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A First Family of Tasajara

by Bret Harte · English · Gutenberg #2723 · 348,432 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A First Family of Tasajara

Author: Bret Harte


        
Release date: May 25, 2006 [eBook #2723]
                Most recently updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2723

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FIRST FAMILY OF TASAJARA ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





A FIRST FAMILY OF TASAJARA


By Bret Harte




CHAPTER I.


“It blows,” said Joe Wingate.

As if to accent the words of the speaker a heavy gust of wind at that
moment shook the long light wooden structure which served as the general
store of Sidon settlement, in Contra Costa. Even after it had passed a
prolonged whistle came through the keyhole, sides, and openings of the
closed glass front doors, that served equally for windows, and filled
the canvas ceiling which hid the roof above like a bellying sail. A wave
of enthusiastic emotion seemed to be communicated to a line of straw
hats and sou-westers suspended from a cross-beam, and swung them with
every appearance of festive rejoicing, while a few dusters, overcoats,
and “hickory” shirts hanging on the side walls exhibited such marked
though idiotic animation that it had the effect of a satirical comment
on the lazy, purposeless figures of the four living inmates of the
store.

Ned Billings momentarily raised his head and shoulders depressed in the
back of his wooden armchair, glanced wearily around, said, “You bet,
it's no slouch of a storm,” and then lapsed again with further extended
legs and an added sense of comfort.

Here the third figure, which had been leaning listlessly against the
shelves, putting aside the arm of a swaying overcoat that seemed to
be emptily embracing him, walked slowly from behind the counter to the
door, examined its fastenings, and gazed at the prospect. He was the
owner of the store, and the view was a familiar one,--a long stretch of
treeless waste before him meeting an equal stretch of dreary sky above,
and night hovering somewhere between the two. This was indicated by
splashes of darker shadow as if washed in with india ink, and a lighter
low-lying streak that might have been the horizon, but was not. To
the right, on a line with the front door of the store, were several
scattered, widely dispersed objects, that, although vague in outline,
were rigid enough in angles to suggest sheds or barns, but certainly not
trees.

“There's a heap more wet to come afore the wind goes down,” he said,
glancing at the sky. “Hark to that, now!”

They listened lazily. There was a faint murmur from the shingles above;
then suddenly the whole window was filmed and blurred as if the
entire prospect had been wiped out with a damp sponge. The man turned
listlessly away.

“That's the kind that soaks in; thar won't be much teamin' over Tasajara
for the next two weeks, I reckon,” said the fourth lounger, who,
seated on a high barrel, was nibbling--albeit critically and
fastidiously--biscuits and dried apples alternately from open boxes on
the counter. “It's lucky you've got in your winter stock, Harkutt.”

The shrewd eyes of Mr. Harkutt, proprietor, glanced at the occupation of
the speaker as if even his foresight might have its possible drawbacks,
but he said nothing.

“There'll be no show for Sidon until you've got a wagon road from here
to the creek,” said Billings languidly, from the depths of his chair.
“But what's the use o' talkin'? Thar ain't energy enough in all Tasajara
to build it. A God-forsaken place, that two months of the year can only
be reached by a mail-rider once a week, don't look ez if it was goin' to
break its back haulin' in goods and settlers. I tell ye what, gentlemen,
it makes me sick!” And apparently it had enfeebled him to the extent of
interfering with his aim in that expectoration of disgust against the
stove with which he concluded his sentence.

“Why don't YOU build it?” asked Wingate, carelessly.

“I wouldn't on principle,” said Billings. “It's gov'ment work. What did
we whoop up things here last spring to elect Kennedy to the legislation
for? What did I rig up my shed and a thousand feet of lumber for benches
at the barbecue for? Why, to get Kennedy elected and make him get a
bill passed for the road! That's MY share of building it, if it comes to
that. And I only wish some folks, that blow enough about what oughter be
done to bulge out that ceiling, would only do as much as I have done for
Sidon.”

As this remark seemed to have a personal as well as local application,
the storekeeper diplomatically turned it. “There's a good many as DON'T
believe that a road from here to the creek is going to do any good to
Sidon. It's very well to say the creek is an embarcadero, but callin' it
so don't put anough water into it to float a steamboat from the bay, nor
clear out the reeds and tules in it. Even if the State builds you roads,
it ain't got no call to make Tasajara Creek navigable for ye; and as
that will cost as much as the road, I don't see where the money's comin'
from for both.”

“There's water enough in front of 'Lige Curtis's shanty, and his
location is only a mile along the bank,” returned Billings.

“Water enough for him to laze away his time fishin' when he's sober, and
deep enough to drown him when he's drunk,” said Wingate. “If you
call that an embarcadero, you kin buy it any day from 'Lige,--title,
possession, and shanty thrown in,--for a demijohn o' whiskey.”

The fourth man here distastefully threw back a half-nibbled biscuit
into the box, and languidly slipped from the barrel to the floor,
fastidiously flicking the crumbs from his clothes as he did so. “I
reckon somebody'll get it for nothing, if 'Lige don't pull up mighty
soon. He'll either go off his head with jim-jams or jump into the creek.
He's about as near desp'rit as they make 'em, and havin' no partner to
look after him, and him alone in the tules, ther' 's no tellin' WHAT he
may do.”

Billings, stretched at full length in his chair, here gurgled
derisively. “Desp'rit!--ketch him! Why, that's his little game! He's
jist playin' off his desp'rit condition to frighten Sidon. Whenever any
one asks him why he don't go to work, whenever he's hard up for a drink,
whenever he's had too much or too little, he's workin' that desp'rit
dodge, and even talkin' o' killin' himself! Why, look here,” he
continued, momentarily raising himself to a sitting posture in his
disgust, “it was only last week he was over at Rawlett's trying to
raise provisions and whiskey outer his water rights on the creek! Fact,
sir,--had it all written down lawyer-like on paper. Rawlett didn't
exactly see it in that light, and told him so. Then he up with the
desp'rit dodge and began to work that. Said if he had to starve in a
swamp like a dog he might as well kill himself at once, and would too
if he could afford the weppins. Johnson said it was not a bad idea, and
offered to lend him his revolver; Bilson handed up his shot-gun, and
left it alongside of him, and turned his head away considerate-like and
thoughtful while Rawlett handed him a box of rat pizon over the counter,
in case he preferred suthin' more quiet. Well, what did 'Lige do?
Nothin'! Smiled kinder sickly, looked sorter wild, and shut up. He
didn't suicide much. No, sir! He didn't kill himself,--not he. Why, old
Bixby--and he's a deacon in good standin'--allowed, in 'Lige's hearin'
and for 'Lige's benefit, that self-destruction was better nor bad
example, and proved it by Scripture too. And yet 'Lige did nothin'!
Desp'rit! He's only desp'rit to laze around and fish all day off a log
in the tules, and soak up with whiskey, until, betwixt fever an' ague
and the jumps, he kinder shakes hisself free o' responsibility.”

A long silence followed; it was somehow felt that the subject was
incongruously exciting; Billings allowed himself to lapse again behind
the back of his chair. Meantime it had grown so dark that the dull glow
of the stove was beginning to outline a faint halo on the ceiling even
while it plunged the further lines of shelves behind the counter into
greater obscurity.

“Time to light up, Harkutt, ain't it?” said Wingate, tentatively.

“Well, I was reckoning ez it's such a wild night there wouldn't be any
use keepin' open, and when you fellows left I'd just shut up for good
and make things fast,” said Harkutt, dubiously. Before his guests had
time to fully weigh this delicate hint, another gust of wind shook the
tenement, and even forced the unbolted upper part of the door to yield
far enough to admit an eager current of humid air that seemed to justify
the wisdom of Harkutt's suggestion. Billings slowly and with a sigh
assumed a sitting posture in the chair. The biscuit-nibbler selected a
fresh dainty from the counter, and Wingate abstractedly walked to the
window and rubbed the glass. Sky and water had already disappeared
behind a curtain of darkness that was illuminated by a single point of
light--the lamp in the window of some invisible but nearer house--which
threw its rays across the glistening shallows in the road. “Well,” said
Wingate, buttoning up his coat in slow dejection, “I reckon I oughter
be travelin' to help the old woman do the chores before supper.” He had
just recognized the light in his own dining-room, and knew by that sign
that his long-waiting helpmeet had finally done the chores herself.

“Some folks have it mighty easy,” said Billings, with long-drawn
discontent, as he struggled to his feet. “You've only a step to go,
and yer's me and Peters there”--indicating the biscuit-nibbler, who was
beginning to show alarming signs of returning to the barrel again--“hev
got to trapse five times that distance.”

“More'n half a mile, if it comes to that,” said Peters, gloomily. He
paused in putting on his overcoat as if thinking better of it, while
even the more fortunate and contiguous Wingate languidly lapsed against
the counter again.

The moment was a critical one. Billings was evidently also regretfully
eying the chair he had just quitted. Harkutt resolved on a heroic
effort.

“Come, boys,” he said, with brisk conviviality, “take a parting drink
with me before you go.” Producing a black bottle from some obscurity
beneath the counter that smelt strongly of india-rubber boots, he placed
it with four glasses before his guests. Each made a feint of holding his
glass against the opaque window while filling it, although nothing could
be seen. A sudden tumult of wind and rain again shook the building, but
even after it had passed the glass door still rattled violently.

“Just see what's loose, Peters,” said Billings; “you're nearest it.”

Peters, still holding the undrained glass in his hand, walked slowly
towards it.

“It's suthin'--or somebody outside,” he said, hesitatingly.

The three others came eagerly to his side. Through the glass, clouded
from within by their breath, and filmed from without by the rain, some
vague object was moving, and what seemed to be a mop of tangled hair
was apparently brushing against the pane. The door shook again, but less
strongly. Billings pressed his face against the glass. “Hol' on,” he
said in a quick whisper,--“it's 'Lige!” But it was too late. Harkutt
had already drawn the lower bolt, and a man stumbled from the outer
obscurity into the darker room.

The inmates drew away as he leaned back for a moment against the door
that closed behind him. Then dimly, but instinctively, discerning the
glass of liquor which Wingate still mechanically held in his hand,
he reached forward eagerly, took it from Wingate's surprised and
unresisting fingers, and drained it at a gulp. The four men laughed
vaguely, but not as cheerfully as they might.

“I was just shutting up,” began Harkutt, dubiously.

“I won't keep you a minit,” said the intruder, nervously fumbling in
the breast pocket of his hickory shirt. “It's a matter of
business--Harkutt--I”--But he was obliged to stop here to wipe his
face and forehead with the ends of a loose handkerchief tied round his
throat. From the action, and what could be seen of his pale,
exhausted face, it was evident that the moisture upon it was beads of
perspiration, and not the rain which some abnormal heat of his body was
converting into vapor from his sodden garments as he stood there.

“I've got a document here,” he began again, producing a roll of paper
tremblingly from his pocket, “that I'd like you to glance over, and
perhaps you'd”--His voice, which had been feverishly exalted, here broke
and rattled with a cough.

Billings, Wingate, and Peters fell apart and looked out of the window.
“It's too dark to read anything now, 'Lige,” said Harkutt, with evasive
good humor, “and I ain't lightin' up to-night.”

“But I can tell you the substance of it,” said the man, with a faintness
that however had all the distinctness of a whisper, “if you'll just step
inside a minute. It's a matter of importance and a bargain”--

“I reckon we must be goin',” said Billings to the others, with marked
emphasis. “We're keepin' Harkutt from shuttin' up.” “Good-night!”
 “Good-night!” added Peters and Wingate, ostentatiously following
Billings hurriedly through the door. “So long!”

The door closed behind them, leaving Harkutt alone with his importunate
intruder. Possibly his resentment at his customers' selfish abandonment
of him at this moment developed a vague spirit of opposition to them and
mitigated his feeling towards 'Lige. He groped his way to the counter,
struck a match, and lit a candle. Its feeble rays faintly illuminated
the pale, drawn face of the applicant, set in a tangle of wet, unkempt,
party-colored hair. It was not the face of an ordinary drunkard;
although tremulous and sensitive from some artificial excitement, there
was no ENGORGEMENT or congestion in the features or complexion, albeit
they were morbid and unhealthy. The expression was of a suffering that
was as much mental as physical, and yet in some vague way appeared
unmeaning--and unheroic.

“I want to see you about selling my place on the creek. I want you to
take it off my hands for a bargain. I want to get quit of it, at once,
for just enough to take me out o' this. I don't want any profit; only
money enough to get away.” His utterance, which had a certain kind of
cultivation, here grew thick and harsh again, and he looked eagerly at
the bottle which stood on the counter.

“Look here, 'Lige,” said Harkutt, not unkindly. “It's too late to do
anythin' tonight. You come in to-morrow.” He would have added “when
you're sober,” but for a trader's sense of politeness to a possible
customer, and probably some doubt of the man's actual condition.

“God knows where or what I may be tomorrow! It would kill me to go back
and spend another night as the last, if I don't kill myself on the way
to do it.”

Harkutt's face darkened grimly. It was indeed as Billings had said.
The pitiable weakness of the man's manner not only made his desperation
inadequate and ineffective, but even lent it all the cheapness of
acting. And, as if to accent his simulation of a part, his fingers,
feebly groping in his shirt bosom, slipped aimlessly and helplessly
from the shining handle of a pistol in his pocket to wander hesitatingly
towards the bottle on the counter.

Harkutt took the bottle, poured out a glass of the liquor, and pushed
it before his companion, who drank it eagerly. Whether it gave him more
confidence, or his attention was no longer diverted, he went on
more collectedly and cheerfully, and with no trace of his previous
desperation in his manner. “Come, Harkutt, buy my place. It's a bargain,
I tell you. I'll sell it cheap. I only want enough to get away with.
Give me twenty-five dollars and it's yours. See, there's the papers--the
quitclaim--all drawn up and signed.” He drew the roll of paper from his
pocket again, apparently forgetful of the adjacent weapon.

“Look here, 'Lige,” said Harkutt, with a business-like straightening of
his lips, “I ain't buyin' any land in Tasajara,--least of all yours on
the creek. I've got more invested here already than I'll ever get back
again. But I tell you what I'll do. You say you can't go back to your
shanty. Well, seein' how rough it is outside, and that the waters of
the creek are probably all over the trail by this time, I reckon you're
about right. Now, there's five dollars!” He laid down a coin sharply on
the counter. “Take that and go over to Rawlett's and get a bed and
some supper. In the mornin' you may be able to strike up a trade with
somebody else--or change your mind. How did you get here? On your hoss?”

“Yes.”

“He ain't starved yet?”

“No; he can eat grass. I can't.”

Either the liquor or Harkutt's practical unsentimental treatment of
the situation seemed to give him confidence. He met Harkutt's eye more
steadily as the latter went on. “You kin turn your hoss for the night
into my stock corral next to Rawlett's. It'll save you payin' for fodder
and stablin'.”

The man took up the coin with a certain slow gravity which was almost
like dignity. “Thank you,” he said, laying the paper on the counter.
“I'll leave that as security.”

“Don't want it, 'Lige,” said Harkutt, pushing it back.

“I'd rather leave it.”

“But suppose you have a chance to sell it to somebody at Rawlett's?”
 continued Harkutt, with a precaution that seemed ironical.

“I don't think there's much chance of that.”

He remained quiet, looking at Harkutt with an odd expression as
he rubbed the edge of the coin that he held between his fingers
abstractedly on the counter. Something in his gaze--rather perhaps
the apparent absence of anything in it approximate to the present
occasion--was beginning to affect Harkutt with a vague uneasiness.
Providentially a resumed onslaught of wind and rain against the panes
effected a diversion. “Come,” he said, with brisk practicality, “you'd
better hurry on to Rawlett's before it gets worse. Have your clothes
dried by his fire, take suthin' to eat, and you'll be all right.” He
rubbed his hands cheerfully, as if summarily disposing of the situation,
and incidentally of all 'Lige's troubles, and walked with him to the
door. Nevertheless, as the man's look remained unchanged, he hesitated
a moment with his hand on the handle, in the hope that he would say
something, even if only to repeat his appeal, but he did not. Then
Harkutt opened the door; the man moved mechanically out, and at the
distance of a few feet seemed to melt into the rain and darkness.
Harkutt remained for a moment with his face pressed against the glass.
After an interval he thought he heard the faint splash of hoofs in the
shallows of the road; he opened the door softly and looked out.

The light had disappeared from the nearest house; only an uncertain bulk
of shapeless shadows remained. Other remoter and more vague outlines
near the horizon seemed to have a funereal suggestion of tombs and grave
mounds, and one--a low shed near the road--looked not unlike a halted
bier. He hurriedly put up the shutters in a momentary lulling of the
wind, and re-entering the store began to fasten them from within.

While thus engaged an inner door behind the counter opened softly and
cautiously, projecting a brighter light into the deserted apartment from
some sacred domestic interior with the warm and wholesome incense of
cooking. It served to introduce also the equally agreeable presence of a
young girl, who, after assuring herself of the absence of every one but
the proprietor, idly slipped into the store, and placing her rounded
elbows, from which her sleeves were uprolled, upon the counter, leaned
lazily upon them, with both hands supporting her dimpled chin, and gazed
indolently at him; so indolently that, with her pretty face once
fixed in this comfortable attitude, she was constrained to follow his
movements with her eyes alone, and often at an uncomfortable angle. It
was evident that she offered the final but charming illustration of the
enfeebling listlessness of Sidon.

“So those loafers have gone at last,” she said, meditatively. “They'll
take root here some day, pop. The idea of three strong men like that
lazing round for two mortal hours doin' nothin'. Well!” As if to
emphasize her disgust she threw her whole weight upon the counter by
swinging her feet from the floor to touch the shelves behind her.

Mr. Harkutt only replied by a slight grunt as he continued to screw on
the shutters.

“Want me to help you, dad?” she said, without moving.

Mr. Harkutt muttered something unintelligible, which, however, seemed to
imply a negative, and her attention here feebly wandered to the roll of
paper, and she began slowly and lazily to read it aloud.

“'For value received, I hereby sell, assign, and transfer to Daniel D.
Harkutt all my right, titles and interest in, and to the undivided
half of, Quarter Section 4, Range 5, Tasajara Township'--hum--hum,” she
murmured, running her eyes to the bottom of the page. “Why, Lord! It's
that 'Lige Curtis!” she laughed. “The idea of HIM having property! Why,
dad, you ain't been THAT silly!”

“Put down that paper, miss,” he said, aggrievedly; “bring the candle
here, and help me to find one of these infernal screws that's dropped.”

The girl indolently disengaged herself from the counter and Elijah
Curtis's transfer, and brought the candle to her father. The screw was
presently found and the last fastening secured. “Supper gettin' cold,
dad,” she said, with a slight yawn. Her father sympathetically responded
by stretching himself from his stooping position, and the two passed
through the private door into inner domesticity, leaving the already
forgotten paper lying with other articles of barter on the counter.




CHAPER II.


With the closing of the little door behind them they seemed to have shut
out the turmoil and vibration of the storm. The reason became apparent
when, after a few paces, they descended half a dozen steps to a lower
landing. This disclosed the fact that the dwelling part of the Sidon
General Store was quite below the level of the shop and the road, and
on the slope of the solitary undulation of the Tasajara plain,--a little
ravine that fell away to a brawling stream below. The only arboreous
growth of Tasajara clothed its banks in the shape of willows and alders
that set compactly around the quaint, irregular dwelling which straggled
down the ravine and looked upon a slope of bracken and foliage on either
side. The transition from the black, treeless, storm-swept plain to this
sheltered declivity was striking and suggestive. From the opposite bank
one might fancy that the youthful and original dwelling had ambitiously
mounted the crest, but, appalled at the dreary prospect beyond, had
gone no further; while from the road it seemed as if the fastidious
proprietor had tried to draw a line between the vulgar trading-post,
with which he was obliged to face the coarser civilization of the place,
and the privacy of his domestic life. The real fact, however, was that
the ravine furnished wood and water; and as Nature also provided one
wall of the house,--as in the well-known example of aboriginal cave
dwellings,--its peculiar construction commended itself to Sidon on the
ground of involving little labor.

Howbeit, from the two open windows of the sitting-room which they had
entered only the faint pattering of dripping boughs and a slight murmur
from the swollen brook indicated the storm that shook the upper plain,
and the cool breath of laurel, syringa, and alder was wafted through
the neat apartment. Passing through that pleasant rural atmosphere
they entered the kitchen, a much larger room, which appeared to serve
occasionally as a dining-room, and where supper was already laid out.
A stout, comfortable-looking woman--who had, however, a singularly
permanent expression of pained sympathy upon her face--welcomed them in
tones of gentle commiseration.

“Ah, there you be, you two! Now sit ye right down, dears; DO. You
must be tired out; and you, Phemie, love, draw up by your poor father.
There--that's right. You'll be better soon.”

There was certainly no visible sign of suffering or exhaustion on the
part of either father or daughter, nor the slightest apparent earthly
reason why they should be expected to exhibit any. But, as already
intimated, it was part of Mrs. Harkutt's generous idiosyncrasy to look
upon all humanity as suffering and toiling; to be petted, humored,
condoled with, and fed. It had, in the course of years, imparted a
singularly caressing sadness to her voice, and given her the habit of
ending her sentences with a melancholy cooing and an unintelligible
murmur of agreement. It was undoubtedly sincere and sympathetic, but at
times inappropriate and distressing. It had lost her the friendship of
the one humorist of Tasajara, whose best jokes she had received with
such heartfelt commiseration and such pained appreciation of the evident
labor involved as to reduce him to silence.

Accustomed as Mr. Harkutt was to his wife's peculiarity, he was not
above assuming a certain slightly fatigued attitude befitting it. “Yes,”
 he said, with a vague sigh, “where's Clemmie?”

“Lyin' down since dinner; she reckoned she wouldn't get up to supper,”
 she returned soothingly. “Phemie's goin' to take her up some sass and
tea. The poor dear child wants a change.”

“She wants to go to 'Frisco, and so do I, pop,” said Phemie, leaning
her elbow half over her father's plate. “Come, pop, say do,--just for a
week.”

“Only for a week,” murmured the commiserating Mrs. Harkutt.

“Perhaps,” responded Harkutt, with gloomy sarcasm, “ye wouldn't mind
tellin' me how you're goin' to get there, and where the money's comin'
from to take you? There's no teamin' over Tasajara till the rain stops,
and no money comin' in till the ranchmen can move their stuff. There
ain't a hundred dollars in all Tasajara; at least there ain't been the
first red cent of it paid across my counter for a fortnit! Perhaps if
you do go you wouldn't mind takin' me and the store along with ye, and
leavin' us there.”

“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Harkutt, with sympathetic but shameless
tergiversation. “Don't bother your poor father, Phemie, love; don't you
see he's just tired out? And you're not eatin' anything, dad.”

As Mr. Harkutt was uneasily conscious that he had been eating heartily
in spite of his financial difficulties, he turned the subject abruptly.
“Where's John Milton?”

Mrs. Harkutt shaded her eyes with her hand, and gazed meditatively on
the floor before the fire and in the chimney corner for her only son,
baptized under that historic title. “He was here a minit ago,” she said
doubtfully. “I really can't think where he's gone. But,” assuringly, “it
ain't far.”

“He's skipped with one o' those story-books he's borrowed,” said Phemie.
“He's always doin' it. Like as not he's reading with a candle in the
wood-shed. We'll all be burnt up some night.”

“But he's got through his chores,” interposed Mrs. Harkutt
deprecatingly.

“Yes,” continued Harkutt, aggrievedly, “but instead of goin' to bed, or
addin' up bills, or takin' count o' stock, or even doin' sums or suthin'
useful, he's ruinin' his eyes and wastin' his time over trash.” He rose
and walked slowly into the sitting-room, followed by his daughter and a
murmur of commiseration from his wife. But Mrs. Harkutt's ministration
for the present did not pass beyond her domain, the kitchen.

“I reckon ye ain't expectin' anybody tonight, Phemie?” said Mr. Harkutt,
sinking into a chair, and placing his slippered feet against the wall.

“No,” said Phemie, “unless something possesses that sappy little Parmlee
to make one of his visitations. John Milton says that out on the road
it blows so you can't stand up. It's just like that idiot Parmlee to be
blown in here, and not have strength of mind enough to get away again.”

Mr. Harkutt smiled. It was that arch yet approving, severe yet
satisfied smile with which the deceived male parent usually receives any
depreciation of the ordinary young man by his daughters. Euphemia was
no giddy thing to be carried away by young men's attentions,--not
she! Sitting back comfortably in his rocking-chair, he said, “Play
something.”

The young girl went to the closet and took from the top shelf an
excessively ornamented accordion,--the opulent gift of a reckless
admirer. It was so inordinately decorated, so gorgeous in the blaze of
papier mache, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell on keys and keyboard,
and so ostentatiously radiant in the pink silk of its bellows that it
seemed to overawe the plainly furnished room with its splendors. “You
ought to keep it on the table in a glass vase, Phemie,” said her father
admiringly.

“And have HIM think I worshiped it! Not me, indeed! He's conceited
enough already,” she returned, saucily.

Mr. Harkutt again smiled his approbation, then deliberately closed his
eyes and threw his head back in comfortable anticipation of the coming
strains.

It is to be regretted that in brilliancy, finish, and even cheerfulness
of quality they were not up to the suggestions of the keys and keyboard.
The most discreet and cautious effort on the part of the young performer
seemed only to produce startlingly unexpected, but instantly suppressed
complaints from the instrument, accompanied by impatient interjections
of “No, no,” from the girl herself. Nevertheless, with her pretty
eyebrows knitted in some charming distress of memory, her little mouth
half open between an apologetic smile and the exertion of working the
bellows, with her white, rounded arms partly lifted up and waving
before her, she was pleasantly distracting to the eye. Gradually, as the
scattered strains were marshaled into something like an air, she began
to sing also, glossing over the instrumental weaknesses, filling
in certain dropped notes and omissions, and otherwise assisting the
ineffectual accordion with a youthful but not unmusical voice. The song
was a lugubrious religious chant; under its influence the house seemed
to sink into greater quiet, permitting in the intervals the murmur of
the swollen creek to appear more distinct, and even the far moaning of
the wind on the plain to become faintly audible. At last, having fairly
mastered the instrument, Phemie got into the full swing of the chant.
Unconstrained by any criticism, carried away by the sound of her own
voice, and perhaps a youthful love for mere uproar, or possibly desirous
to drown her father's voice, which had unexpectedly joined in with a
discomposing bass, the conjoined utterances seemed to threaten the frail
structure of their dwelling, even as the gale had distended the store
behind them. When they ceased at last it was in an accession of dripping
from the apparently stirred leaves outside. And then a voice, evidently
from the moist depths of the abyss below, called out,--

“Hullo, there!”

Phemie put down the accordion, said, “Who's that now?” went to the
window, lazily leaned her elbows on the sill, and peered into the
darkness. Nothing was to be seen; the open space of dimly outlined
landscape had that blank, uncommunicative impenetrability with which
Nature always confronts and surprises us at such moments. It seemed to
Phemie that she was the only human being present. Yet after the feeling
had passed she fancied she heard the wash of the current against some
object in the stream, half stationary and half resisting.

“Is any one down there? Is that you, Mr. Parmlee?” she called.

There was a pause. Some invisible auditor said to another, “It's a young
lady.” Then the first voice rose again in a more deferential tone: “Are
we anywhere near Sidon?”

“This is Sidon,” answered Harkutt, who had risen, and was now quite
obliterating his daughter's outline at the window.

“Thank you,” said the voice. “Can we land anywhere here, on this bank?”

“Run down, pop; they're strangers,” said the girl, with excited, almost
childish eagerness.

“Hold on,” called out Harkutt, “I'll be thar in a moment!” He hastily
thrust his feet into a pair of huge boots, clapped on an oilskin hat
and waterproof, and disappeared through a door that led to a lower
staircase. Phemie, still at the window, albeit with a newly added sense
of self-consciousness, hung out breathlessly. Presently a beam of light
from the lower depths of the house shot out into the darkness. It was
her father with a bull's-eye lantern. As he held it up and clambered
cautiously down the bank, its rays fell upon the turbid rushing stream,
and what appeared to be a rough raft of logs held with difficulty
against the bank by two men with long poles. In its centre was a roll
of blankets, a valise and saddle-bags, and the shining brasses of some
odd-looking instruments.

As Mr. Harkutt, supporting himself by a willow branch that overhung
the current, held up the lantern, the two men rapidly transferred their
freight from the raft to the bank, and leaped ashore. The action gave
an impulse to the raft, which, no longer held in position by the
poles, swung broadside to the current and was instantly swept into the
darkness.

Not a word had been spoken, but now the voices of the men rose freely
together. Phemie listened with intense expectation. The explanation
was simple. They were surveyors who had been caught by the overflow
on Tasajara plain, had abandoned their horses on the bank of Tasajara
Creek, and with a hastily constructed raft had intrusted themselves and
their instruments to the current. “But,” said Harkutt quickly, “there is
no connection between Tasajara Creek and this stream.”

The two men laughed. “There is NOW,” said one of them.

“But Tasajara Creek is a part of the bay,” said the astonished Harkutt,
“and this stream rises inland and only runs into the bay four miles
lower down. And I don't see how--

“You're almost twelve feet lower here than Tasajara Creek,” said the
first man, with a certain professional authority, “and that's WHY.
There's more water than Tasajara Creek can carry, and it's seeking the
bay this way. Look,” he continued, taking the lantern from Harkutt's
hand and casting its rays on the stream, “that's salt drift from the
upper bay, and part of Tasajara Creek's running by your house now! Don't
be alarmed,” he added reassuringly, glancing at the staring storekeeper.
“You're all right here; this is only the overflow and will find its
level soon.”

But Mr. Harkutt remained gazing abstractedly at the smiling speaker.
From the window above the impatient Phemie was wondering why he kept
the strangers waiting in the rain while he talked about things that were
perfectly plain. It was so like a man!

“Then there's a waterway straight to Tasajara Creek?” he said slowly.

“There is, as long as this flood lasts,” returned the first speaker
promptly; “and a cutting through the bank of two or three hundred yards
would make it permanent. Well, what's the matter with that?”

“Nothin',” said Harkutt hurriedly. “I am only considerin'! But come in,
dry yourselves, and take suthin'.”

The light over the rushing water was withdrawn, and the whole prospect
sank back into profound darkness. Mr. Harkutt had disappeared with
his guests. Then there was the familiar shuffle of his feet on
the staircase, followed by other more cautious footsteps that grew
delicately and even courteously deliberate as they approached. At which
the young girl, in some new sense of decorum, drew in her pretty head,
glanced around the room quickly, reset the tidy on her father's chair,
placed the resplendent accordion like an ornament in the exact centre of
the table, and then vanished into the hall as Mr. Harkutt entered with
the strangers.

They were both of the same age and appearance, but the principal speaker
was evidently the superior of his companion, and although their attitude
to each other was equal and familiar, it could be easily seen that
he was the leader. He had a smooth, beardless face, with a critical
expression of eye and mouth that might have been fastidious and
supercilious but for the kindly, humorous perception that tempered
it. His quick eye swept the apartment and then fixed itself upon the
accordion, but a smile lit up his face as he said quietly,--

“I hope we haven't frightened the musician away. It was bad enough to
have interrupted the young lady.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Harkutt, who seemed to have lost his abstraction in
the nervousness of hospitality. “I reckon she's only lookin' after her
sick sister. But come into the kitchen, both of you, straight off, and
while you're dryin' your clothes, mother'll fix you suthin' hot.”

“We only need to change our boots and stockings; we've some dry ones in
our pack downstairs,” said the first speaker hesitatingly.

“I'll fetch 'em up and you can change in the kitchen. The old woman
won't mind,” said Harkutt reassuringly. “Come along.” He led the way to
the kitchen; the two strangers exchanged a glance of humorous perplexity
and followed.

The quiet of the little room was once more unbroken. A far-off
commiserating murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her
guests. The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred the
white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves there was
a still, somnolent drip. Presently a hurried whisper and a half-laugh
appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or hall. There
was another moment of hesitation and the door opened suddenly and
ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young
woman, her elder sister, at her side. Perceiving that the room was
empty, they both said “Oh!” yet with a certain artificiality of manner
that was evidently a lingering trace of some previous formal attitude
they had assumed. Then without further speech they each selected a
chair and a position, having first shaken out their dresses, and gazed
silently at each other.

It may be said briefly that sitting thus--in spite of their unnatural
attitude, or perhaps rather because of its suggestion of a photographic
pose--they made a striking picture, and strongly accented their separate
peculiarities. They were both pretty, but the taller girl, apparently
the elder, had an ideal refinement and regularity of feature which was
not only unlike Phemie, but gratuitously unlike the rest of her family,
and as hopelessly and even wantonly inconsistent with her surroundings
as was the elaborately ornamented accordion on the centre-table. She was
one of those occasional creatures, episodical in the South and West,
who might have been stamped with some vague ante-natal impression of a
mother given to over-sentimental contemplation of books of beauty and
albums rather than the family features; offspring of typical men and
women, and yet themselves incongruous to any known local or even general
type. The long swan-like neck, tendriled hair, swimming eyes, and small
patrician head, had never lived or moved before in Tasajara or the
West, nor perhaps even existed except as a personified “Constancy,”
 “Meditation,” or the “Baron's Bride,” in mezzotint or copperplate. Even
the girl's common pink print dress with its high sleeves and shoulders
could not conventionalize these original outlines; and the hand that
rested stiffly on the back of her chair, albeit neither over-white nor
well kept, looked as if it had never held anything but a lyre, a rose,
or a good book. Even the few sprays of wild jessamine which she had
placed in the coils of her waving hair, although a local fashion, became
her as a special ornament.

The two girls kept their constrained and artificially elaborated
attitude for a few moments, accompanied by the murmur of voices in the
kitchen, the monotonous drip of the eaves before the window, and the
far-off sough of the wind. Then Phemie suddenly broke into a constrained
giggle, which she however quickly smothered as she had the accordion,
and with the same look of mischievous distress.

“I'm astonished at you, Phemie,” said Clementina in a deep contralto
voice, which seemed even deeper from its restraint. “You don't seem to
have any sense. Anybody'd think you never had seen a stranger before.”

“Saw him before you did,” retorted Phemie pertly. But here a pushing
of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her. Clementina
fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded a leaf on
the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door opened to the
strangers and her father.

The look of undisguised satisfaction which lit the young men's faces
relieved Mr. Harkutt's awkward introduction of any embarrassment, and
almost before Phemie was fully aware of it, she found herself talking
rapidly and in a high key with Mr. Lawrence Grant, the surveyor, while
her sister was equally, although more sedately, occupied with Mr.
Stephen Rice, his assistant. But the enthusiasm of the strangers, and
the desire to please and be pleased was so genuine and contagious that
presently the accordion was brought into requisition, and Mr. Grant
exhibited a surprising faculty of accompaniment to Mr. Rice's tenor, in
which both the girls joined.

Then a game of cards with partners followed, into which the rival
parties introduced such delightful and shameless obviousness of
cheating, and displayed such fascinating and exaggerated partisanship
that the game resolved itself into a hilarious melee, to which peace was
restored only by an exhibition of tricks of legerdemain with the
cards by the young surveyor. All of which Mr. Harkutt supervised
patronizingly, with occasional fits of abstraction, from his
rocking-chair; and later Mrs. Harkutt from her kitchen threshold, wiping
her arms on her apron and commiseratingly observing that she “declared,
the young folks looked better already.”

But it was here a more dangerous element of mystery and suggestion was
added by Mr. Lawrence Grant in the telling of Miss Euphemia's fortune
from the cards before him, and that young lady, pink with excitement,
fluttered her little hands not unlike timid birds over the cards to be
drawn, taking them from him with an audible twitter of anxiety and
great doubts whether a certain “fair-haired gentleman” was in hearts or
diamonds.

“Here are two strangers,” said Mr. Grant, with extraordinary gravity
laying down the cards, “and here is a 'journey;' this is 'unexpected
news,' and this ten of diamonds means 'great wealth' to you, which you
see follows the advent of the two strangers and is some way connected
with them.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the young lady with great pertness and a toss of her
head. “I suppose they've got the money with them.”

“No, though it reaches you through them,” he answered with unflinching
solemnity. “Wait a bit, I have it! I see, I've made a mistake with this
card. It signifies a journey or a road. Queer! isn't it, Steve? It's THE
ROAD.”

“It is queer,” said Rice with equal gravity; “but it's so. The road,
sure!” Nevertheless he looked up into the large eyes of Clementina with
a certain confidential air of truthfulness.

“You see, ladies,” continued the surveyor, appealing to them with
unabashed rigidity of feature, “the cards don't lie! Luckily we are in
a position to corroborate them. The road in question is a secret known
only to us and some capitalists in San Francisco. In fact even THEY
don't know that it is feasible until WE report to them. But I don't mind
telling you now, as a slight return for your charming hospitality, that
the road is a RAILROAD from Oakland to Tasajara Creek of which we've
just made the preliminary survey. So you see what the cards mean is
this: You're not far from Tasajara Creek; in fact with a very little
expense your father could connect this stream with the creek, and have a
WATERWAY STRAIGHT TO THE RAILROAD TERMINUS. That's the wealth the cards
promise; and if your father knows how to take a hint he can make his
fortune!”

It was impossible to say which was the most dominant in the face of the
speaker, the expression of assumed gravity or the twinkling of humor in
his eyes. The two girls with superior feminine perception divined
that there was much truth in what he said, albeit they didn't
entirely understand it, and what they did understand--except the man's
good-humored motive--was not particularly interesting. In fact they
were slightly disappointed. What had promised to be an audaciously
flirtatious declaration, and even a mischievous suggestion of marriage,
had resolved itself into something absurdly practical and business-like.

Not so Mr. Harkutt. He quickly rose from his chair, and, leaning over
the table, with his eyes fixed on the card as if it really signified the
railroad, repeated quickly: “Railroad, eh! What's that? A railroad to
Tasajara Creek? Ye don't mean it!--That is--it ain't a SURE thing?”

“Perfectly sure. The money is ready in San Francisco now, and by this
time next year--”

“A railroad to Tasajara Creek!” continued Harkutt hurriedly. “What part
of it? Where?”

“At the embarcadero naturally,” responded Grant. “There isn't but the
one place for the terminus. There's an old shanty there now belongs to
somebody.”

“Why, pop!” said Phemie with sudden recollection, “ain't it 'Lige
Curtis's house? The land he offered”--

“Hush!” said her father.

“You know, the one written in that bit of paper,” continued the innocent
Phemie.

“Hush! will you? God A'mighty! are you goin' to mind me? Are you goin'
to keep up your jabber when I'm speakin' to the gentlemen? Is that your
manners? What next, I wonder!”

The sudden and unexpected passion of the speaker, the incomprehensible
change in his voice, and the utterly disproportionate exaggeration of
his attitude towards his daughters, enforced an instantaneous silence.
The rain began to drip audibly at the window, the rush of the river
sounded distinctly from without, even the shaking of the front part
of the dwelling by the distant gale became perceptible. An angry flash
sprang for an instant to the young assistant's eye, but it met the
cautious glance of his friend, and together both discreetly sought the
table. The two girls alone remained white and collected. “Will you go on
with my fortune, Mr. Grant?” said Phemie quietly.

A certain respect, perhaps not before observable, was suggested in the
surveyor's tone as he smilingly replied, “Certainly, I was only waiting
for you to show your confidence in me,” and took up the cards.

Mr. Harkutt coughed. “It looks as if that blamed wind had blown suthin'
loose in the store,” he said affectedly. “I reckon I'll go and see.” He
hesitated a moment and then disappeared in the passage. Yet even here he
stood irresolute, looking at the closed door behind him, and passing his
hand over his still flushed face. Presently he slowly and abstractedly
ascended the flight of steps, entered the smaller passage that led to
the back door of the shop and opened it.

He was at first a little startled at the halo of light from the
still glowing stove, which the greater obscurity of the long room had
heightened rather than diminished. Then he passed behind the counter,
but here the box of biscuits which occupied the centre and cast a shadow
over it compelled him to grope vaguely for what he sought. Then he
stopped suddenly, the paper he had just found dropping from his fingers,
and said sharply,--

“Who's there?”

“Me, pop.”

“John Milton?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the devil are you doin' there, sir?”

“Readin'.”

It was true. The boy was half reclining in a most distorted posture on
two chairs, his figure in deep shadow, but his book was raised above his
head so as to catch the red glow of the stove on the printed page.
Even then his father's angry interruption scarcely diverted his
preoccupation; he raised himself in his chair mechanically, with his
eyes still fixed on his book. Seeing which his father quickly regained
the paper, but continued his objurgation.

“How dare you? Clear off to bed, will you! Do you hear me? Pretty
goin's on,” he added as if to justify his indignation. “Sneakin' in here
and--and lyin' 'round at this time o' night! Why, if I hadn't come in
here to”--

“What?” asked the boy mechanically, catching vaguely at the unfinished
sentence and staring automatically at the paper in his father's hand.

“Nothin', sir! Go to bed, I tell you! Will you? What are you standin'
gawpin' at?” continued Harkutt furiously.

The boy regained his feet slowly and passed his father, but not without
noticing with the same listless yet ineffaceable perception of childhood
that he was hurriedly concealing the paper in his pocket. With the same
youthful inconsequence, wondering at this more than at the interruption,
which was no novel event, he went slowly out of the room.

Harkutt listened to the retreating tread of his bare feet in the passage
and then carefully locked the door. Taking the paper from his pocket,
and borrowing the idea he had just objurgated in his son, he turned it
towards the dull glow of the stove and attempted to read it. But perhaps
lacking the patience as well as the keener sight of youth, he was forced
to relight the candle which he had left on the counter, and reperused
the paper. Yes! there was certainly no mistake! Here was the actual
description of the property which the surveyor had just indicated as
the future terminus of the new railroad, and here it was conveyed to
him--Daniel Harkutt! What was that? Somebody knocking? What did this
continual interruption mean? An odd superstitious fear now mingled with
his irritation.

The sound appeared to come from the front shutters. It suddenly
occurred to him that the light might be visible through the crevices. He
hurriedly extinguished it, and went to the door.

“Who's there?”

“Me,--Peters. Want to speak to you.”

Mr. Harkutt with evident reluctance drew the bolts. The wind, still
boisterous and besieging, did the rest, and precipitately propelled
Peters through the carefully guarded opening. But his surprise at
finding himself in the darkness seemed to forestall any explanation of
his visit.

“Well,” he said with an odd mingling of reproach and suspicion. “I
declare I saw a light here just this minit! That's queer.”

“Yes, I put it out just now. I was goin' away,” replied Harkutt, with
ill-disguised impatience.

“What! been here ever since?”

“No,” said Harkutt curtly.

“Well, I want to speak to ye about 'Lige. Seein' the candle shinin'
through the chinks I thought he might be still with ye. If he ain't, it
looks bad. Light up, can't ye! I want to show you something.”

There was a peremptoriness in his tone that struck Harkutt disagreeably,
but observing that he was carrying something in his hand, he somewhat
nervously re-lit the candle and faced him. Peters had a hat in his hand.
It was 'Lige's!

“'Bout an hour after we fellers left here,” said Peters, “I heard the
rattlin' of hoofs on the road, and then it seemed to stop just by my
house. I went out with a lantern, and, darn my skin! if there warn't
'Lige's hoss, the saddle empty, and 'Lige nowhere! I looked round and
called him--but nothing were to be seen. Thinkin' he might have slipped
off--tho' ez a general rule drunken men don't, and he is a good rider--I
followed down the road, lookin' for him. I kept on follerin' it down to
your run, half a mile below.”

“But,” began Harkutt, with a quick nervous laugh, “you don't reckon that
because of that he”--

“Hold on!” said Peters, grimly producing a revolver from his side-pocket
with the stock and barrel clogged and streaked with mud. “I found THAT
too,--and look! one barrel discharged! And,” he added hurriedly, as
approaching a climax, “look ye,--what I nat'rally took for wet from the
rain--inside that hat--was--blood!”

“Nonsense!” said Harkutt, putting the hat aside with a new
fastidiousness. “You don't think”--

“I think,” said Peters, lowering his voice, “I think, by God! HE'S BIN
AND DONE IT!”

“No!”

“Sure! Oh, it's all very well for Billings and the rest of that
conceited crowd to sneer and sling their ideas of 'Lige gen'rally as
they did jess now here,--but I'd like 'em to see THAT.” It was difficult
to tell if Mr. Peters' triumphant delight in confuting his late
companions' theories had not even usurped in his mind the importance of
the news he brought, as it had of any human sympathy with it.

“Look here,” returned Harkutt earnestly, yet with a singularly cleared
brow and a more natural manner. “You ought to take them things over to
Squire Kerby's, right off, and show 'em to him. You kin tell him how you
left 'Lige here, and say that I can prove by my daughter that he went
away about ten minutes after,--at least, not more than fifteen.” Like
all unprofessional humanity, Mr. Harkutt had an exaggerated conception
of the majesty of unimportant detail in the eye of the law. “I'd go with
you myself,” he added quickly, “but I've got company--strangers--here.”

“How did he look when he left,--kinder wild?” suggested Peters.

Harkutt had begun to feel the prudence of present reticence. “Well,” he
said, cautiously, “YOU saw how he looked.”

“You wasn't rough with him?--that might have sent him off, you know,”
 said Peters.

“No,” said Harkutt, forgetting himself in a quick indignation, “no,
I not only treated him to another drink, but gave him”--he stopped
suddenly and awkwardly.

“Eh?” said Peters.

“Some good advice,--you know,” said Harkutt, hastily. “But come, you'd
better hurry over to the squire's. You know YOU'VE made the discovery;
YOUR evidence is important, and there's a law that obliges you to give
information at once.”

The excitement of discovery and the triumph over his disputants being
spent, Peters, after the Sidon fashion, evidently did not relish
activity as a duty. “You know,” he said dubiously, “he mightn't be dead,
after all.”

Harkutt became a trifle distant. “You know your own opinion of the
thing,” he replied after a pause. “You've circumstantial evidence
enough to see the squire, and set others to work on it; and,” he added
significantly, “you've done your share then, and can wipe your hands of
it, eh?”

“That's so,” said Peters, eagerly. “I'll just run over to the squire.”

“And on account of the women folks, you know, and the strangers here,
I'll say nothin' about it to-night,” added Harkutt.

Peters nodded his head, and taking up the hat of the unfortunate Elijah
with a certain hesitation, as if he feared it had already lost its
dramatic intensity as a witness, disappeared into the storm and darkness
again. A lurking gust of wind lying in ambush somewhere seemed to swoop
down on him as if to prevent further indecision and whirl him away in
the direction of the justice's house; and Mr. Harkutt shut the door,
bolted it, and walked aimlessly back to the counter.

From a slow, deliberate and cautious man, he seemed to have changed
within an hour to an irresolute and capricious one. He took the paper
from his pocket, and, unlocking the money drawer of his counter, folded
into a small compass that which now seemed to be the last testament of
Elijah Curtis, and placed it in a recess. Then he went to the back door
and paused, then returned, reopened the money drawer, took out the
paper and again buttoned it in his hip pocket, standing by the stove and
staring abstractedly at the dull glow of the fire. He even went through
the mechanical process of raking down the ashes,--solely to gain time
and as an excuse for delaying some other necessary action.

He was thinking what he should do. Had the question of his right to
retain and make use of that paper been squarely offered to him an hour
ago, he would without doubt have decided that he ought not to keep it.
Even now, looking at it as an abstract principle, he did not deceive
himself in the least. But Nature has the reprehensible habit of
not presenting these questions to us squarely and fairly, and it is
remarkable that in most of our offending the abstract principle is never
the direct issue. Mr. Harkutt was conscious of having been unwillingly
led step by step into a difficult, not to say dishonest, situation,
and against his own seeking. He had never asked Elijah to sell him the
property; he had distinctly declined it; it had even been forced upon
him as security for the pittance he so freely gave him. This proved (to
himself) that he himself was honest; it was only the circumstances that
were queer. Of course if Elijah had lived, he, Harkutt, might have tried
to drive some bargain with him before the news of the railroad survey
came out--for THAT was only business. But now that Elijah was dead, who
would be a penny the worse or better but himself if he chose to consider
the whole thing as a lucky speculation, and his gift of five dollars as
the price he paid for it? Nobody could think that he had calculated upon
'Lige's suicide, any more than that the property would become valuable.
In fact if it came to that, if 'Lige had really contemplated killing
himself as a hopeless bankrupt after taking Harkutt's money as a loan,
it was a swindle on his--Harkutt's--good-nature. He worked himself into
a rage, which he felt was innately virtuous, at this tyranny of cold
principle over his own warm-hearted instincts, but if it came to the
LAW, he'd stand by law and not sentiment. He'd just let them--by
which he vaguely meant the world, Tasajara, and possibly his own
conscience--see that he wasn't a sentimental fool, and he'd freeze on to
that paper and that property!

Only he ought to have spoken out before. He ought to have told the
surveyor at once that he owned the land. He ought to have said: “Why,
that's my land. I bought it of that drunken 'Lige Curtis for a song and
out of charity.” Yes, that was the only real trouble, and that came from
his own goodness, his own extravagant sense of justice and right,--his
own cursed good-nature. Yet, on second thoughts, he didn't know why he
was obliged to tell the surveyor. Time enough when the company wanted to
buy the land. As soon as it was settled that 'Lige was dead he'd openly
claim the property. But what if he wasn't dead? or they couldn't find
his body? or he had only disappeared? His plain, matter-of-fact face
contracted and darkened. Of course he couldn't ask the company to
wait for him to settle that point. He had the power to dispose of the
property under that paper, and--he should do it. If 'Lige turned up,
that was another matter, and he and 'Lige could arrange it between them.
He was quite firm here, and oddly enough quite relieved in getting rid
of what appeared only a simple question of detail. He never suspected
that he was contemplating the one irretrievable step, and summarily
dismissing the whole ethical question.

He turned away from the stove, opened the back door, and walked with a
more determined step through the passage to the sitting-room. But here
he halted again on the threshold with a quick return of his old habits
of caution. The door was slightly open; apparently his angry outbreak of
an hour ago had not affected the spirits of his daughters, for he could
hear their hilarious voices mingling with those of the strangers. They
were evidently still fortune-telling, but this time it was the prophetic
and divining accents of Mr. Rice addressed to Clementina which were now
plainly audible.

“I see heaps of money and a great many friends in the change that is
coming to you. Dear me! how many suitors! But I cannot promise you any
marriage as brilliant as my friend has just offered your sister. You may
be certain, however, that you'll have your own choice in this, as you
have in all things.”

“Thank you for nothing,” said Clementina's voice. “But what are those
horrid black cards beside them?--that's trouble, I'm sure.”

“Not for you, though near you. Perhaps some one you don't care much for
and don't understand will have a heap of trouble on your account,--yes,
on account of these very riches; see, he follows the ten of diamonds. It
may be a suitor; it may be some one now in the house, perhaps.”

“He means himself, Miss Clementina,” struck in Grant's voice laughingly.

“You're not listening, Miss Harkutt,” said Rice with half-serious
reproach. “Perhaps you know who it is?”

But Miss Clementina's reply was simply a hurried recognition of her
father's pale face that here suddenly confronted her with the opening
door.

“Why, it's father!”




CHAPER III.


In his strange mental condition even the change from Harkutt's feeble
candle to the outer darkness for a moment blinded Elijah Curtis, yet it
was part of that mental condition that he kept moving steadily forward
as in a trance or dream, though at first purposelessly. Then it occurred
to him that he was really looking for his horse, and that the animal was
not there. This for a moment confused and frightened him, first with the
supposition that he had not brought him at all, but that it was part of
his delusion; secondly, with the conviction that without his horse
he could neither proceed on the course suggested by Harkutt, nor take
another more vague one that was dimly in his mind. Yet in his hopeless
vacillation it seemed a relief that now neither was practicable, and
that he need do nothing. Perhaps it was a mysterious providence!

The explanation, however, was much simpler. The horse had been taken by
the luxurious and indolent Billings unknown to his companions. Overcome
at the dreadful prospect of walking home in that weather, this perfect
product of lethargic Sidon had artfully allowed Peters and Wingate to
precede him, and, cautiously unloosing the tethered animal, had safely
passed them in the darkness. When he gained his own inclosure he had
lazily dismounted, and, with a sharp cut on the mustang's haunches,
sent him galloping back to rejoin his master, with what result has been
already told by the unsuspecting Peters in the preceding chapter.

Yet no conception of this possibility entered 'Lige Curtis's alcoholized
consciousness, part of whose morbid phantasy it was to distort or
exaggerate all natural phenomena. He had a vague idea that he could not
go back to Harkutt's; already his visit seemed to have happened long,
long ago, and could not be repeated. He would walk on, enwrapped in
this uncompromising darkness which concealed everything, suggested
everything, and was responsible for everything.

It was very dark, for the wind, having lulled, no longer thinned the
veil of clouds above, nor dissipated a steaming mist that appeared to
rise from the sodden plain. Yet he moved easily through the darkness,
seeming to be upheld by it as something tangible, upon which he might
lean. At times he thought he heard voices,--not a particular voice he
was thinking of, but strange voices--of course unreal to his present
fancy. And then he heard one of these voices, unlike any voice in
Sidon, and very faint and far off, asking if it “was anywhere near
Sidon?”--evidently some one lost like himself. He answered in a voice
that seemed quite as unreal and as faint, and turned in the direction
from which it came. There was a light moving like a will-o'-the-wisp far
before him, yet below him as if coming out of the depths of the earth.
It must be fancy, but he would see--ah!

He had fallen violently forward, and at the same moment felt his
revolver leap from his breast pocket like a living thing, and an instant
after explode upon the rock where it struck, blindingly illuminating the
declivity down which he was plunging. The sulphurous sting of burning
powder was in his eyes and nose, yet in that swift revealing flash he
had time to clutch the stems of a trailing vine beside him, but not
to save his head from sharp contact with the same rocky ledge that had
caught his pistol. The pain and shock gave way to a sickening sense of
warmth at the roots of his hair. Giddy and faint, his fingers relaxed,
he felt himself sinking, with a languor that was half acquiescence,
down, down,--until, with another shock, a wild gasping for air, and a
swift reaction, he awoke in the cold, rushing water!

Clear and perfectly conscious now, though frantically fighting for
existence with the current, he could dimly see a floating black object
shooting by the shore, at times striking the projections of the bank,
until in its recoil it swung half round and drifted broadside on towards
him. He was near enough to catch the frayed ends of a trailing rope that
fastened the structure, which seemed to be a few logs, together. With
a convulsive effort he at last gained a footing upon it, and then fell
fainting along its length. It was the raft which the surveyors from the
embarcadero had just abandoned.

He did not know this, nor would he have thought it otherwise strange
that a raft might be a part of the drift of the overflow, even had he
been entirely conscious; but his senses were failing, though he was
still able to keep a secure position on the raft, and to vaguely believe
that it would carry him to some relief and succor. How long he lay
unconscious he never knew; in his after-recollections of that night, it
seemed to have been haunted by dreams of passing dim banks and strange
places; of a face and voice that had been pleasant to him; of a terror
coming upon him as he appeared to be nearing a place like that home that
he had abandoned in the lonely tules. He was roused at last by a violent
headache, as if his soft felt hat had been changed into a tightening
crown of iron. Lifting his hand to his head to tear off its covering,
he was surprised to find that he was wearing no hat, but that his matted
hair, stiffened and dried with blood and ooze, was clinging like a cap
to his skull in the hot morning sunlight. His eyelids and lashes were
glued together and weighted down by the same sanguinary plaster. He
crawled to the edge of his frail raft, not without difficulty, for it
oscillated and rocked strangely, and dipped his hand in the current.
When he had cleared his eyes he lifted them with a shock of amazement.
Creeks, banks, and plain had disappeared; he was alone on a bend of the
tossing bay of San Francisco!

His first and only sense--cleared by fasting and quickened by
reaction--was one of infinite relief. He was not only free from the
vague terrors of the preceding days and nights, but his whole past
seemed to be lost and sunk forever in this illimitable expanse. The low
plain of Tasajara, with its steadfast monotony of light and shadow,
had sunk beneath another level, but one that glistened, sparkled, was
instinct with varying life, and moved and even danced below him. The low
palisades of regularly recurring tules that had fenced in, impeded, but
never relieved the blankness of his horizon, were forever swallowed
up behind him. All trail of past degradation, all record of pain and
suffering, all footprints of his wandering and misguided feet were
smoothly wiped out in that obliterating sea. He was physically helpless,
and he felt it; he was in danger, and he knew it,--but he was free!

Happily there was but little wind and the sea was slight. The raft was
still intact so far as he could judge, but even in his ignorance he
knew it would scarcely stand the surges of the lower bay. Like most
Californians who had passed the straits of Carquinez at night in a
steamer, he did not recognize the locality, nor even the distant peak
of Tamalpais. There were a few dotting sails that seemed as remote,
as uncertain, and as unfriendly as sea birds. The raft was motionless,
almost as motionless as he was in his cramped limbs and sun-dried,
stiffened clothes. Too weak to keep an upright position, without mast,
stick, or oar to lift a signal above that vast expanse, it seemed
impossible for him to attract attention. Even his pistol was gone.

Suddenly, in an attempt to raise himself, he was struck by a flash so
blinding that it seemed to pierce his aching eyes and brain and turned
him sick. It appeared to come from a crevice between the logs at the
further end of the raft. Creeping painfully towards it he saw that it
was a triangular slip of highly polished metal that he had hitherto
overlooked. He did not know that it was a “flashing” mirror used
in topographical observation, which had slipped from the surveyors'
instruments when they abandoned the raft, but his excited faculties
instinctively detected its value to him. He lifted it, and, facing the
sun, raised it at different angles with his feeble arms. But the effort
was too much for him; the raft presently seemed to be whirling with his
movement, and he again fell.

*****

“Ahoy there!”

The voice was close upon--in his very ears. He opened his eyes. The sea
still stretched emptily before him; the dotting sails still unchanged
and distant. Yet a strange shadow lay upon the raft. He turned his head
with difficulty. On the opposite side--so close upon him as to be almost
over his head--the great white sails of a schooner hovered above him
like the wings of some enormous sea bird. Then a heavy boom swung across
the raft, so low that it would have swept him away had he been in an
upright position; the sides of the vessel grazed the raft and she fell
slowly off. A terrible fear of abandonment took possession of him; he
tried to speak, but could not. The vessel moved further away, but the
raft followed! He could see now it was being held by a boat-hook,--could
see the odd, eager curiosity on two faces that were raised above
the taffrail, and with that sense of relief his eyes again closed in
unconsciousness.

A feeling of chilliness, followed by a grateful sensation of drawing
closer under some warm covering, a stinging taste in his mouth of fiery
liquor and the aromatic steam of hot coffee, were his first returning
sensations. His head and neck were swathed in coarse bandages, and his
skin stiffened and smarting with soap. He was lying in a rude berth
under a half-deck from which he could see the sky and the bellying sail,
and presently a bearded face filled with rough and practical concern
that peered down upon him.

“Hulloo! comin' round, eh? Hold on!” The next moment the stranger had
leaped down beside Elijah. He seemed to be an odd mingling of the sailor
and ranchero with the shrewdness of a seaport trader.

“Hulloo, boss! What was it? A free fight, or a wash-out?”

“A wash-out!”* Elijah grasped the idea as an inspiration. Yes, his cabin
had been inundated, he had taken to a raft, had been knocked off twice
or thrice, and had lost everything--even his revolver!

     * A mining term for the temporary inundation of a claim by
     flood; also used for the sterilizing effect of flood on
     fertile soil.

The man looked relieved. “Then it ain't a free fight, nor havin' your
crust busted and bein' robbed by beach combers, eh?”

“No,” said Elijah, with his first faint smile.

“Glad o' that,” said the man bluntly. “Then thar ain't no police
business to tie up to in 'Frisco? We were stuck thar a week once, just
because we chanced to pick up a feller who'd been found gagged and then
thrown overboard by wharf thieves. Had to dance attendance at court
thar and lost our trip.” He stopped and looked half-pathetically at the
prostrate Elijah. “Look yer! ye ain't just dyin' to go ashore NOW and
see yer friends and send messages, are ye?”

Elijah shuddered inwardly, but outwardly smiled faintly as he replied,
“No!”

“And the tide and wind jest servin' us now, ye wouldn't mind keepin'
straight on with us this trip?”

“Where to?” asked Elijah.

“Santy Barbara.”

“No,” said Elijah, after a moment's pause. “I'll go with you.”

The man leaped to his feet, lifted his head above the upper deck,
shouted “Let her go free, Jerry!” and then turned gratefully to his
passenger. “Look yer! A wash-out is a wash-out, I reckon, put it any
way you like; it don't put anything back into the land, or anything back
into your pocket afterwards, eh? No! And yer well out of it, pardner!
Now there's a right smart chance for locatin' jest back of Santy
Barbara, where thar ain't no God-forsaken tules to overflow; and ez far
ez the land and licker lies ye 'needn't take any water in yours' ef ye
don't want it. You kin start fresh thar, pardner, and brail up. What's
the matter with you, old man, is only fever 'n' agur ketched in them
tules! I kin see it in your eyes. Now you hold on whar you be till I go
forrard and see everything taut, and then I'll come back and we'll have
a talk.”

And they did. The result of which was that at the end of a week's
tossing and seasickness, Elijah Curtis was landed at Santa Barbara,
pale, thin, but self-contained and resolute. And having found favor
in the eyes of the skipper of the Kitty Hawk, general trader,
lumber-dealer, and ranch-man, a week later he was located on the
skipper's land and installed in the skipper's service. And from that
day, for five years Sidon and Tasajara knew him no more.




CHAPER IV.


It was part of the functions of John Milton Harkutt to take down the
early morning shutters and sweep out the store for his father each day
before going to school. It was a peculiarity of this performance that he
was apt to linger over it, partly from the fact that it put off the
evil hour of lessons, partly that he imparted into the process a purely
imaginative and romantic element gathered from his latest novel-reading.
In this he was usually assisted by one or two school-fellows on their
way to school, who always envied him his superior menial occupation. To
go to school, it was felt, was a common calamity of boyhood that called
into play only the simplest forms of evasion, whereas to take down
actual shutters in a bona fide store, and wield a real broom that raised
a palpable cloud of dust, was something that really taxed the noblest
exertions. And it was the morning after the arrival of the strangers
that John Milton stood on the veranda of the store ostentatiously
examining the horizon, with his hand shading his eyes, as one of his
companions appeared.

“Hollo, Milt! wot yer doin'?”

John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one of
the shutters and began to detach it. “Ha!” he said hoarsely. “Clear the
ship for action! Open the ports! On deck there! Steady, you lubbers!”
 In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow was at his side attacking
another shutter. “A long, low schooner bearing down upon us! Lively,
lads, lively!” continued John Milton, desisting a moment to take another
dramatic look at the distant plain. “How does she head now?” he demanded
fiercely.

“Sou' by sou'east, sir,” responded the other boy, frantically dancing
before the window. “But she'll weather it.”

They each then wrested another shutter away, violently depositing them,
as they ran to and fro, in a rack at the corner of the veranda. Added
to an extraordinary and unnecessary clattering with their feet, they
accompanied their movements with a singular hissing sound, supposed to
indicate in one breath the fury of the elements, the bustle of the eager
crew, and the wild excitement of the coming conflict. When the last
shutter was cleared away, John Milton, with the cry “Man the starboard
guns!” dashed into the store, whose floor was marked by the muddy
footprints of yesterday's buyers, seized a broom and began to sweep
violently. A cloud of dust arose, into which his companion at once
precipitated himself with another broom and a loud BANG! to indicate the
somewhat belated sound of cannon. For a few seconds the two boys plied
their brooms desperately in that stifling atmosphere, accompanying each
long sweep and puff of dust out of the open door with the report of
explosions and loud HA'S! of defiance, until not only the store, but the
veranda was obscured with a cloud which the morning sun struggled vainly
to pierce. In the midst of this tumult and dusty confusion--happily
unheard and unsuspected in the secluded domestic interior of the
building--a shrill little voice arose from the road.

“Think you're mighty smart, don't ye?”

The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury, and, as the dust
of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters gazing at them
with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

“Guess ye don't know what happened down the run last night,” he
continued impatiently. “'Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself!
Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his
six-shooter,--one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out,
and he's bin to Squire Kerby tellin' him.”

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference
and pre-knowledge.

“Dad sez your father druv 'Lige outer the store lass night! Dad sez your
father's 'sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez
the squire'll set the constable on your father. Yah!” But here the small
insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless,
when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a
disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his
companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah's disappearance. He
walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and
putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his
former exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative
children, and often assume the functions of premonition, had taken
possession of him. The oddity of his father's manner the evening before,
which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his
sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters's speech. He had
no idea of literally accepting the boy's charges; he scarcely understood
their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father's anger
and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in
the dark for that paper of 'Lige Curtis's. It WAS 'Lige Curtis's paper,
for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over
him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his
father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It
was not the boy's first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy which
the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent
victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last
avenges them,--but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might
not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because
it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above
being diverted. And the two surveyors--of whose heroic advent in a raft
John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled ways, their
strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his fancy. Kept in
the background by his sisters when visitors came, as an unpresentable
feature in the household, he however managed to linger near the
strangers when, in company with Euphemia and Clementina, after breakfast
they strolled beneath the sparkling sunlight in the rude garden
inclosure along the sloping banks of the creek. It was with the average
brother's supreme contempt that he listened to his sisters' “practicin'”
 upon the goodness of these superior beings; it was with an exceptional
pity that he regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return.
He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable
curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading,
this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless
statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at
once that she was “just that kind of person” who would lie abed in
the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the
housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things
for her? Was it not perfectly plain to them that her present sickening
politeness was solely with a view to extract from them caramels,
rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly keep herself, and
perhaps some “buggy-riding” later? Alas, John Milton, it was not! For
standing there with her tall, perfectly-proportioned figure outlined
against a willow, an elastic branch of which she had drawn down by one
curved arm above her head, and on which she leaned--as everybody leaned
against something in Sidon--the two young men saw only a straying
goddess in a glorified rosebud print. Whether the clearly-cut profile
presented to Rice, or the full face that captivated Grant, each
suggested possibilities of position, pride, poetry, and passion that
astonished while it fascinated them. By one of those instincts known
only to the freemasonry of the sex, Euphemia lent herself to this
advertisement of her sister's charms by subtle comparison with her own
prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.

“Clementina certainly is perfect, to keep her supremacy over that pretty
little sister,” thought Rice.

“What a fascinating little creature to hold her own against that tall,
handsome girl,” thought Grant.

“They're takin' stock o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when
their backs is turned,” said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a
dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged
to listen to later.

“We were very fortunate to make a landing at all last night,” said Rice,
looking down upon the still swollen current, and then raising his eyes
to Clementina. “Still more fortunate to make it where we did. I suppose
it must have been the singing that lured us on to the bank,--as,
you know, the sirens used to lure people,--only with less disastrous
consequences.”

John Milton here detected three glaring errors; first, it was NOT
Clementina who had sung; secondly, he knew that neither of his sisters
had ever read anything about sirens, but he had; thirdly, that the
young surveyor was glaringly ignorant of local phenomena and should be
corrected.

“It's nothin' but the current,” he said, with that feverish youthful
haste that betrays a fatal experience of impending interruption. “It's
always leavin' drift and rubbish from everywhere here. There ain't
anythin' that's chucked into the creek above that ain't bound to fetch
up on this bank. Why, there was two sheep and a dead hoss here long
afore YOU thought of coming!” He did not understand why this should
provoke the laughter that it did, and to prove that he had no ulterior
meaning, added with pointed politeness, “So IT ISN'T YOUR FAULT, you
know--YOU couldn't help it;” supplementing this with the distinct
courtesy, “otherwise you wouldn't have come.”

“But it would seem that your visitors are not all as accidental as your
brother would imply, and one, at least, seems to have been expected last
evening. You remember you thought we were a Mr. Parmlee,” said Mr. Rice
looking at Clementina.

It would be strange indeed, he thought, if the beautiful girl were not
surrounded by admirers. But without a trace of self-consciousness, or
any change in her reposeful face, she indicated her sister with a slight
gesture, and said: “One of Phemie's friends. He gave her the accordion.
She's very popular.”

“And I suppose YOU are very hard to please?” he said with a tentative
smile.

She looked at him with her large, clear eyes, and that absence of
coquetry or changed expression in her beautiful face which might have
stood for indifference or dignity as she said: “I don't know. I am
waiting to see.”

But here Miss Phemie broke in saucily with the assertion that Mr.
Parmlee might not have a railroad in his pocket, but that at least he
didn't have to wait for the Flood to call on young ladies, nor did he
usually come in pairs, for all the world as if he had been let out of
Noah's Ark, but on horseback and like a Christian by the front door.
All this provokingly and bewitchingly delivered, however, and with a
simulated exaggeration that was incited apparently more by Mr. Lawrence
Grant's evident enjoyment of it, than by any desire to defend the absent
Parmlee.

“But where is the front door?” asked Grant laughingly.

The young girl pointed to a narrow zigzag path that ran up the bank
beside the house until it stopped at a small picketed gate on the level
of the road and store.

“But I should think it would be easier to have a door and private
passage through the store,” said Grant.

“WE don't,” said the young lady pertly, “we have nothing to do with the
store. I go in to see paw sometimes when he's shutting up and there's
nobody there, but Clem has never set foot in it since we came. It's bad
enough to have it and the lazy loafers that hang around it as near to
us as they are; but paw built the house in such a fashion that we ain't
troubled by their noise, and we might be t'other side of the creek as
far as our having to come across them. And because paw has to sell pork
and flour, we haven't any call to go there and watch him do it.”

The two men glanced at each other. This reserve and fastidiousness were
something rare in a pioneer community. Harkutt's manners certainly did
not indicate that he was troubled by this sensitiveness; it must have
been some individual temperament of his daughters. Stephen felt his
respect increase for the goddess-like Clementina; Mr. Lawrence Grant
looked at Miss Phemie with a critical smile.

“But you must be very limited in your company,” he said; “or is Mr.
Parmlee not a customer of your father's?”

“As Mr. Parmlee does not come to us through the store, and don't talk
trade to me, we don't know,” responded Phemie saucily.

“But have you no lady acquaintances--neighbors--who also avoid the store
and enter only at the straight and narrow gate up there?” continued
Grant mischievously, regardless of the uneasy, half-reproachful glances
of Rice.

But Phemie, triumphantly oblivious of any satire, answered promptly:
“If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the turnpike road as
much as they do off it, or the six daughters of that Georgia Cracker who
wear men's boots and hats, we haven't.”

“And Mr. Parmlee, your admirer?” suggested Rice. “Hasn't he a mother or
sisters here?”

“Yes, but they don't want to know us, and have never called here.”

The embarrassment of the questioner at this unexpected reply, which came
from the faultless lips of Clementina, was somewhat mitigated by the
fact that the young woman's voice and manner betrayed neither annoyance
nor anger.

Here, however, Harkutt appeared from the house with the information that
he had secured two horses for the surveyors and their instruments, and
that he would himself accompany them a part of the way on their
return to Tasajara Creek, to show them the road. His usual listless
deliberation had given way to a certain nervous but uneasy energy. If
they started at once it would be better, before the loungers gathered at
the store and confused them with lazy counsel and languid curiosity. He
took it for granted that Mr. Grant wished the railroad survey to be
a secret, and he had said nothing, as they would be pestered with
questions. “Sidon was inquisitive--and old-fashioned.” The benefit its
inhabitants would get from the railroad would not prevent them from
throwing obstacles in its way at first; he remembered the way they
had acted with a proposed wagon road,--in fact, an idea of his own,
something like the railroad; he knew them thoroughly, and if he might
advise them, it would be to say nothing here until the thing was
settled.

“He evidently does not intend to give us a chance,” said Grant
good-humoredly to his companion, as they turned to prepare for their
journey; “we are to be conducted in silence to the outskirts of the town
like horse-thieves.”

“But you gave him the tip for himself,” said Rice reproachfully; “you
cannot blame him for wanting to keep it.”

“I gave it to him in trust for his two incredible daughters,” said Grant
with a grimace. “But, hang it! if I don't believe the fellow has more
concern in it than I imagined.”

“But isn't she perfect?” said Rice, with charming abstraction.

“Who?”

“Clementina, and so unlike her father.”

“Discomposingly so,” said Grant quietly. “One feels in calling her 'Miss
Harkutt' as if one were touching upon a manifest indiscretion. But here
comes John Milton. Well, my lad, what can I do for you?”

The boy, who had been regarding them from a distance with wistful and
curious eyes as they replaced their instruments for the journey, had
gradually approached them. After a moment's timid hesitation he said,
looking at Grant: “You don't know anybody in this kind o' business,”
 pointing to the instruments, “who'd like a boy, about my size?”

“I'm afraid not, J. M.,” said Grant, cheerfully, without suspending his
operation. “The fact is, you see, it's not exactly the kind of work for
a boy of your size.”

John Milton was silent for a moment, shifting himself slowly from one
leg to another as he watched the surveyor. After a pause he said, “There
don't seem to be much show in this world for boys o' my size. There
don't seem to be much use for 'em any way.” This not bitterly, but
philosophically, and even politely, as if to relieve Grant's rejection
of any incivility.

“Really you quite pain me, John Milton,” said Grant, looking up as he
tightened a buckle. “I never thought of it before, but you're right.”

“Now,” continued the boy slowly, “with girls it's just different. Girls
of my size everybody does things for. There's Clemmy,--she's only two
years older nor me, and don't know half that I do, and yet she kin lie
about all day, and hasn't to get up to breakfast. And Phemie,--who's
jest the same age, size, and weight as me,--maw and paw lets her do
everything she wants to. And so does everybody. And so would you.”

“But you surely don't want to be like a girl?” said Grant, smiling.

It here occurred to John Milton's youthful but not illogical mind that
this was not argument, and he turned disappointedly away. As his father
was to accompany the strangers a short distance, he, John Milton, was
to-day left in charge of the store. That duty, however, did not involve
any pecuniary transactions--the taking of money or making of change but
a simple record on a slate behind the counter of articles selected by
those customers whose urgent needs could not wait Mr. Harkutt's return.
Perhaps on account of this degrading limitation, perhaps for other
reasons, the boy did not fancy the task imposed upon him. The presence
of the idle loungers who usually occupied the armchairs near the stove,
and occasionally the counter, dissipated any romance with which he
might have invested his charge; he wearied of the monotony of their dull
gossip, but mostly he loathed the attitude of hypercritical counsel and
instruction which they saw fit to assume towards him at such moments.
“Instead o' lazin' thar behind the counter when your father ain't here
to see ye, John,” remarked Billings from the depths of his armchair a
few moments after Harkutt had ridden away, “ye orter be bustlin' round,
dustin' the shelves. Ye'll never come to anythin' when you're a man ef
you go on like that. Ye never heard o' Harry Clay--that was called 'the
Mill-boy of the Slashes'--sittin' down doin' nothin' when he was a boy.”

“I never heard of him loafin' round in a grocery store when he was
growned up either,” responded John Milton, darkly.

“P'r'aps you reckon he got to be a great man by standin' up sassin' his
father's customers,” said Peters, angrily. “I kin tell ye, young man, if
you was my boy”--

“If I was YOUR boy, I'd be playin' hookey instead of goin' to school,
jest as your boy is doin' now,” interrupted John Milton, with a literal
recollection of his quarrel and pursuit of the youth in question that
morning.

An undignified silence on the part of the adults followed, the usual
sequel to those passages; Sidon generally declining to expose itself to
the youthful Harkutt's terrible accuracy of statement.

The men resumed their previous lazy gossip about Elijah Curtis's
disappearance, with occasional mysterious allusions in a lower tone,
which the boy instinctively knew referred to his father, but which
either from indolence or caution, the two great conservators of Sidon,
were never formulated distinctly enough for his relentless interference.
The morning sunshine was slowly thickening again in an indolent mist
that seemed to rise from the saturated plain. A stray lounger shuffled
over from the blacksmith's shop to the store to take the place of
another idler who had joined an equally lethargic circle around
the slumbering forge. A dull intermittent sound of hammering came
occasionally from the wheelwright's shed--at sufficiently protracted
intervals to indicate the enfeebled progress of Sidon's vehicular
repair. A yellow dog left his patch of sunlight on the opposite side
of the way and walked deliberately over to what appeared to be more
luxurious quarters on the veranda; was manifestly disappointed but not
equal to the exertion of returning, and sank down with blinking eyes and
a regretful sigh without going further. A procession of six ducks got
well into a line for a laborious “march past” the store, but fell out
at the first mud puddle and gave it up. A highly nervous but respectable
hen, who had ventured upon the veranda evidently against her better
instincts, walked painfully on tiptoe to the door, apparently was met
by language which no mother of a family could listen to, and retired in
strong hysterics. A little later the sun became again obscured, the
wind arose, rain fell, and the opportunity for going indoors and doing
nothing was once more availed of by all Sidon.

It was afternoon when Mr. Harkutt returned. He did not go into the
store, but entered the dwelling from the little picket-gate and steep
path. There he called a family council in the sitting-room as being
the most reserved and secure. Mrs. Harkutt, sympathizing and cheerfully
ready for any affliction, still holding a dust-cloth in her hand, took
her seat by the window, with Phemie breathless and sparkling at one side
of her, while Clementina, all faultless profile and repose, sat on the
other. To Mrs. Harkutt's motherly concern at John Milton's absence, it
was pointed out that he was wanted at the store,--was a mere boy anyhow,
and could not be trusted. Mr. Harkutt, a little ruddier from weather,
excitement, and the unusual fortification of a glass of liquor, a little
more rugged in the lines of his face, and with an odd ring of defiant
self-assertion in his voice, stood before them in the centre of the
room.

He wanted them to listen to him carefully, to remember what he said, for
it was important; it might be a matter of “lawing” hereafter,--and he
couldn't be always repeating it to them,--he would have enough to do.
There was a heap of it that, as women-folks, they couldn't understand,
and weren't expected to. But he'd got it all clear now, and what he was
saying was gospel. He'd always known to himself that the only good that
could ever come to Sidon would come by railroad. When those fools talked
wagon road he had said nothing, but he had his own ideas; he had worked
for that idea without saying anything to anybody; that idea was to get
possession of all the land along the embarcadero, which nobody
cared for, and 'Lige Curtis was ready to sell for a song. Well, now,
considering what had happened, he didn't mind telling them that he had
been gradually getting possession of it, little by little, paying 'Lige
Curtis in advances and installments, until it was his own! They had
heard what those surveyors said; how that it was the only fit terminus
for the railroad. Well, that land, and that water-front, and the
terminus were HIS! And all from his own foresight and prudence.

It is needless to say that this was not the truth. But it is necessary
to point out that this fabrication was the result of his last night's
cogitations and his morning's experience. He had resolved upon a bold
course. He had reflected that his neighbors would be more ready to
believe in and to respect a hard, mercenary, and speculative foresight
in his taking advantage of 'Lige's necessities than if he had--as was
the case--merely benefited by them through an accident of circumstance
and good humor. In the latter case he would be envied and hated; in
the former he would be envied and feared. By logic of circumstance
the greater wrong seemed to be less obviously offensive than the minor
fault. It was true that it involved the doing of something he had not
contemplated, and the certainty of exposure if 'Lige ever returned,
but he was nevertheless resolved. The step from passive to active
wrong-doing is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to
sincerity which we all require. Howbeit, it gave that ring of assertion
to Daniel Harkutt's voice already noted, which most women like, and
only men are prone to suspect or challenge. The incompleteness of his
statement was, for the same reason, overlooked by his feminine auditors.

“And what is it worth, dad?” asked Phemie eagerly.

“Grant says I oughter get at least ten thousand dollars for the site of
the terminus from the company, but of course I shall hold on to the rest
of the land. The moment they get the terminus there, and the depot and
wharf built, I can get my own price and buyers for the rest. Before the
year is out Grant thinks it ought to go up ten per cent on the value of
the terminus, and that a hundred thousand.”

“Oh, dad!” gasped Phemie, frantically clasping her knees with both hands
as if to perfectly assure herself of this good fortune.

Mrs. Harkutt audibly murmured “Poor dear Dan'l,” and stood, as it were,
sympathetically by, ready to commiserate the pains and anxieties of
wealth as she had those of poverty. Clementina alone remained silent,
clear-eyed, and unchanged.

“And to think it all came through THEM!” continued Phemie. “I always had
an idea that Mr. Grant was smart, dad. And it was real kind of him to
tell you.”

“I reckon father could have found it out without them. I don't know why
we should be beholden to them particularly. I hope he isn't expected to
let them think that he is bound to consider them our intimate friends
just because they happened to drop in here at a time when his plans have
succeeded.”

The voice was Clementina's, unexpected but quiet, unemotional and
convincing. “It seemed,” as Mrs. Harkutt afterwards said, “as if the
child had already touched that hundred thousand.” Phemie reddened with a
sense of convicted youthful extravagance.

“You needn't fear for me,” said Harkutt, responding to Clementina's
voice as if it were an echo of his own, and instinctively recognizing
an unexpected ally. “I've got my own ideas of this thing, and what's
to come of it. I've got my own ideas of openin' up that property and
showin' its resources. I'm goin' to run it my own way. I'm goin' to have
a town along the embarcadero that'll lay over any town in Contra Costa.
I'm goin' to have the court-house and county seat there, and a couple
of hotels as good as any in the Bay. I'm goin' to build that wagon road
through here that those lazy louts slipped up on, and carry it clear
over to Five Mile Corner, and open up the whole Tasajara Plain!”

They had never seen him look so strong, so resolute, so intelligent and
handsome. A dimly prophetic vision of him in a black broadcloth suit and
gold watch-chain addressing a vague multitude, as she remembered to
have seen the Hon. Stanley Riggs of Alasco at the “Great Barbecue,”
 rose before Phemie's blue enraptured eyes. With the exception of Mrs.
Harkutt,--equal to any possibilities on the part of her husband,--they
had honestly never expected it of him. They were pleased with their
father's attitude in prosperity, and felt that perhaps he was not
unworthy of being proud of them hereafter.

“But we're goin' to leave Sidon,” said Phemie, “ain't we, paw?”

“As soon as I can run up a new house at the embarcadero,” said Harkutt
peevishly, “and that's got to be done mighty quick if I want to make a
show to the company and be in possession.”

“And that's easier for you to do, dear, now that 'Lige's disappeared,”
 said Mrs. Harkutt consolingly.

“What do ye mean by that? What the devil are ye talkin' about?” demanded
Harkutt suddenly with unexpected exasperation.

“I mean that that drunken 'Lige would be mighty poor company for the
girls if he was our only neighbor,” returned Mrs. Harkutt submissively.

Harkutt, after a fixed survey of his wife, appeared mollified. The two
girls, who were mindful of his previous outburst the evening before,
exchanged glances which implied that his manners needed correction for
prosperity.

“You'll want a heap o' money to build there, Dan'l,” said Mrs. Harkutt
in plaintive diffidence.

“Yes! Yes!” said Harkutt impatiently. “I've kalkilated all that, and
I'm goin' to 'Frisco to-morrow to raise it and put this bill of sale on
record.” He half drew Elijah Curtis's paper from his pocket, but paused
and put it back again.

“Then THAT WAS the paper, dad,” said Phemie triumphantly.

“Yes,” said her father, regarding her fixedly, “and you know now why I
didn't want anything said about it last night--nor even now.”

“And 'Lige had just given it to you! Wasn't it lucky?”

“He HADN'T just given it to me!” said her father with another unexpected
outburst. “God Amighty! ain't I tellin' you all the time it was an old
matter! But you jabber, jabber all the time and don't listen! Where's
John Milton?” It had occurred to him that the boy might have read the
paper--as his sister had--while it lay unheeded on the counter.

“In the store,--you know. You said he wasn't to hear anything of this,
but I'll call him,” said Mrs. Harkutt, rising eagerly.

“Never mind,” returned her husband, stopping her reflectively, “best
leave it as it is; if it's necessary I'll tell him. But don't any of you
say anything, do you hear?”

Nevertheless a few hours later, when the store was momentarily free of
loungers, and Harkutt had relieved his son of his monotonous charge, he
made a pretense, while abstractedly listening to an account of the boy's
stewardship, to look through a drawer as if in search of some missing
article.

“You didn't see anything of a paper I left somewhere about here
yesterday?” he asked carelessly.

“The one you picked up when you came in last night?” said the boy with
discomposing directness.

Harkutt flushed slightly and drew his breath between his set teeth. Not
only could he place no reliance upon ordinary youthful inattention,
but he must be on his guard against his own son as from a spy! But he
restrained himself.

“I don't remember,” he said with affected deliberation, “what it was I
picked up. Do you? Did you read it?”

The meaning of his father's attitude instinctively flashed upon the boy.
He HAD read the paper, but he answered, as he had already determined,
“No.”

An inspiration seized Mr. Harkutt. He drew 'Lige Curtis's bill of sale
from his pocket, and opening it before John Milton said, “Was it that?”

“I don't know,” said the boy. “I couldn't tell.” He walked away with
affected carelessness, already with a sense of playing some part like
his father, and pretended to whistle for the dog across the street.
Harkutt coughed ostentatiously, put the paper back in his pocket,
set one or two boxes straight on the counter, locked the drawer, and
disappeared into the back passage. John Milton remained standing in
the doorway looking vacantly out. But he did not see the dull familiar
prospect beyond. He only saw the paper his father had opened and
unfolded before him. It was the same paper he had read last night. But
there were three words written there THAT WERE NOT THERE BEFORE! After
the words “Value received” there had been a blank. He remembered that
distinctly. This was filled in by the words, “Five hundred dollars.” The
handwriting did not seem like his father's, nor yet entirely like 'Lige
Curtis's. What it meant he did not know,--he would not try to think. He
should forget it, as he had tried to forget what had happened before,
and he should never tell it to any one!

There was a feverish gayety in his sisters' manner that afternoon that
he did not understand; short colloquies that were suspended with ill
concealed impatience when he came near them, and resumed when he
was sent, on equally palpable excuses, out of the room. He had been
accustomed to this exclusion when there were strangers present, but it
seemed odd to him now, when the conversation did not even turn upon the
two superior visitors who had been there, and of whom he confidently
expected they would talk. Such fragments as he overheard were always in
the future tense, and referred to what they intended to do. His
mother, whose affection for him had always been shown in excessive
and depressing commiseration of him in even his lightest moments, that
afternoon seemed to add a prophetic and Cassandra-like sympathy for some
vague future of his that would require all her ministration. “You won't
need them new boots, Milty dear, in the changes that may be comin' to
ye; so don't be bothering your poor father in his worriments over his
new plans.”

“What new plans, mommer?” asked the boy abruptly. “Are we goin' away
from here?”

“Hush, dear, and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks to
worry over, let alone a boy like you. Now be good,”--a quality in Mrs.
Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,--“and after
supper, while I'm in the parlor with your father and sisters, you kin
sit up here by the fire with your book.”

“But,” persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, “is popper goin' to
join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?”

“No, child, what an idea! Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your
father.”

Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and
characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the
surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and
unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung
around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered
Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction
in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had
always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose
members were individually known to him as “a proudy.”

“Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?” he said with an
engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.

“Is what?”

“Wot you're goin' to marry.”

“Idiot!”

“That ain't tellin' which,” responded the boy darkly.

Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her
declare that “really that boy was getting too low and vulgar
for anything.” Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further
explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was “girls' meanness!”

Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father
discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek,
vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility
of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the
current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the
spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the
embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely
habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would
indicate his family or friends. It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless
place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living
there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time
before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton
knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were
fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be
abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father
say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness: “Yes, I
reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take
from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of
it.”

Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on the
road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half resentful
sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of
loneliness and of getting dangerously wet. The swollen creek still
whispered, murmured and swirled beside the bank. At another time he
might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore
raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence; but since the
disappearance of 'Lige, who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy
in his heart, although he had never seen him, he shunned the stream
contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate. Presently the light
from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves
and sprays where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came
fitfully to his ear. They didn't want him there. They had never thought
of asking him to come in. Well!--who cared? And he wasn't going to be
bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire. No!

Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house
and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with
sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin
which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There,
too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other
piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, who
consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fashion to
complete the unhallowed rites. He unearthed the candle, lit it, and
clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then
brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in
the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap
in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a
trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many
other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.

The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The
voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or
expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the
spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place
melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim,
subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept
out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely
and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened
limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish
romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement
and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible
women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered
it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew
feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser
fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton,
with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far
beyond their wildest ken!




CHAPER V.


Prosperity had settled upon the plains of Tasajara. Not only had the
embarcadero emerged from the tules of Tasajara Creek as a thriving town
of steamboat wharves, warehouses, and outlying mills and factories, but
in five years the transforming railroad had penetrated the great plain
itself and revealed its undeveloped fertility. The low-lying lands that
had been yearly overflowed by the creek, now drained and cultivated,
yielded treasures of wheat and barley that were apparently
inexhaustible. Even the helpless indolence of Sidon had been surprised
into activity and change. There was nothing left of the straggling
settlement to recall its former aspect. The site of Harkutt's old store
and dwelling was lost and forgotten in the new mill and granary that
rose along the banks of the creek. Decay leaves ruin and traces for the
memory to linger over; prosperity is unrelenting in its complete and
smiling obliteration of the past.

But Tasajara City, as the embarcadero was now called, had no previous
record, and even the former existence of an actual settler like the
forgotten Elijah Curtis was unknown to the present inhabitants. It was
Daniel Harkutt's idea carried out in Daniel Harkutt's land, with Daniel
Harkutt's capital and energy. But Daniel Harkutt had become Daniel
Harcourt, and Harcourt Avenue, Harcourt Square, and Harcourt House,
ostentatiously proclaimed the new spelling of his patronymic. When the
change was made and for what reason, who suggested it and under what
authority, were not easy to determine, as the sign on his former store
had borne nothing but the legend, Goods and Provisions, and his name did
not appear on written record until after the occupation of Tasajara;
but it is presumed that it was at the instigation of his daughters, and
there was no one to oppose it. Harcourt was a pretty name for a street,
a square, or a hotel; even the few in Sidon who had called it Harkutt
admitted that it was an improvement quite consistent with the change
from the fever-haunted tules and sedges of the creek to the broad,
level, and handsome squares of Tasajara City.

This might have been the opinion of a visitor at the Harcourt House, who
arrived one summer afternoon from the Stockton boat, but whose shrewd,
half-critical, half-professional eyes and quiet questionings betrayed
some previous knowledge of the locality. Seated on the broad veranda
of the Harcourt House, and gazing out on the well-kept green and young
eucalyptus trees of the Harcourt Square or Plaza, he had elicited a
counter question from a prosperous-looking citizen who had been lounging
at his side.

“I reckon you look ez if you might have been here before, stranger.”

“Yes,” said the stranger quietly, “I have been. But it was when the
tules grew in the square opposite, and the tide of the creek washed
them.”

“Well,” said the Tasajaran, looking curiously at the stranger, “I call
myself a pioneer of Tasajara. My name's Peters,--of Peters and Co.,--and
those warehouses along the wharf, where you landed just now, are mine;
but I was the first settler on Harcourt's land, and built the next cabin
after him. I helped to clear out them tules and dredged the channels
yonder. I took the contract with Harcourt to build the last fifteen
miles o' railroad, and put up that depot for the company. Perhaps you
were here before that?”

“I was,” returned the stranger quietly.

“I say,” said Peters, hitching his chair a little nearer to his
companion, “you never knew a kind of broken-down feller, called
Curtis--'Lige Curtis--who once squatted here and sold his right to
Harkutt? He disappeared; it was allowed he killed hisself, but they
never found his body, and, between you and me, I never took stock in
that story. You know Harcourt holds under him, and all Tasajara rests on
that title.”

“I've heard so,” assented the stranger carelessly, “but I never knew the
original settler. Then Harcourt has been lucky?”

“You bet. He's got three millions right about HERE, or within this
quarter section, to say nothing of his outside speculations.”

“And lives here?”

“Not for two years. That's his old house across the plaza, but his
women-folks live mostly in 'Frisco and New York, where he's got houses
too. They say they sorter got sick of Tasajara after his youngest
daughter ran off with a feller.”

“Hallo!” said the stranger with undisguised interest. “I never heard of
that! You don't mean that she eloped”--he hesitated.

“Oh, it was a square enough marriage. I reckon too square to suit some
folks; but the fellow hadn't nothin', and wasn't worth shucks,--a sort
of land surveyor, doin' odd jobs, you know; and the old man and old
woman were agin it, and the tother daughter worse of all. It was allowed
here--you know how women-folks talk!--that the surveyor had been sweet
on Clementina, but had got tired of being played by her, and took up
with Phemie out o' spite. Anyhow they got married, and Harcourt gave
them to understand they couldn't expect anything from him. P'raps that's
why it didn't last long, for only about two months ago she got a divorce
from Rice and came back to her family again.”

“Rice?” queried the stranger. “Was that her husband's name, Stephen
Rice?”

“I reckon! You knew him?”

“Yes,--when the tide came up to the tules, yonder,” answered the
stranger musingly. “And the other daughter,--I suppose she has made a
good match, being a beauty and the sole heiress?”

The Tasajaran made a grimace. “Not much! I reckon she's waitin' for the
Angel Gabriel,--there ain't another good enough to suit her here. They
say she's had most of the big men in California waitin' in a line with
their offers, like that cue the fellows used to make at the 'Frisco
post-office steamer days--and she with nary a letter or answer for any
of them.”

“Then Harcourt doesn't seem to have been as fortunate in his family
affairs as in his speculations?”

Peters uttered a grim laugh. “Well, I reckon you know all about his
son's stampeding with that girl last spring?”

“His son?” interrupted the stranger. “Do you mean the boy they called
John Milton? Why, he was a mere child!”

“He was old enough to run away with a young woman that helped in his
mother's house, and marry her afore a justice of the peace. The old man
just snorted with rage, and swore he'd have the marriage put aside, for
the boy was under age. He said it was a put-up job of the girl's; that
she was older by two years, and only wanted to get what money might be
comin' some day, but that they'd never see a red cent of it. Then, they
say, John Milton up and sassed the old man to his face, and allowed that
he wouldn't take his dirty money if he starved first, and that if the
old man broke the marriage he'd marry her again next year; that true
love and honorable poverty were better nor riches, and a lot more o'
that stuff he picked out o' them ten-cent novels he was allus reading.
My women-folks say that he actually liked the girl, because she was the
only one in the house that was ever kind to him; they say the girls were
just ragin' mad at the idea o' havin' a hired gal who had waited on 'em
as a sister-in-law, and they even got old Mammy Harcourt's back up by
sayin' that John's wife would want to rule the house, and run her out
of her own kitchen. Some say he shook THEM, talked back to 'em mighty
sharp, and held his head a heap higher nor them. Anyhow, he's livin'
with his wife somewhere in 'Frisco, in a shanty on a sand lot, and
workin' odd jobs for the newspapers. No! takin' it by and large--it
don't look as if Harcourt had run his family to the same advantage that
he has his land.”

“Perhaps he doesn't understand them as well,” said the stranger smiling.

“Mor'n likely the material ain't thar, or ain't as vallyble for a new
country,” said Peters grimly. “I reckon the trouble is that he lets them
two daughters run him, and the man who lets any woman or women do that,
lets himself in for all their meannesses, and all he gets in return is a
woman's result,--show!”

Here the stranger, who was slowly rising from his chair with the polite
suggestion of reluctantly tearing himself from the speaker's spell,
said: “And Harcourt spends most of his time in San Francisco, I
suppose?”

“Yes! but to-day he's here to attend a directors' meeting and the
opening of the Free Library and Tasajara Hall. I saw the windows open,
and the blinds up in his house across the plaza as I passed just now.”

The stranger had by this time quite effected his courteous withdrawal.
“Good-afternoon, Mr. Peters,” he said, smilingly lifting his hat, and
turned away.

Peters, who was obliged to take his legs off the chair, and half rise
to the stranger's politeness, here reflected that he did not know his
interlocutor's name and business, and that he had really got nothing
in return for his information. This must be remedied. As the stranger
passed through the hall into the street, followed by the unwonted
civilities of the spruce hotel clerk and the obsequious attentions of
the negro porter, Peters stepped to the window of the office. “Who was
that man who just passed out?” he asked.

The clerk stared in undisguised astonishment. “You don't mean to say you
didn't know WHO he was--all the while you were talking to him?”

“No,” returned Peters, impatiently.

“Why, that was Professor Lawrence Grant!--THE Lawrence Grant--don't you
know?--the biggest scientific man and recognized expert on the Pacific
slope. Why, that's the man whose single word is enough to make or break
the biggest mine or claim going! That man!--why, that's the man whose
opinion's worth thousands, for it carries millions with it--and can't be
bought. That's him who knocked the bottom outer El Dorado last year, and
next day sent Eureka up booming! Ye remember that, sure?”

“Of course--but”--stammered Peters.

“And to think you didn't know him!” repeated the hotel clerk
wonderingly. “And here I was reckoning you were getting points from him
all the time! Why, some men would have given a thousand dollars for your
chance of talking to him--yes!--of even being SEEN talking to him.
Why, old Wingate once got a tip on his Prairie Flower lead worth five
thousand dollars while just changing seats with him in the cars and
passing the time of day, sociable like. Why, what DID you talk about?”

Peters, with a miserable conviction that he had thrown away a valuable
opportunity in mere idle gossip, nevertheless endeavored to look
mysterious as he replied, “Oh, business gin'rally.” Then in the faint
hope of yet retrieving his blunder he inquired, “How long will he be
here?”

“Don't know. I reckon he and Harcourt's got something on hand. He just
asked if he was likely to be at home or at his office. I told him I
reckoned at the house, for some of the family--I didn't get to see who
they were--drove up in a carriage from the 3.40 train while you were
sitting there.”

Meanwhile the subject of this discussion, quite unconscious of the
sensation he had created, or perhaps like most heroes philosophically
careless of it, was sauntering indifferently towards Harcourt's house.
But he had no business with his former host, his only object was to pass
an idle hour before his train left. He was, of course, not unaware that
he himself was largely responsible for Harcourt's success; that it was
HIS hint which had induced the petty trader of Sidon to venture his all
in Tasajara; HIS knowledge of the topography and geology of the
plain that had stimulated Harcourt's agricultural speculations; HIS
hydrographic survey of the creek that had made Harcourt's plan of
widening the channel to commerce practicable and profitable. This he
could not help but know. But that it was chiefly owing to his own clear,
cool, far-seeing, but never visionary, scientific observation,--his
own accurate analysis, unprejudiced by even a savant's enthusiasm, and
uninfluenced by any personal desire or greed of gain,--that Tasajara
City had risen from the stagnant tules, was a speculation that had never
occurred to him. There was a much more uneasy consciousness of what he
had done in Mr. Harcourt's face a few moments later, when his visitor's
name was announced, and it is to be feared that if that name had been
less widely honored and respected than it was, no merely grateful
recollection of it would have procured Grant an audience. As it was,
it was with a frown and a touch of his old impatient asperity that he
stepped to the threshold of an adjoining room and called, “Clemmy!”

Clementina appeared at the door.

“There's that man Grant in the parlor. What brings HIM here, I wonder?
Who does he come to see?”

“Who did he ask for?”

“Me,--but that don't mean anything.”

“Perhaps he wants to see you on some business.”

“No. That isn't his high-toned style. He makes other people go to him
for that,” he said bitterly. “Anyhow--don't you think it's mighty queer
his coming here after his friend--for it was he who introduced Rice
to us--had behaved so to your sister, and caused all this divorce and
scandal?”

“Perhaps he may know nothing about it; he and Rice separated long ago,
even before Grant became so famous. We never saw much of him, you know,
after we came here. Suppose you leave him to ME. I'll see him.”

Mr. Harcourt reflected. “Didn't he used to be rather attentive to
Phemie?”

Clementina shrugged her shoulders carelessly. “I dare say--but I don't
think that NOW”--

“Who said anything about NOW?” retorted her father, with a return of his
old abruptness. After a pause he said: “I'll go down and see him first,
and then send for you. You can keep him for the opening and dinner, if
you like.”

Meantime Lawrence Grant, serenely unsuspicious of these domestic
confidences, had been shown into the parlor--a large room furnished in
the same style as the drawing-room of the hotel he had just quitted.
He had ample time to note that it was that wonderful Second Empire
furniture which he remembered that the early San Francisco pioneers in
the first flush of their wealth had imported directly from France, and
which for years after gave an unexpected foreign flavor to the western
domesticity and a tawdry gilt equality to saloons and drawing-rooms,
public and private. But he was observant of a corresponding change in
Harcourt, when a moment later he entered the room. That individuality
which had kept the former shopkeeper of Sidon distinct from, although
perhaps not superior to, his customers--was strongly marked. He was
perhaps now more nervously alert than then; he was certainly more
impatient than before,--but that was pardonable in a man of
large affairs and action. Grant could not deny that he seemed
improved,--rather perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness,
and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable.
That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere
eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt
jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without
superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was neither
critical nor aggressively reminiscent, and above all not inclined to
claim the credit of creating him and Tasajara, became more confident,
more at his ease, and, I fear, in proportion more unpleasant. It is the
repose and not the struggle of the parvenu that confounds us.

“And YOU, Grant,--you have made yourself famous, and, I hear, have got
pretty much your own prices for your opinions ever since it was known
that you--you--er--were connected with the growth of Tasajara.”

Grant smiled; he was not quite prepared for this; but it was amusing
and would pass the time. He murmured a sentence of half ironical
deprecation, and Mr. Harcourt continued:--

“I haven't got my San Francisco house here to receive you in, but I hope
some day, sir, to see you there. We are only here for the day and night,
but if you care to attend the opening ceremonies at the new hall, we
can manage to give you dinner afterwards. You can escort my daughter
Clementina,--she's here with me.”

The smile of apologetic declination which had begun to form on Grant's
lips was suddenly arrested. “Then your daughter is here?” he asked, with
unaffected interest.

“Yes,--she is in fact a patroness of the library and sewing-circle, and
takes the greatest interest in it. The Reverend Doctor Pilsbury relies
upon her for everything. She runs the society, even to the training of
the young ladies, sir. You shall see their exercises.”

This was certainly a new phase of Clementina's character. Yet why should
she not assume the role of Lady Bountiful with the other functions of
her new condition. “I should have thought Miss Harcourt would have found
this rather difficult with her other social duties,” he said, “and would
have left it to her married sister.” He thought it better not to appear
as if avoiding reference to Euphemia, although quietly ignoring her late
experiences. Mr. Harcourt was less easy in his response.

“Now that Euphemia is again with her own family,” he said ponderously,
with an affectation of social discrimination that was in weak contrast
to his usual direct business astuteness, “I suppose she may take her
part in these things, but just now she requires rest. You may have heard
some rumor that she is going abroad for a time? The fact is she hasn't
the least intention of doing so, nor do we consider there is the
slightest reason for her going.” He paused as if to give great emphasis
to a statement that seemed otherwise unimportant. “But here's Clementina
coming, and I must get you to excuse ME. I've to meet the trustees of
the church in ten minutes, but I hope she'll persuade you to stay, and
I'll see you later at the hall.”

As Clementina entered the room her father vanished and, I fear,
as completely dropped out of Mr. Grant's mind. For the daughter's
improvement was greater than her father's, yet so much more refined as
to be at first only delicately perceptible. Grant had been prepared for
the vulgar enhancement of fine clothes and personal adornment, for the
specious setting of luxurious circumstances and surroundings, for the
aplomb that came from flattery and conscious power. But he found none of
these; her calm individuality was intensified rather than subdued; she
was dressed simply, with an economy of ornament, rich material, and
jewelry, but an accuracy of taste that was always dominant. Her plain
gray merino dress, beautifully fitting her figure, suggested, with
its pale blue facings, some uniform, as of the charitable society she
patronized. She came towards him with a graceful movement of greeting,
yet her face showed no consciousness of the interval that had elapsed
since they met; he almost fancied himself transported back to the
sitting-room at Sidon with the monotonous patter of the leaves outside,
and the cool moist breath of the bay and alder coming in at the window.

“Father says that you are only passing through Tasajara to-day, as you
did through Sidon five years ago,” she said with a smiling earnestness
that he fancied however was the one new phase of her character. “But
I won't believe it! At least we will not accept another visit quite as
accidental as that, even though you brought us twice the good fortune
you did then. You see, we have not forgotten it if you have, Mr. Grant.
And unless you want us to believe that your fairy gifts will turn some
day to leaves and ashes, you will promise to stay with us tonight, and
let me show you some of the good we have done with them. Perhaps
you don't know, or don't want to know, that it was I who got up this
'Library and Home Circle of the Sisters of Tasajara' which we are
to open to-day. And can you imagine why? You remember--or have you
forgotten--that you once affected to be concerned at the social
condition of the young ladies on the plains of Sidon? Well, Mr. Grant,
this is gotten up in order that the future Mr. Grants who wander may
find future Miss Billingses who are worthy to converse with them and
entertain them, and who no longer wear men's hats and live on the public
road.”

It was such a long speech for one so taciturn as he remembered
Clementina to have been; so unexpected in tone considering her father's
attitude towards him, and so unlooked for in its reference to a slight
incident of the past, that Grant's critical contemplation of her gave
way to a quiet and grateful glance of admiration. How could he have
been so mistaken in her character? He had always preferred the outspoken
Euphemia, and yet why should he not have been equally mistaken in
her? Without having any personal knowledge of Rice's matrimonial
troubles--for their intimate companionship had not continued after the
survey--he had been inclined to blame him; now he seemed to find excuses
for him. He wondered if she really had liked him as Peters had hinted;
he wondered if she knew that he, Grant, was no longer intimate with him
and knew nothing of her affairs. All this while he was accepting her
proffered hospitality and sending to the hotel for his luggage. Then
he drifted into a conversation, which he had expected would be brief,
pointless, and confined to a stupid resume of their mutual and social
progress since they had left Sidon. But here he was again mistaken; she
was talking familiarly of present social topics, of things that she knew
clearly and well, without effort or attitude. She had been to New
York and Boston for two winters; she had spent the previous summer at
Newport; it might have been her whole youth for the fluency, accuracy,
and familiarity of her detail, and the absence of provincial enthusiasm.
She was going abroad, probably in the spring. She had thought of going
to winter in Italy, but she would wait now until her sister was ready to
go with her. Mr. Grant of course knew that Euphemia was separated from
Mr. Rice--no--not until her father told him? Well--the marriage had been
a wild and foolish thing for both. But Euphemia was back again with them
in the San Francisco house; she had talked of coming to Tasajara to-day,
perhaps she might be there tonight. And, good heavens! it was actually
three o'clock already, and they must start at once for the Hall. She
would go and get her hat and return instantly.

It was true; he had been talking with her an hour--pleasantly,
intelligently, and yet with a consciousness of an indefinite
satisfaction beyond all this. It must have been surprise at her
transformation, or his previous misconception of her character. He had
been watching her features and wondering why he had ever thought them
expressionless. There was also the pleasant suggestion--common to
humanity in such instances--that he himself was in some way responsible
for the change; that it was some awakened sympathy to his own nature
that had breathed into this cold and faultless statue the warmth of
life. In an odd flash of recollection he remembered how, five years ago,
when Rice had suggested to her that she was “hard to please,” she had
replied that she “didn't know, but that she was waiting to see.” It did
not occur to him to wonder why she had not awakened then, or if this
awakening had anything to do with her own volition. It was not probable
that they would meet again after to-day, or if they did, that she would
not relapse into her former self and fail to impress him as she had now.
But--here she was--a paragon of feminine promptitude--already standing
in the doorway, accurately gloved and booted, and wearing a demure gray
hat that modestly crowned her decorously elegant figure.

They crossed the plaza side by side, in the still garish sunlight that
seemed to mock the scant shade of the youthful eucalyptus trees, and
presently fell in with the stream of people going in their direction.
The former daughters of Sidon, the Billingses, the Peterses, and
Wingates, were there bourgeoning and expanding in the glare of their new
prosperity, with silk and gold; there were newer faces still, and pretty
ones,--for Tasajara as a “Cow County” had attracted settlers with large
families,--and there were already the contrasting types of East and
West. Many turned to look after the tall figure of the daughter of the
Founder of Tasajara,--a spectacle lately rare to the town; a few glanced
at her companion, equally noticeable as a stranger. Thanks, however, to
some judicious preliminary advertising from the hotel clerk, Peters, and
Daniel Harcourt himself, by the time Grant and Miss Harcourt had reached
the Hall his name and fame were already known, and speculation had
already begun whether this new stroke of Harcourt's shrewdness might not
unite Clementina to a renowned and profitable partner.

The Hall was in one of the further and newly opened suburbs, and its
side and rear windows gave immediately upon the outlying and illimitable
plain of Tasajara. It was a tasteful and fair-seeming structure of wood,
surprisingly and surpassingly new. In fact that was its one dominant
feature; nowhere else had youth and freshness ever shown itself
as unconquerable and all-conquering. The spice of virgin woods and
trackless forests still rose from its pine floors, and breathed from its
outer shell of cedar that still oozed its sap, and redwood that still
dropped its life-blood. Nowhere else were the plastered walls and
ceilings as white and dazzling in their unstained purity, or as redolent
of the outlying quarry in their clear cool breath of lime and stone.
Even the turpentine of fresh and spotless paint added to this sense
of wholesome germination, and as the clear and brilliant Californian
sunshine swept through the open windows west and east, suffusing the
whole palpitating structure with its searching and resistless radiance,
the very air seemed filled with the aroma of creation.

The fresh colors of the young Republic, the bright blazonry of the
newest State, the coat-of-arms of the infant County of Tasajara--(a
vignette of sunset-tules cloven by the steam of an advancing
train)--hanging from the walls, were all a part of this invincible
juvenescence. Even the newest silks, ribbons and prints of the latest
holiday fashions made their first virgin appearance in the new building
as if to consecrate it, until it was stirred by the rustle of youth, as
with the sound and movement of budding spring.

A strain from the new organ--whose heart, however, had prematurely
learned its own bitterness--and a thin, clear, but somewhat shrill
chanting from a choir of young ladies were followed by a prayer from the
Reverend Mr. Pilsbury. Then there was a pause of expectancy, and Grant's
fair companion, who up to that moment had been quietly acting as guide
and cicerone to her father's guest, excused herself with a little
grimace of mock concern and was led away by one of the committee.
Grant's usually keen eyes were wandering somewhat abstractedly over the
agitated and rustling field of ribbons, flowers and feathers before him,
past the blazonry of banner on the walls, and through the open windows
to the long sunlit levels beyond, when he noticed a stir upon the raised
dais or platform at the end of the room, where the notables of Tasajara
were formally assembled. The mass of black coats suddenly parted and
drew back against the wall to allow the coming forward of a single
graceful figure. A thrill of nervousness as unexpected as unaccountable
passed over him as he recognized Clementina. In the midst of a sudden
silence she read the report of the committee from a paper in her hand,
in a clear, untroubled voice--the old voice of Sidon--and formally
declared the building opened. The sunlight, nearly level, streamed
through the western window across the front of the platform where she
stood and transfigured her slight but noble figure. The hush that had
fallen upon the Hall was as much the effect of that tranquil, ideal
presence as of the message with which it was charged. And yet that
apparition was as inconsistent with the clear, searching light
which helped to set it off, as it was with the broad new blazonry of
decoration, the yet unsullied record of the white walls, or even the
frank, animated and pretty faces that looked upon it. Perhaps it was
some such instinct that caused the applause which hesitatingly and
tardily followed her from the platform to appear polite and half
restrained rather than spontaneous.

Nevertheless Grant was honestly and sincerely profuse in his
congratulations. “You were far cooler and far more self-contained than I
should have been in your place,” he said, “than in fact I actually WAS,
only as your auditor. But I suppose you have done it before?”

She turned her beautiful eyes on his wonderingly. “No,--this is the
first time I ever appeared in public,--not even at school, for even
there I was always a private pupil.”

“You astonish me,” said Grant; “you seemed like an old hand at it.”

“Perhaps I did, or rather as if I didn't think anything of it
myself,--and that no doubt is why the audience didn't think anything of
it either.”

So she HAD noticed her cold reception, and yet there was not the
slightest trace of disappointment, regret, or wounded vanity in her
tone or manner. “You must take me to the refreshment room now,” she
said pleasantly, “and help me to look after the young ladies who are my
guests. I'm afraid there are still more speeches to come, and father and
Mr. Pilsbury are looking as if they confidently expected something more
would be 'expected' of them.”

Grant at once threw himself into the task assigned to him, with his
natural gallantry and a certain captivating playfulness which he still
retained. Perhaps he was the more anxious to please in order that his
companion might share some of his popularity, for it was undeniable that
Miss Harcourt still seemed to excite only a constrained politeness
among those with whom she courteously mingled. And this was still more
distinctly marked by the contrast of a later incident.

For some moments the sound of laughter and greeting had risen near the
door of the refreshment room that opened upon the central hall, and
there was a perceptible movement of the crowd--particularly of youthful
male Tasajara--in that direction. It was evident that it announced the
unexpected arrival of some popular resident. Attracted like the others,
Grant turned and saw the company making way for the smiling, easy,
half-saucy, half-complacent entry of a handsomely dressed young girl. As
she turned from time to time to recognize with rallying familiarity or
charming impertinence some of her admirers, there was that in her
tone and gesture which instantly recalled to him the past. It was
unmistakably Euphemia! His eyes instinctively sought Clementina's. She
was gazing at him with such a grave, penetrating look,--half doubting,
half wistful,--a look so unlike her usual unruffled calm that he felt
strangely stirred. But the next moment, when she rejoined him, the look
had entirely gone. “You have not seen my sister since you were at Sidon,
I believe?” she said quietly. “She would be sorry to miss you.” But
Euphemia and her train were already passing them on the opposite side of
the long table. She had evidently recognized Grant, yet the two sisters
were looking intently into each other's eyes when he raised his own.
Then Euphemia met his bow with a momentary accession of color, a
coquettish wave of her hand across the table, a slight exaggeration of
her usual fascinating recklessness, and smilingly moved away. He turned
to Clementina, but here an ominous tapping at the farther end of the
long table revealed the fact that Mr. Harcourt was standing on a chair
with oratorical possibilities in his face and attitude. There was
another forward movement in the crowd and--silence. In that solid,
black-broadclothed, respectable figure, that massive watchchain, that
white waistcoat, that diamond pin glistening in the satin cravat,
Euphemia might have seen the realization of her prophetic vision at
Sidon five years before.

He spoke for ten minutes with a fluency and comprehensive business-like
directness that surprised Grant. He was not there, he said, to glorify
what had been done by himself, his family, or his friends in Tasajara.
Others who were to follow him might do that, or at least might be better
able to explain and expatiate upon the advantages of the institution
they had just opened, and its social, moral, and religious effect upon
the community. He was there as a business man to demonstrate to
them--as he had always done and always hoped to do--the money value
of improvement; the profit--if they might choose to call it--of
well-regulated and properly calculated speculation. The plot of land
upon which they stood, of which the building occupied only one eighth,
was bought two years before for ten thousand dollars. When the plans
of the building were completed a month afterwards, the value of the
remaining seven eighths had risen enough to defray the cost of the
entire construction. He was in a position to tell them that only that
morning the adjacent property, subdivided and laid out in streets and
building-plots, had been admitted into the corporate limits of the city;
and that on the next anniversary of the building they would approach
it through an avenue of finished dwellings! An outburst of applause
followed the speaker's practical climax; the fresh young faces of his
auditors glowed with invincible enthusiasm; the afternoon trade-winds,
freshening over the limitless plain beyond, tossed the bright banners
at the windows as with sympathetic rejoicing, and a few odorous pine
shavings, overlooked in a corner in the hurry of preparation, touched
by an eddying zephyr, crept out and rolled in yellow ringlets across the
floor.

The Reverend Doctor Pilsbury arose in a more decorous silence. He had
listened approvingly, admiringly, he might say even reverently, to the
preceding speaker. But although his distinguished friend had, with his
usual modesty, made light of his own services and those of his charming
family, he, the speaker, had not risen to sing his praises. No; it
was not in this Hall, projected by his foresight and raised by his
liberality; in this town, called into existence by his energy and
stamped by his attributes; in this county, developed by his genius and
sustained by his capital; ay, in this very State whose grandeur was made
possible by such giants as he,--it was not in any of these places that
it was necessary to praise Daniel Harcourt, or that a panegyric of him
would be more than idle repetition. Nor would he, as that distinguished
man had suggested, enlarge upon the social, moral, and religious
benefits of the improvement they were now celebrating. It was written
on the happy, innocent faces, in the festive garb, in the decorous
demeanor, in the intelligent eyes that sparkled around him, in the
presence of those of his parishioners whom he could meet as freely here
to-day as in his own church on Sunday. What then could he say? What then
was there to say? Perhaps he should say nothing if it were not for
the presence of the young before him.--He stopped and fixed his eyes
paternally on the youthful Johnny Billings, who with a half dozen
other Sunday-school scholars had been marshaled before the reverend
speaker.--And what was to be the lesson THEY were to learn from it? They
had heard what had been achieved by labor, enterprise, and diligence.
Perhaps they would believe, and naturally too, that what labor,
enterprise, and diligence had done could be done again. But was that
all? Was there nothing behind these qualities--which, after all, were
within the reach of every one here? Had they ever thought that back
of every pioneer, every explorer, every pathfinder, every founder and
creator, there was still another? There was no terra incognita so rare
as to be unknown to one; no wilderness so remote as to be beyond a
greater ken than theirs; no waste so trackless but that one had already
passed that way! Did they ever reflect that when the dull sea ebbed and
flowed in the tules over the very spot where they were now standing, who
it was that also foresaw, conceived, and ordained the mighty change that
would take place; who even guided and directed the feeble means employed
to work it; whose spirit moved, as in still older days of which they had
read, over the face of the stagnant waters? Perhaps they had. Who then
was the real pioneer of Tasajara,--back of the Harcourts, the Peterses,
the Billingses, and Wingates? The reverend gentleman gently paused for
a reply. It was given in the clear but startled accents of the half
frightened, half-fascinated Johnny Billings, in three words:--

“'Lige Curtis, sir!”




CHAPER VI


The trade wind, that, blowing directly from the Golden Gate, seemed to
concentrate its full force upon the western slope of Russian Hill,
might have dismayed any climber less hopeful and sanguine than that most
imaginative of newspaper reporters and most youthful of husbands, John
Milton Harcourt. But for all that it was an honest wind, and its dry,
practical energy and salt-pervading breath only seemed to sting him to
greater and more enthusiastic exertions, until, quite at the summit of
the hill and last of a straggling line of little cottages half submerged
in drifting sand, he stood upon his own humble porch.

“I was thinking, coming up the hill, Loo,” he said, bursting into the
sitting-room, pantingly, “of writing something about the future of the
hill! How it will look fifty years from now, all terraced with houses
and gardens!--and right up here a kind of Acropolis, don't you know. I
had quite a picture of it in my mind just now.”

A plainly-dressed young woman with a pretty face, that, however, looked
as if it had been prematurely sapped of color and vitality, here laid
aside some white sewing she had in her lap, and said:--

“But you did that once before, Milty, and you know the 'Herald' wouldn't
take it because they said it was a free notice of Mr. Boorem's building
lots, and he didn't advertise in the 'Herald.' I always told you that
you ought to have seen Boorem first.”

The young fellow blinked his eyes with a momentary arrest of that
buoyant hopefulness which was their peculiar characteristic, but
nevertheless replied with undaunted cheerfulness, “I forgot. Anyhow,
it's all the same, for I worked it into that 'Sunday Walk.' And it's
just as easy to write it the other way, you see,--looking back, DOWN THE
HILL, you know. Something about the old Padres toiling through the sand
just before the Angelus; or as far back as Sir Francis Drake's time,
and have a runaway boat's crew, coming ashore to look for gold that the
Mexicans had talked of. Lord! that's easy enough! I tell you what, Loo,
it's worth living up here just for the inspiration.” Even while boyishly
exhaling this enthusiasm he was also divesting himself of certain
bundles whose contents seemed to imply that he had brought his
dinner with him,--the youthful Mrs. Harcourt setting the table in a
perfunctory, listless way that contrasted oddly with her husband's
cheerful energy.

“You haven't heard of any regular situation yet?” she asked
abstractedly.

“No,--not exactly,” he replied. “But [buoyantly] it's a great deal
better for me not to take anything in a hurry and tie myself to any
particular line. Now, I'm quite free.”

“And I suppose you haven't seen that Mr. Fletcher again?” she continued.

“No. He only wanted to know something about me. That's the way with them
all, Loo. Whenever I apply for work anywhere it's always: 'So you're
Dan'l Harcourt's son, eh? Quarreled with the old man? Bad job; better
make it up! You'll make more stickin' to him. He's worth millions!'
Everybody seems to think everything of HIM, as if I had no individuality
beyond that, I've a good mind to change my name.”

“And pray what would mine be then?”

There was so much irritation in her voice that he drew nearer her and
gently put his arm around her waist. “Why, whatever mine was, darling,”
 he said with a tender smile. “You didn't fall in love with any
particular name, did you, Loo?”

“No, but I married a particular one,” she said quickly.

His eyelids quivered again, as if he was avoiding some unpleasantly
staring suggestion, and she stopped.

“You know what I mean, dear,” she said, with a quick little laugh. “Just
because your father's an old crosspatch, YOU haven't lost your rights to
his name and property. And those people who say you ought to make it up
perhaps know what's for the best.”

“But you remember what he said of you, Loo?” said the young man with a
flashing eye. “Do you think I can ever forget that?”

“But you DO forget it, dear; you forget it when you go in town among
fresh faces and people; when you are looking for work. You forget it
when you're at work writing your copy,--for I've seen you smile as
you wrote. You forget it climbing up the dreadful sand, for you were
thinking just now of what happened years ago, or is to happen years to
come. And I want to forget it too, Milty. I don't want to sit here all
day, thinking of it, with the wind driving the sand against the window,
and nothing to look at but those white tombs in Lone Mountain Cemetery,
and those white caps that might be gravestones too, and not a soul to
talk to or even see pass by until I feel as if I were dead and buried
also. If you were me--you--you--you--couldn't help crying too!”

Indeed he was very near it now. For as he caught her in his arms,
suddenly seeing with a lover's sympathy and the poet's swifter
imagination all that she had seen and even more, he was aghast at the
vision conjured. In her delicate health and loneliness how dreadful must
have been these monotonous days, and this glittering, cruel sea! What
a selfish brute he was! Yet as he stood there holding her, silently and
rhythmically marking his tenderness and remorseful feelings by rocking
her from side to side like a languid metronome, she quietly disengaged
her wet lashes from his shoulder and said in quite another tone:--

“So they were all at Tasajara last week?”

“Who, dear?”

“Your father and sisters.”

“Yes,” said John Milton, hesitatingly.

“And they've taken back your sister after her divorce?”

The staring obtrusiveness of this fact apparently made her husband's
bright sympathetic eye blink as before.

“And if you were to divorce me, YOU would be taken back too,” she
added quickly, suddenly withdrawing herself with a pettish movement and
walking to the window.

But he followed. “Don't talk in that way, Loo! Don't look in that way,
dear!” he said, taking her hand gently, yet not without a sense of some
inconsistency in her conduct that jarred upon his own simple directness.
“You know that nothing can part us now. I was wrong to let my little
girl worry herself all alone here, but I--I--thought it was all so--so
bright and free out on this hill,--looking far away beyond the Golden
Gate,--as far as Cathay, you know, and such a change from those dismal
flats of Tasajara and that awful stretch of tules. But it's all right
now. And now that I know how you feel, we'll go elsewhere.”

She did not reply. Perhaps she found it difficult to keep up her injured
attitude in the face of her husband's gentleness. Perhaps her attention
had been attracted by the unusual spectacle of a stranger, who had just
mounted the hill and was now slowly passing along the line of
cottages with a hesitating air of inquiry. “He may be looking for this
house,--for you,” she said in an entirely new tone of interest. “Run out
and see. It may be some one who wants”--

“An article,” said Milton cheerfully. “By Jove! he IS coming here.”

The stranger was indeed approaching the little cottage, and with
apparently some confidence. He was a well-dressed, well-made man, whose
age looked uncertain from the contrast between his heavy brown moustache
and his hair, that, curling under the brim of his hat, was almost white
in color. The young man started, and said, hurriedly: “I really believe
it is Fletcher,--they say his hair turned white from the Panama fever.”

It was indeed Mr. Fletcher who entered and introduced himself,--a gentle
reserved man, with something of that colorlessness of premature age
in his speech which was observable in his hair. He had heard of Mr.
Harcourt from a friend who had recommended him highly. As Mr. Harcourt
had probably been told, he, the speaker, was about to embark some
capital in a first-class newspaper in San Francisco, and should select
the staff himself. He wanted to secure only first-rate talent,--but
above all, youthfulness, directness, and originality. The “Clarion,” for
that was to be its name, was to have nothing “old fogy” about it. No. It
was distinctly to be the organ of Young California! This and much more
from the grave lips of the elderly young man, whose speech seemed to be
divided between the pretty, but equally faded, young wife, and the one
personification of invincible youth present,--her husband.

“But I fear I have interrupted your household duties,” he said
pleasantly. “You were preparing dinner. Pray go on. And let me help
you,--I'm not a bad cook,--and you can give me my reward by letting me
share it with you, for the climb up here has sharpened my appetite. We
can talk as we go on.”

It was in vain to protest; there was something paternal as well as
practical in the camaraderie of this actual capitalist and possible
Maecenas and patron as he quietly hung up his hat and overcoat, and
helped to set the table with a practiced hand. Nor, as he suggested, did
the conversation falter, and before they had taken their seats at the
frugal board he had already engaged John Milton Harcourt as assistant
editor of the “Clarion” at a salary that seemed princely to this son
of a millionaire! The young wife meantime had taken active part in the
discussion; whether it was vaguely understood that the possession of
poetical and imaginative faculties precluded any capacity for business,
or whether it was owing to the apparent superior maturity of Mrs.
Harcourt and the stranger, it was certain that THEY arranged the
practical details of the engagement, and that the youthful husband sat
silent, merely offering his always hopeful and sanguine consent.

“You'll take a house nearer to town, I suppose?” continued Mr. Fletcher
to the lady, “though you've a charming view here. I suppose it was quite
a change from Tasajara and your father-in-law's house? I daresay he had
as fine a place there--on his own homestead--as he has here?”

Young Harcourt dropped his sensitive eyelids again. It seemed hard that
he could never get away from these allusions to his father! Perhaps it
was only to that relationship that he was indebted for his visitor's
kindness. In his simple honesty he could not bear the thought of such
a misapprehension. “Perhaps, Mr. Fletcher, you do not know,” he said,
“that my father is not on terms with me, and that we neither expect
anything nor could we ever take anything from him. Could we, Loo?” He
added the useless question partly because he saw that his wife's face
betrayed little sympathy with him, and partly that Fletcher was looking
at her curiously, as if for confirmation. But this was another of John
Milton's trials as an imaginative reporter; nobody ever seemed to care
for his practical opinions or facts!

“Mr. Fletcher is not interested in our little family differences,
Milty,” she said, looking at Mr. Fletcher, however, instead of him.
“You're Daniel Harcourt's SON whatever happens.”

The cloud that had passed over the young man's face and eyes did not,
however, escape Mr. Fletcher's attention, for he smiled, and added
gayly, “And I hope my valued lieutenant in any case.” Nevertheless John
Milton was quite ready to avail himself of an inspiration to fetch some
cigars for his guest from the bar of the Sea-View House on the slope of
the hill beyond, and thereby avoid a fateful subject. Once in the fresh
air again he promptly recovered his boyish spirits. The light flying
scud had already effaced the first rising stars; the lower creeping
sea-fog had already blotted out the western shore and sea; but below him
to the east the glittering lights of the city seemed to start up with a
new, mysterious, and dazzling brilliancy. It was the valley of diamonds
that Sindbad saw lying almost at his feet! Perhaps somewhere there the
light of his own fame and fortune was already beginning to twinkle!

He returned to his humble roof joyous and inspired. As he entered the
hall he heard his wife's voice and his own name mentioned, followed
by that awkward, meaningless silence on his entrance which so plainly
indicated either that he had been the subject of conversation or that it
was not for his ears. It was a dismal reminder of his boyhood at Sidon
and Tasajara. But he was too full of hope and ambition to heed it
to-night, and later, when Mr. Fletcher had taken his departure, his
pent-up enthusiasm burst out before his youthful partner. Had she
realized that their struggles were over now, that their future was
secure? They need no longer fear ever being forced to take bounty from
the family; they were independent of them all! He would make a name for
himself that should be distinct from his father's as he should make a
fortune that would be theirs alone. The young wife smiled. “But all
that need not prevent you, dear, from claiming your RIGHTS when the time
comes.”

“But if I scorn to make the claim or take a penny of his, Loo?”

“You say you scorn to take the money you think your father got by a mere
trick,--at the best,--and didn't earn. And now you will be able to show
you can live without it, and earn your own fortune. Well, dear, for that
very reason why should you let your father and others enjoy and waste
what is fairly your share? For it is YOUR share whether it came to your
father fairly or not; and if not, it is still your duty, believing as
you do, to claim it from him, that at least YOU may do with it what you
choose. You might want to restore it--to--to--somebody.”

The young man laughed. “But, my dear Loo! suppose that I were weak
enough to claim it, do you think my father would give it up? He has the
right, and no law could force him to yield to me more than he chooses.”

“Not the law, but YOU could.”

“I don't understand you,” he said quickly.

“You could force him by simply telling him what you once told me.”

John Milton drew back, and his hand dropped loosely from his wife's.
The color left his fresh young face; the light quivered for a moment
and then became fixed and set in his eyes. For that moment he looked ten
years her senior. “I was wrong ever to tell even you that, Loo,” he said
in a low voice. “You are wrong to ever remind me of it. Forget it
from this moment, as you value our love and want it to live and be
remembered. And forget, Loo, as I do,--and ever shall,--that you ever
suggested to me to use my secret in the way you did just now.”

But here Mrs. Harcourt burst into tears, more touched by the alteration
in her husband's manner, I fear, than by any contrition for wrongdoing.
Of course if he wished to withdraw his confidences from her, just as he
had almost confessed he wished to withdraw his NAME, she couldn't help
it, but it was hard that when she sat there all day long trying to think
what was best for them, she should be blamed! At which the quiet and
forgiving John Milton smiled remorsefully and tried to comfort her.
Nevertheless an occasional odd, indefinable chill seemed to creep
across the feverish enthusiasm with which he was celebrating this day of
fortune. And yet he neither knew nor suspected until long after that his
foolish wife had that night half betrayed his secret to the stranger!

The next day he presented a note of introduction from Mr. Fletcher to
the business manager of the “Clarion,” and the following morning was
duly installed in office. He did not see his benefactor again; that
single visit was left in the mystery and isolation of an angelic
episode. It later appeared that other and larger interests in the San
Jose valley claimed his patron's residence and attendance; only the
capital and general purpose of the paper--to develop into a party
organ in the interest of his possible senatorial aspirations in due
season--was furnished by him. Grateful as John Milton felt towards him,
he was relieved; it seemed probable that Mr. Fletcher HAD selected him
on his individual merits, and not as the son of a millionaire.

He threw himself into his work with his old hopeful enthusiasm,
and perhaps an originality of method that was part of his singular
independence. Without the student's training or restraint,--for his two
years' schooling at Tasajara during his parents' prosperity came too
late to act as a discipline,--he was unfettered by any rules, and guided
only by an unerring instinctive taste that became near being genius.
He was a brilliant and original, if not always a profound and accurate,
reporter. By degrees he became an accustomed interest to the readers
of the “Clarion;” then an influence. Actors themselves in many a fierce
drama, living lives of devotion, emotion, and picturesque incident, they
had satisfied themselves with only the briefest and most practical daily
record of their adventure, and even at first were dazed and startled
to find that many of them had been heroes and some poets. The stealthy
boyish reader of romantic chronicle at Sidon had learned by heart the
chivalrous story of the emigration. The second column of the “Clarion”
 became famous even while the figure of its youthful writer, unknown and
unrecognized, was still nightly climbing the sands of Russian Hill, and
even looking down as before on the lights of the growing city, without a
thought that he had added to that glittering constellation.

Cheerful and contented with the exercise of work, he would have been
happy but for the gradual haunting of another dread which presently
began to drag him at earlier hours up the steep path to his little home;
to halt him before the door with the quickened breath of an anxiety he
would scarcely confess to himself, and sometimes hold him aimlessly a
whole day beneath his roof. For the pretty but delicate Mrs. Harcourt,
like others of her class, had added a weak and ineffective maternity
to their other conjugal trials, and one early dawn a baby was born that
lingered with them scarcely longer than the morning mist and exhaled
with the rising sun. The young wife regained her strength slowly,--so
slowly that the youthful husband brought his work at times to the house
to keep her company. And a singular change had come over her. She no
longer talked of the past, nor of his family. As if the little life
that had passed with that morning mist had represented some ascending
expiatory sacrifice, it seemed to have brought them into closer
communion.

Yet her weak condition made him conceal another trouble that had come
upon him. It was in the third month of his employment on the “Clarion”
 that one afternoon, while correcting some proofs on his chief's desk, he
came upon the following editorial paragraph:--

“The played-out cant of 'pioneer genius' and 'pioneer discovery' appears
to have reached its climax in the attempt of some of our contemporaries
to apply it to Dan Harcourt's new Tasajara Job before the legislature.
It is perfectly well known in Harcourt's own district that, far from
being a pioneer and settler HIMSELF he simply succeeded after a
fashion to the genuine work of one Elijah Curtis, an actual pioneer
and discoverer, years before, while Harcourt, we believe, was keeping a
frontier doggery in Sidon, and dispensing 'tanglefoot' and salt junk
to the hayfooted Pike Countians of his precinct. This would make him as
much of the 'pioneer discoverer' as the rattlesnake who first takes up
board and lodgings and then possession in a prairie dog's burrow. And if
the traveler's tale is true that the rattlesnake sometimes makes a meal
of his landlord, the story told at Sidon may be equally credible that
the original pioneer mysteriously disappeared about the time that Dan
Harcourt came into the property. From which it would seem that Harcourt
is not in a position for his friends to invite very deep scrutiny into
his 'pioneer' achievements.”

Stupefaction, a vague terror, and rising anger, rapidly succeeded each
other in the young man's mind as he stood mechanically holding the
paper in his hand. It was the writing of his chief editor, whose easy
brutality he had sometimes even boyishly admired. Without stopping to
consider their relative positions he sought him indignantly and laid the
proof before him. The editor laughed. “But what's that to YOU? YOU'RE
not on terms with the old man.”

“But he is my father!” said John Milton hotly.

“Look here,” said the editor good-naturedly, “I'd like to oblige
you, but it isn't BUSINESS, you know,--and this IS, you
understand,--PROPRIETOR'S BUSINESS too! Of course I see it might stand
in the way of your making up to the old man afterwards and coming in for
a million. Well! you can tell him it's ME. Say I WOULD put it in. Say
I'm nasty--and I AM!”

“Then it must go in?” said John Milton with a white face.

“You bet.”

“Then I must go out!” And writing out his resignation, he laid it before
his chief and left.

But he could not bear to tell this to his wife when he climbed the hill
that night, and he invented some excuse for bringing his work home. The
invalid never noticed any change in his usual buoyancy, and indeed I
fear, when he was fairly installed with his writing materials at the
foot of her bed, he had quite forgotten the episode. He was recalled to
it by a faint sigh.

“What is it, dear?” he said looking up.

“I like to see you writing, Milty. You always look so happy.”

“Always so happy, dear?”

“Yes. You are happy, are you not?”

“Always.” He got up and kissed her. Nevertheless, when he sat down to
his work again, his face was turned a little more to the window.

Another serious incident--to be also kept from the invalid--shortly
followed. The article in the “Clarion” had borne its fruit. The third
day after his resignation a rival paper sharply retorted. “The cowardly
insinuations against the record of a justly honored capitalist,” said
the “Pioneer,” “although quite in keeping with the brazen 'Clarion,'
might attract the attentions of the slandered party, if it were not
known to his friends as well as himself that it may be traced almost
directly to a cast-off member of his own family, who, it seems, is
reduced to haunting the back doors of certain blatant journals to
dispose of his cheap wares. The slanderer is secure from public exposure
in the superior decency of his relations, who refrain from airing their
family linen upon editorial lines.”

This was the journal to which John Milton had hopefully turned for work.
When he read it there seemed but one thing for him to do--and he did
it. Gentle and optimistic as was his nature, he had been brought up in
a community where sincere directness of personal offense was followed by
equally sincere directness of personal redress, and--he challenged the
editor. The bearer of his cartel was one Jack Hamlin, I grieve to say a
gambler by profession, but between whom and John Milton had sprung up an
odd friendship of which the best that can be said is that it was to each
equally and unselfishly unprofitable. The challenge was accepted, the
preliminaries arranged. “I suppose,” said Jack carelessly, “as the old
man ought to do something for your wife in case of accident, you've made
some sort of a will?”

“I've thought of that,” said John Milton, dubiously, “but I'm afraid
it's no use. You see”--he hesitated--“I'm not of age.”

“May I ask how old you are, sonny?” said Jack with great gravity.

“I'm almost twenty,” said John Milton, coloring.

“It isn't exactly vingt-et-un, but I'd stand on it; if I were you I
wouldn't draw to such a hand,” said Jack, coolly.

The young husband had arranged to be absent from his home that night,
and early morning found him, with Jack, grave, but courageous, in a
little hollow behind the Mission Hills. To them presently approached his
antagonist, jauntily accompanied by Colonel Starbottle, his second. They
halted, but after the formal salutation were instantly joined by Jack
Hamlin. For a few moments John Milton remained awkwardly alone--pending
a conversation which even at that supreme moment he felt as being
like the general attitude of his friends towards him, in its complete
ignoring of himself. The next moment the three men stepped towards him.
“We have come, sir,” said Colonel Starbottle in his precisest speech but
his jauntiest manner, “to offer you a full and ample apology--a personal
apology--which only supplements that full public apology that my
principal, sir, this gentleman,” indicating the editor of the “Pioneer,”
 “has this morning made in the columns of his paper, as you will
observe,” producing a newspaper. “We have, sir,” continued the
colonel loftily, “only within the last twelve hours become aware of
the--er--REAL circumstances of the case. We would regret that the affair
had gone so far already, if it had not given us, sir, the opportunity
of testifying to your gallantry. We do so gladly; and if--er--er--a FEW
YEARS LATER, Mr. Harcourt, you should ever need--a friend in any matter
of this kind, I am, sir, at your service.” John Milton gazed half
inquiringly, half uneasily at Jack.

“It's all right, Milt,” he said sotto voce. “Shake hands all round and
let's go to breakfast. And I rather think that editor wants to employ
you HIMSELF.”

It was true, for when that night he climbed eagerly the steep homeward
hill he carried with him the written offer of an engagement on the
“Pioneer.” As he entered the door his wife's nurse and companion met him
with a serious face. There had been a strange and unexpected change in
the patient's condition, and the doctor had already been there twice.
As he put aside his coat and hat and entered her room, it seemed to
him that he had forever put aside all else of essay and ambition beyond
those four walls. And with the thought a great peace came upon him. It
seemed good to him to live for her alone.

It was not for long. As each monotonous day brought the morning mist and
evening fog regularly to the little hilltop where his whole being was
now centred, she seemed to grow daily weaker, and the little circle of
her life narrowed day by day. One morning when the usual mist appeared
to have been withheld and the sun had risen with a strange and cruel
brightness; when the waves danced and sparkled on the bay below and
light glanced from dazzling sails, and even the white tombs on Lone
Mountain glittered keenly; when cheery voices hailing each other on the
hillside came to him clearly but without sense or meaning; when earth,
sky, and sea seemed quivering with life and motion,--he opened the door
of that one little house on which the only shadow seemed to have fallen,
and went forth again into the world alone.




CHAPER VII.


Mr. Daniel Harcourt's town mansion was also on an eminence, but it
was that gentler acclivity of fashion known as Rincon Hill, and
sunned itself on a southern slope of luxury. It had been described
as “princely” and “fairy-like,” by a grateful reporter; tourists and
travelers had sung its praises in letters to their friends and in
private reminiscences, for it had dispensed hospitality to most of the
celebrities who had visited the coast. Nevertheless its charm was mainly
due to the ruling taste of Miss Clementina Harcourt, who had astonished
her father by her marvelous intuition of the nice requirements and
elegant responsibilities of their position; and had thrown her mother
into the pained perplexity of a matronly hen, who, among the ducks' eggs
intrusted to her fostering care, had unwittingly hatched a graceful but
discomposing cygnet.

Indeed, after holding out feebly against the siege of wealth at Tasajara
and San Francisco, Mrs. Harcourt had abandoned herself hopelessly to
the horrors of its invasion; had allowed herself to be dragged from her
kitchen by her exultant daughters and set up in black silk in a certain
conventional respectability in the drawing-room. Strange to say, her
commiserating hospitality, or hospital-like ministration, not only gave
her popularity, but a certain kind of distinction. An exaltation
so sorrowfully deprecated by its possessor was felt to be a sign of
superiority. She was spoken of as “motherly,” even by those who vaguely
knew that there was somewhere a discarded son struggling in poverty
with a helpless wife, and that she had sided with her husband in
disinheriting a daughter who had married unwisely. She was sentimentally
spoken of as a “true wife,” while never opposing a single meanness of
her husband, suggesting a single active virtue, nor questioning her
right to sacrifice herself and her family for his sake. With nothing
she cared to affect, she was quite free from affectation, and even the
critical Lawrence Grant was struck with the dignity which her narrow
simplicity, that had seemed small even in Sidon, attained in her
palatial hall in San Francisco. It appeared to be a perfectly logical
conclusion that when such unaffectedness and simplicity were forced to
assume a hostile attitude to anybody, the latter must be to blame.

Since the festival of Tasajara Mr. Grant had been a frequent visitor
at Harcourt's, and was a guest on the eve of his departure from San
Francisco. The distinguished position of each made their relations
appear quite natural without inciting gossip as to any attraction in
Harcourt's daughters. It was late one afternoon as he was passing the
door of Harcourt's study that his host called him in. He found him
sitting at his desk with some papers before him and a folded copy of the
“Clarion.” With his back to the fading light of the window his face was
partly in shadow.

“By the way, Grant,” he began, with an assumption of carelessness
somewhat inconsistent with the fact that he had just called him in, “it
may be necessary for me to pull up those fellows who are blackguarding
me in the 'Clarion.'”

“Why, they haven't been saying anything new?” asked Grant, laughingly,
as he glanced towards the paper.

“No--that is--only a rehash of what they said before,” returned Harcourt
without opening the paper.

“Well,” said Grant playfully, “you don't mind their saying that you're
NOT the original pioneer of Tasajara, for it's true; nor that that
fellow 'Lige Curtis disappeared suddenly, for he did, if I remember
rightly. But there's nothing in that to invalidate your rights to
Tasajara, to say nothing of your five years' undisputed possession.”

“Of course there's no LEGAL question,” said Harcourt almost sharply.
“But as a matter of absurd report, I may want to contradict their
insinuations. And YOU remember all the circumstances, don't you?”

“I should think so! Why, my dear fellow, I've told it everywhere!--here,
in New York, Newport, and in London; by Jove, it's one of my best
stories! How a company sent me out with a surveyor to look up a railroad
and agricultural possibilities in the wilderness; how just as I found
them--and a rather big thing they made, too--I was set afloat by a
flood and a raft, and drifted ashore on your bank, and practically
demonstrated to you what you didn't know and didn't dare to hope
for--that there could be a waterway straight to Sidon from the
embarcadero. I've told what a charming evening we had with you and
your daughters in the old house, and how I returned your hospitality by
giving you a tip about the railroad; and how you slipped out while we
were playing cards, to clinch the bargain for the land with that drunken
fellow, 'Lige Curtis”--

“What's that?” interrupted Harcourt, quickly.

It was well that the shadow hid from Grant the expression of Harcourt's
face, or his reply might have been sharper. As it was, he answered a
little stiffly:--

“I beg your pardon”--

Harcourt recovered himself. “You're all wrong!” he said, “that bargain
was made long BEFORE; I never saw 'Lige Curtis after you came to the
house. It was before that, in the afternoon,” he went on hurriedly,
“that he was last in my store. I can prove it.” Nevertheless he was so
shocked and indignant at being confronted in his own suppressions and
falsehoods by an even greater and more astounding misconception of
fact, that for a moment he felt helpless. What, he reflected, if it were
alleged that 'Lige had returned again after the loafers had gone, or had
never left the store as had been said? Nonsense! There was John Milton,
who had been there reading all the time, and who could disprove it. Yes,
but John Milton was his discarded son,--his enemy,--perhaps even his
very slanderer!

“But,” said Grant quietly, “don't you remember that your daughter
Euphemia said something that evening about the land Lige had OFFERED
you, and you snapped up the young lady rather sharply for letting out
secrets, and THEN you went out? At least that's my impression.”

It was, however, more than an impression; with Grant's scientific memory
for characteristic details he had noticed that particular circumstance
as part of the social phenomena.

“I don't know what Phemie SAID,” returned Harcourt, impatiently. “I KNOW
there was no offer pending; the land had been sold to me before I ever
saw you. Why--you must have thought me up to pretty sharp practice with
Curtis--eh?” he added, with a forced laugh.

Grant smiled; he had been accustomed to hear of such sharp practice
among his business acquaintance, although he himself by nature and
profession was incapable of it, but he had not deemed Harcourt more
scrupulous than others. “Perhaps so,” he said lightly, “but for Heaven's
sake don't ask me to spoil my reputation as a raconteur for the sake of
a mere fact or two. I assure you it's a mighty taking story as I tell
it--and it don't hurt you in a business way. You're the hero of it--hang
it all!”

“Yes,” said Harcourt, without noticing Grant's half cynical superiority,
“but you'll oblige me if you won't tell it again IN THAT WAY. There are
men here mean enough to make the worst of it. It's nothing to me, of
course, but my family--the girls, you know--are rather sensitive.”

“I had no idea they even knew it,--much less cared for it,” said Grant,
with sudden seriousness. “I dare say if those fellows in the 'Clarion'
knew that they were annoying the ladies they'd drop it. Who's the
editor? Look here--leave it to me; I'll look into it. Better that you
shouldn't appear in the matter at all.”

“You understand that if it was a really serious matter, Grant,” said
Harcourt with a slight attitude, “I shouldn't allow any one to take my
place.”

“My dear fellow, there'll be nobody 'called out' and no 'shooting at
sight,' whatever is the result of my interference,” returned Grant,
lightly. “It'll be all right.” He was quite aware of the power of his
own independent position and the fact that he had been often appealed to
before in delicate arbitration.

Harcourt was equally conscious of this, but by a strange inconsistency
now felt relieved at the coolness with which Grant had accepted the
misconception which had at first seemed so dangerous. If he were ready
to condone what he thought was SHARP PRACTICE, he could not be less
lenient with the real facts that might come out,--of course always
excepting that interpolated consideration in the bill of sale, which,
however, no one but the missing Curtis could ever discover. The fact
that a man of Grant's secure position had interested himself in this
matter would secure him from the working of that personal vulgar
jealousy which his humbler antecedents had provoked. And if, as he
fancied, Grant really cared for Clementina--

“As you like,” he said, with half-affected lightness, “and now let us
talk of something else. Clementina has been thinking of getting up
a riding party to San Mateo for Mrs. Ashwood. We must show them some
civility, and that Boston brother of hers, Mr. Shipley, will have to
be invited also. I can't get away, and my wife, of course, will only
be able to join them at San Mateo in the carriage. I reckon it would be
easier for Clementina if you took my place, and helped her look after
the riding party. It will need a man, and I think she'd prefer you--as
you know she's rather particular--unless, of course, you'd be wanted for
Mrs. Ashwood or Phemie, or somebody else.”

From his shadowed corner he could see that a pleasant light had sprung
into Grant's eyes, although his reply was in his ordinary easy banter.
“I shall be only too glad to act as Miss Clementina's vaquero, and lasso
her runaways, or keep stragglers in the road.”

There seemed to be small necessity, however, for this active
co-operation, for when the cheerful cavalcade started from the house
a few mornings later, Mr. Lawrence Grant's onerous duties seemed to be
simply confined to those of an ordinary cavalier at the side of Miss
Clementina, a few paces in the rear of the party. But this safe distance
gave them the opportunity of conversing without being overheard,--an
apparently discreet precaution.

“Your father was so exceedingly affable to me the other day that if I
hadn't given you my promise to say nothing, I think I would have fallen
on my knees to him then and there, revealed my feelings, asked for your
hand and his blessing--or whatever one does at such a time. But how long
do you intend to keep me in this suspense?”

Clementina turned her clear eyes half abstractedly upon him, as if
imperfectly recalling some forgotten situation. “You forget,” she said,
“that part of your promise was that you wouldn't even speak of it to me
again without my permission.”

“But my time is so short now. Give me some definite hope before I go.
Let me believe that when we meet in New York”--

“You will find me just the same as now! Yes, I think I can promise THAT.
Let that suffice. You said the other day you liked me because I had not
changed for five years. You can surely trust that I will not alter in as
many months.”

“If I only knew”--

“Ah, if I only knew,--if WE ALL only knew. But we don't. Come, Mr.
Grant, let it rest as it is. Unless you want to go still further back
and have it as it WAS, at Sidon. There I think you fancied Euphemia
most.”

“Clementina!”

“That is my name, and those people ahead of us know it already.”

“You are called CLEMENTINA,--but you are not merciful!”

“You are very wrong, for you might see that Mr. Shipley has twice
checked his horse that he might hear what you are saying, and Phemie is
always showing Mrs. Ashwood something in the landscape behind us.”

All this was the more hopeless and exasperating to Grant since in the
young girl's speech and manner there was not the slightest trace of
coquetry or playfulness. He could not help saying a little bitterly: “I
don't think that any one would imagine from your manner that you were
receiving a declaration.”

“But they might imagine from yours that you had the right to quarrel
with me,--which would be worse.”

“We cannot part like this! It is too cruel to me.”

“We cannot part otherwise without the risk of greater cruelty.”

“But say at least, Clementina, that I have no rival. There is no other
more favored suitor?”

“That is so like a man--and yet so unlike the proud one I believed you
to be. Why should a man like you even consider such a possibility? If I
were a man I know I couldn't.” She turned upon him a glance so clear and
untroubled by either conscious vanity or evasion that he was hopelessly
convinced of the truth of her statement, and she went on in a slightly
lowered tone, “You have no right to ask me such a question,--but perhaps
for that reason I am willing to answer you. There is none. Hush! For a
good rider you are setting a poor example to the others, by crowding
me towards the bank. Go forward and talk to Phemie, and tell her not to
worry Mrs. Ashwood's horse nor race with her; I don't think he's quite
safe, and Mrs. Ashwood isn't accustomed to using the Spanish bit.
I suppose I must say something to Mr. Shipley, who doesn't seem to
understand that I'M acting as chaperon, and YOU as captain of the
party.”

She cantered forward as she spoke, and Grant was obliged to join her
sister, who, mounted on a powerful roan, was mischievously exciting
a beautiful quaker-colored mustang ridden by Mrs. Ashwood, already
irritated by the unfamiliar pressure of the Eastern woman's hand upon
his bit. The thick dust which had forced the party of twenty to close up
in two solid files across the road compelled them at the first opening
in the roadside fence to take the field in a straggling gallop. Grant,
eager to escape from his own discontented self by doing something for
others, reined in beside Euphemia and the fair stranger.

“Let me take your place until Mrs. Ashwood's horse is quieted,” he half
whispered to Euphemia.

“Thank you,--and I suppose it does not make any matter to Clem who
quiets mine,” she said, with provoking eyes and a toss of her head
worthy of the spirited animal she was riding.

“She thinks you quite capable of managing yourself and even others,”
 he replied with a playful glance at Shipley, who was riding somewhat
stiffly on the other side.

“Don't be too sure,” retorted Phemie with another dangerous look; “I may
give you trouble yet.”

They were approaching the first undulation of the russet plain they had
emerged upon,--an umbrageous slope that seemed suddenly to diverge
in two defiles among the shaded hills. Grant had given a few words of
practical advice to Mrs. Ashwood, and shown her how to guide her mustang
by the merest caressing touch of the rein upon its sensitive neck. He
had not been sympathetically inclined towards the fair stranger, a rich
and still youthful widow, although he could not deny her unquestioned
good breeding, mental refinement, and a certain languorous
thoughtfulness that was almost melancholy, which accented her blonde
delicacy. But he had noticed that her manner was politely reserved and
slightly constrained towards the Harcourts, and he had already resented
it with a lover's instinctive loyalty. He had at first attributed it
to a want of sympathy between Mrs. Ashwood's more intellectual
sentimentalities and the Harcourts' undeniable lack of any sentiment
whatever. But there was evidently some other innate antagonism. He
was very polite to Mrs. Ashwood; she responded with a gentlewoman's
courtesy, and, he was forced to admit, even a broader comprehension
of his own merits than the Harcourt girls had ever shown, but he could
still detect that she was not in accord with the party.

“I am afraid you do not like California, Mrs. Ashwood?” he said
pleasantly. “You perhaps find the life here too unrestrained and
unconventional?”

She looked at him in quick astonishment. “Are you quite sincere? Why,
it strikes me that this is just what it is NOT. And I have so longed
for something quite different. From what I have been told about the
originality and adventure of everything here, and your independence of
old social forms and customs, I am afraid I expected the opposite
of what I've seen. Why, this very party--except that the ladies are
prettier and more expensively gotten up--is like any party that might
have ridden out at Saratoga or New York.”

“And as stupid, you would say.”

“As CONVENTIONAL, Mr. Grant; always excepting this lovely creature
beneath me, whom I can't make out and who doesn't seem to care that I
should. There! look! I told you so!”

Her mustang had suddenly bounded forward; but as Grant followed he
could see that the cause was the example of Phemie, who had, in some
mad freak, dashed out in a frantic gallop. A half-dozen of the
younger people hilariously accepted the challenge; the excitement was
communicated to the others, until the whole cavalcade was sweeping
down the slope. Grant was still at Mrs. Ashwood's side, restraining
her mustang and his own impatient horse when Clementina joined them.
“Phemie's mare has really bolted, I fear,” she said in a quick whisper,
“ride on, and never mind us.” Grant looked quickly ahead; Phemie's roan,
excited by the shouts behind her and to all appearance ungovernable, was
fast disappearing with her rider. Without a word, trusting to his own
good horsemanship and better knowledge of the ground, he darted out of
the cavalcade to overtake her.

But the unfortunate result of this was to give further impulse to the
now racing horses as they approached a point where the slope terminated
in two diverging canyons. Mrs. Ashwood gave a sharp pull upon her
bit. To her consternation the mustang stopped short almost
instantly,--planting his two fore feet rigidly in the dust and even
sliding forward with the impetus. Had her seat been less firm she might
have been thrown, but she recovered herself, although in doing so
she still bore upon the bit, when to her astonishment the mustang
deliberately stiffened himself as if for a shock, and then began to back
slowly, quivering with excitement. She did not know that her native-bred
animal fondly believed that he was participating in a rodeo, and that to
his equine intelligence his fair mistress had just lassoed something!
In vain she urged him forward; he still waited for the shock! When the
cloud of dust in which she had been enwrapped drifted away, she saw to
her amazement that she was alone. The entire party had disappeared into
one of the canyons,--but which one she could not tell!

When she succeeded at last in urging her mustang forward again she
determined to take the right-hand canyon and trust to being either met
or overtaken. A more practical and less adventurous nature would have
waited at the point of divergence for the return of some of the party,
but Mrs. Ashwood was, in truth, not sorry to be left to herself and the
novel scenery for a while, and she had no doubt but she would eventually
find her way to the hotel at San Mateo, which could not be far away, in
time for luncheon.

The road was still well defined, although it presently began to wind
between ascending ranks of pines and larches that marked the terraces
of hills, so high that she wondered she had not noticed them from the
plains. An unmistakable suggestion of some haunting primeval solitude,
a sense of the hushed and mysterious proximity of a nature she had never
known before, the strange half-intoxicating breath of unsunned foliage
and untrodden grasses and herbs, all combined to exalt her as she
cantered forward. Even her horse seemed to have acquired an intelligent
liberty, or rather to have established a sympathy with her in his needs
and her own longings; instinctively she no longer pulled him with the
curb; the reins hung loosely on his self-arched and unfettered neck;
secure in this loneliness she found herself even talking to him with
barbaric freedom. As she went on, the vague hush of all things animate
and inanimate around her seemed to thicken, until she unconsciously
halted before a dim and pillared wood, and a vast and heathless opening
on whose mute brown lips Nature seemed to have laid the finger of
silence. She forgot the party she had left, she forgot the luncheon she
was going to; more important still she forgot that she had already left
the traveled track far behind her, and, tremulous with anticipation,
rode timidly into that arch of shadow.

As her horse's hoofs fell noiselessly on the elastic moss-carpeted aisle
she forgot even more than that. She forgot the artificial stimulus and
excitement of the life she had been leading so long; she forgot the
small meannesses and smaller worries of her well-to-do experiences; she
forgot herself,--rather she regained a self she had long forgotten.
For in the sweet seclusion of this half darkened sanctuary the clinging
fripperies of her past slipped from her as a tawdry garment. The
petted, spoiled, and vapidly precocious girlhood which had merged into
a womanhood of aimless triumphs and meaner ambitions; the worldly but
miserable triumph of a marriage that had left her delicacy abused and
her heart sick and unsatisfied; the wifehood without home, seclusion,
or maternity; the widowhood that at last brought relief, but with it the
consciousness of hopelessly wasted youth,--all this seemed to drop from
her here as lightly as the winged needles or noiseless withered spray
from the dim gray vault above her head. In the sovereign balm of that
woodland breath her better spirit was restored; somewhere in these
wholesome shades seemed to still lurk what should have been her innocent
and nymph-like youth, and to come out once more and greet her. Old songs
she had forgotten, or whose music had failed in the discords of her
frivolous life, sang themselves to her again in that sweet, grave
silence; girlish dreams that she had foolishly been ashamed of, or had
put away with her childish toys, stole back to her once more and became
real in this tender twilight; old fancies, old fragments of verse and
childish lore, grew palpable and moved faintly before her. The boyish
prince who should have come was there; the babe that should have been
hers was there!--she stopped suddenly with flaming eyes and indignant
color. For it appeared that a MAN was there too, and had just risen from
the fallen tree where he had been sitting.




CHAPER VIII.


She had so far forgotten herself in yielding to the spell of the place,
and in the revelation of her naked soul and inner nature, that it was
with something of the instinct of outraged modesty that she seemed to
shrink before this apparition of the outer world and outer worldliness.
In an instant the nearer past returned; she remembered where she was,
how she had come there, from whom she had come, and to whom she was
returning. She could see that she had not only aimlessly wandered from
the world but from the road; and for that instant she hated this man who
had reminded her of it, even while she knew she must ask his assistance.
It relieved her slightly to observe that he seemed as disturbed and
impatient as herself, and as he took a pencil from between his lips and
returned it to his pocket he scarcely looked at her.

But with her return to the world of convenances came its repression,
and with a gentlewoman's ease and modulated voice she leaned over her
mustang's neck and said: “I have strayed from my party and am afraid I
have lost my way. We were going to the hotel at San Mateo. Would you be
kind enough to direct me there, or show me how I can regain the road by
which I came?”

Her voice and manner were quite enough to arrest him where he stood with
a pleased surprise in his fresh and ingenuous face. She looked at him
more closely. He was, in spite of his long silken mustache, so absurdly
young; he might, in spite of that youth, be so absurdly man-like! What
was he doing there? Was he a farmer's son, an artist, a surveyor, or a
city clerk out for a holiday? Was there perhaps a youthful female of his
species somewhere for whom he was waiting and upon whose tryst she was
now breaking? Was he--terrible thought!--the outlying picket of some
family picnic? His dress, neat, simple, free from ostentatious ornament,
betrayed nothing. She waited for his voice.

“Oh, you have left San Mateo miles away to the right,” he said with
quick youthful sympathy, “at least five miles! Where did you leave your
party?”

His voice was winning, and even refined, she thought. She answered it
quite spontaneously: “At a fork of two roads. I see now I took the wrong
turning.”

“Yes, you took the road to Crystal Spring. It's just down there in the
valley, not more than a mile. You'd have been there now if you hadn't
turned off at the woods.”

“I couldn't help it, it was so beautiful.”

“Isn't it?”

“Perfect.”

“And such shadows, and such intensity of color.”

“Wonderful!--and all along the ridge, looking down that defile!”

“Yes, and that point where it seems as if you had only to stretch out
your hand to pick a manzanita berry from the other side of the canyon,
half a mile across!”

“Yes, and that first glimpse of the valley through the Gothic gateway of
rocks!”

“And the color of those rocks,--cinnamon and bronze with the light green
of the Yerba buena vine splashing over them.”

“Yes, but for color DID you notice that hillside of yellow poppies
pouring down into the valley like a golden Niagara?”

“Certainly,--and the perfect clearness of everything.”

“And yet such complete silence and repose!”

“Oh,

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