.

“I was only thinking,” he said hurriedly and sympathetically, “that it
was too fine for me. But I will be proud to keep it as a souvenir of
you. It's not too pretty for THAT!”

“Uncle gets me these things. He don't keer what they cost,” she went on,
ignoring the compliment. “Why, I've got awfully fine gowns up there that
I only wear when I go to Marysville oncet in a while.”

“Does he take you there?” asked Brice.

“No!” she answered quietly. “Not”--a little defiantly--“that he's
afeard, for they can't prove anything against him; no man kin swear to
him, and thar ain't an officer that keers to go for him. But he's that
shy for ME he don't keer to have me mixed with him.”

“But nobody recognizes you?”

“Sometimes--but I don't keer for that.” She cocked her hat a little
audaciously, but Brice noticed that her arms afterwards dropped at her
side with the same weary gesture he had observed before. “Whenever I go
into shops it's always 'Yes, miss,' and 'No, miss,' and 'Certainly,
Miss Dimwood.' Oh, they're mighty respectful. I reckon they allow that
Snapshot Harry's rifle carries far.”

Presently she faced him again, for their conversation had been carried
on in profile. There was a critical, searching look in her brown eyes.

“Here I'm talkin' to you as if you were one”--Mr. Brice was positive
she was going to say “one of the gang,” but she hesitated and concluded,
“one of my relations--like cousin Hiram.”

“I wish you would think of me as being as true a friend,” said the young
man earnestly.

She did not reply immediately, but seemed to be examining the distance.
They were not far from the canyon now, and the river bank. A fringe of
buckeyes hid the base of the mountain, which had begun to tower up above
them to the invisible stage road overhead. “I am going to be a real
guide to you now,” she said suddenly. “When we reach that buckeye corner
and are out of sight, we will turn into it instead of going through the
canyon. You shall go up the mountain to the stage road, from THIS side.”

“But it is impossible!” he exclaimed, in astonishment. “Your uncle said
so.”

“Coming DOWN, but not going up,” she returned, with a laugh. “I found
it, and no one knows it but myself.”

He glanced up at the towering cliff; its nearly perpendicular flanks
were seamed with fissures, some clefts deeply set with stunted growths
of thorn and “scrub,” but still sheer and forbidding, and then glanced
back at her incredulously. “I will show you,” she said, answering his
look with a smile of triumph. “I haven't tramped over this whole valley
for nothing! But wait until we reach the river bank. They must think
that we've gone through the canyon.”

“They?

“Yes--any one who is watching us,” said the girl dryly.

A few steps further on brought them to the buckeye thicket, which
extended to the river bank and mouth of the canyon. The girl lingered
for a moment ostentatiously before it, and then, saying “Come,” suddenly
turned at right angles into the thicket. Brice followed, and the next
moment they were hidden by its friendly screen from the valley. On the
other side rose the mountain wall, leaving a narrow trail before them.
It was composed of the rocky debris and fallen trees of the cliff, from
which buckeyes and larches were now springing. It was uneven, irregular,
and slowly ascending; but the young girl led the way with the free
footstep of a mountaineer, and yet a grace that was akin to delicacy.
Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl's fashion, she
was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude
and rustic surroundings. It was the same slim shoe-print which had
guided him that morning. Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing
curiously at the cliff side. Brice followed the direction of her eyes.
On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the
mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly
wind was flapping heavily, like a raven's wing, or as if still saturated
with the last night's rain. “That's mighty queer!” said Flo, gazing
intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which
had a vague, weird suggestion. “It wasn't there yesterday.”

“It looks like a man's coat,” remarked Brice uneasily.

“Whew!” said the girl. “Then somebody has come down who won't go up
again! There's a lot of fresh rocks and brush here, too. What's that?”
 She was pointing to a spot some yards before them where there had been a
recent precipitation of debris and uprooted shrubs. But mingled with it
lay a mass of rags strangely akin to the tattered remnant that flagged
from the bush a hundred feet above them. The girl suddenly uttered a
sharp feminine cry of mingled horror and disgust,--the first weakness
of sex she had shown,--and, recoiling, grasped Brice's arm. “Don't go
there! Come away!”

But Brice had already seen that which, while it shocked him, was urging
him forward with an invincible fascination. Gently releasing himself,
and bidding the girl stand back, he moved toward the unsightly heap.
Gradually it disclosed a grotesque caricature of a human figure, but so
maimed and doubled up that it seemed a stuffed and fallen scarecrow. As
is common in men stricken suddenly down by accident in the fullness of
life, the clothes asserted themselves before all else with a hideous
ludicrousness, obliterating even the majesty of death in their helpless
yet ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the
wearer, but to have been assumed in ghastly jocularity,--a boot half off
the swollen foot, a ripped waistcoat thrown over the shoulder, were like
the properties of some low comedian. At first the body appeared to be
headless; but as Brice cleared away the debris and lifted it, he saw
with horror that the head was twisted under the shoulder, and swung
helplessly from the dislocated neck. But that horror gave way to a more
intense and thrilling emotion as he saw the face--although strangely
free from laceration or disfigurement, and impurpled and distended into
the simulation of a self-complacent smile--was a face he recognized! It
was the face of the cynical traveler in the coach--the man who he was
now satisfied had robbed it.

A strange and selfish resentment took possession of him. Here was the
man through whom he had suffered shame and peril, and who even now
seemed complacently victorious in death. He examined him closely; his
coat and waistcoat had been partly torn away in his fall; his shirt
still clung to him, but through its torn front could be seen a heavy
treasure belt encircling his waist. Forgetting his disgust, Brice tore
away the shirt and unloosed the belt. It was saturated with water like
the rest of the clothing, but its pocket seemed heavy and distended. In
another instant he had opened it, and discovered the envelope containing
the packet of greenbacks, its seal still inviolate and unbroken. It was
the stolen treasure!

A faint sigh recalled him to himself. The girl was standing a few feet
from him, regarding him curiously.

“It's the thief himself!” he said, in a breathless explanation. “In
trying to escape he must have fallen from the road above. But here are
the greenbacks safe! We must go back to your uncle at once,” he said
excitedly. “Come!”

“Are you mad?” she cried, in astonishment.

“No,” returned Brice, in equal astonishment, “but you know I agreed with
him that we should work together to recover the money, and I must show
him our good luck.”

“He told you that if you met the thief and could get the money from him,
you were welcome to it,” said the girl gravely, “and you HAVE got it.”

“But not in the way he meant,” returned Brice hurriedly. “This man's
death is the result of his attempting to escape from your uncle's guards
along the road; the merit of it belongs to them and your uncle. It would
be cowardly and mean of me to take advantage of it.”

The girl looked at him with an expression of mingled admiration and
pity. “But the guards were placed there before he ever saw you,” said
she impatiently. “And whatever uncle Harry may want to do, he must do
what the gang says. And with the money once in their possession, or
even in yours, if they knew it, I wouldn't give much for its chances--or
YOURS either--for gettin' out o' this hollow again.”

“But if THEY are treacherous, that is no reason why I should be so,”
 protested Brice stoutly.

“You've no right to say they were treacherous when they knew nothing of
your plans,” said the girl sharply. “Your company would have more call
to say YOU were treacherous to it for making a plan without consultin'
them.” Brice winced, for he had never thought of that before. “You can
offer that reward AFTER you get away from here with the greenbacks.
But,” she added proudly, with a toss of her head, “go back if you want
to! Tell him all! Tell him where you found it--tell him I did not take
you through the canyon, but was showin' you a new trail I had never
shown to THEM! Tell him that I am a traitor, for I have given them and
him away to you, a stranger, and that you consider yourself the only
straight and honest one about here!”

Brice flushed with shame. “Forgive me,” he said hurriedly; “you are
right and I am wrong again. I will do just what you say. I will first
place these greenbacks in a secure place--and then”--

“Get away first--that's your only holt,” she interrupted him quickly,
her eyes still flashing through indignant tears. “Come quick, for I must
put you on the trail before they miss me.”

She darted forward; he followed, but she kept the lead, as much, he
fancied, to evade his observation as to expedite his going. Presently
they stopped before the sloping trunk of a huge pine that had long since
fallen from the height above, but, although splintered where it had
broken ground, had preserved some fifty feet of its straight trunk erect
and leaning like a ladder against the mountain wall. “There,” she
said, hurriedly pointing to its decaying but still projecting lateral
branches, “you climb it--I have. At the top you'll find it's stuck in a
cleft among the brush. There's a little hollow and an old waterway from
a spring above which makes a trail through the brush. It's as good as
the trail you took from the stage road this mornin', but it's not as
safe comin' down. Keep along it to the spring, and it will land ye jest
the other side of uncle Hiram's cabin. Go quick! I'll wait here until
ye've reached the cleft.”

“But you,” he said, turning toward her, “how can I ever thank you?”

As if anticipating a leave-taking, the girl had already withdrawn
herself a few yards away, and simply made an upward gesture with her
hand. “Quick! Up with you! Every minute now is a risk to me.”

Thus appealed to, Brice could only comply. Perhaps he was a little hurt
at the girl's evident desire to avoid a gentler parting. Securing his
prized envelope within his breast, he began to ascend the tree. Its
inclination, and the aid offered by the broken stumps of branches, made
this comparatively easy, and in a few moments he reached its top,
and stood upon a little ledge in the wall. A swift glance around
him revealed the whole waterway or fissure slanting upward along the
mountain face. Then he turned quickly to look down the dizzy height. At
first he could distinguish nothing but the top of the buckeyes and their
white clustering blossoms. Then something fluttered,--the torn white
handkerchief of his that she had kept. And then he caught a single
glimpse of the flower-plumed hat receding rapidly among the trees, and
Flora Dimwood was gone.


III

In twenty-four hours Edward Brice was in San Francisco. But although
successful and the bearer of the treasure, it is doubtful if he
approached this end of his journey with the temerity he had shown on
entering the robbers' valley. A consciousness that the methods he
had employed might excite the ridicule, if not the censure, of his
principals, or that he might have compromised them in his meeting with
Snapshot Harry, considerably modified his youthful exultation. It is
possible that Flora's reproach, which still rankled in his mind, may
have quickened his sensitiveness on that point. However, he had resolved
to tell the whole truth, except his episode with Flora, and to place the
conduct of Snapshot Harry and the Tarboxes in as favorable a light as
possible. But first he had recourse to the manager, a man of shrewd
worldly experience, who had recommended him to his place. When he had
finished and handed him the treasured envelope, the man looked at him
with a critical and yet not unkindly expression. “Perhaps it's just as
well, Brice, that you did come to me at first, and did not make your
report to the president and directors.”

“I suppose,” said Brice diffidently, “that they wouldn't have liked my
communicating with the highwayman without their knowledge?”

“More than that--they wouldn't have believed your story.”

“Not believe it?” cried Brice, flushing quickly. “Do you think”--

The manager checked him with a laugh. “Hold on! I believe every word
of it, and why? Because you've added nothing to it to make yourself the
regular hero. Why, with your opportunity, and no one able to contradict
you, you might have told me you had a hand-to-hand fight with the
thief, and had to kill him to recover the money, and even brought your
handkerchief and hat back with the bullet holes to prove it.” Brice
winked as he thought of the fair possessor of those articles. “But as a
story for general circulation, it won't do. Have you told it to any one
else? Does any one know what happened but yourself?”

Brice thought of Flora, but he had resolved not to compromise her, and
he had a consciousness that she would be equally loyal to him. “No one,”
 he answered boldly.

“Very good. And I suppose you wouldn't mind if it were kept out of the
newspapers? You're not hankering after a reputation as a hero?”

“Certainly not,” said Brice indignantly.

“Well, then, we'll keep it where it is. You will say nothing. I will
hand over the greenbacks to the company, but only as much of your story
as I think they'll stand. You're all right as it is. Yuba Bill has
already set you up in his report to the company, and the recovery of
this money will put you higher! Only, the PUBLIC need know nothing about
it.”

“But,” asked Brice amazedly, “how can it be prevented? The shippers who
lost the money will have to know that it has been recovered.”

“Why should they? The company will assume the risk, and repay them just
the same. It's a great deal better to have the reputation for accepting
the responsibility than for the shippers to think that they only get
their money through the accident of its recovery.”

Brice gasped at this large business truth. Besides, it occurred to him
that it kept the secret, and Flora's participation in it, from Snapshot
Harry and the gang. He had not thought of that before.

“Come,” continued the manager, with official curtness. “What do you say?
Are you willing to leave it to me?”

Brice hesitated a moment. It was not what his impulsive truthful nature
had suggested. It was not what his youthful fancy had imagined. He had
not worked upon the sympathies of the company on behalf of Snapshot
Harry as he believed he would do. He had not even impressed the manager.
His story, far from exciting a chivalrous sentiment, had been pronounced
improbable. Yet he reflected he had so far protected HER, and he
consented with a sigh.

Nevertheless, the result ought to have satisfied him. A dazzling check,
inclosed in a letter of thanks from the company the next day, and his
promotion from “the road” to the San Francisco office, would have been
quite enough for any one but Edward Brice. Yet he was grateful, albeit
a little frightened and remorseful over his luck. He could not help
thinking of the kindly tolerance of the highwayman, the miserable death
of the actual thief, which had proved his own salvation, and above all
the generous, high-spirited girl who had aided his escape. While on his
way to San Francisco, and yet in the first glow of his success, he had
written her a few lines from Marysville, inclosed in a letter to Mr.
Tarbox. He had received no reply.

Then a week passed. He wrote again, and still no reply. Then a vague
feeling of jealousy took possession of him as he remembered her warning
hint of the attentions to which she was subjected, and he became
singularly appreciative of Snapshot Harry's proficiency as a marksman.
Then, cruelest of all, for your impassioned lover is no lover at all
if not cruel in his imaginings, he remembered how she had evaded her
uncle's espionage with HIM; could she not equally with ANOTHER? Perhaps
that was why she had hurried him away,--why she had prevented
his returning to her uncle. Following this came another week of
disappointment and equally miserable cynical philosophy, in which
he persuaded himself he was perfectly satisfied with his material
advancement, that it was the only outcome of his adventure to be
recognized; and he was more miserable than ever.

A month had passed, when one morning he received a small package by
post. The address was in a handwriting unknown to him, but opening
the parcel he was surprised to find only a handkerchief neatly folded.
Examining it closely, he found it was his own,--the one he had given
her, the rent made by her uncle's bullet so ingeniously and delicately
mended as to almost simulate embroidery. The joy that suddenly filled
him at this proof of her remembrance showed him too plainly how hollow
had been his cynicism and how lasting his hope! Turning over the wrapper
eagerly, he discovered what he had at first thought was some business
card. It was, indeed, printed and not engraved, in some common newspaper
type, and bore the address, “Hiram Tarbox, Land and Timber Agent, 1101
California Street.” He again examined the parcel; there was nothing
else,--not a line from HER! But it was a clue at last, and she had not
forgotten him! He seized his hat, and ten minutes later was breasting
the steep sand hill into which California Street in those days plunged,
and again emerged at its crest, with a few struggling houses.

But when he reached the summit he could see that the outline of the
street was still plainly marked along the distance by cottages and
new suburban villa-like blocks of houses. No. 1101 was in one of these
blocks, a small tenement enough, but a palace compared to Mr. Tarbox's
Sierran cabin. He impetuously rang the bell, and without waiting to be
announced dashed into the little drawing-room and Mr. Tarbox's presence.
That had changed too; Mr. Tarbox was arrayed in a suit of clothes as
new, as cheaply decorative, as fresh and, apparently, as damp as his own
drawing room.

“Did you get my letter? Did you give her the one I inclosed? Why didn't
you answer?” burst out Brice, after his first breathless greeting.

Mr. Tarbox's face here changed so suddenly into his old dejected
doggedness that Brice could have imagined himself back in the Sierran
cabin. The man straightened and bowed himself at Brice's questions, and
then replied with bold, deliberate emphasis:

“Yes, I DID get your letter. I DIDN'T give no letter o' yours to her.
And I didn't answer your letter BEFORE, for I didn't propose to answer
it AT ALL.”

“Why?” demanded Brice indignantly.

“I didn't give her your letter because I didn't kalkilate to be any
go-between 'twixt you and Snapshot Harry's niece. Look yar, Mr. Brice.
Sense I read that 'ar paragraph in that paper you gave me, I allowed to
myself that it wasn't the square thing for me to have any more doin's
with him, and I quit it. I jest chucked your letter in the fire. I
didn't answer you because I reckoned I'd no call to correspond with ye,
and when I showed ye that trail over to Harry's camp, it was ended. I've
got a house and business to look arter, and it don't jibe with keepin'
company with 'road agents.' That's what I got outer that paper you gave
me, Mr. Brice.”

Rage and disgust filled Brice at the man's utter selfishness and
shameless desertion of his kindred, none the less powerfully that he
remembered the part he himself had played in concocting the paragraph.
“Do you mean to say,” he demanded passionately, “that for the sake of
that foolish paragraph you gave up your own kindred? That you truckled
to the mean prejudices of your neighbors and kept that poor, defenseless
girl from the only honest roof she could find refuge under? That you
dared to destroy my letter to her, and made her believe I was as selfish
and ungrateful as yourself?”

“Young feller,” said Mr. Tarbox still more deliberately, yet with a
certain dignity that Brice had never noticed before, “what's between you
and Flo, and what rights she has fer thinkin' ye 'ez selfish' and 'ez
ongrateful' ez me--ef she does, I dunno!--but when ye talk o' me givin'
up my kindred, and sling such hogwash ez 'ongrateful' and 'selfish'
round this yer sittin'-room, mebbe it mout occur to ye that Harry
Dimwood might hev HIS opinion o' what was 'ongrateful' and 'selfish' ef
I'd played in between his niece and a young man o' the express company,
his nat'ral enemy. It's one thing to hev helped ye to see her in
her uncle's own camp, but another to help ye by makin' a clandecent
post-offis o' my cabin. Ef, instead o' writin', you'd hev posted
yourself by comin' to me, you mout hev found out that when I broke with
Harry I offered to take Flo with me for good and all--ef he'd keep
away from us. And that's the kind o' 'honest roof' that that thar 'poor
defenseless girl' got under when her crippled mother died three
weeks ago, and left Harry free. It was by 'trucklin'' to them 'mean
prejudices,' and readin' that thar 'foolish paragraph,' that I settled
this thing then and thar!”

Brice's revulsion of sentiment was so complete, and the gratitude that
beamed in his eyes was so sincere, that Mr. Tarbox hardly needed the
profuse apologies which broke from him. “Forgive me!” he continued to
stammer, “I have wronged you, wronged HER--everybody. But as you know,
Mr. Tarbox, how I have felt over this, how deeply--how passionately”--

“It DOES make a man loony sometimes,” said Mr. Tarbox, relaxing into
demure dryness again, “so I reckon you DID! Mebbe she reckoned so, too,
for she asked me to give you the handkercher I sent ye. It looked as if
she'd bin doin' some fancy work on it.”

Brice glanced quickly at Mr. Tarbox's face. It was stolid and
imperturbable. She had evidently kept the secret of what passed in
the hollow to herself. For the first time he looked around the room
curiously. “I didn't know you were a land agent before,” he said.

“No more I was! All that kem out o' that paragraph, Mr. Brice. That man
Heckshill, who was so mighty perlite that night, wrote to me afterwards
that he didn't know my name till he'd seed that paragraph, and he wanted
to know ef, ez a 'well-known citizen,' I could recommend him some timber
lands. I recommended him half o' my own quarter section, and he took it.
He's puttin' up a mill thar, and that's another reason why we want peace
and quietness up thar. I'm tryin' (betwixt and between us, Mr. Brice) to
get Harry to cl'ar out and sell his rights in the valley and the water
power on the Fork to Heckshill and me. I'm opening a business here.”

“Then you've left Mrs. Tarbox with Miss Flora in your cabin while you
attend to business here,” said Brice tentatively.

“Not exactly, Mr. Brice. The old woman thought it a good chance to come
to 'Frisco and put Flo in one o' them Catholic convent schools--that
asks no questions whar the raw logs come from, and turns 'em out
first-class plank all round. You foller me, Mr. Brice? But Mrs. Tarbox
is jest in the next room, and would admire to tell ye all this--and I'll
go in and send her to you.” And with a patronizing wave of the hand, Mr.
Tarbox complacently disappeared in the hall.

Mr. Brice was not sorry to be left to himself in his utter bewilderment!
Flo, separated from her detrimental uncle, and placed in a convent
school! Tarbox, the obscure pioneer, a shrewd speculator emerging into
success, and taking the uncle's place! And all this within that month
which he had wasted with absurd repinings. How feeble seemed his own
adventure and advancement; how even ludicrous his pretensions to any
patronage and superiority. How this common backwoodsman had set him in
his place as easily as SHE had evaded the advances of the journalist and
Heckshill! They had taught him a lesson; perhaps even the sending back
of his handkerchief was part of it! His heart grew heavy; he walked to
the window and gazed out with a long sigh.

A light laugh, that might have been an echo of the one which had
attracted him that night in Tarbox's cabin, fell upon his ear. He turned
quickly to meet Flora Dimwood's laughing eyes shining upon him as she
stood in the doorway.

Many a time during that month he had thought of this meeting--had
imagined what it would be like--what would be his manner towards
her--what would be her greeting, and what they would say. He would be
cold, gentle, formal, gallant, gay, sad, trustful, reproachful, even as
the moods in which he thought of her came to his foolish brain. He would
always begin with respectful seriousness, or a frankness equal to her
own, but never, never again would he offend as he had offended under the
buckeyes! And now, with her pretty face shining upon him, all his plans,
his speeches, his preparations vanished, and left him dumb. Yet he moved
towards her with a brief articulate something on his lips,--something
between a laugh and a sigh,--but that really was a kiss, and--in point
of fact--promptly folded her in his arms.

Yet it was certainly direct, and perhaps the best that could be done,
for the young lady did not emerge from it as coolly, as unemotionally,
nor possibly as quickly as she had under the shade of the buckeyes. But
she persuaded him--by still holding his hand--to sit beside her on the
chilly, highly varnished “green rep” sofa, albeit to him it was a bank
in a bower of enchantment. Then she said, with adorable reproachfulness,
“You don't ask what I did with the body.”

Mr. Edward Brice started. He was young, and unfamiliar with the evasive
expansiveness of the female mind at such supreme moments.

“The body--oh, yes--certainly.”

“I buried it myself--it was suthin too awful!--and the gang would have
been sure to have found it, and the empty belt. I burned THAT. So that
nobody knows nothin'.”

It was not a time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am
afraid that the girl's characteristically familiar speech, even when
pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent,
endeared her the more to him. And when she said, “And now, Mr. Edward
Brice, sit over at that end of the sofy and let's talk,” they talked.
They talked for an hour, more or less continuously, until they were
surprised by a discreet cough and the entrance of Mrs. Tarbox. Then
there was more talk, and the discovery that Mr. Brice was long due at
the office.

“Ye might drop in, now and then, whenever ye feel like it, and Flo is at
home,” suggested Mrs. Tarbox at parting.

Mr. Brice DID drop in frequently during the next month. On one of
these occasions Mr. Tarbox accompanied him to the door. “And now--ez
everything is settled and in order, Mr. Brice, and ef you should be
wantin' to say anything about it to your bosses at the office, ye may
mention MY name ez Flo Dimwood's second cousin, and say I'm a depositor
in their bank. And,” with greater deliberation, “ef anything at any time
should be thrown up at ye for marryin' a niece o' Snapshot Harry's, ye
might mention, keerless like, that Snapshot Harry, under the name o'
Henry J. Dimwood, has held shares in their old bank for years!”




A TREASURE OF THE REDWOODS


PART I

Mr. Jack Fleming stopped suddenly before a lifeless and decaying
redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the
very tree he had passed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been
describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those
lost in the woods.

There was no mistaking the tree, with its one broken branch which
depended at an angle like the arm of a semaphore; nor did it relieve
his mind to reflect that his mishap was partly due to his own foolish
abstraction. He was returning to camp from a neighboring mining town,
and while indulging in the usual day-dreams of a youthful prospector,
had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the
forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced
boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only
a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown
seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of
decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and
invested the gloom with a profound silence.

As he stood for a moment or two, irresolute, his ear, by this time
attuned to the stillness, caught the faint but distinct lap and trickle
of water. He was hot and thirsty, and turned instinctively in that
direction. A very few paces brought him to a fallen tree; at the foot of
its upturned roots gurgled the spring whose upwelling stream had slowly
but persistently loosened their hold on the soil, and worked their ruin.
A pool of cool and clear water, formed by the disruption of the soil,
overflowed, and after a few yards sank again in the sodden floor.

As he drank and bathed his head and hands in this sylvan basin, he
noticed the white glitter of a quartz ledge in its depths, and was
considerably surprised and relieved to find, hard by, an actual outcrop
of that rock through the thick carpet of bark and dust. This betokened
that he was near the edge of the forest or some rocky opening. He
fancied that the light grew clearer beyond, and the presence of a few
fronds of ferns confirmed him in the belief that he was approaching a
different belt of vegetation. Presently he saw the vertical beams of the
sun again piercing the opening in the distance. With this prospect of
speedy deliverance from the forest at last secure, he did not hurry
forward, but on the contrary coolly retraced his footsteps to the spring
again. The fact was that the instincts and hopes of the prospector were
strongly dominant in him, and having noticed the quartz ledge and the
contiguous outcrop, he determined to examine them more closely. He
had still time to find his way home, and it might not be so easy to
penetrate the wilderness again. Unfortunately, he had neither pick, pan,
nor shovel with him, but a very cursory displacement of the soil around
the spring and at the outcrop with his hands showed him the usual red
soil and decomposed quartz which constituted an “indication.” Yet none
knew better than himself how disappointing and illusive its results
often were, and he regretted that he had not a pan to enable him to test
the soil by washing it at the spring. If there were only a miner's cabin
handy, he could easily borrow what he wanted. It was just the usual
luck,--“the things a man sees when he hasn't his gun with him!”

He turned impatiently away again in the direction of the opening. When
he reached it, he found himself on a rocky hillside sloping toward a
small green valley. A light smoke curled above a clump of willows; it
was from the chimney of a low dwelling, but a second glance told him
that it was no miner's cabin. There was a larger clearing around the
house, and some rude attempt at cultivation in a roughly fenced area.
Nevertheless, he determined to try his luck in borrowing a pick and pan
there; at the worst he could inquire his way to the main road again.

A hurried scramble down the hill brought him to the dwelling,--a
rambling addition of sheds to the usual log cabin. But he was surprised
to find that its exterior, and indeed the palings of the fence around
it, were covered with the stretched and drying skins of animals. The
pelts of bear, panther, wolf, and fox were intermingled with squirrel
and wildcat skins, and the displayed wings of eagle, hawk, and
kingfisher. There was no trail leading to or from the cabin; it seemed
to have been lost in this opening of the encompassing woods and left
alone and solitary.

The barking of a couple of tethered hounds at last brought a figure to
the door of the nearest lean-to shed. It seemed to be that of a
young girl, but it was clad in garments so ridiculously large and
disproportionate that it was difficult to tell her precise age. A calico
dress was pinned up at the skirt, and tightly girt at the waist by an
apron--so long that one corner had to be tucked in at the apron
string diagonally, to keep the wearer from treading on it. An enormous
sunbonnet of yellow nankeen completely concealed her head and face, but
allowed two knotted and twisted brown tails of hair to escape under its
frilled cape behind. She was evidently engaged in some culinary work,
and still held a large tin basin or pan she had been cleaning clasped to
her breast.

Fleming's eye glanced at it covetously, ignoring the figure behind it.
But he was diplomatic.

“I have lost my way in the woods. Can you tell me in what direction the
main road lies?”

She pointed a small red hand apparently in the direction he had come.
“Straight over thar--across the hill.”

Fleming sighed. He had been making a circuit of the forest instead of
going through it--and this open space containing the cabin was on a
remote outskirt!

“How far is it to the road?” he asked.

“Jest a spell arter ye rise the hill, ef ye keep 'longside the woods.
But it's a right smart chance beyond, ef ye go through it.”

This was quite plain to him. In the local dialect a “spell” was under
a mile; “a right smart chance” might be three or four miles farther.
Luckily the spring and outcrop were near the outskirts; he would pass
near them again on his way. He looked longingly at the pan which she
still held in her hands. “Would you mind lending me that pan for a
little while?” he said half laughingly.

“Wot for?” demanded the girl quickly. Yet her tone was one of childish
curiosity rather than suspicion. Fleming would have liked to avoid the
question and the consequent exposure of his discovery which a direct
answer implied. But he saw it was too late now.

“I want to wash a little dirt,” he said bluntly.

The girl turned her deep sunbonnet toward him. Somewhere in its depths
he saw the flash of white teeth. “Go along with ye--ye're funnin'!” she
said.

“I want to wash out some dirt in that pan--I'm prospecting for gold,” he
said; “don't you understand?”

“Are ye a miner?”

“Well, yes--a sort of one,” he returned, with a laugh.

“Then ye'd better be scootin' out o' this mighty quick afore dad comes.
He don't cotton to miners, and won't have 'em around. That's why he
lives out here.”

“Well, I don't live out here,” responded the young man lightly. “I
shouldn't be here if I hadn't lost my way, and in half an hour I'll be
off again. So I'm not likely to bother him. But,” he added, as the girl
still hesitated, “I'll leave a deposit for the pan, if you like.”

“Leave a which?”

“The money that the pan's worth,” said Fleming impatiently.

The huge sunbonnet stiffly swung around like the wind-sail of a ship
and stared at the horizon. “I don't want no money. Ye kin git,” said the
voice in its depths.

“Look here,” he said desperately, “I only wanted to prove to you that
I'll bring your pan back safe. Now look! If you don't like to take
money, I'll leave this ring with you until I come back. There!” He
slipped a small specimen ring, made out of his first gold findings, from
his little finger.

The sunbonnet slowly swung around again and stared at the ring. Then the
little red right hand reached forward, took the ring, placed it on the
forefinger of the left hand, with all the other fingers widely extended
for the sunbonnet to view, and all the while the pan was still held
against her side by the other hand. Fleming noticed that the hands,
though tawny and not over clean, were almost childlike in size, and that
the forefinger was much too small for the ring. He tried to fathom the
depths of the sun-bonnet, but it was dented on one side, and he could
discern only a single pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.

“Well,” said Fleming, “is it a go?”

“Of course ye'll be comin' back for it again,” said the girl slowly.

There was so much of hopeless disappointment at that prospect in her
voice that Fleming laughed outright. “I'm afraid I shall, for I value
the ring very much,” he said.

The girl handed him the pan. “It's our bread pan,” she said.

It might have been anything, for it was by no means new; indeed, it was
battered on one side and the bottom seemed to have been broken; but it
would serve, and Fleming was anxious to be off. “Thank you,” he said
briefly, and turned away. The hound barked again as he passed; he heard
the girl say, “Shut your head, Tige!” and saw her turn back into the
kitchen, still holding the ring before the sunbonnet.

When he reached the woods, he attacked the outcrop he had noticed, and
detached with his hands and the aid of a sharp rock enough of the loose
soil to fill the pan. This he took to the spring, and, lowering the
pan in the pool, began to wash out its contents with the centrifugal
movement of the experienced prospector. The saturated red soil
overflowed the brim with that liquid ooze known as “slumgullion,” and
turned the crystal pool to the color of blood until the soil was washed
away. Then the smaller stones were carefully removed and examined, and
then another washing of the now nearly empty pan showed the fine black
sand covering the bottom. This was in turn as gently washed away.

Alas! the clean pan showed only one or two minute glistening yellow
scales, like pinheads, adhering from their specific gravity to the
bottom; gold, indeed, but merely enough to indicate “the color,” and
common to ordinary prospecting in his own locality.

He tried another panful with the same result. He became aware that the
pan was leaky, and that infinite care alone prevented the bottom from
falling out during the washing. Still it was an experiment, and the
result a failure.

Fleming was too old a prospector to take his disappointment seriously.
Indeed, it was characteristic of that performance and that period that
failure left neither hopelessness nor loss of faith behind it; the
prospector had simply miscalculated the exact locality, and was equally
as ready to try his luck again. But Fleming thought it high time to
return to his own mining work in camp, and at once set off to return the
pan to its girlish owner and recover his ring.

As he approached the cabin again, he heard the sound of singing. It was
evidently the girl's voice, uplifted in what seemed to be a fragment of
some negro camp-meeting hymn:--

     “Dar was a poor man and his name it was Lazarum,
     Lord bress de Lamb--glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”

The first two lines had a brisk movement, accented apparently by the
clapping of hands or the beating of a tin pan, but the refrain, “Lord
bress de Lamb,” was drawn out in a lugubrious chant of infinite tenuity.

     “The rich man died and he went straight to hellerum.
     Lord bress de Lamb--glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”

Fleming paused at the cabin door. Before he could rap the voice rose
again:--

     “When ye see a poo' man be sure to give him crumbsorum,
     Lord bress de Lamb--glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”

At the end of this interminable refrain, drawn out in a youthful nasal
contralto, Fleming knocked. The girl instantly appeared, holding the
ring in her fingers. “I reckoned it was you,” she said, with an affected
briskness, to conceal her evident dislike at parting with the trinket.
“There it is!”

But Fleming was too astounded to speak. With the opening of the door
the sunbonnet had fallen back like a buggy top, disclosing for the first
time the head and shoulders of the wearer. She was not a child, but
a smart young woman of seventeen or eighteen, and much of his
embarrassment arose from the consciousness that he had no reason
whatever for having believed her otherwise.

“I hope I didn't interrupt your singing,” he said awkwardly.

“It was only one o' mammy's camp-meetin' songs,” said the girl.

“Your mother? Is she in?” he asked, glancing past the girl into the
kitchen.

“'Tain't mother--she's dead. Mammy's our old nurse. She's gone to
Jimtown, and taken my duds to get some new ones fitted to me. These are
some o' mother's.”

This accounted for her strange appearance; but Fleming noticed that
the girl's manner had not the slightest consciousness of their
unbecomingness, nor of the charms of face and figure they had marred.

She looked at him curiously. “Hev you got religion?”

“Well, no!” said Fleming, laughing; “I'm afraid not.”

“Dad hez--he's got it pow'ful.”

“Is that the reason he don't like miners?” asked Fleming.

“'Take not to yourself the mammon of unrighteousness,'” said the girl,
with the confident air of repeating a lesson. “That's what the Book
says.”

“But I read the Bible, too,” replied the young man.

“Dad says, 'The letter killeth'!” said the girl sententiously.

Fleming looked at the trophies nailed on the walls with a vague wonder
if this peculiar Scriptural destructiveness had anything to do with his
skill as a marksman. The girl followed his eye.

“Dad's a mighty hunter afore the Lord.”

“What does he do with these skins?”

“Trades 'em off for grub and fixin's. But he don't believe in trottin'
round in the mud for gold.”

“Don't you suppose these animals would have preferred it if he had? Gold
hunting takes nothing from anybody.”

The girl stared at him, and then, to his great surprise, laughed instead
of being angry. It was a very fascinating laugh in her imperfectly
nourished pale face, and her little teeth revealed the bluish milky
whiteness of pips of young Indian corn.

“Wot yer lookin' at?” she asked frankly.

“You,” he replied, with equal frankness.

“It's them duds,” she said, looking down at her dress; “I reckon I ain't
got the hang o' 'em.”

Yet there was not the slightest tone of embarrassment or even coquetry
in her manner, as with both hands she tried to gather in the loose folds
around her waist.

“Let me help you,” he said gravely.

She lifted up her arms with childlike simplicity and backed toward him
as he stepped behind her, drew in the folds, and pinned them around what
proved a very small waist indeed. Then he untied the apron, took it
off, folded it in half, and retied its curtailed proportions around the
waist. “It does feel a heap easier,” she said, with a little shiver of
satisfaction, as she lifted her round cheek, and the tail of her blue
eyes with their brown lashes, over her shoulder. It was a tempting
moment--but Jack felt that the whole race of gold hunters was on trial
just then, and was adamant! Perhaps he was a gentle fellow at heart,
too.

“I could loop up that dress also, if I had more pins,” he remarked
tentatively. Jack had sisters of his own.

The pins were forthcoming. In this operation--a kind of festooning--the
girl's petticoat, a piece of common washed-out blue flannel, as pale
as her eyes, but of the commonest material, became visible, but without
fear or reproach to either.

“There, that looks more tidy,” said Jack, critically surveying his work
and a little of the small ankles revealed. The girl also examined it
carefully by its reflection on the surface of the saucepan. “Looks a
little like a chiny girl, don't it?”

Jack would have resented this, thinking she meant a Chinese, until he
saw her pointing to a cheap crockery ornament, representing a Dutch
shepherdess, on the shelf. There was some resemblance.

“You beat mammy out o' sight!” she exclaimed gleefully. “It will jest
set her clear crazy when she sees me.”

“Then you had better say you did it yourself,” said Fleming.

“Why?” asked the girl, suddenly opening her eyes on him with relentless
frankness.

“You said your father didn't like miners, and he mightn't like your
lending your pan to me.”

“I'm more afraid o' lyin' than o' dad,” she said with an elevation of
moral sentiment that was, however, slightly weakened by the addition,
“Mammy'll say anything I'll tell her to say.”

“Well, good-by,” said Fleming, extending his hand.

“Ye didn't tell me what luck ye had with the pan,” she said, delaying
taking his hand.

Fleming shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, my usual luck,--nothing,” he
returned, with a smile.

“Ye seem to keer more for gettin' yer old ring back than for any luck,”
 she continued. “I reckon you ain't much o' a miner.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Ye didn't say wot yer name was, in case dad wants to know.”

“I don't think he will want to; but it's John Fleming.”

She took his hand. “You didn't tell me yours,” he said, holding the
little red fingers, “in case I wanted to know.”

It pleased her to consider the rejoinder intensely witty. She showed all
her little teeth, threw away his hand, and said:--

“G' long with ye, Mr. Fleming. It's Tinka”--

“Tinker?”

“Yes; short for Katinka,--Katinka Jallinger.”

“Good-by, Miss Jallinger.”

“Good-by. Dad's name is Henry Boone Jallinger, of Kentucky, ef ye was
ever askin'.”

“Thank you.”

He turned away as she swiftly re-entered the house. As he walked away,
he half expected to hear her voice uplifted again in the camp-meeting
chant, but he was disappointed. When he reached the top of the hill he
turned and looked back at the cabin.

She was apparently waiting for this, and waved him an adieu with the
humble pan he had borrowed. It flashed a moment dazzlingly as it caught
the declining sun, and then went out, even obliterating the little
figure behind it.


PART II

Mr. Jack Fleming was indeed “not much of a miner.” He and his
partners--both as young, hopeful, and inefficient as himself--had
for three months worked a claim in a mountain mining settlement
which yielded them a certain amount of healthy exercise, good-humored
grumbling, and exalted independence. To dig for three or four hours in
the morning, smoke their pipes under a redwood-tree for an hour at
noon, take up their labors again until sunset, when they “washed up”
 and gathered sufficient gold to pay for their daily wants, was, without
their seeking it, or even knowing it, the realization of a charming
socialistic ideal which better men than themselves had only dreamed of.
Fleming fell back into this refined barbarism, giving little thought to
his woodland experience, and no revelation of it to his partners. He had
transacted their business at the mining town. His deviations en route
were nothing to them, and small account to himself.

The third day after his return he was lying under a redwood when his
partner approached him.

“You aren't uneasy in your mind about any unpaid bill--say a wash
bill--that you're owing?”

“Why?”

“There's a big nigger woman in camp looking for you; she's got a folded
account paper in her hand. It looks deucedly like a bill.”

“There must be some mistake,” suggested Fleming, sitting up.

“She says not, and she's got your name pat enough! Faulkner” (his other
partner) “headed her straight up the gulch, away from camp, while I came
down to warn you. So if you choose to skedaddle into the brush out there
and lie low until we get her away, we'll fix it!”

“Nonsense! I'll see her.”

His partner looked aghast at this temerity, but Fleming, jumping to his
feet, at once set out to meet his mysterious visitor. This was no easy
matter, as the ingenious Faulkner was laboriously leading his charge up
the steep gulch road, with great politeness, but many audible misgivings
as to whether this was not “Jack Fleming's day for going to Jamestown.”

He was further lightening the journey by cheering accounts of the recent
depredations of bears and panthers in that immediate locality. When
overtaken by Fleming he affected a start of joyful surprise, to conceal
the look of warning which Fleming did not heed,--having no eyes but
for Faulkners companion. She was a very fat negro woman, panting with
exertion and suppressed impatience. Fleming's heart was filled with
compunction.

“Is you Marse Fleming?” she gasped.

“Yes,” said Fleming gently. “What can I do for you?”

“Well! Ye kin pick dis yar insek, dis caterpillier,” she said, pointing
to Faulkner, “off my paf. Ye kin tell dis yar chipmunk dat when he comes
to showin' me mule tracks for b'ar tracks, he's barkin' up de wrong
tree! Dat when he tells me dat he sees panfers a-promenadin' round in de
short grass or hidin' behime rocks in de open, he hain't talkin' to no
nigger chile, but a growed woman! Ye kin tell him dat Mammy Curtis lived
in de woods afo' he was born, and hez seen more b'ars and mountain lyuns
dan he hez hairs in his mustarches.”

The word “Mammy” brought a flash of recollection to Fleming.

“I am very sorry,” he began; but to his surprise the negro woman burst
into a good-tempered laugh.

“All right, honey! S'long's you is Marse Fleming and de man dat took
dat 'ar pan offer Tinka de odder day, I ain't mindin' yo' frens'
bedevilments. I've got somefin fo' you, yar, and a little box,” and she
handed him a folded paper.

Fleming felt himself reddening, he knew not why, at which Faulkner
discreetly but ostentatiously withdrew, conveying to his other partner
painful conviction that Fleming had borrowed a pan from a traveling
tinker, whose negro wife was even now presenting a bill for the same,
and demanding a settlement. Relieved by his departure, Fleming hurriedly
tore open the folded paper. It was a letter written upon a leaf torn
out of an old account book, whose ruled lines had undoubtedly given
his partners the idea that it was a bill. Fleming hurriedly read the
following, traced with a pencil in a schoolgirl's hand:--


Mr. J. FLEMING.

Dear Sir,--After you went away that day I took that pan you brought back
to mix a batch of bread and biscuits. The next morning at breakfast dad
says: “What's gone o' them thar biscuits--my teeth is just broke with
them--they're so gritty--they're abominable! What's this?” says he, and
with that he chucks over to me two or three flakes of gold that was in
them. You see what had happened, Mr. Fleming, was this! You had better
luck than you was knowing of! It was this way! Some of the gold you
washed had got slipped into the sides of the pan where it was broke,
and the sticky dough must have brought it out, and I kneaded them up
unbeknowing. Of course I had to tell a wicked lie, but “Be ye all things
to all men,” says the Book, and I thought you ought to know your good
luck, and I send mammy with this and the gold in a little box. Of
course, if dad was a hunter of Mammon and not of God's own beasts, he
would have been mighty keen about finding where it came from, but he
allows it was in the water in our near spring. So good-by. Do you care
for your ring now as much as you did?

Yours very respectfully,

KATINKA JALLINGER.


As Mr. Fleming glanced up from the paper, mammy put a small cardboard
box in his hand. For an instant he hesitated to open it, not knowing how
far mammy was intrusted with the secret. To his great relief she said
briskly: “Well, dar! now dat job's done gone and often my han's, I allow
to quit and jest get off dis yer camp afo' ye kin shake a stick. So
don't tell me nuffin I ain't gotter tell when I goes back.”

Fleming understood. “You can tell her I thank her--and--I'll attend to
it,” he said vaguely; “that is--I”--

“Hold dar! that's just enuff, honey--no mo'! So long to ye and youse
folks.”

He watched her striding away toward the main road, and then opened the
box.

It contained three flakes of placer or surface gold, weighing in all
about a quarter of an ounce. They could easily have slipped into the
interstices of the broken pan and not have been observed by him. If this
was the result of the washing of a single pan--and he could now easily
imagine that other flakes might have escaped--what--But he stopped,
dazed and bewildered at the bare suggestion. He gazed upon the vanishing
figure of “mammy.” Could she--could Katinka--have the least suspicion of
the possibilities of this discovery? Or had Providence put the keeping
of this secret into the hands of those who least understood its
importance? For an instant he thought of running after her with a
word of caution; but on reflection he saw that this might awaken her
suspicion and precipitate a discovery by another.

His only safety for the present was silence, until he could repeat his
experiment. And that must be done quickly.

How should he get away without his partners' knowledge of his purpose?
He was too loyal to them to wish to keep this good fortune to himself,
but he was not yet sure of his good fortune. It might be only a little
“pocket” which he had just emptied; it might be a larger one which
another trial would exhaust.

He had put up no “notice;” he might find it already in possession of
Katinka's father, or any chance prospector like himself. In either case
he would be covered with ridicule by his partners and the camp, or more
seriously rebuked for his carelessness and stupidity. No! he could not
tell them the truth; nor could he lie. He would say he was called away
for a day on private business.

Luckily for him, the active imagination of his partners was even now
helping him. The theory of the “tinker” and the “pan” was indignantly
rejected by his other partner. His blushes and embarrassment were
suddenly remembered by Faulkner, and by the time he reached his cabin,
they had settled that the negro woman had brought him a love letter! He
was young and good looking; what was more natural than that he should
have some distant love affair?

His embarrassed statement that he must leave early the next morning
on business that he could not at PRESENT disclose was considered amply
confirmatory, and received with maliciously significant acquiescence.
“Only,” said Faulkner, “at YOUR age, sonny,”--he was nine months older
than Fleming,--“I should have gone TO-NIGHT.” Surely Providence was
favoring him!

He was off early the next morning. He was sorely tempted to go first to
the cabin, but every moment was precious until he had tested the proof
of his good fortune.

It was high noon before he reached the fringe of forest. A few paces
farther and he found the spring and outcrop. To avert his partners'
suspicions he had not brought his own implements, but had borrowed a
pan, spade, and pick from a neighbor's claim before setting out. The
spot was apparently in the same condition as when he left it, and with
a beating heart he at once set to work, an easy task with his new
implements. He nervously watched the water overflow the pan of dirt
at its edges until, emptied of earth and gravel, the black sand alone
covered the bottom. A slight premonition of disappointment followed;
a rich indication would have shown itself before this! A few more
workings, and the pan was quite empty except for a few pin-points of
“color,” almost exactly the quantity he found before. He washed another
pan with the same result. Another taken from a different level of the
outcrop yielded neither more nor less! There was no mistake: it was
a failure! His discovery had been only a little “pocket,” and the few
flakes she had sent him were the first and last of that discovery.

He sat down with a sense of relief; he could face his partners again
without disloyalty; he could see that pretty little figure once more
without the compunction of having incurred her father's prejudices by
locating a permanent claim so near his cabin. In fact, he could carry
out his partners' fancy to the letter!

He quickly heaped his implements together and turned to leave the wood;
but he was confronted by a figure that at first he scarcely recognized.
Yet--it was Katinka! the young girl of the cabin, who had sent him the
gold. She was dressed differently--perhaps in her ordinary every-day
garments--a bright sprigged muslin, a chip hat with blue ribbons set
upon a coil of luxurious brown hair. But what struck him most was that
the girlish and diminutive character of the figure had vanished with
her ill-fitting clothes; the girl that stood before him was of ordinary
height, and of a prettiness and grace of figure that he felt would
have attracted anywhere. Fleming felt himself suddenly embarrassed,--a
feeling that was not lessened when he noticed that her pretty lip was
compressed and her eyebrows a little straightened as she gazed at him.

“Ye made a bee line for the woods, I see,” she said coldly. “I allowed
ye might have been droppin' in to our house first.”

“So I should,” said Fleming quickly, “but I thought I ought to first
make sure of the information you took the trouble to send me.” He
hesitated to speak of the ill luck he had just experienced; he could
laugh at it himself--but would she?

“And ye got a new pan?” she said half poutingly.

Here seemed his opportunity. “Yes, but I'm afraid it hasn't the magic
of yours. I haven't even got the color. I believe you bewitched your old
pan.”

Her face flushed a little and brightened, and her lip relaxed with a
smile. “Go 'long with yer! Ye don't mean to say ye had no luck to-day?”

“None--but in seeing you.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Ye see, I said all 'long ye weren't much o' a miner.
Ye ain't got no faith. Ef ye had as much as a grain o' mustard seed,
ye'd remove mountains; it's in the Book.”

“Yes, and this mountain is on the bedrock, and my faith is not strong
enough,” he said laughingly. “And then, that would be having faith in
Mammon, and you don't want me to have THAT.”

She looked at him curiously. “I jest reckon ye don't care a picayune
whether ye strike anything or not,” she said half admiringly.

“To please you I'll try again, if you'll look on. Perhaps you'll bring
me luck as you did before. You shall take the pan. I will fill it and
you shall wash it out. You'll be my MASCOT.”

She stiffened a little at this, and then said pertly, “Wot's that?”

“My good fairy.”

She smiled again, this time with a new color in her pale face. “Maybe I
am,” she said, with sudden gravity.

He quickly filled the pan again with soil, brought it to the spring,
and first washed out the greater bulk of loose soil. “Now come here and
kneel down beside me,” he said, “and take the pan and do as I show you.”

She knelt down obediently. Suddenly she lifted her little hand with a
gesture of warning. “Wait a minit--jest a minit--till the water runs
clear again.”

The pool had become slightly discolored from the first washing.

“That makes no difference,” he said quickly.

“Ah! but wait, please!” She laid her brown hand upon his arm; a pleasant
warmth seemed to follow her touch. Then she said joyously, “Look down
there.”

“Where?” he asked.

“There--don't ye see it?”

“See what?”

“You and me!”

He looked where she pointed. The pool had settled, resumed its
mirror-like calm, and reflected distinctly, not only their two bending
faces, but their two figures kneeling side by side. Two tall redwoods
rose on either side of them, like the columns before an altar.

There was a moment of silence. The drone of a bumble-bee near by seemed
to make the silence swim drowsily in their ears; far off they heard the
faint beat of a woodpecker. The suggestion of their kneeling figures in
this magic mirror was vague, unreasoning, yet for the moment none the
less irresistible. His arm instinctively crept around her little waist
as he whispered,--he scarce knew what he said,--“Perhaps here is the
treasure I am seeking.”

The girl laughed, released herself, and sprang up; the pan sank
ingloriously to the bottom of the pool, where Fleming had to grope for
it, assisted by Tinka, who rolled up her sleeve to her elbow. For a
minute or two they washed gravely, but with no better success than
attended his own individual efforts. The result in the bottom of the pan
was the same. Fleming laughed.

“You see,” he said gayly, “the Mammon of unrighteousness is not for
me--at least, so near your father's tabernacle.”

“That makes no difference now,” said the girl quickly, “for dad is goin'
to move, anyway, farther up the mountains. He says it's gettin' too
crowded for him here--when the last settler took up a section three
miles off.”

“And are YOU going too?” asked the young man earnestly.

Tinka nodded her brown head. Fleming heaved a genuine sigh. “Well, I'll
try my hand here a little longer. I'll put up a notice of claim; I don't
suppose your father would object. You know he couldn't LEGALLY.”

“I reckon ye might do it ef ye wanted--ef ye was THAT keen on gettin'
gold!” said Tinka, looking away. There was something in the girl's tone
which this budding lover resented. He had become sensitive.

“Oh, well,” he said, “I see that it might make unpleasantness with your
father. I only thought,” he went on, with tenderer tentativeness, “that
it would be pleasant to work here near you.”

“Ye'd be only wastin' yer time,” she said darkly.

Fleming rose gravely. “Perhaps you're right,” he answered sadly and a
little bitterly, “and I'll go at once.”

He walked to the spring, and gathered up his tools. “Thank you again for
your kindness, and good-by.”

He held out his hand, which she took passively, and he moved away.

But he had not gone far before she called him. He turned to find her
still standing where he had left her, her little hands clinched at her
side, and her widely opened eyes staring at him. Suddenly she ran
at him, and, catching the lapels of his coat in both hands, held him
rigidly fast.

“No! no! ye sha'n't go--ye mustn't go!” she said, with hysterical
intensity. “I want to tell ye something! Listen!--you--you--Mr. Fleming!
I've been a wicked, wicked girl! I've told lies to dad--to mammy--to
YOU! I've borne false witness--I'm worse than Sapphira--I've acted a
big lie. Oh, Mr. Fleming, I've made you come back here for nothing!
Ye didn't find no gold the other day. There wasn't any. It was all me!
I--I--SALTED THAT PAN!”

“Salted it!” echoed Fleming, in amazement.

“Yes, 'salted it,'” she faltered; “that's what dad says they call
it--what those wicked sons of Mammon do to their claims to sell them.
I--put gold in the pan myself; it wasn't there before.”

“But why?” gasped Fleming.

She stopped. Then suddenly the fountains in the deep of her blue eyes
were broken up; she burst into a sob, and buried her head in her hands,
and her hands on his shoulder. “Because--because”--she sobbed against
him--“I WANTED YOU to come back!”

He folded her in his arms. He kissed her lovingly, forgivingly,
gratefully, tearfully, smilingly--and paused; then he kissed her
sympathetically, understandingly, apologetically, explanatorily, in lieu
of other conversation. Then, becoming coherent, he asked,--

“But WHERE did you get the gold?”

“Oh,” she said between fitful and despairing sobs, “somewhere!--I don't
know--out of the old Run--long ago--when I was little! I didn't never
dare say anything to dad--he'd have been crazy mad at his own daughter
diggin'--and I never cared nor thought a single bit about it until I saw
you.”

“And you have never been there since?”

“Never.”

“Nor anybody else?”

“No.”

Suddenly she threw back her head; her chip hat fell back from her
face, rosy with a dawning inspiration! “Oh, say, Jack!--you don't
think that--after all this time--there might”--She did not finish the
sentence, but, grasping his hand, cried, “Come!”

She caught up the pan, he seized the shovel and pick, and they raced
like boy and girl down the hill. When within a few hundred feet of the
house she turned at right angles into the clearing, and saying, “Don't
be skeered; dad's away,” ran boldly on, still holding his hand, along
the little valley. At its farther extremity they came to the “Run,” a
half-dried watercourse whose rocky sides were marked by the erosion of
winter torrents. It was apparently as wild and secluded as the forest
spring. “Nobody ever came here,” said the girl hurriedly, “after dad
sunk the well at the house.”

One or two pools still remained in the Run from the last season's flow,
water enough to wash out several pans of dirt.

Selecting a spot where the white quartz was visible, Fleming attacked
the bank with the pick. After one or two blows it began to yield and
crumble away at his feet. He washed out a panful perfunctorily, more
intent on the girl than his work; she, eager, alert, and breathless,
had changed places with him, and become the anxious prospector! But the
result was the same. He threw away the pan with a laugh, to take her
little hand! But she whispered, “Try again.”

He attacked the bank once more with such energy that a great part of
it caved and fell, filling the pan and even burying the shovel in the
debris. He unearthed the latter while Tinka was struggling to get out
the pan.

“The mean thing is stuck and won't move,” she said pettishly. “I think
it's broken now, too, just like ours.”

Fleming came laughingly forward, and, putting one arm around the girl's
waist, attempted to assist her with the other. The pan was immovable,
and, indeed, seemed to be broken and bent. Suddenly he uttered an
exclamation and began hurriedly to brush away the dirt and throw the
soil out of the pan.

In another moment he had revealed a fragment of decomposed quartz, like
discolored honeycombed cheese, half filling the pan. But on its side,
where the pick had struck it glancingly, there was a yellow streak
like a ray of sunshine! And as he strove to lift it he felt in that
unmistakable omnipotency of weight that it was seamed and celled with
gold.


The news of Mr. Fleming's engagement, two weeks later, to the daughter
of the recluse religious hunter who had made a big strike at Lone Run,
excited some skeptical discussion, even among the honest congratulations
of his partners.

“That's a mighty queer story how Jack got that girl sweet on him just by
borrowin' a prospectin' pan of her,” said Faulkner, between the whiffs
of his pipe under the trees. “You and me might have borrowed a hundred
prospectin' pans and never got even a drink thrown in. Then to think
of that old preachin' coon-hunter hevin' to give in and pass his strike
over to his daughter's feller, jest because he had scruples about gold
diggin' himself. He'd hev booted you and me outer his ranch first.”

“Lord, ye ain't takin' no stock in that hogwash,” responded the other.
“Why, everybody knows old man Jallinger pretended to be sick o' miners
and minin' camps, and couldn't bear to hev 'em near him, only jest
because he himself was all the while secretly prospectin' the whole lode
and didn't want no interlopers. It was only when Fleming nippled in by
gettin' hold o' the girl that Jallinger knew the secret was out, and
that's the way he bought him off. Why, Jack wasn't no miner--never
was--ye could see that. HE never struck anything. The only treasure he
found in the woods was Tinka Jallinger!”




A BELLE OF CANADA CITY


Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small glass at
her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and
olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow
level--the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground
was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular
attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising
clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main
Street with its new brick block of “stores,” ending abruptly against a
tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where
the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn
shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this
foreground was Cissy's world--her life, her sole girlish experience. She
did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but
moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine
by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the
hollows of her temples. Like others of her sex, she was a poor critic
of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of
her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek
as in her bright eyes and expression. Nevertheless, she was somewhat
consoled by the ravishing effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and
turned away not wholly dissatisfied. Indeed, as the acknowledged belle
of Canada City and the daughter of its principal banker, small wonder
that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her
faults--and her attractions.

She bounded down the stairs and into the front parlor, for their house
possessed the unheard-of luxury of a double drawing-room, albeit the
second apartment contained a desk, and was occasionally used by Cissy's
father in private business interviews with anxious seekers of “advances”
 who shunned the publicity of the bank. Here she instantly flew into the
arms of her bosom friend, Miss Piney Tibbs, a girl only a shade or two
less pretty than herself, who, always more or less ill at ease in these
splendors, was awaiting her impatiently. For Miss Tibbs was merely the
daughter of the hotel-keeper; and although Tibbs was a Southerner, and
had owned “his own niggers” in the States, she was of inferior position
and a protegee of Cissy's.

“Thank goodness you've come,” exclaimed Miss Tibbs, “for I've bin
sittin' here till I nigh took root. What kep' ye?”

“How does it look?” responded Cissy, as a relevant reply.

The “it” referred to Cissy's new hat, and to the young girl the
coherence was perfectly plain. Miss Tibbs looked at “it” severely. It
would not do for a protegee to be too complaisant.

“Hem! Must have cost a heap o' money.”

“It did! Came from the best milliner in San Francisco.”

“Of course,” said Piney, with half assumed envy. “When your popper runs
the bank and just wallows in gold!”

“Never mind, dear,” replied Cissy cheerfully. “So'll YOUR popper some
day. I'm goin' to get mine to let YOUR popper into something--Ditch
stocks and such. Yes! True, O King! Popper'll do anything for me,” she
added a little loftily.

Loyal as Piney was to her friend, she was by no means convinced of
this. She knew the difference between the two men, and had a vivid
recollection of hearing her own father express his opinion of Cissy's
respected parent as a “Gold Shark” and “Quartz Miner Crusher.” It did
not, however, affect her friendship for Cissy. She only said, “Let's
come!” caught Cissy around the waist, pranced with her out into the
veranda, and gasped, out of breath, “Where are we goin' first?”

“Down Main Street,” said Cissy promptly.

“And let's stop at Markham's store. They've got some new things in from
Sacramento,” added Piney.

“Country styles,” returned Cissy, with a supercilious air. “No! Besides,
Markham's head clerk is gettin' too presumptuous. Just guess! He asked
me, while I was buyin' something, if I enjoyed the dance last Monday!”

“But you danced with him,” said the simple Piney, in astonishment.

“But not in his store among his customers,” said Cissy sapiently. “No!
we're going down Main Street past Secamps'. Those Secamp girls are
sure to be at their windows, looking out. This hat will just turn 'em
green--greener than ever.”

“You're just horrid, Ciss!” said Piney, with admiration.

“And then,” continued Cissy, “we'll just sail down past the new block to
the parson's and make a call.”

“Oh, I see,” said Piney archly. “It'll be just about the time when the
new engineer of the mill works has a clean shirt on, and is smoking his
cigyar before the office.”

Cissy tossed her hat disdainfully. “Much anybody cares whether he's
there or not! I haven't forgotten how he showed us over the mill the
other day in a pair of overalls, just like a workman.”

“But they say he's awfully smart and well educated, and needn't work,
and I'm sure it's very nice of him to dress just like the other men when
he's with 'em,” urged Piney.

“Bah! That was just to show that he didn't care what we thought of him,
he's that conceited! And it wasn't respectful, considering one of the
directors was there, all dressed up. Don't tell me! You can see it in
his eye, looking you over without blinking and then turning away as if
he'd got enough of you. He makes me tired.”

Piney did not reply. The engineer had seemed to her to be a singularly
attractive young man, yet she was equally impressed with Cissy's
superior condition, which could find flaws in such perfection. Following
her friend down the steps of the veranda, they passed into the staring
graveled walk of the new garden, only recently recovered from the wild
wood, its accurate diamond and heart shaped beds of vivid green set
in white quartz borders giving it the appearance of elaborately iced
confectionery. A few steps further brought them to the road and the
wooden “sidewalk” to Main Street, which carried civic improvements
to the hillside, and Mr. Trixit's very door. Turning down this
thoroughfare, they stopped laughing, and otherwise assumed a conscious
half artificial air; for it was the hour when Canada City lounged
listlessly before its shops, its saloons, its offices and mills, or even
held lazy meetings in the dust of the roadway, and the passage down the
principal street of its two prettiest girls was an event to be viewed as
if it were a civic procession. Hats flew off as they passed; place was
freely given; impeding barrels and sacks were removed from the wooden
pavement, and preoccupied indwellers hastily summoned to the front door
to do homage to Cissy Trixit and Piney as they went by. Not but that
Canada City, in the fierce and unregenerate days of its youth, had
seen fairer and higher colored faces, more gayly bedizened, on its
thoroughfares, but never anything so fresh and innocent. Men stood
there all unconsciously, reverencing their absent mothers, sisters, and
daughters, in their spontaneous homage to the pair, and seemed to feel
the wholesome breath of their Eastern homes wafted from the freshly
ironed skirts of these foolish virgins as they rustled by. I am afraid
that neither Cissy nor Piney appreciated this feeling; few women did at
that time; indeed, these young ladies assumed a slight air of hauteur.

“Really, they do stare so,” said Cissy, with eyes dilating with
pleasurable emotion; “we'll have to take the back street next time!”

Piney, proud in the glory reflected from Cissy, and in her own,
answered, “We will--sure!”

There was only one interruption to this triumphal progress, and that was
so slight as to be noticed by only one of the two girls. As they passed
the new works at the mill, the new engineer, as Piney had foreseen, was
leaning against the doorpost, smoking a pipe. He took his hat from his
head and his pipe from his month as they approached, and greeted them
with an easy “Good-afternoon,” yet with a glance that was quietly
observant and tolerantly critical.

“There!” said Cissy, when they had passed, “didn't I tell you? Did you
ever see such conceit in your born days? I hope you did not look at
him.”

Piney, conscious of having done so, and of having blushed under his
scrutiny, nevertheless stoutly asserted that she had merely looked at
him “to see who it was.” But Cissy was placated by passing the Secamps'
cottage, from whose window the three strapping daughters of John
Secamp, lately an emigrant from Missouri, were, as Cissy had surmised,
lightening the household duties by gazing at the--to them--unwonted
wonders of the street. Whether their complexions, still bearing traces
of the alkali dust and inefficient nourishment of the plains, took a
more yellow tone from the spectacle of Cissy's hat, I cannot say. Cissy
thought they did; perhaps Piney was nearer the truth when she suggested
that they were only “looking” to enable them to make a home-made copy of
the hat next week.

Their progress forward and through the outskirts of the town was of
the same triumphal character. Teamsters withheld their oaths and their
uplifted whips as the two girls passed by; weary miners, toiling in
ditches, looked up with a pleasure that was half reminiscent of their
past; younger skylarkers stopped in their horse-play with half smiling,
half apologetic faces; more ambitious riders on the highway urged their
horses to greater speed under the girls' inspiring eyes, and “Vaquero
Billy,” charging them, full tilt, brought up his mustang on its haunches
and rigid forelegs, with a sweeping bow of his sombrero, within a foot
of their artfully simulated terror! In this way they at last reached the
clearing in the forest, the church with its ostentatious spire, and the
Reverend Mr. Windibrook's dwelling, otherwise humorously known as “The
Pastorage,” where Cissy intended to call.

The Reverend Mr. Windibrook had been selected by his ecclesiastical
superiors to minister to the spiritual wants of Canada City as being
what was called a “hearty” man. Certainly, if considerable lung
capacity, absence of reserve, and power of handshaking and back slapping
were necessary to the redemption of Canada City, Mr. Windibrook's
ministration would have been successful. But, singularly enough, the
rude miner was apt to resent this familiarity, and it is recorded that
Isaac Wood, otherwise known as “Grizzly Woods,” once responded to a
cheerful back slap from the reverend gentleman by an ostentatiously
friendly hug which nearly dislocated the parson's ribs. Perhaps Mr.
Windibrook was more popular on account of his admiring enthusiasm of the
prosperous money-getting members of his flock and a singular sympathy
with their methods, and Mr. Trixit's daring speculations were an
especially delightful theme to him.

“Ah, Miss Trixit,” he said, as Cissy entered the little parlor, “and how
is your dear father? Still startling the money market with his fearless
speculations? This, brother Jones,” turning to a visitor, “is the
daughter of our Napoleon of finance, Montagu Trixit. Only last week,
in that deal in 'the Comstock,' he cleared fifty thousand dollars! Yes,
sir,” repeating it with unction, “fifty--thousand--dollars!--in about
two hours, and with a single stroke of the pen! I believe I am
not overstating, Miss Trixit?” he added, appealing to Cissy with
a portentous politeness that was as badly fitting as his previous
“heartiness.”

Cissy colored slightly. “I don't know,” she said simply. She was
perfectly truthful. She knew nothing of her father's business, except
the vague reputation of his success.

Her modesty, however, produced a singular hilarity in Mr. Windibrook,
and a playful push. “YOU don't know? Ha, but I do. Yes, sir,”--to the
visitor,--“I have reason to remember it. I called upon him the next day.
I used, sir, the freedom of an old friend. 'Trixit,' I said, clapping
my hand on his shoulder, 'the Lord has been good to you. I congratulate
you.'

“'H'm!' he said, without looking up. 'What do you reckon those
congratulations are worth?'

“Many a man, sir, who didn't know his style, would have been staggered.
But I knew my man. I looked him straight in the eye. 'A new organ,' I
said, 'and as good a one as Sacramento can turn out.'

“He took up a piece of paper, scrawled a few lines on it to his cashier,
and said, 'Will that do?'” Mr. Windibrook's voice sank to a thrilling
whisper. “It was an order for one thousand dollars! Fact, sir. THAT is
the father of this young lady.”

“Ye had better luck than Bishop Briggs had with old Johnson, the
Excelsior Bank president,” said the visitor, encouraged by Windibrook's
“heartiness” into a humorous retrospect. “Briggs goes to him for a
subscription for a new fence round the buryin'-ground--the old one
havin' rotted away. 'Ye don't want no fence,' sez Johnson, short like.
'No fence round a buryin'-ground?' sez Briggs, starin'. 'No! Them as is
IN the buryin'-ground can't get OUT, and them as ISN'T don't want to
get IN, nohow! So you kin just travel--I ain't givin' money away on
uselessnesses!' Ha! ha!”

A chill silence followed, which checked even Piney's giggle. Mr.
Windibrook evidently had no “heartiness” for non-subscribing
humor. “There are those who can jest with sacred subjects,” he said
ponderously, “but I have always found Mr. Trixit, though blunt,
eminently practical. Your father is still away,” he added, shifting the
conversation to Cissy, “hovering wherever he can extract the honey to
store up for the provision of age. An industrious worker.”

“He's still away,” said Cissy, feeling herself on safe ground, though
she was not aware of her father's entomological habits. “In San
Francisco, I think.”

She was glad to get away from Mr. Windibrook's “heartiness” and console
herself with Mrs. Windibrook's constitutional depression, which was
partly the result of nervous dyspepsia and her husband's boisterous
cordiality. “I suppose, dear, you are dreadfully anxious about your
father when he is away from home?” she said to Cissy, with a sympathetic
sigh.

Cissy, conscious of never having felt a moment's anxiety, and accustomed
to his absences, replied naively, “Why?”

“Oh,” responded Mrs. Windibrook, “on account of his great business
responsibilities, you know; so much depends upon him.”

Again Cissy did not comprehend; she could not understand why this
masterful man, her father, who was equal to her own and, it seemed,
everybody's needs, had any responsibility, or was not as infallible
and constant as the sunshine or the air she breathed. Without being his
confidante, or even his associate, she had since her mother's death no
other experience; youthfully alive to the importance of their wealth, it
seemed to her, however, only a natural result of being HIS daughter. She
smiled vaguely and a little impatiently. They might have talked to
her about HERSELF; it was a little tiresome to always have to answer
questions about her “popper.” Nevertheless, she availed herself of
Mrs. Windibrook's invitation to go into the garden and see the new
summerhouse that had been put up among the pines, and gradually diverted
her hostess's conversation into gossip of the town. If it was somewhat
lugubrious and hesitating, it was, however, a relief to Cissy, and
bearing chiefly upon the vicissitudes of others, gave her the comforting
glow of comparison.

Touching the complexion of the Secamp girls, Mrs. Windibrook attributed
it to their great privations in the alkali desert. “One day,” continued
Mrs. Windibrook, “when their father was ill with fever and ague, they
drove the cattle twenty miles to water through that dreadful poisonous
dust, and when they got there their lips were cracked and bleeding and
their eyelids like burning knives, and Mamie Secamp's hair, which used
to be a beautiful brown like your own, my dear, was bleached into a
rusty yellow.”

“And they WILL wear colors that don't suit them,” said Cissy
impatiently.

“Never mind, dear,” said Mrs. Windibrook ambiguously; “I suppose they
will have their reward.”

Nor was the young engineer discussed in a lighter vein. “It pains me
dreadfully to see that young man working with the common laborers and
giving himself no rest, just because he says he wants to know exactly
'how the thing is done' and why the old works failed,” she remarked
sadly. “When Mr. Windibrook knew he was the son of Judge Masterton and
had rich relations, he wished, of course, to be civil, but somehow young
Masterton and he didn't 'hit off.' Indeed, Mr. Windibrook was told that
he had declared that the prosperity of Canada City was only a mushroom
growth, and it seems too shocking to repeat, dear, but they say he said
that the new church--OUR church--was simply using the Almighty as a big
bluff to the other towns. Of course, Mr. Windibrook couldn't see him
after that. Why, he even said your father ought to send you to school
somewhere, and not let you grow up in this half civilized place.”

Strangely enough, Cissy did not hail this corroboration of her dislike
to young Masterton with the liveliness one might have expected. Perhaps
it was because Piney Tibbs was no longer present, having left Cissy at
the parsonage and returned home. Still she enjoyed her visit after a
fashion, romped with the younger Windibrooks and climbed a tree in
the security of her sylvan seclusion and the promptings of her still
healthy, girlish blood, and only came back to cake and tea and her
new hat, which she had prudently hung up in the summer-house, as the
afternoon was waning. When they returned to the house, they found that
Mr. Windibrook had gone out with his visitor, and Cissy was spared the
advertisement of a boisterous escort home, which he generally insisted
upon. She gayly took leave of the infant Windibrook and his mother,
sallied out into the empty road, and once more became conscious of her
new hat.

The shadows were already lengthening, and a cool breeze stirred the deep
aisles of the pines on either side of the highway. One or two
people passed her hurriedly, talking and gesticulating, evidently so
preoccupied that they did not notice her. Again, a rapid horseman rode
by without glancing round, overtook the pedestrians, exchanged a few
hurried words with them, and then spurred swiftly away as one of them
shouted after him, “There's another dispatch confirming it.” A group
of men talking by the roadside failed to look up as she passed. Cissy
pouted slightly at this want of taste, which made some late election
news or the report of a horse race more enthralling than her new hat and
its owner. Even the toilers in the ditches had left their work, and were
congregated around a man who was reading aloud from a widely margined
“extra” of the “Canada City Press.” It seemed provoking, as she knew
her cheeks were glowing from her romp, and was conscious that she was
looking her best. However, the Secamps' cottage was just before her, and
the girls were sure to be on the lookout! She shook out her skirts and
straightened her pretty little figure as she approached the house. But
to her surprise, her coming had evidently been anticipated by them,
and they were actually--and unexpectedly--awaiting her behind the low
whitewashed garden palings! As she neared them they burst into a
shrill, discordant laugh, so full of irony, gratified malice, and mean
exaltation that Cissy was for a moment startled. But only for a moment;
she had her father's reckless audacity, and bore them down with a
display of such pink cheeks and flashing eyes that their laughter was
checked, and they remained open-mouthed as she swept by them.

Perhaps this incident prevented her from noticing another but more
passive one. A group of men standing before the new mill--the same
men who had so solicitously challenged her attention with their bows a
couple of hours ago--turned as she approached and suddenly dispersed. It
was not until this was repeated by another group that its oddity forced
itself upon her still angry consciousness. Then the street seemed to
be full of those excited preoccupied groups who melted away as she
advanced. Only one man met her curious eyes,--the engineer,--yet she
missed the usual critical smile with which he was wont to greet her,
and he gave her a bow of such profound respect and gravity that for the
first time she felt really uneasy. Was there something wrong with her
hat? That dreadful, fateful hat! Was it too conspicuous? Did he think
it was vulgar? She was eager to cross the street on the next block where
there were large plate-glass windows which she and Piney--if Piney were
only with her now!--had often used as mirrors.

But there was a great crowd on the next block, congregated around the
bank,--her father's bank! A vague terror, she knew not what, now began
to creep over her. She would have turned into a side street, but mingled
with her fear was a resolution not to show it,--not to even THINK of
it,--to combat it as she had combated the horrid laugh of the Secamp
girls, and she kept her way with a beating heart but erect head, without
looking across the street.

There was another crowd before the newspaper office--also on the other
side--and a bulletin board, but she would not try to read it. Only one
idea was in her mind,--to reach home before any one should speak to her;
for the last intelligible sound that had reached her was the laugh of
the Secamp girls, and this was still ringing in her ears, seeming to
voice the hidden strangeness of all she saw, and stirring her, as that
had, with childish indignation. She kept on with unmoved face, however,
and at last turned into the planked side-terrace,--a part of her
father's munificence,--and reached the symmetrical garden-beds and
graveled walk. She ran up the steps of the veranda and entered the
drawing-room through the open French window. Glancing around the
familiar room, at her father's closed desk, at the open piano with the
piece of music she had been practicing that morning, the whole walk
seemed only a foolish dream that had frightened her. She was Cissy
Trixit, the daughter of the richest man in the town! This was her
father's house, the wonder of Canada City!

A ring at the front doorbell startled her; without waiting for the
servant to answer it, she stepped out on the veranda, and saw a boy whom
she recognized as a waiter at the hotel kept by Piney's father. He
was holding a note in his hand, and staring intently at the house and
garden. Seeing Cissy, he transferred his stare to her. Snatching the
note from him, she tore it open, and read in Piney's well-known scrawl,
“Dad won't let me come to you now, dear, but I'll try to slip out late
to-night.” Why should she want to come? She had said nothing about
coming NOW--and why should her father prevent her? Cissy crushed the
note between her fingers, and faced the boy.

“What are you staring at--idiot?”

The boy grinned hysterically, a little frightened at Cissy's
straightened brows and snapping eyes.

“Get away! there's no answer.”

The boy ran off, and Cissy returned to the drawing-room. Then it
occurred to her that the servant had not answered the bell. She rang
again furiously. There was no response. She called down the basement
staircase, and heard only the echo of her voice in the depths. How still
the house was! Were they ALL out,--Susan, Norah, the cook, the Chinaman,
and the gardener? She ran down into the kitchen; the back door was open,
the fires were burning, dishes were upon the table, but the kitchen was
empty. Upon the floor lay a damp copy of the “extra.” She picked it
up quickly. Several black headlines stared her in the face. “Enormous
Defalcation!” “Montagu Trixit Absconded!” “50,000 Dollars Missing!” “Run
on the Bank!”

She threw the paper through the open door as she would have hurled back
the accusation from living lips. Then, in a revulsion of feeling lest
any one should find her there, she ran upstairs and locked herself in
her own room.

So that was what it all meant! All!--from the laugh of the Secamp girls
to the turning away of the townspeople as she went by. Her father was a
thief who had stolen money from the bank and run away leaving her alone
to bear it! No! It was all a lie--a wicked, jealous lie! A foolish lie,
for how could he steal money from HIS OWN bank? Cissy knew very little
of her father--perhaps that was why she believed in him; she knew still
less of business, but she knew that HE did. She had often heard them
say it--perhaps the very ones who now called him names. He! who had made
Canada City what it was! HE, who, Windibrook said, only to-day, had,
like Moses, touched the rocks of the Canada with his magic wand of
Finance, and streams of public credit and prosperity had gushed from
it! She would never speak to them again! She would shut herself up here,
dismiss all the servants but the Chinaman, and wait until her father
returned.

There was a knock, and the entreating voice of Norah, the cook, outside
the door. Cissy unlocked it and flung it open indignantly.

“Ah! It's yourself, miss--and I never knew ye kem back till I met that
gossoon of a hotel waiter in the street,” said the panting servant.
“Sure it was only an hour ago while I was at me woorrck in the kitchen,
and Jim rushes in and sez: 'For the love of God, if iver ye want to see
a blessed cint of the money ye put in the masther's bank, off wid ye now
and draw it out--for there's a run on the bank!'”

“It was an infamous lie,” said Cissy fiercely.

“Sure, miss, how was oi to know? And if the masther HAS gone away, it's
ownly takin' me money from the other divils down there that's drawin' it
out and dividin' it betwixt and between them.”

Cissy had a very vague idea of what a “run on the bank” meant, but
Norah's logic seemed to satisfy her feminine reason. She softened a
little.

“Mr. Windibrook is in the parlor, miss, and a jintleman on the veranda,”
 continued Norah, encouraged.

Cissy started. “I'll come down,” she said briefly.

Mr. Windibrook was waiting beside the piano, with his soft hat in one
hand and a large white handkerchief in the other. He had confidently
expected to find Cissy in tears, and was ready with boisterous
condolement, but was a little taken aback as the young girl entered
with a pale face, straightened brows, and eyes that shone with audacious
rebellion. However, it was too late to change his attitude. “Ah, my
young friend,” he said a little awkwardly, “we must not give way to our
emotions, but try to recognize in our trials the benefits of a great
lesson. But,” he added hurriedly, seeing her stand still silent but
erect before him, “I see that you do!” He paused, coughed slightly, cast
a glance at the veranda,--where Cissy now for the first time observed
a man standing in an obviously assumed attitude of negligent
abstraction,--moved towards the back room, and in a lower voice said, “A
word with you in private.”

Without replying, Cissy followed him.

“If,” said Mr. Windibrook, with a sickly smile, “you are questioned
regarding your father's affairs, you may remember his peculiar and
utterly unsolicited gift of a certain sum towards a new organ, to which
I alluded to-day. You can say that he always expressed great liberality
towards the church, and it was no surprise to you.”

Cissy only stared at him with dangerous eyes.

“Mrs. Windibrook,” continued the reverend gentleman in his highest,
heartiest voice, albeit a little hurried, “wished me to say to you that
until you heard from--your friends--she wanted you to come and stay with
her. DO come! DO!”

Cissy, with her bright eyes fixed upon her visitor, said, “I shall stay
here.”

“But,” said Mr. Windibrook impatiently, “you cannot. That man you see on
the veranda is the sheriff's officer. The house and all that it contains
are in the hands of the law.”

Cissy's face whitened in proportion as her eyes grew darker, but she
said stoutly, “I shall stay here till my popper tells me to go.”

“Till your popper tells you to go!” repeated Mr. Windibrook harshly,
dropping his heartiness and his handkerchief in a burst of unguarded
temper. “Your papa is a thief escaping from justice, you foolish girl;
a disgraced felon, who dare not show his face again in Canada City; and
you are lucky, yes! lucky, miss, if you do not share his disgrace!”

“And you're a wicked, wicked liar!” said Cissy, clinching her little
fists at her side and edging towards him with a sidelong bantam-like
movement as she advanced her freckled cheek close to his with an
effrontery so like her absconding father that he recoiled before it.
“And a mean, double-faced hypocrite, too! Didn't you always praise him?
Didn't you call him a Napoleon, and a--Moses? Didn't you say he was
the making of Canada City? Didn't you get him to raise your salary, and
start a subscription for your new house? Oh, you--you--stinking beast!”

Here the stranger on the veranda, still gazing abstractedly at
the landscape, gave a low and apparently unconscious murmur, as if
enraptured with the view. Mr. Windibrook, recalled to an attempt at
dignity, took up his hat and handkerchief. “When you have remembered
yourself and your position, Miss Trixit,” he said loftily, “the offer I
have made you”--

“I despise it! I'd sooner stay in the woods with the grizzlies and
rattlesnakes?” said Cissy pantingly. “Go and leave me alone! Do you
hear?” She stamped her little foot. “Are you listening? Go!”

Mr. Windibrook promptly retreated through the door and down the steps
into the garden, at which the stranger on the veranda reluctantly tore
himself away from the landscape and slowly entered the parlor through
the open French window. Here, however, he became equally absorbed and
abstracted in the condition of his beard, carefully stroking his shaven
cheek and lips and pulling his goatee.

After a pause he turned to the angry Cissy, standing by the piano,
radiant with glowing cheeks and flashing eyes, and said slowly, “I
reckon you gave the parson as good as he sent. It kinder settles a man
to hear the frozen truth about himself sometimes, and you've helped old
Shadbelly considerably on the way towards salvation. But he was right
about one thing, Miss Trixit. The house IS in the hands of the law. I'm
representing it as deputy sheriff. Mebbe you might remember me--Jake
Poole--when your father was addressing the last Citizen's meeting,
sittin' next to him on the platform--I'M in possession. It isn't a job
I'm hankerin' much arter; I'd a lief rather hunt hoss thieves or track
down road agents than this kind o' fancy, underhand work. So you'll
excuse me, miss, if I ain't got the style.” He paused, rubbed his chin
thoughtfully, and then said slowly and with great deliberation: “Ef
there's any little thing here, miss,--any keepsakes or such trifles
ez you keer for in partickler, things you wouldn't like strangers to
have,--you just make a little pile of 'em and drop 'em down somewhere
outside the back door. There ain't no inventory taken nor sealin' up
of anythin' done just yet, though I have to see there ain't anythin'
disturbed. But I kalkilate to walk out on that veranda for a spell
and look at the landscape.” He paused again, and said, with a sigh of
satisfaction, “It's a mighty pooty view out thar; it just takes me every
time.”

As he turned and walked out through the French window, Cissy did not
for a moment comprehend him; then, strangely enough, his act of rude
courtesy for the first time awakened her to the full sense of the
situation. This house, her father's house, was no longer hers! If her
father should NEVER return, she wanted nothing from it, NOTHING! She
gripped her beating heart with the little hand she had clinched so
valiantly a moment ago. Suddenly her hand dropped. Some one had glided
noiselessly into the back room; a figure in a blue blouse; a Chinaman,
their house servant, Ah Fe. He cast a furtive glance at the stranger on
the veranda, and then beckoned to her stealthily. She came towards him
wonderingly, when he suddenly whipped a note from his sleeve, and with
a dexterous movement slipped it into her fingers. She tore it open. A
single glance showed her a small key inclosed in a line of her father's
handwriting. Drawing quickly back into the corner, she read as follows:
“If this reaches you in time, take from the second drawer of my desk an
envelope marked 'Private Contracts' and give it to the bearer.” There
was neither signature nor address.

Putting her finger to her lips, she cast a quick glance at the absorbed
figure on the veranda and stepped before the desk. She fitted the key
to the drawer and opened it rapidly but noiselessly. There lay
the envelope, and among other ticketed papers a small roll of
greenbacks--such as her father often kept there. It was HIS money; she
did not scruple to take it with the envelope. Handing the latter to
the Chinaman, who made it instantly disappear up his sleeve like a
conjurer's act, she signed him to follow her into the hall.

“Who gave you that note, Ah Fe?” she whispered breathlessly.

“Chinaman.”

“Who gave it to him?”

“Chinaman.”

“And to HIM?”

“Nollee Chinaman.”

“Another Chinaman?”

“Yes--heap Chinaman--allee same as gang.”

“You mean it passed from one Chinaman's hand to another?”

“Allee same.”

“Why didn't the first Chinaman who got it bring it here?”

“S'pose Mellikan man want to catchee lettel. He spotty Chinaman. He
follee Chinaman. Chinaman passee lettel nex' Chinaman. He no get.
Mellikan man no habe got. Sabe?”

“Then this package will go back the same way?”

“Allee same.”

“And who will YOU give it to now?”

“Allee same man blingee me lettel. Hop Li--who makee washee.”

An idea here struck Cissy which made her heart jump and her cheeks
flame. Ah Fe gazed at her with an infantile smile of admiration.

“How far did that letter come?” she asked, with eager questioning eyes.

“Lettee me see him,” said Ah Fe.

Cissy handed him the missive; he examined closely some half-a-dozen
Chinese characters that were scrawled along the length of the outer
fold, and which she had innocently supposed were a part of the markings
of the rice paper on which the note was written.

“Heap Chinaman velly much walkee--longee way! S'pose you look.” He
pointed through the open front door to the prospect beyond. It was a
familiar one to Cissy,--the long Canada, the crest on crest of serried
pines, and beyond the dim snow-line. Ah Fe's brown finger seemed to
linger there.

“In the snow,” she whispered, her cheek whitening like that dim line,
but her eyes sparkling like the sunshine over it.

“Allee same, John,” said Ah Fe plaintively.

“Ah Fe,” whispered Cissy, “take ME with you to Hop Li.”

“No good,” said Ah Fe stolidly. “Hop Li, he givee this”--he indicated
the envelope in his sleeve--“to next Chinaman. HE no go. S'pose you go
with me, Hop Li--you no makee nothing--allee same, makee foolee!”

“I know; but you just take me there. DO!”

The young girl was irresistible. Ah Fe's face relaxed. “Allee litee!” he
said, with a resigned smile.

“You wait here a moment,” said Cissy, brightening. She flew up the
staircase. In a few minutes she was back again. She had exchanged her
smart rose-sprigged chintz for a pathetic little blue-checked frock of
her school-days; the fateful hat had given way to a brown straw “flat,”
 bent like a frame around her charming face. All the girlishness, and
indeed a certain honest boyishness of her nature, seemed to have come
out in her glowing, freckled cheek, brilliant, audacious eyes, and the
quick stride which brought her to Ah Fe's side.

“Now let's go,” she said, “out the back way and down the side streets.”
 She paused, cast a glance through the drawing-room at the contemplative
figure of the sheriff's deputy on the veranda, and then passed out of
the house forever.

*****

The excitement over the failure of Montagu Trixit's bank did not burn
itself out until midnight. By that time, however, it was pretty well
known that the amount of the defalcations had been exaggerated; that
it had been preceded by the suspension of the “Excelsior Bank” of San
Francisco, of which Trixit was also a managing director, occasioned by
the discovery of the withdrawal of securities for use in the branch bank
at Canada City; that he had fled the State eastward across the Sierras;
yet that, owing to the vigilance of the police on the frontier, he had
failed to escape and was in hiding. But there were adverse reports of a
more sinister nature. It was said that others were implicated; that they
dared not bring him to justice; it was pointed out that there was more
concern among many who were not openly connected with the bank than
among its unfortunate depositors. Besides the inevitable downfall of
those who had invested their fortunes in it, there was distrust or
suspicion everywhere. Even Trixit's enemies were forced to admit the
saying that “Canada City was the bank, and the bank was Trixit.”

Perhaps this had something to do with an excited meeting of the
directors of the New Mill, to whose discussions Dick Masterton, the
engineer, had been hurriedly summoned. When the president told him that
he had been selected to undertake the difficult and delicate mission
of discovering the whereabouts of Montagu Trixit, and, if possible,
procuring an interview with him, he was amazed. What had the New Mill,
which had always kept itself aloof from the bank and its methods, to
do with the disgraced manager? He was still more astonished when the
president added bluntly:--

“Trixit holds securities of ours for money advanced to the mill by
himself privately. They do not appear on the books, but if he chooses
to declare them as assets of the bank, it's a bad thing for us. If he
is bold enough to keep them, he may be willing to make some arrangement
with us to carry them on. If he has got away or committed suicide, as
some say, it's for you to find the whereabouts of the securities and get
them. He is said to have been last seen near the Summit. You understand
our position?”

Masterton did, with suppressed disgust. But he was young, and there was
the thrill of adventure in this. “I will go,” he said quietly.

“We thought you would. You must take the up stage to-night. Come
again and get your final instructions. By the way, you might get some
information at Trixit's house. You--er--er--are acquainted with his
daughter, I think?”

“Which makes it quite impossible for me to seek her for such a purpose,”
 said Masterton coldly.

A few hours later he was on the coach. As they cleared the outskirts of
the town, they passed two Chinamen plodding sturdily along in the dust
of the highway.

*****

Mr. Masterton started from a slight doze in the heavy, lumbering
“mountain wagon” which had taken the place of the smart Concord coach
that he had left at the last station. The scenery, too, had changed; the
four horses threaded their way through rocky defiles of stunted larches
and hardy “brush,” with here and there open patches of shrunken snow.
Yet at the edge of declivities he could still see through the rolled-up
leather curtains the valley below bathed in autumn, the glistening
rivers half spent with the long summer drought, and the green slopes
rolling upward into crest after crest of ascending pines. At times a
drifting haze, always imperceptible from below, veiled the view; a chill
wind blew through the vehicle, and made the steel sledge-runners that
hung beneath the wagon, ready to be shipped under the useless wheels,
an ominous provision. A few rude “stations,” half blacksmith shops, half
grocery, marked the deserted but wellworn road; along, narrow “packer's”
 wagon, or a tortuous file of Chinamen carrying mysterious bundles
depending from bamboo poles, was their rare and only company. The rough
sheepskin jackets which these men wore over their characteristic blue
blouses and their heavy leggings were a new revelation to Masterton,
accustomed to the thinly clad coolie of the mines. They seemed a
distinct race.

“I never knew those chaps get so high up, but they seem to understand
the cold,” he remarked.

The driver looked up, and ejaculated his disgust and his tobacco juice
at the same moment.

“I reckon they're everywhar in Californy whar you want 'em and whar you
don't; you take my word for it, afore long Californy will hev to reckon
that she ginerally DON'T want 'em, ef a white man has to live here. With
a race tied up together in a language ye can't understand, ways that no
feller knows,--from their prayin' to devils, swappin' their wives, and
havin' their bones sent back to Chiny,--wot are ye goin' to do, and
where are ye? Wot are ye goin' to make outer men that look so much alike
ye can't tell 'em apart; that think alike and act alike, and never in
ways that ye kin catch on to! Fellers knotted together in some underhand
secret way o' communicatin' with each other, so that ef ye kick a
Chinaman up here on the Summit, another Chinaman will squeal in the
valley! And the way they do it just gets me! Look yer! I'll tell ye
somethin' that happened, that's gospel truth! Some of the boys that
reckoned to hev some fun with the Chinee gang over at Cedar Camp started
out one afternoon to raid 'em. They groped along through the woods whar
nobody could see 'em, kalkilatin' to come down with a rush on the camp,
over two miles away. And nobody DID see 'em, only ONE Chinaman wot they
met a mile from the camp, burnin' punk to his joss or devil, and he
scooted away just in the contrary direction. Well, sir, when they
waltzed into that camp, darn my skin! ef there was a Chinaman there, or
as much as a grain of rice to grab! Somebody had warned 'em! Well! this
sort o' got the boys, and they set about discoverin' how it was done.
One of 'em noticed that there was some of them bits of tissue paper
slips that they toss around at funerals lyin' along the road near the
camp, and another remembered that the Chinaman they met on the hill
tossed a lot of that paper in the air afore he scooted. Well, sir, the
wind carried just enough of that paper straight down the hill into
that camp ten minutes afore THEY could get there, to give them Chinamen
warnin'--whatever it was! Fact! Why, I've seen 'em stringin' along the
road just like them fellers we passed just now, and then stop all of a
suddent like hounds off the scent, jabber among themselves, and start
off in a different direction”--

“Just what they're doing now! By thunder!” interrupted another
passenger, who was looking through the rolled-up curtain at his side.

All the passengers turned by one accord and looked out. The file of
Chinamen under observation had indeed turned, and was even then moving
rapidly away at right angles from the road.

“Got some signal, you bet!” said the driver; “some yeller paper or piece
o' joss stick in the road. What?”

The remark was addressed to the passenger who had just placed his finger
on his lip, and indicated a stolid-looking Chinaman, overlooked before,
who was sitting in the back or “steerage” seat.

“Oh, he be darned!” said the driver impatiently. “HE is no account; he's
only the laundryman from Rocky Canyon. I'm talkin' of the coolie gang.”

But here the conversation flagged, and the air growing keener, the flaps
of the leather side curtains were battened down. Masterton gave himself
up to conflicting reflections. The information that he had gathered
was meagre and unsatisfactory, and he could only trust to luck and
circumstance to fulfill his mission. The first glow of adventure having
passed, he was uneasily conscious that the mission was not to his taste.
The pretty, flushed but defiant face of Cissy that afternoon haunted
him; he had not known the immediate cause of it, but made no doubt that
she had already heard the news of her father's disgrace when he met
her. He regretted now that he hadn't spoken to her, if only a few formal
words of sympathy. He had always been half tenderly amused at her frank
conceit and her “airs,”--the innocent, undisguised pride of the country
belle, so different from the hard aplomb of the city girl! And now the
foolish little moth, dancing in the sunshine of prosperity, had felt the
chill of winter in its pretty wings. The contempt he had for the father
had hitherto shown itself in tolerant pity for the daughter, so proud
of her father's position and what it brought her. In the revelation that
his own directors had availed themselves of that father's methods, and
the ignoble character of his present mission, he felt a stirring of
self-reproach. What would become of her? Of course, frivolous as she
was, she would not feel the keenness of this misfortune like another,
nor yet rise superior to it. She would succumb for the present, to
revive another season in a dimmer glory elsewhere. His critical, cynical
observation of her had determined that any filial affection she
might have would be merged and lost in the greater deprivation of her
position.

A sudden darkening of the landscape below, and a singular opaque
whitening of the air around them, aroused him from his thoughts. The
driver drew up the collar of his overcoat and laid his whip smartly over
the backs of his cattle. The air grew gradually darker, until suddenly
it seemed to disintegrate into invisible gritty particles that swept
through the wagon. Presently these particles became heavier, more
perceptible, and polished like small shot, and a keen wind drove them
stingingly into the faces of the passengers, or insidiously into their
pockets, collars, or the folds of their clothes. The snow forced itself
through the smallest crevice.

“We'll get over this when once we've passed the bend; the road seems to
dip beyond,” said Masterton cheerfully from his seat beside the driver.

The driver gave him a single scornful look, and turned to the passenger
who occupied the seat on the other side of him. “I don't like the look
o' things down there, but ef we are stuck, we'll have to strike out for
the next station.”

“But,” said Masterton, as the wind volleyed the sharp snow pellets in
their faces and the leaders were scarcely distinguishable through the
smoke-like discharges, “it can't be worse than here.”

The driver did not speak, but the other passenger craned over his back,
and said explanatorily:--

“I reckon ye don't know these storms; this kind o' dry snow don't stick
and don't clog. Look!”

Indeed, between the volleys, Masterton could see that the road was
perfectly bare and wind-swept, and except slight drifts and banks beside
outlying bushes and shrubs,--which even then were again blown away
before his eyes,--the level landscape was unclothed and unchanged. Where
these mysterious snow pellets went to puzzled and confused him; they
seemed to vanish, as they had appeared, into the air about them.

“I'd make a straight rush for the next station,” said the other
passenger confidently to the driver. “If we're stuck, we're that much on
the way; if we turn back now, we'll have to take the grade anyway when
the storm's over, and neither you nor I know when THAT'll be. It may be
only a squall just now, but it's gettin' rather late in the season. Just
pitch in and drive all ye know.”

The driver laid his lash on the horses, and for a few moments the heavy
vehicle dashed forward in violent conflict with the storm. At times the
elastic hickory framework of its domed leather roof swayed and bent like
the ribs of an umbrella; at times it seemed as if it would be lifted
bodily off; at times the whole interior of the vehicle was filled with a
thin smoke by drifts through every cranny. But presently, to Masterton's
great relief, the interminable level seemed to end, and between the
whitened blasts he could see that the road was descending. Again the
horses were urged forward, and at last he could feel that the vehicle
began to add the momentum of its descent to its conflict with the storm.
The blasts grew less violent, or became only the natural resistance of
the air to their dominant rush. With the cessation of the snow volleys
and the clearing of the atmosphere, the road became more strongly
defined as it plunged downward to a terrace on the mountain flank,
several hundred feet below. Presently they came again upon a thicker
growth of bushes, and here and there a solitary fir. The wind died away;
the cold seemed to be less bitter. Masterton, in his relief, glanced
smilingly at his companions on the box, but the driver's mouth was
compressed as he urged his team forward, and the other passenger looked
hardly less anxious. They were now upon the level terrace, and the storm
apparently spending its fury high up and behind them. But in spite of
the clearing of the air, he could not but notice that it was singularly
dark. What was more singular, the darkness seemed to have risen from
below, and to flow in upon them as they descended. A curtain of profound
obscurity, darker even than the mountain wall at their side, shut out
the horizon and the valley below. But for the temperature, Masterton
would have thought a thunderstorm was closing in upon them. An odd
feeling of uneasiness crept over him.

A few fitful gusts now came from the obscurity; one of them was
accompanied by what seemed a flight of small startled birds crossing the
road ahead of them. A second larger and more sustained flight showed his
astonished eyes that they were white, and each bird an enormous flake
of SNOW! For an instant the air was filled with these disks, shreds,
patches,--two or three clinging together,--like the downfall shaken from
a tree, striking the leather roof and sides with a dull thud, spattering
the road into which they descended with large rosettes that melted away
only to be followed by hundreds more that stuck and STAYED. In five
minutes the ground was white with it, the long road gleaming out ahead
in the darkness; the roof and sides of the wagon were overlaid with it
as with a coating of plaster of Paris; the harness of the horses,
and even the reins, stood out over their steaming backs like white
trappings. In five minutes more the steaming backs themselves were
blanketed with it; the arms and legs of the outside passengers pinioned
to the seats with it, and the arms of the driver kept free only by
incessant motion. It was no longer snowing; it was “snowballing;” it
was an avalanche out of the slopes of the sky. The exhausted horses
floundered in it; the clogging wheels dragged in it; the vehicle at last
plunged into a billow of it--and stopped.

The bewildered and half blinded passengers hurried out into the road
to assist the driver to unship the wheels and fit the steel runners
in their axles. But it was too late! By the time the heavy wagon was
converted into a sledge, it was deeply imbedded in wet and clinging
snow. The narrow, long-handled shovels borrowed from the prospectors'
kits were powerless before this heavy, half liquid impediment. At last
the driver, with an oath, relinquished the attempt, and, unhitching his
horses, collected the passengers and led them forward by a narrower and
more sheltered trail toward the next stations now scarce a mile away.
The led horses broke a path before them, the snow fell less heavily,
but it was nearly an hour before the straggling procession reached the
house, and the snow-coated and exhausted passengers huddled and steamed
round the red-hot stove in the bar-room. The driver had vanished with
his team into the shed; Masterton's fellow passenger on the box-seat,
after a few whispered words to the landlord, also disappeared.

“I see you've got Jake Poole with you,” said one of the bar-room
loungers to Masterton, indicating the passenger who had just left. “I
reckon he's here on the same fool business.”

Masterton looked his surprise and mystification.

“Jake Poole, the deputy sheriff,” repeated the other. “I reckon he's
here pretendin' to hunt for Montagu Trixit like the San Francisco
detectives that kem up yesterday.”

Masterton with difficulty repressed a start. He had heard of Poole, but
did not know him by sight. “I don't think I understand,” he said coolly.

“I reckon you're a stranger in these parts,” returned the lounger,
looking at Masterton curiously. “Ef you warn't, ye'd know that about the
last man San Francisco or Canada City WANTED to ketch is Monty Trixit!
He knows too much and THEY know it. But they've got to keep up a show
chase--a kind o' cirkis-ridin'--up here to satisfy the stockholders. You
bet that Jake Poole hez got his orders--they might kill him to shut his
mouth, ef they got an excuse--and he made a fight--but he ain't no such
fool. No, sir! Why, the sickest man you ever saw was that director that
kem up here with a detective when he found that Monty HADN'T left the
State.”

“Then he IS hiding about here?” said Masterton, with assumed calmness.

The man paused, lowered his voice, and said: “I wouldn't swear he wasn't
a mile from whar we're talkin' now. Why, they do allow that he's taken a
drink at this very bar SINCE the news came!--and that thar's a hoss kept
handy in the stable already saddled just to tempt him ef he was inclined
to scoot.”

“That's only a bluff to start him goin' so that they kin shoot him in
his tracks,” said a bystander.

“That ain't no good ef he has, as they SAY he has, papers stowed away
with a friend that would frighten some mighty partickler men out o'
their boots,” returned the first speaker. “But he's got his spies too,
and thar ain't a man that crosses the Divide as ain't spotted by them.
The officers brag about havin' put a cordon around the district, and yet
they've just found out that he managed to send a telegraphic dispatch
from Black Rock station right under their noses. Why, only an hour or
so arter the detectives and the news arrived here, thar kem along one o'
them emigrant teams from Pike, and the driver said that a smart-lookin'
chap in store-clothes had come out of an old prospector's cabin up
thar on the rise about a mile away and asked for a newspaper. And the
description the teamster gave just fitted Trixit to a T. Well, the
information was give so public like that the detectives HAD to make a
rush over thar, and b'gosh! although thar wasn't a soul passed them
but a file of Chinese coolies, when they got thar they found
NOTHIN',--nothin' but them Chinamen cookin' their rice by the roadside.”

Masterton smiled carelessly, and walked to the window, as if intent upon
the still falling snow. But he had at once grasped the situation that
seemed now almost providential for his inexperience and his mission. The
man he was seeking was within his possible reach, if the story he had
heard was true. The detectives would not be likely to interfere with his
plans, for he was the only man who really wished to meet the fugitive.
The presence of Poole made him uneasy, though he had never met the man
before. Was it barely possible that he was on the same mission on behalf
of others? IF what he heard was true, there might be others equally
involved with the absconding manager. But then the spies--how could the
deputy sheriff elude them, and how could HE?

He was turning impatiently away from the window when his eye caught
sight of a straggling file of Chinamen breasting the storm on their way
up the hill. A sudden idea seized him. Perhaps THEY were the spies in
question. He remembered the driver's story. A sudden flash of intuition
made him now understand the singular way the file of coolies which
they met had diverted their course after passing the wagon. They had
recognized the deputy on the box. Stay!--there was another Chinaman in
the coach; HE might have given them the signal. He glanced hurriedly
around the room for him; he was gone. Perhaps he had already joined the
file he had just seen. His only hope was to follow them--but how? and
how to do it quietly? The afternoon was waning; it would be three or
four hours before the down coach would arrive, from which the driver
expected assistance. Now, if ever, was his opportunity.

He made his way through the back door, and found himself among the straw
and chips of the stable-yard and woodshed. Still uncertain what to do,
he mechanically passed before the long shed which served as temporary
stalls for the steaming wagon horses. At the further end, to his
surprise, was a tethered mustang ready saddled and bridled--the
opportune horse left for the fugitive, according to the lounger's story.
Masterton cast a quick glance around the stable; it was deserted by all
save the feeding animals.

He was new to adventures of this kind, or he would probably have weighed
the possibilities and consequences. He was ordinarily a thoughtful,
reflective man, but like most men of intellect, he was also imaginative
and superstitious, and this crowning accident of the providential
situation in which he found himself was superior to his logic. There
would also be a grim irony in his taking this horse for such a purpose.
He again looked and listened. There was no one within sight or hearing.
He untied the rope from the bit-ring, leaped into the saddle, and
emerged cautiously from the shed. The wet snow muffled the sound of the
horse's hoofs. Moving round to the rear of the stable so as to bring it
between himself and the station, he clapped his heels into the mustang's
flanks and dashed into the open.

At first he was confused and bewildered by the half hidden boulders and
snow-shrouded bushes that beset the broken ground, and dazzled by the
still driving storm. But he knew that they would also divert attention
from his flight, and beyond, he could now see a white slope slowly
rising before him, near whose crest a few dark spots were crawling in
file, like Alpine climbers. They were the Chinamen he was seeking. He
had reasoned that when they discovered they were followed they would, in
the absence of any chance of signaling through the storm, detach one
of their number to give the alarm. HIM he would follow. He felt
his revolver safe on his hip; he would use it only if necessary to
intimidate the spies.

For some moments his ascent through the wet snow was slow and difficult,
but as he advanced, he felt a change of temperature corresponding to
that he had experienced that afternoon on the wagon coming down. The air
grew keener, the snow drier and finer. He kept a sharp lookout for
the moving figures, and scanned the horizon for some indication of the
prospector's deserted hut. Suddenly the line of figures he was watching
seemed to be broken, and then gathered together as a group. Had they
detected him? Evidently they had, for, as he had expected, one of them
had been detached, and was now moving at right angles from the party
towards the right. With a thrill of excitement he urged his horse
forward; the group was far to the left, and he was nearing the solitary
figure. But to his astonishment, as he approached the top of the slope
he now observed another figure, as far to the left of the group as he
was to the right, and that figure he could see, even at that distance,
was NOT a Chinaman. He halted for a better observation; for an
instant he thought it might be the fugitive himself, but as quickly he
recognized it was another man--the deputy. It was HE whom the Chinaman
had discovered; it was HE who had caused the diversion and the dispatch
of the vedette to warn the fugitive. His own figure had evidently
not yet been detected. His heart beat high with hope; he again dashed
forward after the flying messenger, who was undoubtedly seeking the
prospector's ruined hut and--Trixit.

But it was no easy matter. At this elevation the snow had formed a
crust, over which the single Chinaman--a lithe young figure--skimmed
like a skater, while Masterton's horse crashed though it into unexpected
depths. Again, the runner could deviate by a shorter cut, while the
horseman was condemned to the one half obliterated trail. The only thing
in Masterton's favor, however, was that he was steadily increasing his
distance from the group and the deputy sheriff, and so cutting off
their connection with the messenger. But the trail grew more and more
indistinct as it neared the summit, until at last it utterly vanished.
Still he kept up his speed toward the active little figure--which now
seemed to be that of a mere boy--skimming over the frozen snow. Twice
a stumble and flounder of the mustang through the broken crust ought
to have warned him of his recklessness, but now a distinct glimpse of
a low, blackened shanty, the prospector's ruined hut, toward which
the messenger was making, made him forget all else. The distance was
lessening between them; he could see the long pigtail of the fugitive
standing out from his bent head, when suddenly his horse plunged forward
and downward. In an awful instant of suspense and twilight, such as
he might have seen in a dream, he felt himself pitched headlong into
suffocating depths, followed by a shock, the crushing weight and
steaming flank of his horse across his shoulder, utter darkness,
and--merciful unconsciousness.

How long he lay there thus he never knew. With his returning
consciousness came this strange twilight again,--the twilight of a
dream. He was sitting in the new church at Canada City, as he had sat
the first Sunday of his arrival there, gazing at the pretty face of
Cissy Trixit in the pew opposite him, and wondering who she was. Again
he saw the startled, awakened light that came into her adorable eyes,
the faint blush that suffused her cheek as she met his inquiring gaze,
and the conscious, half conceited, half girlish toss of her little
head as she turned her eyes away, and then a file of brown Chinamen,
muttering some harsh, uncouth gibberish, interposed between them. This
was followed by what seemed to be the crashing in of the church roof, a
stifling heat succeeded by a long, deadly chill. But he knew that
THIS last was all a dream, and he tried to struggle to his feet to see
Cissy's face again,--a reality that he felt would take him out of this
horrible trance,--and he called to her across the pew and heard her
sweet voice again in answer, and then a wave of unconsciousness once
more submerged him.

He came back to life with a sharp tingling of his whole frame as if
pierced with a thousand needles. He knew he was being rubbed, and in his
attempts to throw his torturers aside, he saw faintly by the light of a
flickering fire that they were Chinamen, and he was lying on the floor
of a rude hut. With his first movements they ceased, and, wrapping him
like a mummy in warm blankets, dragged him out of the heap of loose snow
with which they had been rubbing him, toward the fire that glowed upon
the large adobe hearth. The stinging pain was succeeded by a warm glow;
a pleasant languor, which made even thought a burden, came over him, and
yet his perceptions were keenly alive to his surroundings. He heard
the Chinamen mutter something and then depart, leaving him alone. But
presently he was aware of another figure that had entered, and was now
sitting with its back to him at a rude table, roughly extemporized from
a packing-box, apparently engaged in writing. It was a small Chinaman,
evidently the one he had chased! The events of the past few hours--his
mission, his intentions, and every incident of the pursuit--flashed back
upon him. Where was he? What was he doing here? Had Trixit escaped him?

In his exhausted state he was unable to formulate a question which even
then he doubted if the Chinaman could understand. So he simply watched
him lazily, and with a certain kind of fascination, until he should
finish his writing and turn round. His long pigtail, which seemed
ridiculously disproportionate to his size,--the pigtail which he
remembered had streamed into the air in his flight,--had partly escaped
from the discovered hat under which it had been coiled. But what was
singular, it was not the wiry black pigtail of his Mongolian fellows,
but soft and silky, and as the firelight played upon it, it seemed of a
shining chestnut brown! It was like--like--he stopped--was he dreaming
again? A long sigh escaped him.

The figure instantly turned. He started. It was Cissy Trixit! There
was no mistaking that charming, sensitive face, glowing with health and
excitement, albeit showing here and there the mark of the pigment with
which it had been stained, now hurriedly washed off. A little of it had
run into the corners of her eyelids, and enhanced the brilliancy of her
eyes.

He found his tongue with an effort. “What are you doing here?” he asked
with a faint voice, and a fainter attempt to smile.

“That's what I might ask about you,” she said pertly, but with a slight
touch of scorn; “but I guess I know as well as I do about the others. I
came here to see my father,” she added defiantly.

“And you are the--the--one--I chased?”

“Yes; and I'd have outrun you easily, even with your horse to help
you,” she said proudly, “only I turned back when you went down into that
prospector's hole with your horse and his broken neck atop of you.”

He groaned slightly, but more from shame than pain. The young girl took
up a glass of whiskey ready on the table and brought it to him. “Take
that; it will fetch you all right in a moment. Popper says no bones are
broken.”

Masterton waived the proffered glass. “Your father--is he here?” he
asked hurriedly, recalling his mission.

“Not now; he's gone to the station--to--fetch--my clothes,” she said,
with a little laugh.

“To the station?” repeated Masterton, bewildered.

“Yes,” she replied, “to the station. Of course you don't know the news,”
 she added, with an air of girlish importance. “They've stopped all
proceedings against him, and he's as free as you are.”

Masterton tried to rise, but another groan escaped him. He was really
in pain. Cissy's bright eyes softened. She knelt beside him, her soft
breath fanning his hair, and lifted him gently to a sitting position.

“Oh, I've done it before,” she laughed, as she read his wonder, with
his gratitude, in his eyes. “The horse was already stiff, and you
were nearly so, by the time I came up to you and got”--she laughed
again--“the OTHER Chinaman to help me pull you out of that hole.”

“I know I owe you my life,” he said, his face flushing.

“It was lucky I was there,” she returned naively; “perhaps lucky you
were chasing me.”

“I'm afraid that of the many who would run after you I should be the
least lucky,” he said, with an attempt to laugh that did not, however,
conceal his mortification; “but I assure you that I only wished to have
an interview with your father,--a BUSINESS interview, perhaps as much in
his interest as my own.”

The old look of audacity came back to her face. “I guess that's what
they all came here for, except one, but it didn't keep them from
believing and saying he was a thief behind his back. Yet they all wanted
his--confidence,” she added bitterly.

Masterton felt that his burning cheeks were confessing the truth of
this. “You excepted one,” he said hesitatingly.

“Yes--the deputy sheriff. He came to help ME.”

“You!”

“Yes, ME!” A coquettish little toss of her head added to his confusion.
“He threw up his job just to follow me, without my knowing it, to see
that I didn't come to any harm. He saw me only once, too, at the house
when he came to take possession. He said he thought I was 'clear grit'
to risk everything to find father, and he said he saw it in me when he
was there; that's how he guessed where I was gone when I ran away, and
followed me.”

“He was as right as he was lucky,” said Masterton gravely. “But how did
you get here?”

She slipped down on the floor beside him with an unconscious movement
that her masculine garments only made the more quaintly girlish, and,
clasping her knee with both hands, looked at the fire as she rocked
herself slightly backward and forward as she spoke.

“It will shock a proper man like you, I know,” she began demurely, “but
I came ALONE, with only a Chinaman to guide me. I got these clothes from
our laundryman, so that I shouldn't attract attention. I would have got
a Chinese lady's dress, but I couldn't walk in THEIR shoes,”--she looked
down at her little feet encased in wooden sandals,--“and I had a long
way to walk. But even if I didn't look quite right to Chinamen, no white
man was able to detect the difference. You passed me twice in the stage,
and you didn't know me. I traveled night and day, most of the time
walking, and being passed along from one Chinaman to another, or, when
we were alone, being slung on a pole between two coolies like a bale of
goods. I ate what they could give me, for I dared not go into a shop or
a restaurant; I couldn't shut my eyes in their dens, so I stayed awake
all night. Yet I got ahead of you and the sheriff,--though I didn't know
at the time what YOU were after,” she added presently.

He was overcome with wondering admiration of her courage, and of
self-reproach at his own short-sightedness. This was the girl he had
looked upon as a spoiled village beauty, satisfied with her small
triumphs and provincial elevation, and vacant of all other purpose. Here
was she--the all-unconscious heroine--and he her critic helpless at
her feet! It was not a cheerful reflection, and yet he took a certain
delight in his expiation. Perhaps he had half believed in her without
knowing it. What could he do or say? I regret to say he dodged the
question meanly.

“And you think your disguise escaped detection?” he said, looking
markedly at her escaped braid of hair.

She followed his eyes rather than his words, half pettishly caught up
the loosened braid, swiftly coiled it around the top of her head, and,
clapping the weather-beaten and battered conical hat back again upon it,
defiantly said: “Yes! Everybody isn't as critical as you are, and even
you wouldn't be--of a Chinaman!”

He had never seen her except when she was arrayed with the full
intention to affect the beholders and perfectly conscious of her
attractions; he was utterly unprepared for this complete ignoring of
adornment now, albeit he was for the first time aware how her real
prettiness made it unnecessary. She looked fully as charming in this
grotesque head-covering as she had in that paragon of fashion, the new
hat, which had excited his tolerant amusement.

“I'm afraid I'm a very poor critic,” he said bluntly. “I never conceived
that this sort of thing was at all to your taste.”

“I came to see my father because I wanted to,” she said, with equal
bluntness.

“And I came to see him though I DIDN'T want to,” he said, with a cynical
laugh.

She turned, and fixed her brown eyes inquiringly upon him.

“Why did you come, then?”

“I was ordered by my directors.”

“Then you did not believe he was a thief?” she asked, her eyes
softening.

“It would ill become me to accuse your father or my directors,” he
answered diplomatically.

She was quick enough to detect the suggestion of moral superiority
in his tone, but woman enough to forgive it. “You're no friend of
Windibrook,” she said, “I know.”

“I am not,” he replied frankly.

“If you would like to see my popper, I can manage it,” she said
hesitatingly. “He'll do anything for me,” she added, with a touch of her
old pride.

“Who could blame him?” returned Masterton gravely. “But if he is a free
man now, and able to go where he likes, and to see whom he likes, he may
not care to give an audience to a mere messenger.”

“You wait and let me see him first,” said the girl quickly. Then, as the
sound of sleigh-bells came from the road outside, she added, “Here he
is. I'll get your clothes; they are out here drying by the fire in
the shed.” She disappeared through a back door, and returned presently
bearing his dried garments. “Dress yourself 

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