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Title:  On the Frontier

Author:  Bret Harte

April, 2001  [Etext #2574]


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ON THE FRONTIER

by Bret Harte




CONTENTS


AT THE MISSION OF SAN CARMEL

A BLUE GRASS PENELOPE

LEFT OUT ON LONE STAR MOUNTAIN




AT THE MISSION OF SAN CARMEL


PROLOGUE


It was noon of the 10th of August, 1838.  The monotonous coast line
between Monterey and San Diego had set its hard outlines against
the steady glare of the Californian sky and the metallic glitter of
the Pacific Ocean.  The weary succession of rounded, dome-like
hills obliterated all sense of distance; the rare whaling vessel or
still rarer trader, drifting past, saw no change in these rusty
undulations, barren of distinguishing peak or headland, and bald of
wooded crest or timbered ravine.  The withered ranks of wild oats
gave a dull procession of uniform color to the hills, unbroken by
any relief of shadow in their smooth, round curves.  As far as the
eye could reach, sea and shore met in one bleak monotony, flecked
by no passing cloud, stirred by no sign of life or motion.  Even
sound was absent; the Angelus, rung from the invisible Mission
tower far inland, was driven back again by the steady northwest
trades, that for half the year had swept the coast line and left it
abraded of all umbrage and color.

But even this monotony soon gave way to a change and another
monotony as uniform and depressing.  The western horizon, slowly
contracting before a wall of vapor, by four o'clock had become a
mere cold, steely strip of sea, into which gradually the northern
trend of the coast faded and was lost.  As the fog stole with soft
step southward, all distance, space, character, and locality again
vanished; the hills upon which the sun still shone bore the same
monotonous outlines as those just wiped into space.  Last of all,
before the red sun sank like the descending host, it gleamed upon
the sails of a trading vessel close in shore.  It was the last
object visible.  A damp breath breathed upon it, a soft hand passed
over the slate, the sharp pencilling of the picture faded and
became a confused gray cloud.

The wind and waves, too, went down in the fog; the now invisible
and hushed breakers occasionally sent the surf over the sand in a
quick whisper, with grave intervals of silence, but with no
continuous murmur as before.  In a curving bight of the shore the
creaking of oars in their rowlocks began to be distinctly heard,
but the boat itself, although apparently only its length from the
sands, was invisible.

"Steady, now; way enough."  The voice came from the sea, and was
low, as if unconsciously affected by the fog.  "Silence!"

The sound of a keel grating the sand was followed by the order,
"Stern all!" from the invisible speaker.

"Shall we beach her?" asked another vague voice.

"Not yet.  Hail again, and all together."

"Ah hoy--oi--oi--oy!"

There were four voices, but the hail appeared weak and ineffectual,
like a cry in a dream, and seemed hardly to reach beyond the surf
before it was suffocated in the creeping cloud.  A silence
followed, but no response.

"It's no use to beach her and go ashore until we find the boat,"
said the first voice, gravely; "and we'll do that if the current
has brought her here.  Are you sure you've got the right bearings?"

"As near as a man could off a shore with not a blasted pint to take
his bearings by."

There was a long silence again, broken only by the occasional dip
of oars, keeping the invisible boat-head to the sea.

"Take my word for it, lads, it's the last we'll see of that boat
again, or of Jack Cranch, or the captain's baby."

"It DOES look mighty queer that the painter should slip.  Jack
Cranch ain't the man to tie a granny knot."

"Silence!" said the invisible leader.  "Listen."

A hail, so faint and uncertain that it might have been the long-
deferred, far-off echo of their own, came from the sea, abreast of
them.

"It's the captain.  He hasn't found anything, or he couldn't be so
far north.  Hark!"

The hail was repeated again faintly, dreamily.  To the seamen's
trained ears it seemed to have an intelligent significance, for the
first voice gravely responded, "Aye, aye!" and then said softly,
"Oars."

The word was followed by a splash.  The oars clicked sharply and
simultaneously in the rowlocks, then more faintly, then still
fainter, and then passed out into the darkness.

The silence and shadow both fell together; for hours sea and shore
were impenetrable.  Yet at times the air was softly moved and
troubled, the surrounding gloom faintly lightened as with a misty
dawn, and then was dark again; or drowsy, far-off cries and
confused noises seemed to grow out of the silence, and, when they
had attracted the weary ear, sank away as in a mocking dream, and
showed themselves unreal.  Nebulous gatherings in the fog seemed to
indicate stationary objects that, even as one gazed, moved away;
the recurring lap and ripple on the shingle sometimes took upon
itself the semblance of faint articulate laughter or spoken words.
But towards morning a certain monotonous grating on the sand, that
had for many minutes alternately cheated and piqued the ear,
asserted itself more strongly, and a moving, vacillating shadow in
the gloom became an opaque object on the shore.

With the first rays of the morning light the fog lifted.  As the
undraped hills one by one bared their cold bosoms to the sun, the
long line of coast struggled back to life again.  Everything was
unchanged, except that a stranded boat lay upon the sands, and in
its stern sheets a sleeping child.


CHAPTER I.


The 10th of August, 1852, brought little change to the dull
monotony of wind, fog, and treeless coast line.  Only the sea was
occasionally flecked with racing sails that outstripped the old,
slow-creeping trader, or was at times streaked and blurred with the
trailing smoke of a steamer.  There were a few strange footprints
on those virgin sands, and a fresh track, that led from the beach
over the rounded hills, dropped into the bosky recesses of a hidden
valley beyond the coast range.

It was here that the refectory windows of the Mission of San Carmel
had for years looked upon the reverse of that monotonous picture
presented to the sea.  It was here that the trade winds, shorn of
their fury and strength in the heated, oven-like air that rose from
the valley, lost their weary way in the tangled recesses of the
wooded slopes, and breathed their last at the foot of the stone
cross before the Mission.  It was on the crest of those slopes that
the fog halted and walled in the sun-illumined plain below; it was
in this plain that limitless fields of grain clothed the fat adobe
soil; here the Mission garden smiled over its hedges of fruitful
vines, and through the leaves of fig and gnarled pear trees: and it
was here that Father Pedro had lived for fifty years, found the
prospect good, and had smiled also.

Father Pedro's smile was rare.  He was not a Las Casas, nor a
Junipero Serra, but he had the deep seriousness of all disciples
laden with the responsible wording of a gospel not their own.  And
his smile had an ecclesiastical as well as a human significance,
the pleasantest object in his prospect being the fair and curly
head of his boy acolyte and chorister, Francisco, which appeared
among the vines, and his sweetest pastoral music, the high soprano
humming of a chant with which the boy accompanied his gardening.

Suddenly the acolyte's chant changed to a cry of terror.  Running
rapidly to Father Pedro's side, he grasped his sotana, and even
tried to hide his curls among its folds.

"'St! 'st!" said the Padre, disengaging himself with some
impatience.  "What new alarm is this?  Is it Luzbel hiding among
our Catalan vines, or one of those heathen Americanos from
Monterey?  Speak!"

"Neither, holy father," said the boy, the color struggling back
into his pale cheeks, and an apologetic, bashful smile lighting his
clear eyes.  "Neither; but oh! such a gross, lethargic toad!  And
it almost leaped upon me."

"A toad leaped upon thee!" repeated the good father with evident
vexation.  "What next?  I tell thee, child, those foolish fears are
most unmeet for thee, and must be overcome, if necessary, with
prayer and penance.  Frightened by a toad!  Blood of the Martyrs!
'Tis like any foolish girl!"

Father Pedro stopped and coughed.

"I am saying that no Christian child should shrink from any of
God's harmless creatures.  And only last week thou wast disdainful
of poor Murieta's pig, forgetting that San Antonio himself did
elect one his faithful companion, even in glory."

"Yes, but it was so fat, and so uncleanly, holy father," replied
the young acolyte, "and it smelt so."

"Smelt so?" echoed the father doubtfully.  "Have a care, child,
that this is not luxuriousness of the senses.  I have noticed of
late you gather overmuch of roses and syringa, excellent in their
way and in moderation, but still not to be compared with the flower
of Holy Church, the lily."

"But lilies don't look well on the refectory table, and against the
adobe wall," returned the acolyte, with a pout of a spoilt child;
"and surely the flowers cannot help being sweet, any more than
myrrh or incense.  And I am not frightened of the heathen
Americanos either NOW.  There was a small one in the garden
yesterday, a boy like me, and he spoke kindly and with a pleasant
face."

"What said he to thee, child?" asked Father Pedro, anxiously.

"Nay, the matter of his speech I could not understand," laughed the
boy, "but the manner was as gentle as thine, holy father."

"'St, child," said the Padre impatiently.  "Thy likings are as
unreasonable as thy fears.  Besides, have I not told thee it ill
becomes a child of Christ to chatter with those sons of Belial?
But canst thou not repeat the words--the WORDS he said?" he
continued suspiciously.

"'Tis a harsh tongue the Americanos speak in their throat," replied
the boy.  "But he said 'Devilishnisse' and 'pretty-as-a-girl,' and
looked at me."

The good father made the boy repeat the words gravely, and as
gravely repeated them after him with infinite simplicity.  "They
are but heretical words," he replied in answer to the boy's
inquiring look; "it is well you understand not English.  Enough.
Run away, child, and be ready for the Angelus.  I will commune with
myself awhile under the pear trees."

Glad to escape so easily, the young acolyte disappeared down the
alley of fig trees, not without a furtive look at the patches of
chickweed around their roots, the possible ambuscade of creeping or
saltant vermin.  The good priest heaved a sigh and glanced round
the darkening prospect.  The sun had already disappeared over the
mountain wall that lay between him and the sea, rimmed with a faint
white line of outlying fog.  A cool zephyr fanned his cheek; it was
the dying breath of the vientos generales beyond the wall.  As
Father Pedro's eyes were raised to this barrier, which seemed to
shut out the boisterous world beyond, he fancied he noticed for the
first time a slight breach in the parapet, over which an advanced
banner of the fog was fluttering.  Was it an omen?  His speculations
were cut short by a voice at his very side.

He turned quickly and beheld one of those "heathens" against whom
he had just warned his young acolyte; one of that straggling band
of adventurers whom the recent gold discoveries had scattered along
the coast.  Luckily the fertile alluvium of these valleys, lying
parallel with the sea, offered no "indications" to attract the gold
seekers.  Nevertheless to Father Pedro even the infrequent contact
with the Americanos was objectionable; they were at once
inquisitive and careless; they asked questions with the sharp
perspicacity of controversy; they received his grave replies with
the frank indifference of utter worldliness.  Powerful enough to
have been tyrannical oppressors, they were singularly tolerant and
gentle, contenting themselves with a playful, good-natured
irreverence, which tormented the good father more than opposition.
They were felt to be dangerous and subversive.

The Americano, however, who stood before him did not offensively
suggest these national qualities.  A man of middle height, strongly
built, bronzed and slightly gray from the vicissitudes of years and
exposure, he had an air of practical seriousness that commended
itself to Father Pedro.  To his religious mind it suggested self-
consciousness; expressed in the dialect of the stranger it only
meant "business."

"I'm rather glad I found you out here alone," began the latter; "it
saves time.  I haven't got to take my turn with the rest, in
there"--he indicated the church with his thumb--"and you haven't
got to make an appointment.  You have got a clear forty minutes
before the Angelus rings," he added, consulting a large silver
chronometer, "and I reckon I kin git through my part of the job
inside of twenty, leaving you ten minutes for remarks.  I want to
confess."

Father Pedro drew back with a gesture of dignity.  The stranger,
however, laid his hand upon the Padre's sleeve with the air of a
man anticipating objection, but never refusal, and went on.

"Of course, I know.  You want me to come at some other time, and in
THERE.  You want it in the reg'lar style.  That's your way and your
time.  My answer is: it ain't MY way and MY time.  The main idea of
confession, I take it, is gettin' at the facts.  I'm ready to give
'em if you'll take 'em out here, now.  If you're willing to drop
the Church and confessional, and all that sort o' thing, I, on my
side, am willing to give up the absolution, and all that sort o'
thing.  You might," he added, with an unconscious touch of pathos
in the suggestion, "heave in a word or two of advice after I get
through; for instance, what YOU'D do in the circumstances, you see!
That's all.  But that's as you please.  It ain't part of the
business."

Irreverent as this speech appeared, there was really no trace of
such intention in his manner, and his evident profound conviction
that his suggestion was practical, and not at all inconsistent with
ecclesiastical dignity, would alone have been enough to touch the
Padre, had not the stranger's dominant personality already
overridden him.  He hesitated.  The stranger seized the opportunity
to take his arm, and lead him with the half familiarity of powerful
protection to a bench beneath the refectory window.  Taking out his
watch again, he put it in the passive hands of the astonished
priest, saying, "Time me," cleared his throat, and began:--

"Fourteen years ago there was a ship cruisin' in the Pacific, jest
off this range, that was ez nigh on to a Hell afloat as anything
rigged kin be.  If a chap managed to dodge the cap'en's belayin-pin
for a time, he was bound to be fetched up in the ribs at last by
the mate's boots.  There was a chap knocked down the fore hatch
with a broken leg in the Gulf, and another jumped overboard off
Cape Corrientes, crazy as a loon, along a clip of the head from the
cap'en's trumpet.  Them's facts.  The ship was a brigantine,
trading along the Mexican coast.  The cap'en had his wife aboard, a
little timid Mexican woman he'd picked up at Mazatlan.  I reckon
she didn't get on with him any better than the men, for she ups and
dies one day, leavin' her baby, a year-old gal.  One of the crew
was fond o' that baby.  He used to get the black nurse to put it in
the dingy, and he'd tow it astern, rocking it with the painter like
a cradle.  He did it--hatin' the cap'en all the same.  One day the
black nurse got out of the dingy for a moment, when the baby was
asleep, leavin' him alone with it.  An idea took hold on him, jest
from cussedness, you'd say, but it was partly from revenge on the
cap'en and partly to get away from the ship.  The ship was well
inshore, and the current settin' towards it.  He slipped the
painter--that man--and set himself adrift with the baby.  It was a
crazy act, you'd reckon, for there wasn't any oars in the boat; but
he had a crazy man's luck, and he contrived, by sculling the boat
with one of the seats he tore out, to keep her out of the breakers,
till he could find a bight in the shore to run her in.  The alarm
was given from the ship, but the fog shut down upon him; he could
hear the other boats in pursuit.  They seemed to close in on him,
and by the sound he judged the cap'en was just abreast of him in
the gig, bearing down upon him in the fog.  He slipped out of the
dingy into the water without a splash, and struck out for the
breakers.  He got ashore after havin' been knocked down and dragged
in four times by the undertow.  He had only one idea then,
thankfulness that he had not taken the baby with him in the surf.
You kin put that down for him: it's a fact.  He got off into the
hills, and made his way up to Monterey."

"And the child?" asked the Padre, with a sudden and strange
asperity that boded no good to the penitent; "the child thus
ruthlessly abandoned--what became of it?"

"That's just it, the child," assented the stranger, gravely.
"Well, if that man was on his death-bed instead of being here
talking to you, he'd swear that he thought the cap'en was sure to
come up to it the next minit.  That's a fact.  But it wasn't until
one day that he--that's me--ran across one of that crew in Frisco.
'Hallo, Cranch,' sez he to me, 'so you got away, didn't you?  And
how's the cap'en's baby?  Grown a young gal by this time, ain't
she?'  'What are you talkin about,' ez I; 'how should I know?'  He
draws away from me, and sez, 'D--- it,' sez he, 'you don't mean
that you' . . .  I grabs him by the throat and makes him tell me
all.  And then it appears that the boat and the baby were never
found again, and every man of that crew, cap'en and all, believed I
had stolen it."

He paused.  Father Pedro was staring at the prospect with an
uncompromising rigidity of head and shoulder.

"It's a bad lookout for me, ain't it?" the stranger continued, in
serious reflection.

"How do I know," said the priest harshly, without turning his head,
"that you did not make away with this child?"

"Beg pardon."

"That you did not complete your revenge by--by--killing it, as your
comrade suspected you?  Ah!  Holy Trinity," continued Father Pedro,
throwing out his hands with an impatient gesture, as if to take the
place of unutterable thought.

"How do YOU know?" echoed the stranger coldly.

"Yes."

The stranger linked his fingers together and threw them over his
knee, drew it up to his chest caressingly, and said quietly,
"Because you DO know."

The Padre rose to his feet.

"What mean you?" he said, sternly fixing his eyes upon the speaker.
Their eyes met.  The stranger's were gray and persistent, with
hanging corner lids that might have concealed even more purpose
than they showed.  The Padre's were hollow, open, and the whites
slightly brown, as if with tobacco stains.  Yet they were the first
to turn away.

"I mean," returned the stranger, with the same practical gravity,
"that you know it wouldn't pay me to come here, if I'd killed the
baby, unless I wanted you to fix things right with me up there,"
pointing skywards, "and get absolution; and I've told you THAT
wasn't in my line."

"Why do you seek me, then?" demanded the Padre, suspiciously.

"Because I reckon I thought a man might be allowed to confess
something short of a murder.  If you're going to draw the line
below that--"

"This is but sacrilegious levity," interrupted Father Pedro,
turning as if to go.  But the stranger did not make any movement to
detain him.

"Have you implored forgiveness of the father--the man you wronged--
before you came here?" asked the priest, lingering.

"Not much.  It wouldn't pay if he was living, and he died four
years ago."

"You are sure of that?"

"I am."

"There are other relations, perhaps?"

"None."

Father Pedro was silent.  When he spoke again, it was with a
changed voice.  "What is your purpose, then?" he asked, with the
first indication of priestly sympathy in his manner.  "You cannot
ask forgiveness of the earthly father you have injured, you refuse
the intercession of holy Church with the Heavenly Father you have
disobeyed.  Speak, wretched man!  What is it you want?"

"I want to find the child."

"But if it were possible, if she were still living, are you fit to
seek her, to even make yourself known to her, to appear before
her?"

"Well, if I made it profitable to her, perhaps."

"Perhaps," echoed the priest, scornfully.  "So be it.  But why come
here?"

"To ask your advice.  To know how to begin my search.  You know
this country.  You were here when that boat drifted ashore beyond
that mountain."

"Ah, indeed.  I have much to do with it.  It is an affair of the
alcalde--the authorities--of your--your police."

"Is it?"

The Padre again met the stranger's eyes.  He stopped, with the
snuff box he had somewhat ostentatiously drawn from his pocket
still open in his hand.

"Why is it not, Senor?" he demanded.

"If she lives, she is a young lady by this time, and might not want
the details of her life known to any one."

"And how will you recognize your baby in this young lady?" asked
Father Pedro, with a rapid gesture, indicating the comparative
heights of a baby and an adult.

"I reckon I'll know her, and her clothes too; and whoever found her
wouldn't be fool enough to destroy them."

"After fourteen years!  Good! you have faith, Senor--"

"Cranch," supplied the stranger, consulting his watch.  "But time's
up.  Business is business.  Good-by; don't let me keep you."

He extended his hand.

The Padre met it with a dry, unsympathetic palm, as sere and yellow
as the hills.  When their hands separated, the father still
hesitated, looking at Cranch.  If he expected further speech or
entreaty from him he was mistaken, for the American, without
turning his head, walked in the same serious, practical fashion
down the avenue of fig trees, and disappeared beyond the hedge of
vines.  The outlines of the mountain beyond were already lost in
the fog.  Father Pedro turned into the refectory.

"Antonio."

A strong flavor of leather, onions, and stable preceded the
entrance of a short, stout vaquero from the little patio.

"Saddle Pinto and thine own mule to accompany Francisco, who will
take letters from me to the Father Superior at San Jose to-morrow
at daybreak."

"At daybreak, reverend father?"

"At daybreak.  Hark ye, go by the mountain trails and avoid the
highway.  Stop at no posada nor fonda, but if the child is weary,
rest then awhile at Don Juan Briones' or at the rancho of the
Blessed Fisherman.  Have no converse with stragglers, least of all
those gentile Americanos.  So . . ."

The first strokes of the Angelus came from the nearer tower.  With
a gesture Father Pedro waved Antonio aside, and opened the door of
the sacristy.

"Ad Majorem Dei Gloria."


CHAPTER II


The hacienda of Don Juan Briones, nestling in a wooded cleft of the
foot-hills, was hidden, as Father Pedro had wisely reflected, from
the straying feet of travelers along the dusty highway to San Jose.
As Francisco, emerging from the canada, put spurs to his mule at
the sight of the whitewashed walls, Antonio grunted.

"Oh aye, little priest! thou wast tired enough a moment ago, and
though we are not three leagues from the Blessed Fisherman, thou
couldst scarce sit thy saddle longer.  Mother of God! and all to
see that little mongrel, Juanita."

"But, good Antonio, Juanita was my play-fellow, and I may not soon
again chance this way.  And Juanita is not a mongrel, no more than
I am."

"She is a mestiza, and thou art a child of the Church, though this
following of gypsy wenches does not show it."

"But Father Pedro does not object," urged the boy.

"The reverend father has forgotten he was ever young," replied
Antonio, sententiously, "or he wouldn't set fire and tow together."

"What sayest thou, good Antonio?" asked Francisco quickly, opening
his blue eyes in frank curiosity; "who is fire, and who is tow?"

The worthy muleteer, utterly abashed and confounded by this display
of the acolyte's direct simplicity, contented himself by shrugging
his shoulders, and a vague "Quien sabe?"

"Come," said the boy, gayly, "confess it is only the aguardiente of
the Blessed Fisherman thou missest.  Never fear, Juanita will find
thee some.  And see! here she comes."

There was a flash of white flounces along the dark brown corridor,
the twinkle of satin slippers, the flying out of long black braids,
and with a cry of joy a young girl threw herself upon Francisco as
he entered the patio, and nearly dragged him from his mule.

"Have a care, little sister," laughed the acolyte, looking at
Antonio, "or there will be a conflagration.  Am I the fire?" he
continued, submitting to the two sounding kisses the young girl
placed upon either cheek, but still keeping his mischievous glance
upon the muleteer.

"Quien sabe?" repeated Antonio, gruffly, as the young girl blushed
under his significant eyes.  "It is no affair of mine," he added to
himself, as he led Pinto away.  "Perhaps Father Pedro is right, and
this young twig of the Church is as dry and sapless as himself.
Let the mestiza burn if she likes."

"Quick, Pancho," said the young girl, eagerly leading him along the
corridor.  "This way.  I must talk with thee before thou seest Don
Juan; that is why I ran to intercept thee, and not as that fool
Antonio would signify, to shame thee.  Wast thou ashamed, my
Pancho?"

The boy threw his arm familiarly round the supple, stayless little
waist, accented only by the belt of the light flounced saya, and
said, "But why this haste and feverishness, 'Nita?  And now I look
at thee, thou hast been crying."

They had emerged from a door in the corridor into the bright
sunlight of a walled garden.  The girl dropped her eyes, cast a
quick glance around her, and said,--

"Not here, to the arroyo," and half leading, half dragging him,
made her way through a copse of manzanita and alder until they
heard the faint tinkling of water.  "Dost thou remember," said the
girl, "it was here," pointing to an embayed pool in the dark
current, "that I baptized thee, when Father Pedro first brought
thee here, when we both played at being monks?  They were dear old
days, for Father Pedro would trust no one with thee but me, and
always kept us near him."

"Aye and he said I would be profaned by the touch of any other, and
so himself always washed and dressed me, and made my bed near his."

"And took thee away again, and I saw thee not till thou camest with
Antonio, over a year ago, to the cattle branding.  And now, my
Pancho, I may never see thee again."  She buried her face in her
hands and sobbed aloud.

The little acolyte tried to comfort her, but with such abstraction
of manner and inadequacy of warmth that she hastily removed his
caressing hand.

"But why?  What has happened?" he asked eagerly.

The girl's manner had changed.  Her eyes flashed, and she put her
brown fist on her waist and began to rock from side to side.

"But I'll not go," she said viciously.

"Go where?" asked the boy.

"Oh, where?" she echoed, impatiently.  "Hear me, Francisco; thou
knowest I am, like thee, an orphan; but I have not, like thee, a
parent in the Holy Church.  For, alas," she added, bitterly, "I am
not a boy, and have not a lovely voice borrowed from the angels.  I
was, like thee, a foundling, kept by the charity of the reverend
fathers, until Don Juan, a childless widower, adopted me.  I was
happy, not knowing and caring who were the parents who had
abandoned me, happy only in the love of him who became my adopted
father.  And now--"  She paused.

"And now?" echoed Francisco, eagerly.

"And now they say it is discovered who are my parents."

"And they live?"

"Mother of God! no," said the girl, with scarcely filial piety.
"There is some one, a thing, a mere Don Fulano, who knows it all,
it seems, who is to be my guardian."

"But how? tell me all, dear Juanita," said the boy with a feverish
interest, that contrasted so strongly with his previous abstraction
that Juanita bit her lips with vexation.

"Ah!  How?  Santa Barbara! an extravaganza for children.  A
necklace of lies.  I am lost from a ship of which my father--Heaven
rest him--is General, and I am picked up among the weeds on the
sea-shore, like Moses in the bulrushes.  A pretty story, indeed."

"Oh, how beautiful!" exclaimed Francisco, enthusiastically.  "Ah,
Juanita, would it had been me."

"THEE!" said the girl bitterly,--"thee!  No!--it was a girl wanted.
Enough, it was me."

"And when does the guardian come?" persisted the boy, with
sparkling eyes.

"He is here even now, with that pompous fool the American alcalde
from Monterey, a wretch who knows nothing of the country or the
people, but who helped the other American to claim me.  I tell
thee, Francisco, like as not it is all a folly, some senseless
blunder of those Americanos that imposes upon Don Juan's simplicity
and love for them."

"How looks he, this Americano who seeks thee?" asked Francisco.

"What care I how he looks," said Juanita, "or what he is?  He may
have the four S's, for all I care.  Yet," she added with a slight
touch of coquetry, "he is not bad to look upon, now I recall him."

"Had he a long moustache and a sad, sweet smile, and a voice so
gentle and yet so strong that you felt he ordered you to do things
with out saying it?  And did his eye read your thoughts?--that very
thought that you must obey him?"

"Saints preserve thee, Pancho!  Of whom dost thou speak?"

"Listen, Juanita.  It was a year ago, the eve of Natividad, he was
in the church when I sang.  Look where I would, I always met his
eye.  When the canticle was sung and I was slipping into the
sacristy, he was beside me.  He spoke kindly, but I understood him
not.  He put into my hand gold for an aguinaldo.  I pretended I
understood not that also, and put it into the box for the poor.  He
smiled and went away.  Often have I seen him since, and last night,
when I left the Mission, he was there again with Father Pedro."

"And Father Pedro, what said he of him?" asked Juanita.

"Nothing."  The boy hesitated.  "Perhaps--because I said nothing of
the stranger."

Juanita laughed.  "So thou canst keep a secret from the good father
when thou carest.  But why dost thou think this stranger is my new
guardian?"

"Dost thou not see, little sister? he was even then seeking thee,"
said the boy with joyous excitement.  "Doubtless he knew we were
friends and playmates--may be the good father has told him thy
secret.  For it is no idle tale of the alcalde, believe me.  I see
it all!  It is true!"

"Then thou wilt let him take me away," exclaimed the girl bitterly,
withdrawing the little hand he had clasped in his excitement.

"Alas, Juanita, what avails it now?  I am sent to San Jose, charged
with a letter to the Father Superior, who will give me further
orders.  What they are, or how long I must stay, I know not.  But I
know this: the good Father Pedro's eyes were troubled when he gave
me his blessing, and he held me long in his embrace.  Pray Heaven I
have committed no fault.  Still it may be that the reputation of my
gift hath reached the Father Superior, and he would advance me."
And Francisco's eyes lit up with youthful pride at the thought.

Not so Juanita.  Her black eyes snapped suddenly with suspicion,
she drew in her breath, and closed her little mouth firmly.  Then
she began a crescendo.

Mother of God! was that all?  Was he a child, to be sent away for
such time or for such purpose as best pleased the fathers?  Was he
to know no more than that?  With such gifts as God had given him,
was he not at least to have some word in disposing of them?  Ah!
SHE would not stand it.

The boy gazed admiringly at the piquant energy of the little figure
before him, and envied her courage.  "It is the mestizo blood," he
murmured to himself.  Then aloud, "Thou shouldst have been a man,
'Nita."

"And thou a woman."

"Or a priest.  Eh, what is that?"

They had both risen, Juanita defiantly, her black braids flying as
she wheeled and suddenly faced the thicket, Francisco clinging to
her with trembling hands and whitened lips.  A stone, loosened from
the hillside, had rolled to their feet; there was a crackling in
the alders on the slope above them.

"Is it a bear, or a brigand?" whispered Francisco, hurriedly,
sounding the uttermost depths of his terror in the two words.

"It is an eavesdropper," said Juanita, impetuously; "and who and
why, I intend to know," and she started towards the thicket.

"Do not leave me, good Juanita," said the young acolyte, grasping
the girl's skirt.

"Nay; run to the hacienda quickly, and leave me to search the
thicket.  Run!"

The boy did not wait for a second injunction, but scuttled away,
his long coat catching in the brambles, while Juanita darted like a
kitten into the bushes.  Her search was fruitless, however, and she
was returning impatiently when her quick eye fell upon a letter
lying amidst the dried grass where she and Francisco had been
seated the moment before.  It had evidently fallen from his breast
when he had risen suddenly, and been overlooked in his alarm.  It
was Father Pedro's letter to the Father Superior of San Jose.

In an instant she had pounced upon it as viciously as if it had
been the interloper she was seeking.  She knew that she held in her
fingers the secret of Francisco's sudden banishment.  She felt
instinctively that this yellowish envelope, with its red string and
its blotch of red seal, was his sentence and her own.  The little
mestiza had not been brought up to respect the integrity of either
locks or seals, both being unknown in the patriarchal life of the
hacienda.  Yet with a certain feminine instinct she looked
furtively around her, and even managed to dislodge the clumsy wax
without marring the pretty effigy of the crossed keys impressed
upon it.  Then she opened the letter and read.

Suddenly she stopped and put back her hair from her brown temples.
Then a succession of burning blushes followed each other in waves
from her neck up, and died in drops of moisture in her eyes.  This
continued until she was fairly crying, dropping the letter from her
hands and rocking to and fro.  In the midst of this she quickly
stopped again; the clouds broke, a sunshine of laughter started
from her eyes, she laughed shyly, she laughed loudly, she laughed
hysterically.  Then she stopped again as suddenly, knitted her
brows, swooped down once more upon the letter, and turned to fly.
But at the same moment the letter was quietly but firmly taken from
her hand, and Mr. Jack Cranch stood beside her.

Juanita was crimson, but unconquered.  She mechanically held out
her hand for the letter; the American took her little fingers,
kissed them, and said:--

"How are you again?"

"The letter," replied Juanita, with a strong disposition to stamp
her foot.

"But," said Cranch, with business directness, "you've read enough
to know it isn't for you."

"Nor for you either," responded Juanita.

"True.  It is for the Reverend Father Superior of San Jose Mission.
I'll give it to him."

Juanita was becoming alarmed, first at this prospect, second at the
power the stranger seemed to be gaining over her.  She recalled
Francisco's description of him with something like superstitious
awe.

"But it concerns Francisco.  It contains a secret he should know."

"Then you can tell him it.  Perhaps it would come easier from you."

Juanita blushed again.  "Why?" she asked, half dreading his reply.

"Because," said the American, quietly, "you are old playmates; you
are attached to each other."

Juanita bit her lips.  "Why don't you read it yourself?" she asked
bluntly.

"Because I don't read other people's letters, and if it concerns me
you'll tell me."

"What if I don't?"

"Then the Father Superior will."

"I believe you know Francisco's secret already," said the girl,
boldly.

"Perhaps."

"Then, Mother of God! Senor Crancho, what do you want?"

"I do not want to separate two such good friends as you and
Francisco."

"Perhaps you'd like to claim us both," said the girl, with a sneer
that was not devoid of coquetry.

"I should be delighted."

"Then here is your occasion, Senor, for here comes my adopted
father, Don Juan, and your friend, Senor Br--r--own, the American
alcalde."

Two men appeared in the garden path below them.  The stiff, glazed,
broad-brimmed black hat, surmounting a dark face of Quixotic
gravity and romantic rectitude, indicated Don Juan Briones.  His
companion, lazy, specious, and red-faced, was Senor Brown, the
American alcalde.

"Well, I reckon we kin about call the thing fixed," said Senor
Brown, with a large wave of the hand, suggesting a sweeping away of
all trivial details.  "Ez I was saying to the Don yer, when two
high-toned gents like you and him come together in a delicate
matter of this kind, it ain't no hoss trade nor sharp practice.
The Don is that lofty in principle that he's willin' to sacrifice
his affections for the good of the gal; and you, on your hand,
kalkilate to see all he's done for her, and go your whole pile
better.  You'll make the legal formalities good.  I reckon that old
Injin woman who can swear to the finding of the baby on the shore
will set things all right yet.  For the matter o' that, if you want
anything in the way of a certificate, I'm on hand always."

"Juanita and myself are at your disposition, caballeros," said Don
Juan, with a grave exaltation.  "Never let it be said that the
Mexican nation was outdone by the great Americanos in deeds of
courtesy and affection.  Let it rather stand that Juanita was a
sacred trust put into my hands years ago by the goddess of American
liberty, and nurtured in the Mexican eagle's nest.  Is it not so,
my soul?" he added, more humanly, to the girl, when he had quite
recovered from the intoxication of his own speech.  "We love thee,
little one, but we keep our honor."

"There's nothing mean about the old man," said Brown, admiringly,
with a slight dropping of his left eyelid; "his head is level, and
he goes with his party."

"Thou takest my daughter, Senor Cranch," continued the old man,
carried away by his emotion; "but the American nation gives me a
son."

"You know not what you say, father," said the young girl, angrily,
exasperated by a slight twinkle in the American's eye.

"Not so," said Cranch.  "Perhaps one of the American nation may
take him at his word."

"Then, caballeros, you will, for the moment at least, possess
yourselves of the house and its poor hospitality," said Don Juan,
with time-honored courtesy, producing the rustic key of the gate of
the patio.  "It is at your disposition, caballeros," he repeated,
leading the way as his guests passed into the corridor.

Two hours passed.  The hills were darkening on their eastern
slopes; the shadows of the few poplars that sparsedly dotted the
dusty highway were falling in long black lines that looked like
ditches on the dead level of the tawny fields; the shadows of
slowly moving cattle were mingling with their own silhouettes, and
becoming more and more grotesque.  A keen wind rising in the hills
was already creeping from the canada as from the mouth of a funnel,
and sweeping the plains.  Antonio had forgathered with the
servants, had pinched the ears of the maids, had partaken of
aguardiente, had saddled the mules,--Antonio was becoming
impatient.

And then a singular commotion disturbed the peaceful monotony of
the patriarchal household of Don Juan Briones.  The stagnant
courtyard was suddenly alive with peons and servants, running
hither and thither.  The alleys and gardens were filled with
retainers.  A confusion of questions, orders, and outcrys rent the
air, the plains shook with the galloping of a dozen horsemen.  For
the acolyte Francisco, of the Mission San Carmel, had disappeared
and vanished, and from that day the hacienda of Don Juan Briones
knew him no more.


CHAPTER III


When Father Pedro saw the yellow mules vanish under the low
branches of the oaks beside the little graveyard, caught the last
glitter of the morning sun on Pinto's shining headstall, and heard
the last tinkle of Antonio's spurs, something very like a mundane
sigh escaped him.  To the simple wonder of the majority of early
worshipers--the half-breed converts who rigorously attended the
spiritual ministrations of the Mission, and ate the temporal
provisions of the reverend fathers--he deputed the functions of the
first mass to a coadjutor, and, breviary in hand, sought the
orchard of venerable pear trees.  Whether there was any occult
sympathy in his reflections with the contemplation of their
gnarled, twisted, gouty, and knotty limbs, still bearing gracious
and goodly fruit, I know not, but it was his private retreat, and
under one of the most rheumatic and misshapen trunks there was a
rude seat.  Here Father Pedro sank, his face towards the mountain
wall between him and the invisible sea.  The relentless, dry,
practical Californian sunlight falling on his face grimly pointed
out a night of vigil and suffering.  The snuffy yellow of his eyes
was injected yet burning, his temples were ridged and veined like a
tobacco leaf; the odor of desiccation which his garments always
exhaled was hot and feverish, as if the fire had suddenly awakened
among the ashes.

Of what was Father Pedro thinking?

He was thinking of his youth, a youth spent under the shade of
those pear trees, even then venerable as now.  He was thinking of
his youthful dreams of heathen conquest, emulating the sacrifices
and labors of Junipero Serra; a dream cut short by the orders of
the archbishop, that sent his companion, Brother Diego, north on a
mission to strange lands, and condemned him to the isolation of San
Carmel.  He was thinking of that fierce struggle with envy of a
fellow creature's better fortune that, conquered by prayer and
penance, left him patient, submissive, and devoted to his humble
work; how he raised up converts to the faith, even taking them from
the breast of heretic mothers.

He recalled how once, with the zeal of propagandism quickening in
the instincts of a childless man, he had dreamed of perpetuating
his work through some sinless creation of his own; of dedicating
some virgin soul, one over whom he could have complete control,
restricted by no human paternal weakness, to the task he had begun.
But how?  Of all the boys eagerly offered to the Church by their
parents there seemed none sufficiently pure and free from parental
taint.  He remembered how one night, through the intercession of
the Blessed Virgin herself, as he firmly then believed, this dream
was fulfilled.  An Indian woman brought him a Waugee child--a baby-
girl that she had picked up on the sea-shore.  There were no
parents to divide the responsibility, the child had no past to
confront, except the memory of the ignorant Indian woman, who
deemed her duty done, and whose interest ceased in giving it to the
Padre.  The austere conditions of his monkish life compelled him to
the first step in his adoption of it--the concealment of its sex.
This was easy enough, as he constituted himself from that moment
its sole nurse and attendant, and boldly baptized it among the
other children by the name of Francisco.  No others knew its
origin, nor cared to know.  Father Pedro had taken a muchacho
foundling for adoption; his jealous seclusion of it and his
personal care was doubtless some sacerdotal formula at once high
and necessary.

He remembered with darkening eyes and impeded breath how his close
companionship and daily care of this helpless child had revealed to
him the fascinations of that paternity denied to him; how he had
deemed it his duty to struggle against the thrill of baby fingers
laid upon his yellow cheeks, the pleading of inarticulate words,
the eloquence of wonder-seeing and mutely questioning eyes; how he
had succumbed again and again, and then struggled no more, seeing
only in them the suggestion of childhood made incarnate in the Holy
Babe.  And yet, even as he thought, he drew from his gown a little
shoe, and laid it beside his breviary.  It was Francisco's baby
slipper, a duplicate to those worn by the miniature waxen figure of
the Holy Virgin herself in her niche in the transept.

Had he felt during these years any qualms of conscience at this
concealment of the child's sex?  None.  For to him the babe was
sexless, as most befitted one who was to live and die at the foot
of the altar.  There was no attempt to deceive God; what mattered
else?  Nor was he withholding the child from the ministrations of
the sacred sisters; there was no convent near the Mission, and as
each year passed, the difficulty of restoring her to the position
and duties of her sex became greater and more dangerous.  And then
the acolyte's destiny was sealed by what again appeared to Father
Pedro as a direct interposition of Providence.  The child developed
a voice of such exquisite sweetness and purity that an angel seemed
to have strayed into the little choir, and kneeling worshipers
below, transported, gazed upwards, half expectant of a heavenly
light breaking through the gloom of the raftered ceiling.  The fame
of the little singer filled the valley of San Carmel; it was a
miracle vouchsafed the Mission; Don Jose Peralta remembered, ah
yes, to have heard in old Spain of boy choristers with such voices!

And was this sacred trust to be withdrawn from him?  Was this life
which he had brought out of an unknown world of sin, unstained and
pure, consecrated and dedicated to God, just in the dawn of power
and promise for the glory of the Mother Church, to be taken from
his side?  And at the word of a self-convicted man of sin--a man
whose tardy repentance was not yet absolved by the Holy Church.
Never! never!  Father Pedro dwelt upon the stranger's rejection of
the ministrations of the Church with a pitiable satisfaction; had
he accepted it, he would have had a sacred claim upon Father
Pedro's sympathy and confidence.  Yet he rose again, uneasily and
with irregular steps returned to the corridor, passing the door of
the familiar little cell beside his own.  The window, the table,
and even the scant toilette utensils were filled with the flowers
of yesterday, some of them withered and dry; the white gown of the
little chorister was hanging emptily against the wall.  Father
Pedro started and trembled; it seemed as if the spiritual life of
the child had slipped away with its garments.

In that slight chill, which even in the hottest days in California
always invests any shadow cast in that white sunlight, Father Pedro
shivered in the corridor.  Passing again into the garden, he
followed in fancy the wayfaring figure of Francisco, saw the child
arrive at the rancho of Don Juan, and with the fateful blindness of
all dreamers projected a picture most unlike the reality.  He
followed the pilgrims even to San Jose, and saw the child deliver
the missive which gave the secret of her sex and condition to the
Father Superior.  That the authority at San Jose might dissent with
the Padre of San Carmel, or decline to carry out his designs, did
not occur to the one-idea'd priest.  Like all solitary people,
isolated from passing events, he made no allowances for occurrences
outside of his routine.  Yet at this moment a sudden thought
whitened his yellow cheek.  What if the Father Superior deemed it
necessary to impart the secret to Francisco?  Would the child
recoil at the deception, and, perhaps, cease to love him?  It was
the first time, in his supreme selfishness, he had taken the
acolyte's feelings into account.  He had thought of him only as one
owing implicit obedience to him as a temporal and spiritual guide.

"Reverend Father!"

He turned impatiently.  It was his muleteer, Jose.  Father Pedro's
sunken eye brightened.

"Ah, Jose!  Quickly, then; hast thou found Sanchicha?"

"Truly, your reverence!  And I have brought her with me, just as
she is; though if your reverence make more of her than to fill the
six-foot hole and say a prayer over her, I'll give the mule that
brought her here for food for the bull's horns.  She neither hears
nor speaks, but whether from weakness or sheer wantonness, I know
not."

"Peace, then! and let thy tongue take example from hers.  Bring her
with thee into the sacristy and attend without.  Go!"

Father Pedro watched the disappearing figure of the muleteer and
hurriedly swept his thin, dry hand, veined and ribbed like a brown
November leaf, over his stony forehead, with a sound that seemed
almost a rustle.  Then he suddenly stiffened his fingers over his
breviary, dropped his arms perpendicularly before him, and with a
rigid step returned to the corridor and passed into the sacristy.

For a moment in the half-darkness the room seemed to be empty.
Tossed carelessly in the corner appeared some blankets topped by a
few straggling black horse tails, like an unstranded riata.  A
trembling agitated the mass as Father Pedro approached.  He bent
over the heap and distinguished in its midst the glowing black eyes
of Sanchicha, the Indian centenarian of the Mission San Carmel.
Only her eyes lived.  Helpless, boneless, and jelly-like, old age
had overtaken her with a mild form of deliquescence.

"Listen, Sanchicha," said the father, gravely.  "It is important
that thou shouldst refresh thy memory for a moment.  Look back
fourteen years, mother; it is but yesterday to thee.  Thou dost
remember the baby--a little muchacha thou broughtest me then--
fourteen years ago?"

The old woman's eyes became intelligent, and turned with a quick
look towards the open door of the church, and thence towards the
choir.

The Padre made a motion of irritation.  "No, no!  Thou dost not
understand; thou dost not attend me.  Knowest thou of any mark of
clothing, trinket, or amulet found upon the babe?"

The light of the old woman's eyes went out.  She might have been
dead.  Father Pedro waited a moment, and then laid his hand
impatiently on her shoulder.

"Dost thou mean there are none?"

A ray of light struggled back into her eyes.

"None."

"And thou hast kept back or put away no sign nor mark of her
parentage?  Tell me, on this crucifix."

The eyes caught the crucifix, and became as empty as the orbits of
the carven Christ upon it.

Father Pedro waited patiently.  A moment passed; only the sound of
the muleteer's spurs was heard in the courtyard.

"It is well," he said at last, with a sigh of relief.  "Pepita
shall give thee some refreshment, and Jose will bring thee back
again.  I will summon him."

He passed out of the sacristy door, leaving it open.  A ray of
sunlight darted eagerly in, and fell upon the grotesque heap in the
corner.  Sanchicha's eyes lived again; more than that, a singular
movement came over her face.  The hideous caverns of her toothless
mouth opened--she laughed.  The step of Jose was heard in the
corridor, and she became again inert.

The third day, which should have brought the return of Antonio, was
nearly spent.  Father Pedro was impatient but not alarmed.  The
good fathers at San Jose might naturally detain Antonio for the
answer, which might require deliberation.  If any mischance had
occurred to Francisco, Antonio would have returned or sent a
special messenger.  At sunset he was in his accustomed seat in the
orchard, his hands clasped over the breviary in his listless lap,
his eyes fixed upon the mountain between him and that mysterious
sea that had brought so much into his life.  He was filled with a
strange desire to see it, a vague curiosity hitherto unknown to his
preoccupied life; he wished to gaze upon that strand, perhaps the
very spot where she had been found; he doubted not his questioning
eyes would discover some forgotten trace of her; under his
persistent will and aided by the Holy Virgin, the sea would give up
its secret.  He looked at the fog creeping along the summit, and
recalled the latest gossip of San Carmel; how that since the advent
of the Americanos it was gradually encroaching on the Mission.  The
hated name vividly recalled to him the features of the stranger as
he had stood before him three nights ago, in this very garden; so
vividly that he sprang to his feet with an exclamation.  It was no
fancy, but Senor Cranch himself advancing from under the shadow of
a pear tree.

"I reckoned I'd catch you here," said Mr. Cranch, with the same
dry, practical business fashion, as if he was only resuming an
interrupted conversation, "and I reckon I ain't going to keep you a
minit longer than I did t'other day."  He mutely referred to his
watch, which he already held in his hand, and then put it back in
his pocket.  "Well! we found her!"

"Francisco," interrupted the priest with a single stride, laying
his hand upon Cranch's arm, and staring into his eyes.

Mr. Cranch quietly removed Father Pedro's hand.  "I reckon that
wasn't the name as I caught it," he returned dryly.  "Hadn't you
better sit down?"

"Pardon me--pardon me, Senor," said the priest, hastily sinking
back upon his bench, "I was thinking of other things.  You--you--
came upon me suddenly.  I thought it was the acolyte.  Go on,
Senor!  I am interested."

"I thought you'd be," said Cranch, quietly.  "That's why I came.
And then you might be of service too."

"True, true," said the priest, with rapid accents; "and this girl,
Senor, this girl is--"

"Juanita, the mestiza, adopted daughter of Don Juan Briones, over
on the Santa Clare Valley," replied Cranch, jerking his thumb over
his shoulder, and then sitting down upon the bench beside Father
Pedro.

The priest turned his feverish eyes piercingly upon his companion
for a few seconds, and then doggedly fixed them upon the ground.
Cranch drew a plug of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a portion,
placed it in his cheek, and then quietly began to strap the blade
of his jack-knife upon his boot.  Father Pedro saw it from under
his eyelids, and even in his preoccupation despised him.

"Then you are certain she is the babe you seek?" said the father,
without looking up.

"I reckon as near as you can be certain of anything.  Her age
tallies; she was the only foundling girl baby baptized by you, you
know,"--he partly turned round appealingly to the Padre,--"that
year.  Injin woman says she picked up a baby.  Looks like a pretty
clear case, don't it?"

"And the clothes, friend Cranch?" said the priest, with his eyes
still on the ground, and a slight assumption of easy indifference.

"They will be forthcoming, like enough, when the time comes," said
Cranch; "the main thing at first was to find the girl; that was MY
job; the lawyers, I reckon, can fit the proofs and say what's
wanted, later on."

"But why lawyers," continued Padre Pedro, with a slight sneer he
could not repress, "if the child is found and Senor Cranch is
satisfied?"

"On account of the property.  Business is business!"

"The property?"

Mr. Cranch pressed the back of his knife-blade on his boot, shut it
up with a click, and putting it in his pocket said calmly,--

"Well, I reckon the million of dollars that her father left when he
died, which naturally belongs to her, will require some proof that
she is his daughter."

He had placed both his hands in his pockets, and turned his eyes
full upon Father Pedro.  The priest arose hurriedly.

"But you said nothing of this before, Senor Cranch," said he, with
a gesture of indignation, turning his back quite upon Cranch, and
taking a step towards the refectory.

"Why should I?  I was looking after the girl, not the property,"
returned Cranch, following the Padre with watchful eyes, but still
keeping his careless, easy attitude.

"Ah, well!  Will it be said so, think you?  Eh!  Bueno.  What will
the world think of your sacred quest, eh?" continued the Padre
Pedro, forgetting himself in his excitement, but still averting his
face from his companion.

"The world will look after the proofs, and I reckon not bother if
the proofs are all right," replied Cranch, carelessly; "and the
girl won't think the worse of me for helping her to a fortune.
Hallo! you've dropped something."  He leaped to his feet, picked up
the breviary which had fallen from the Padre's fingers, and
returned it to him with a slight touch of gentleness that was
unsuspected in the man.

The priest's dry, tremulous hand grasped the volume without
acknowledgment.

"But these proofs?" he said hastily; "these proofs, Senor?"

"Oh, well, you'll testify to the baptism, you know."

"But if I refuse; if I will have nothing to do with this thing!  If
I will not give my word that there is not some mistake," said the
priest, working himself into a feverish indignation.  "That there
are not slips of memory, eh?  Of so many children baptized, is it
possible for me to know which, eh?  And if this Juanita is not your
girl, eh?"

"Then you'll help me to find who is," said Cranch, coolly.

Father Pedro turned furiously on his tormentor.  Overcome by his
vigil and anxiety.  He was oblivious of everything but the presence
of the man who seemed to usurp the functions of his own conscience.
"Who are you, who speak thus?" he said hoarsely, advancing upon
Cranch with outstretched and anathematizing fingers.  "Who are you,
Senor Heathen, who dare to dictate to me, a Father of Holy Church?
I tell you, I will have none of this.  Never!  I will not.  From
this moment, you understand--nothing.  I will never . . ."

He stopped.  The first stroke of the Angelus rang from the little
tower.  The first stroke of that bell before whose magic exorcism
all human passions fled, the peaceful bell that had for fifty years
lulled the little fold of San Carmel to prayer and rest, came to
his throbbing ear.  His trembling hands groped for the crucifix,
carried it to his left breast; his lips moved in prayer.  His eyes
were turned to the cold, passionless sky, where a few faint, far-
spaced stars had silently stolen to their places.  The Angelus
still rang, his trembling ceased, he remained motionless and rigid.

The American, who had uncovered in deference to the worshiper
rather than the rite, waited patiently.  The eyes of Father Pedro
returned to the earth, moist as if with dew caught from above.  He
looked half absently at Cranch.

"Forgive me, my son," he said, in a changed voice.  "I am only a
worn old man.  I must talk with thee more of this--but not to-
night--not to-night;--to-morrow--to-morrow--to-morrow."

He turned slowly and appeared to glide rather than move under the
trees, until the dark shadow of the Mission tower met and
encompassed him.  Cranch followed him with anxious eyes.  Then he
removed the quid of tobacco from his cheek.

"Just as I reckoned," remarked he, quite audibly.  "He's clean gold
on the bed rock after all!"


CHAPTER IV


That night Father Pedro dreamed a strange dream.  How much of it
was reality, how long it lasted, or when he awoke from it, he could
not tell.  The morbid excitement of the previous day culminated in
a febrile exaltation in which he lived and moved as in a separate
existence.

This is what he remembered.  He thought he had risen at night in a
sudden horror of remorse, and making his way to the darkened church
had fallen upon his knees before the high altar, when all at once
the acolyte's voice broke from the choir, but in accents so
dissonant and unnatural that it seemed a sacrilege, and he
trembled.  He thought he had confessed the secret of the child's
sex to Cranch, but whether the next morning or a week later he did
not know.  He fancied, too, that Cranch had also confessed some
trifling deception to him, but what, or why, he could not remember;
so much greater seemed the enormity of his own transgression.  He
thought Cranch had put in his hands the letter he had written to
the Father Superior, saying that his secret was still safe, and
that he had been spared the avowal and the scandal that might have
ensued.  But through all, and above all, he was conscious of one
fixed idea: to seek the seashore with Sanchicha, and upon the spot
where she had found Francisco, meet the young girl who had taken
his place, and so part from her forever.  He had a dim recollection
that this was necessary to some legal identification of her, as
arranged by Cranch, but how or why he did not understand; enough
that it was a part of his penance.

It was early morning when the faithful Antonio, accompanied by
Sanchicha and Jose, rode forth with him from the Mission of San
Carmel.  Except on the expressionless features of the old woman,
there was anxiety and gloom upon the faces of the little cavalcade.
He did not know how heavily his strange abstraction and
hallucinations weighed upon their honest hearts.  As they wound up
the ascent of the mountain he noticed that Antonio and Jose
conversed with bated breath and many pious crossings of themselves,
but with eyes always wistfully fixed upon him.  He wondered if, as
part of his penance, he ought not to proclaim his sin and abase
himself before them; but he knew that his devoted followers would
insist upon sharing his punishment; and he remembered his promise
to Cranch, that for HER sake he would say nothing.  Before they
reached the summit he turned once or twice to look back upon the
Mission.  How small it looked, lying there in the peaceful valley,
contrasted with the broad sweep of the landscape beyond, stopped at
the further east only by the dim, ghost-like outlines of the
Sierras.  But the strong breath of the sea was beginning to be
felt; in a few moments more they were facing it with lowered
sombreros and flying serapes, and the vast, glittering, illimitable
Pacific opened out beneath them.

Dazed and blinded, as it seemed to him, by the shining, restless
expanse, Father Pedro rode forward as if still in a dream.
Suddenly he halted, and called Antonio to his side.

"Tell me, child, didst thou not say that this coast was wild and
desolate of man, beast, and habitation?"

"Truly I did, reverend father."

"Then what is that?" pointing to the shore.

Almost at their feet nestled a cluster of houses, at the head of an
arroyo reaching up from the beach.  They looked down upon the smoke
of a manufactory chimney, upon strange heaps of material and
curious engines scattered along the sands, with here and there
moving specks of human figures.  In a little bay a schooner swung
at her cables.

The vaquero crossed himself in stupefied alarm.  "I know not, your
reverence; it is only two years ago, before the rodeo, that I was
here for strayed colts, and I swear by the blessed bones of San
Antonio that it was as I said."

"Ah! it is like these Americanos," responded the muleteer.  "I have
it from my brother Diego that he went from San Jose to Pescadero
two months ago, across the plains, with never a hut nor fonda to
halt at all the way.  He returned in seven days, and in the midst
of the plain there were three houses and a mill, and many people.
and why was it?  Ah! Mother of God! one had picked up in the creek
where he drank that much of gold;" and the muleteer tapped one of
the silver coins that fringed his jacket sleeves in place of
buttons.

"And they are washing the sands for gold there now," said Antonio,
eagerly pointing to some men gathered round a machine like an
enormous cradle.  "Let us hasten on."

Father Pedro's momentary interest had passed.  The words of his
companions fell dull and meaningless upon his dreaming ears.  He
was conscious only that the child was more a stranger to him as an
outcome of this hard, bustling life, than when he believed her
borne to him over the mysterious sea.  It perplexed his dazed,
disturbed mind to think that if such an antagonistic element could
exist within a dozen miles of the Mission, and he not know it,
could not such an atmosphere have been around him, even in his
monastic isolation, and he remain blind to it?  Had he really lived
in the world without knowing it?  Had it been in his blood?  Had it
impelled him to--  He shuddered and rode on.

They were at the last slope of the zigzag descent to the shore,
when he saw the figures of a man and woman moving slowly through a
field of wild oats, not far from the trail.  It seemed to his
distorted fancy that the man was Cranch.  The woman!  His heart
stopped beating.  Ah! could it be?  He had never seen her in her
proper garb: would she look like that?  Would she be as tall?  He
thought he bade Jose and Antonio go on slowly before with
Sanchicha, and dismounted, walking slowly between the high stalks
of grain, lest he should disturb them.  They evidently did not hear
his approach, but were talking earnestly.  It seemed to Father
Pedro that they had taken each other's hands, and as he looked
Cranch slipped his arm round her waist.  With only a blind instinct
of some dreadful sacrilege in this act, Father Pedro would have
rushed forward, when the girl's voice struck his ear.  He stopped,
breathless.  It was not Francisco, but Juanita, the little mestiza.

"But are you sure you are not pretending to love me now, as you
pretended to think I was the muchacha you had run away with and
lost?  Are you sure it is not pity for the deceit you practiced
upon me--upon Don Juan--upon poor Father Pedro?"

It seemed as if Cranch had tried to answer with a kiss, for the
girl drew suddenly away from him with a coquettish fling of the
black braids, and whipped her little brown hands behind her.

"Well, look here," said Cranch, with the same easy, good-natured,
practical directness which the priest remembered, and which would
have passed for philosophy in a more thoughtful man, "put it
squarely, then.  In the first place, it was Don Juan and the
alcalde who first suggested you might be the child."

"But you have said you knew it was Francisco all the time,"
interrupted Juanita.

"I did; but when I found the priest would not assist me at first,
and admit that the acolyte was a girl, I preferred to let him think
I was deceived in giving a fortune to another, and leave it to his
own conscience to permit it or frustrate it.  I was right.  I
reckon it was pretty hard on the old man, at his time of life, and
wrapped up as he was in the girl; but at the moment he came up to
the scratch like a man."

"And to save him you have deceived me?  Thank you, Senor," said the
girl with a mock curtsey.

"I reckon I preferred to have you for a wife than a daughter," said
Cranch, "if that's what you mean.  When you know me better,
Juanita," he continued, gravely, "you'll know that I would never
have let you believe I sought in you the one if I had not hoped to
find in you the other."

"Bueno!  And when did you have that pretty hope?"

"When I first saw you."

"And that was--two weeks ago."

"A year ago, Juanita.  When Francisco visited you at the rancho.  I
followed and saw you."

Juanita looked at him a moment, and then suddenly darted at him,
caught him by the lapels of his coat and shook him like a terrier.

"Are you sure that you did not love that Francisco?  Speak!"  (She
shook him again.)  "Swear that you did not follow her!"

"But--I did," said Cranch, laughing and shaking between the
clenching of the little hands.

"Judas Iscariot!  Swear you do not love her all this while."

"But, Juanita!"

"Swear!"

Cranch swore.  Then to Father Pedro's intense astonishment she drew
the American's face towards her own by the ears and kissed him.

"But you might have loved her, and married a fortune," said
Juanita, after a pause.

"Where would have been my reparation--my duty?" returned Cranch,
with a laugh.

"Reparation enough for her to have had you," said Juanita, with
that rapid disloyalty of one loving woman to another in an
emergency.  This provoked another kiss from Cranch, and then
Juanita said demurely,--

"But we are far from the trail.  Let us return, or we shall miss
Father Pedro.  Are you sure he will come?"

"A week ago he promised to be here to see the proofs to-day."

The voices were growing fainter and fainter; they were returning to
the trail.

Father Pedro remained motionless.  A week ago!  Was it a week ago
since--since what?  And what had he been doing here?  Listening!
He! Father Pedro, listening like an idle peon to the confidences of
two lovers.  But they had talked of him, of his crime, and the man
had pitied him.  Why did he not speak?  Why did he not call after
them?  He tried to raise his voice.  It sank in his throat with a
horrible choking sensation.  The nearest heads of oats began to nod
to him, he felt himself swaying backwards and forwards.  He fell--
heavily, down, down, down, from the summit of the mountain to the
floor of the Mission chapel, and there he lay in the dark.

       .        .        .        .        .        .

"He moves."

"Blessed Saint Anthony preserve him!"

It was Antonio's voice, it was Jose's arm, it was the field of wild
oats, the sky above his head,--all unchanged.

"What has happened?" said the priest feebly.

"A giddiness seized your reverence just now, as we were coming to
seek you."

"And you met no one?"

"No one, your reverence."

Father Pedro passed his hand across his forehead.

"But who are these?" he said, pointing to two figures who now
appeared upon the trail.

Antonio turned.

"It is the Americano, Senor Cranch, and his adopted daughter, the
mestiza Juanita, seeking your reverence, methinks."

"Ah!" said Father Pedro.

Cranch came forward and greeted the priest cordially.  "It was kind
of you, Father Pedro," he said, meaningly, with a significant
glance at Jose and Antonio, "to come so far to bid me and my
adopted daughter farewell.  We depart when the tide serves, but not
before you partake of our hospitality in yonder cottage."

Father Pedro gazed at Cranch and then at Juanita.

"I see," he stammered.  "But she goes not alone.  She will be
strange at first.  She takes some friend, perhaps--some companion?"
he continued, tremulously.

"A very old and dear one, Father Pedro, who is waiting for us now."

He led the way to a little white cottage, so little and white and
recent, that it seemed a mere fleck of sea foam cast on the sands.
Disposing of Jose and Antonio in the neighboring workshop and
outbuildings, he assisted the venerable Sanchicha to dismount, and,
together with Father Pedro and Juanita, entered a white palisaded
enclosure beside the cottage, and halted before what appeared to be
a large, folding trap-door, covering a slight, sandy mound.  It was
locked with a padlock; beside it stood the American alcalde and Don
Juan Briones.  Father Pedro looked hastily around for another
figure, but it was not there.

"Gentlemen," began Cranch, in his practical business way, "I reckon
you all know we've come here to identify a young lady, who"--he
hesitated--"was lately under the care of Father Pedro, with a
foundling picked up on this shore fifteen years ago by an Indian
woman.  How this foundling came here, and how I was concerned in
it, you all know.  I've told everybody here how I scrambled ashore,
leaving that baby in the dingy, supposing it would be picked up by
the boat pursuing me.  I've told some of you," he looked at Father
Pedro, "how I first discovered, from one of the men, three years
ago, that the child was not found by its father.  But I have never
told any one, before now, I KNEW it was picked up here.

"I never could tell the exact locality where I came ashore, for the
fog was coming on as it is now.  But two years ago I came up with a
party of gold hunters to work these sands.  One day, digging near
this creek, I struck something embedded deep below the surface.
Well, gentlemen, it wasn't gold, but something worth more to me
than gold or silver.  Here it is."

At a sign the alcalde unlocked the doors and threw them open.  They
disclosed an irregular trench, in which, filled with sand, lay the
half-excavated stern of a boat.

"It was the dingy of the Trinidad, gentlemen; you can still read
her name.  I found hidden away, tucked under the stern sheets,
mouldy and water-worn, some clothes that I recognized to be the
baby's.  I knew then that the child had been taken away alive for
some purpose, and the clothes were left so that she should carry no
trace with her.  I recognized the hand of an Indian.  I set to work
quietly.  I found Sanchicha here, she confessed to finding a baby,
but what she had done with it she would not at first say.  But
since then she has declared before the alcalde that she gave it to
Father Pedro, of San Carmel, and that here it stands--Francisco
that was!  Francisca that it is!"

He stepped aside to make way for a tall girl, who had approached
from the cottage.

Father Pedro had neither noticed the concluding words nor the
movement of Cranch.  His eyes were fixed upon the imbecile
Sanchicha,--Sanchicha, on whom, to render his rebuke more complete,
the Deity seemed to have worked a miracle, and restored intelligence
to eye and lip.  He passed his hand tremblingly across his forehead,
and turned away, when his eye fell upon the last comer.

It was she.  The moment he had longed for and dreaded had come.
She stood there, animated, handsome, filled with a hurtful
consciousness in her new charms, her fresh finery, and the pitiable
trinkets that had supplanted her scapulary, and which played under
her foolish fingers.  The past had no place in her preoccupied
mind; her bright eyes were full of eager anticipation of a
substantial future.  The incarnation of a frivolous world, even as
she extended one hand to him in half-coquettish embarrassment she
arranged the folds of her dress with the other.  At the touch of
her fingers, he felt himself growing old and cold.  Even the
penance of parting, which he had looked forward to, was denied him;
there was no longer sympathy enough for sorrow.  He thought of the
empty chorister's robe in the little cell, but not now with regret.
He only trembled to think of the flesh that he had once caused to
inhabit it.

"That's all, gentlemen," broke in the practical voice of Cranch.
"Whether there are proofs enough to make Francisca the heiress of
her father's wealth, the lawyers must say.  I reckon it's enough
for me that they give me the chance of repairing a wrong by taking
her father's place.  After all, it was a mere chance."

"It was the will of God," said Father Pedro, solemnly.

They were the last words he addressed them.  For when the fog had
begun to creep inshore, hastening their departure, he only answered
their farewells by a silent pressure of the hand, mute lips, and
far-off eyes.

When the sound of their laboring oars grew fainter, he told Antonio
to lead him and Sanchicha again to the buried boat.  There he bade
her kneel beside him.  "We will do penance here, thou and I,
daughter," he said gravely.  When the fog had drawn its curtain
gently around the strange pair, and sea and shore were blotted out,
he whispered, "Tell me, it was even so, was it not, daughter, on
the night she came?"  When the distant clatter of blocks and rattle
of cordage came from the unseen vessel, now standing out to sea, he
whispered again, "So, this is what thou didst hear, even then."
And so during the night he marked, more or less audibly to the
half-conscious woman at his side, the low whisper of the waves, the
murmur of the far-off breakers, the lightening and thickening of
the fog, the phantoms of moving shapes, and the slow coming of the
dawn.  And when the morning sun had rent the veil over land and
sea, Antonio and Jose found him, haggard, but erect, beside the
trembling old woman, with a blessing on his lips, pointing to the
horizon where a single sail still glimmered:--

         "Va Usted con Dios."



A BLUE GRASS PENELOPE


CHAPTER I


She was barely twenty-three years old.  It is probable that up to
that age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been
uneventful.  Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating
extremes as a small farmhouse and large lands, a good position and
no society, in that vast grazing district of Kentucky known as the
"Blue Grass" region, all the possibilities of a Western American
girl's existence lay before her.  A piano in the bare-walled house,
the latest patented mower in the limitless meadows, and a silk
dress sweeping the rough floor of the unpainted "meeting-house"
were already the promise of those possibilities.  Beautiful she
was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally
shared with her few neighbors.  There were small, narrow, arched
feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying
log-cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened
eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes
and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the county
judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and
unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter.  Eventually she had
married the male of her species, a young stranger, who, as
schoolmaster in the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent
a scant capital of education.  In obedience to the unwritten law of
the West, after the marriage was celebrated the doors of the
ancestral home cheerfully opened, and bride and bridegroom issued
forth, without regret and without sentiment, to seek the further
possibilities of a life beyond these already too familiar voices.
With their departure for California as Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tucker,
the parental nest in the Blue Grass meadows knew them no more.

They submitted with equal cheerfulness to the privations and
excesses of their new conditions.  Within three years the
schoolmaster developed into a lawyer and capitalist, the Blue Grass
bride supplying a grace and ease to these transitions that were all
her own.  She softened the abruptness of sudden wealth, mitigated
the austerities of newly acquired power, and made the most glaring
incongruity picturesque.  Only one thing seemed to limit their
progress in the region of these possibilities.  They were
childless.  It was as if they had exhausted the future in their own
youth, leaving little or nothing for another generation to do.


A southwesterly storm was beating against the dressing-room windows
of their new house in one of the hilly suburbs of San Francisco,
and threatening the unseasonable frivolity of the stucco
ornamentation of cornice and balcony.  Mrs. Tucker had been called
from the contemplation of the dreary prospect without by the
arrival of a visitor.  On entering the drawing-room she found him
engaged in a half-admiring, half-resentful examination of its new
furniture and hangings.  Mrs. Tucker at once recognized Mr. Calhoun
Weaver, a former Blue Grass neighbor; with swift feminine intuition
she also felt that his slight antagonism was likely to be
transferred from her furniture to herself.  Waiving it with the
lazy amiability of Southern indifference, she welcomed him by the
familiarity of a Christian name.

"I reckoned that mebbee you opined old Blue Grass friends wouldn't
naturally hitch on to them fancy doins," he said, glancing around
the apartment to avoid her clear eyes, as if resolutely setting
himself against the old charm of her manner as he had against the
more recent glory of her surroundings, "but I thought I'd just drop
in for the sake of old times."

"Why shouldn't you, Cal?" said Mrs. Tucker with a frank smile.

"Especially as I'm going up to Sacramento to-night with some
influential friends," he continued, with an ostentation calculated
to resist the assumption of her charms and her furniture.  "Senator
Dyce of Kentucky, and his cousin Judge Briggs; perhaps you know
'em, or may be Spencer--I mean Mr. Tucker--does."

"I reckon," said Mrs. Tucker smiling; "but tell me something about
the boys and girls at Vineville, and about yourself.  YOU'RE
looking well, and right smart too."  She paused to give due
emphasis to this latter recognition of a huge gold chain with which
her visitor was somewhat ostentatiously trifling.

"I didn't know as you cared to hear anything about Blue Grass," he
returned, a little abashed.  "I've been away from there some time
myself," he added, his uneasy vanity taking fresh alarm at the
faint suspicion of patronage on the part of his hostess.  "They're
doin' well, though; perhaps as well as some others."

"And you're not married yet," continued Mrs. Tucker, oblivious of
the innuendo.  "Ah, Cal," she added archly, "I am afraid you are as
fickle as ever.  What poor girl in Vineville have you left pining?"

The simple face of the man before her flushed with foolish
gratification at this old-fashioned, ambiguous flattery.  "Now look
yer, Belle," he said, chuckling, "if you're talking of old times
and you think I bear malice agin Spencer, why--"

But Mrs. Tucker interrupted what might have been an inopportune
sentimental retrospect with a finger of arch but languid warning.
"That will do!  I'm dying to know all about it, and you must stay
to dinner and tell me.  It's right mean you can't see Spencer too;
but he isn't back from Sacramento yet."

Grateful as a tete-a-tete with his old neighbor in her more
prosperous surroundings would have been, if only for the sake of
later gossiping about it, he felt it would be inconsistent with his
pride and his assumption of present business.  More than that, he
was uneasily conscious that in Mrs. Tucker's simple and unaffected
manner there was a greater superiority than he had ever noticed
during their previous acquaintance.  He would have felt kinder to
her had she shown any "airs and graces," which he could have
commented upon and forgiven.  He stammered some vague excuse of
preoccupation, yet lingered in the hope of saying something which,
if not aggressively unpleasant, might at least transfer to her
indolent serenity some of his own irritation.  "I reckon," he said,
as he moved hesitatingly towards the door, "that Spencer has made
himself easy and secure in them business risks he's taking.  That
'ere Alameda ditch affair they're talking so much about is a mighty
big thing, rather TOO big if it ever got to falling back on him.
But I suppose he's accustomed to take risks?"

"Of course he is," said Mrs. Tucker gayly.  "He married ME."

The visitor smiled feebly, but was not equal to the opportunity
offered for gallant repudiation.  "But suppose you ain't accustomed
to risks?"

"Why not?  I married HIM," said Mrs. Tucker.

Mr. Calhoun Weaver was human, and succumbed to this last charming
audacity.  He broke into a noisy but genuine laugh, shook Mrs.
Tucker's hand with effusion, said, "Now that's regular Blue Grass
and no mistake!" and retreated under cover of his hilarity.  In the
hall he made a rallying stand to repeat confidentially to the
servant who had overheard them: "Blue Grass, all over, you bet your
life," and, opening the door, was apparently swallowed up in the
tempest.

Mrs. Tucker's smile kept her lips until she had returned to her
room, and even then languidly shone in her eyes for some minutes
after, as she gazed abstractedly from her window on the storm-
tossed bay in the distance.  Perhaps some girlish vision of the
peaceful Blue Glass plain momentarily usurped the prospect; but it
is to be doubted if there was much romance in that retrospect, or
that it was more interesting to her than the positive and sharply
cut outlines of the practical life she now held.  Howbeit she soon
forgot this fancy in lazily watching a boat that, in the teeth of
the gale, was beating round Alcatraz Island.  Although at times a
mere blank speck on the gray waste of foam, a closer scrutiny
showed it to be one of those lateen-rigged Italian fishing boats
that so often flecked the distant bay.  Lost in the sudden
darkening of rain, or reappearing beneath the lifted curtain of the
squall, she watched it weather the island, and then turn its
laboring but persistent course towards the open channel.  A rent in
the Indian-inky sky, that showed the narrowing portals of the
Golden Gate beyond, revealed, as unexpectedly, the destination of
the little craft, a tall ship that hitherto lay hidden in the mist
of the Saucelito shore.  As the distance lessened between boat and
ship, they were again lost in the downward swoop of another squall.
When it lifted, the ship was creeping under the headland towards
the open sea, but the boat was gone.  Mrs. Tucker in vain rubbed
the pane with her handkerchief; it had vanished.  Meanwhile the
ship, as she neared the Gate, drew out from the protecting
headland, stood outlined for a moment with spars and canvas hearsed
in black against the lurid rent in the horizon, and then seemed to
sink slowly into the heaving obscurity beyond.  A sudden onset of
rain against the windows obliterated the remaining prospect; the
entrance of a servant completed the diversion.

"Captain Poindexter, ma'am!"

Mrs. Tucker lifted her pretty eyebrows interrogatively.  Captain
Poindexter was a legal friend of her husband, and had dined there
frequently; nevertheless she asked: "Did you tell him Mr. Tucker
was not at home?"

"Yes, 'm."

"Did he ask for ME?"

"Yes, 'm."

"Tell him I'll be down directly."

Mrs. Tucker's quiet face did not betray the fact that this second
visitor was even less interesting than the first.  In her heart she
did not like Captain Poindexter.  With a clever woman's instinct
she had early detected the fact that he had a superior, stronger
nature than her husband; as a loyal wife, she secretly resented the
occasional unconscious exhibition of this fact on the part of his
intimate friend in their familiar intercourse.  Added to this
slight jealousy, there was a certain moral antagonism between
herself and the captain which none but themselves knew.  They were
both philosophers, but Mrs. Tucker's serene and languid optimism
would not tolerate the compassionate and kind-hearted pessimisms of
the lawyer.  "Knowing what Jack Poindexter does of human nature,"
her husband had once said, "it's mighty fine in him to be so kind
and forgiving.  You ought to like him better, Belle."  "And qualify
myself to be forgiven," said the lady pertly.  "I don't see what
you're driving at, Belle; I give it up," had responded the puzzled
husband.  Mrs. Tucker kissed his high but foolish forehead
tenderly, and said: "I'm glad you don't, dear."

Meanwhile her second visitor had, like the first, employed the
interval in a critical survey of the glories of the new furniture,
but with apparently more compassion than resentment in his manner.
Once only had his expression changed.  Over the fireplace hung a
large photograph of Mr. Spencer Tucker.  It was retouched, refined,
and idealized in the highest style of that polite and diplomatic
art.  As Captain Poindexter looked upon the fringed hazel eyes, the
drooping raven moustache, the clustering ringlets, and the Byronic
full throat and turned-down collar of his friend, a smile of
exhausted humorous tolerance and affectionate impatience curved his
lips.  "Well, you ARE a fool, aren't you?" he apostrophized it
half-audibly.

He was standing before the picture as she entered.  Even in the
trying contiguity of that peerless work he would have been called a
fine-looking man.  As he advanced to greet her, it was evident that
his military title was not one of the mere fanciful sobriquets of
the locality.  In his erect figure and the disciplined composure of
limb and attitude there were still traces of the refined academic
rigors of West Point.  The pliant adaptability of Western
civilization which enabled him, three years before, to leave the
army and transfer his executive ability to the more profitable
profession of the law, had loosed sash and shoulder-strap, but had
not entirely removed the restraint of the one, or the bearing of
the other.

"Spencer is in Sacramento," began Mrs. Tucker in languid
explanation, after the first greetings were over.

"I knew he was not here," replied Captain Poindexter gently, as he
drew the proffered chair towards her, "but this is business that
concerns you both."  He stopped and glanced upwards at the picture.
"I suppose you know nothing of his business?  Of course not," he
added reassuringly, "nothing, absolutely nothing, certainly."  He
said this so kindly, and yet so positively, as if to promptly
dispose of that question before going further, that she assented
mechanically.  "Well, then, he's taken some big risks in the way of
business, and--well, things have gone bad with him, you know.  Very
bad!  Really, they couldn't be worse!  Of course it was dreadfully
rash and all that," he went on, as if commenting upon the amusing
waywardness of a child; "but the result is the usual smash-up of
everything, money, credit, and all!"  He laughed and added: "Yes,
he's got cut off--mules and baggage regularly routed and dispersed!
I'm in earnest."  He raised his eyebrows and frowned slightly, as
if to deprecate any corresponding hilarity on the part of Mrs.
Tucker, or any attempt to make TOO light of the subject, and then
rising, placed his hands behind his back, beamed half-humorously
upon her from beneath her husband's picture, and repeated: "That's
so."

Mrs. Tucker instinctively knew that he spoke the truth, and that it
was impossible for him to convey it in any other than his natural
manner; but between the shock and the singular influence of that
manner she could at first only say, "You don't mean it!" fully
conscious of the utter inanity of the remark, and that it seemed
scarcely less cold-blooded than his own.

Poindexter, still smiling, nodded.

She arose with an effort.  She had recovered from the first shock,
and pride lent her a determined calmness that more than equaled
Poindexter's easy philosophy.

"Where is he?" she asked.

"At sea, and I hope by this time where he can not be found or
followed."

Was her momentary glimpse of the outgoing ship a coincidence, or
only a vision?  She was confused and giddy, but, mastering her
weakness, she managed to continue in a lower voice:

"You have no message for me from him?  He told you nothing to tell
me?"

"Nothing, absolutely nothing," replied Poindexter.  "It was as much
as he could do, I reckon, to get fairly away before the crash
came."

"Then you did not see him go?"

"Well, no," said Poindexter.  "I'd hardly have managed things in
this way."  He checked himself and added, with a forgiving smile,
"But he was the best judge of what he needed, of course."

"I suppose I will hear from him," she said quietly, "as soon as he
is safe.  He must have had enough else to think about, poor
fellow."

She said this so naturally and quietly that Poindexter was
deceived.  He had no idea that the collected woman before him was
thinking only of solitude and darkness, of her own room, and madly
longing to be there.  He said, "Yes, I dare say," in quite another
voice, and glanced at the picture.  But as she remained standing,
he continued more earnestly, "I didn't come here to tell you what
you might read in the newspapers to-morrow morning, and what
everybody might tell you.  Before that time I want you to do
something to save a fragment of your property from the ruin; do you
understand?  I want you to make a rally, and bring off something in
good order."

"For him?" said Mrs. Tucker, with brightening eyes.

"Well, yes, of course--if you like--but as if for yourself.  Do you
know the Rancho de los Cuervos?"

"I do."

"It's almost the only bit of real property your husband hasn't
sold, mortgaged, or pledged.  Why it was exempt, or whether only
forgotten, I can't say."

"I'll tell you why," said Mrs. Tucker, with a slight return of
color.  "It was the first land we ever bought, and Spencer always
said it should be mine and he would build a new house on it."

Captain Poindexter smiled and nodded at the picture.  "Oh, he did
say that, did he?  Well, THAT'S evidence.  But you see he never
gave you the deed, and by sunrise to-morrow his creditors will
attach it--unless--"

"Unless--" repeated Mrs. Tucker, with kindling eyes.

"Unless," continued Captain Poindexter, "they happen to find YOU in
possession."

"I'll go," said Mrs. Tucker.

"Of course you will," returned Poindexter, pleasantly; "only, as
it's a big contract to take, suppose we see how you can fill it.
It's forty miles to Los Cuervos, and you can't trust yourself to
steamboat or stage-coach.  The steamboat left an hour ago."

"If I had only known this then!" ejaculated Mrs. Tucker.

"I knew it, but you had company then," said Poindexter, with
ironical gallantry, "and I wouldn't disturb you."  Without saying
how he knew it, he continued, "In the stage-coach you might be
recognized.  You must go in a private conveyance and alone; even I
can not go with you, for I must go on before and meet you there.
Can you drive forty miles?"

Mrs. Tucker lifted up her abstracted pretty lids.  "I once drove
fifty--at home," she returned simply.

"Good! and I dare say you did it then for fun.  Do it now for
something real and personal, as we lawyers say.  You will have
relays and a plan of the road.  It's rough weather for a pasear,
but all the better for that.  You'll have less company on the
road."

"How soon can I go?" she asked.

"The sooner the better.  I've arranged everything for you already,"
he continued with a laugh.  "Come now, that's a compliment to you,
isn't it?"  He smiled a moment in her steadfast, earnest face, and
then said, more gravely, "You'll do.  Now listen."

He then carefully detailed his plan.  There was so little of
excitement or mystery in their manner that the servant, who
returned to light the gas, never knew that the ruin and bankruptcy
of the house was being told before her, or that its mistress was
planning her secret flight.

"Good afternoon; I will see you to-morrow then," said Poindexter,
raising his eyes to hers as the servant opened the door for him.

"Good afternoon," repeated Mrs. Tucker quietly answering his look.
"You need not light the gas in my room, Mary," she continued in the
same tone of voice as the door closed upon him; "I shall lie down
for a few moments, and then I may run over to the Robinsons for the
evening."

She regained her room composedly.  The longing desire to bury her
head in her pillow and "think out" her position had gone.  She did
not apostrophize her fate, she did not weep; few real women do in
the access of calamity, or when there is anything else to be done.
She felt that she knew it all; she believed she had sounded the
profoundest depths of the disaster, and seemed already so old in
her experience that she almost fancied she had been prepared for
it.  Perhaps she did not fully appreciate it; to a life like hers
it was only an incident, the mere turning of a page of the
illimitable book of youth; the breaking up of what she now felt had
become a monotony.  In fact, she was not quite sure she had ever
been satisfied with their present success.  Had it brought her all
she expected?  She wanted to say this to her husband, not only to
comfort him, poor fellow, but that they might come to a better
understanding of life in the future.  She was not perhaps different
from other loving women who, believing in this unattainable goal of
matrimony, have sought it in the various episodes of fortune or
reverses, in the bearing of children, or the loss of friends.  In
her childless experience there was no other life that had taken
root in her circumstances and might suffer transplantation; only
she and her husband could lose or profit by the change.  The
"perfect" understanding would come under other conditions than
these.

She would have gone superstitiously to the window to gaze in the
direction of the vanished ship, but another instinct restrained
her.  She would put aside all yearning for him until she had done
something to help him, and earned the confidence he seemed to have
withheld.  Perhaps it was pride--perhaps she never really believed
his exodus was distant or complete.

With a full knowledge that to-morrow the various ornaments and
pretty trifles around her would be in the hands of the law, she
gathered only a few necessaries for her flight and some familiar
personal trinkets.  I am constrained to say that this self-
abnegation was more fastidious than moral.  She had no more idea of
the ethics of bankruptcy than any other charming woman; she simply
did not like to take with her any contagious memory of the chapter
of the life just closing.  She glanced around the home she was
leaving without a lingering regret; there was no sentiment of
tradition or custom that might be destroyed; her roots lay too near
the surface to suffer from dislocation; the happiness of her
childless union had depended upon no domestic centre, nor was its
flame sacred to any local hearthstone.  It was without a sigh that,
when night had fully fallen, she slipped unnoticed down the
staircase.  At the door of the drawing-room she paused and then
entered with the first guilty feeling of shame she had known that
evening.  Looking stealthily around she mounted a chair before her
husband's picture, kissed the irreproachable moustache hurriedly,
said, "You foolish darling, you!" and slipped out again.  With this
touching indorsement of the views of a rival philosopher, she
closed the door softly and left her home forever.


CHAPTER II


The wind and rain had cleared the unfrequented suburb of any
observant lounger, and the darkness, lit only by far-spaced, gusty
lamps, hid her hastening figure.  She had barely crossed the second
street when she heard the quick clatter of hoofs behind her; a
buggy drove up to the curbstone, and Poindexter leaped out.  She
entered quickly, but for a moment he still held the reins of the
impatient horse.  "He's rather fresh," he said, eying her keenly;
"are you sure you can manage him?"

"Give me the reins," she said simply.

He placed them in the two firm, well-shaped hands that reached from
the depths of the vehicle, and was satisfied.  Yet he lingered.

"It's rough work for a lone woman," he said, almost curtly.  "I
can't go with you, but, speak frankly, is there any man you know
whom you can trust well enough to take?  It's not too late yet;
think a moment!"

He paused over the buttoning of the leather apron of the vehicle.

"No, there is none," answered the voice from the interior; "and
it's better so.  Is all ready?"

"One moment more."  He had recovered his half-bantering manner.
"You HAVE a friend and countryman already with you, do you know?
Your horse is Blue Grass.  Good night."

With these words ringing in her ears she began her journey.  The
horse, as if eager to maintain the reputation which his native
district had given his race, as well as the race of the pretty
woman behind him, leaped impatiently forward.  But pulled together
by the fine and firm fingers that seemed to guide rather than check
his exuberance, he presently struck into the long, swinging pace of
his kind, and kept it throughout without "break" or acceleration.
Over the paved streets the light buggy rattled, and the slender
shafts danced around his smooth barrel, but when they touched the
level high-road, horse and vehicle slipped forward through the
night, a swift and noiseless phantom.  Mrs. Tucker could see his
graceful back dimly rising and falling before her with tireless
rhythm, and could feel the intelligent pressure of his mouth until
it seemed the responsive grasp of a powerful but kindly hand.  The
faint glow of conquest came to her cold cheek; the slight stirrings
of pride moved her preoccupied heart.  A soft light filled her
hazel eyes.  A desolate woman, bereft of husband and home, and
flying through storm and night, she knew not where, she still
leaned forward towards her horse.  "Was he Blue Grass, then, dear
old boy?" she gently cooed at him in the darkness.  He evidently
WAS, and responded by blowing her an ostentatious equine kiss.
"And he would be good to his own forsaken Belle," she murmured
caressingly, "and wouldn't let any one harm her?"  But here,
overcome by the lazy witchery of her voice, he shook his head so
violently that Mrs. Tucker, after the fashion of her sex, had the
double satisfaction of demurely restraining the passion she had
evoked.

To avoid the more traveled thoroughfare, while the evening was
still early, it had been arranged that she should at first take a
less direct but less frequented road.  This was a famous pleasure-
drive from San Francisco, a graveled and sanded stretch of eight
miles to the sea and an ultimate "cocktail," in a "stately
pleasure-dome decreed" among the surf and rocks of the Pacific
shore.  It was deserted now, and left to the unobstructed sweep of
the wind and rain.  Mrs. Tucker would not have chosen this road.
With the instinctive jealousy of a bucolic inland race born by
great rivers, she did not like the sea; and again the dim and
dreary waste tended to recall the vision connected with her
husband's flight, upon which she had resolutely shut her eyes.  But
when she had reached it the road suddenly turned, following the
trend of the beach, and she was exposed to the full power of its
dread fascinations.  The combined roar of sea and shore was in her
ears; as the direct force of the gale had compelled her to furl the
protecting hood of the buggy to keep the light vehicle from
oversetting or drifting to leeward, she could no longer shut out
the heaving chaos on the right from which the pallid ghosts of dead
and dying breakers dimly rose and sank as if in awful salutation.
At times through the darkness a white sheet appeared spread before
the path and beneath the wheels of the buggy, which, when withdrawn
with a reluctant hiss, seemed striving to drag the exhausted beach
seaward with it.  But the blind terror of her horse, who swerved at
every sweep of the surge, shamed her own half-superstitious fears,
and with the effort to control his alarm she regained her own self-
possession, albeit with eyelashes wet not altogether with the salt
spray from the sea.  This was followed by a reaction, perhaps
stimulated by her victory over the beaten animal, when for a time,
she knew not how long, she felt only a mad sense of freedom and
power; oblivious of even her sorrows, her lost home and husband,
and with intense feminine consciousness she longed to be a man.
She was scarcely aware that the track turned again inland until the
beat of the horse's hoofs on the firm ground and an acceleration of
speed showed her she had left the beach and the mysterious sea
behind her, and she remembered that she was near the end of the
first stage of her journey.  Half an hour later the twinkling
lights of the roadside inn where she was to change horses rose out
of the darkness.

Happily for her, the ostler considered the horse, who had a local
reputation, of more importance than the unknown muffled figure in
the shadow of the unfurled hood, and confined his attention to the
animal.  After a careful examination of his feet and a few comments
addressed solely to the superior creation, he led him away.  Mrs.
Tucker would have liked to part more affectionately from her four-
footed compatriot, and felt a sudden sense of loneliness at the
loss of her new friend, but a recollection of certain cautions of
Captain Poindexter's kept her mute.  Nevertheless, the ostler's
ostentatious adjuration of "Now then, aren't you going to bring out
that mustang for the Senora?" puzzled her.  It was not until the
fresh horse was put to, and she had flung a piece of gold into the
attendant's hand, that the "Gracias" of his unmistakable Saxon
speech revealed to her the reason of the lawyer's caution.
Poindexter had evidently represented her to these people as a
native Californian who did not speak English.  In her inconsistency
her blood took fire at this first suggestion of deceit, and burned
in her face.  Why should he try to pass her off as anybody else?
Why should she not use her own, her husband's name?  She stopped
and bit her lip.

It was but the beginning of an uneasy train of thought.  She
suddenly found herself thinking of her visitor, Calhoun Weaver, and
not pleasantly.  He would hear of their ruin tomorrow, perhaps of
her own flight.  He would remember his visit, and what would he
think of her deceitful frivolity?  Would he believe that she was
then ignorant of the failure?  It was her first sense of any
accountability to others than herself, but even then it was rather
owing to an uneasy consciousness of what her husband must feel if
he were subjected to the criticisms of men like Calhoun.  She
wondered if others knew that he had kept her in ignorance of his
flight.  Did Poindexter know it, or had he only entrapped her into
the admission?  Why had she not been clever enough to make him
think that she knew it already?  For the moment she hated
Poindexter for sharing that secret.  Yet this was again followed by
a new impatience of her husband's want of insight into her ability
to help him.  Of course the poor fellow could not bear to worry
her, could not bear to face such men as Calhoun, or even Poindexter
(she added exultingly to herself), but he might have sent her a
line as he fled, only to prepare her to meet and combat the shame
alone.  It did not occur to her unsophisticated singleness of
nature that she was accepting as an error of feeling what the world
would call cowardly selfishness.

At midnight the storm lulled and a few stars trembled through the
rent clouds.  Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and
her country instincts, a little overlaid by the urban experiences
of the last few years, came again to the surface.  She felt the
fresh, cool radiation from outlying, upturned fields, the faint,
sad odors from dim stretches of pricking grain and quickening leaf,
and wondered if at Los Cuervos it might be possible to reproduce
the peculiar verdure of her native district.  She beguiled her
fancy by an ambitious plan of retrieving their fortunes by farming;
her comfortable tastes had lately rebelled against the homeless
mechanical cultivation of these desolate but teeming Californian
acres, and for a moment indulged in a vision of a vine-clad cottage
home that in any other woman would have been sentimental.  Her
cramped limbs aching, she took advantage of the security of the
darkness and the familiar contiguity of the fields to get down from
the vehicle, gather her skirts together, and run at the head of the
mustang, until her chill blood was thawed, night drawing a modest
veil over this charming revelation of the nymph and woman.  But the
sudden shadow of a coyote checked the scouring feet of this swift
Camilla, and sent her back precipitately to the buggy.  Nevertheless,
she was refreshed and able to pursue her journey, until the cold
gray of early morning found her at the end of her second stage.

Her route was changed again from the main highway, rendered
dangerous by the approach of day and the contiguity of the
neighboring rancheros.  The road was rough and hilly, her new horse
and vehicle in keeping with the rudeness of the route--by far the
most difficult of her whole journey.  The rare wagon tracks that
indicated her road were often scarcely discernible; at times they
led her through openings in the half-cleared woods, skirted
suspicious morasses, painfully climbed the smooth, dome-like hills,
or wound along perilous slopes at a dangerous angle.  Twice she had
to alight and cling to the sliding wheels on one of those
treacherous inclines, or drag them from impending ruts or immovable
mire.  In the growing light she could distinguish the distant, low-
lying marshes eaten by encroaching sloughs and insidious channels,
and beyond them the faint gray waste of the Lower Bay.  A darker
peninsula in the marsh she knew to be the extreme boundary of her
future home: the Rancho de los Cuervos.  In another hour she began
to descend to the plain, and once more to approach the main road,
which now ran nearly parallel with her track.  She scanned it
cautiously for any early traveler; it stretched north and south in
apparent unending solitude.  She struck into it boldly, and urged
her horse to the top of his speed, until she reached the cross road
that led to the rancho.  But here she paused and allowed the reins
to drop idly on the mustang's back.  A singular and unaccountable
irresolution seized her.  The difficulties of her journey were
over; the rancho lay scarcely two miles away; she had achieved the
most important part of her task in the appointed time, but she
hesitated.  What had she come for?  She tried to recall Poindexter's
words, even her own enthusiasm, but in vain.  She was going to take
possession of her husband's property, she knew, that was all.  But
the means she had taken seemed now so exaggerated and mysterious for
that simple end that she began to dread an impending something, or
some vague danger she had not considered, that she was rushing
blindly to meet.  Full of this strange feeling she almost
mechanically stopped her horse as she entered the cross road.

From this momentary hesitation a singular sound aroused her.  It
seemed at first like the swift hurrying by of some viewless courier
of the air, the vague alarm of some invisible flying herald, or
like the inarticulate cry that precedes a storm.  It seemed to rise
and fall around her as if with some changing urgency of purpose.
Raising her eyes she suddenly recognized the two far-stretching
lines of telegraph wire above her head, and knew the aeolian cry of
the morning wind along its vibrating chords.  But it brought
another and more practical fear to her active brain.  Perhaps even
now the telegraph might be anticipating her!  Had Poindexter
thought of that?  She hesitated no longer, but laying the whip on
the back of her jaded mustang again hurried forward.

As the level horizon grew more distinct, her attention was
attracted by the white sail of a small boat lazily threading the
sinuous channel of the slough.  It might be Poindexter arriving by
the more direct route from the steamboat that occasionally lay off
the ancient embarcadero of the Los Cuervos Rancho.  But even while
watching it her quick ear caught the sound of galloping hoofs
behind her.  She turned quickly and saw she was followed by a
horseman.  But her momentary alarm was succeeded by a feeling of
relief as she recognized the erect figure and square shoulders of
Poindexter.  Yet she could not help thinking that he looked more
like a militant scout, and less like a cautious legal adviser, than
ever.

With unaffected womanliness she rearranged her slightly disordered
hair as he drew up beside her.  "I thought you were in yonder
boat," she said.

"Not I," he laughed; "I distanced you by the high road two hours,
and have been reconnoitring, until I saw you hesitate at the cross
roads."

"But who is in the boat?" asked Mrs. Tucker, partly to hide her
embarrassment.

"Only some early Chinese market gardener, I dare say.  But you are
safe now.  You are on your own land.  You passed the boundary
monument of the rancho five minutes ago.  Look!  All you see before
you is yours from the embarcadero to yonder Coast Range."

The tone of half-raillery did not, however, cheer Mrs. Tucker.  She
shuddered slightly and cast her eyes over the monotonous sea of
tule and meadow.

"It doesn't look pretty, perhaps," continued Poindexter, "but it's
the richest land in the State, and the embarcadero will some day be
a town.  I suppose you'll call it Blue Grassville.  But you seem
tired!" he said, suddenly dropping his voice to a tone of half-
humorous sympathy.

Mrs. Tucker managed to get rid of an impending tear under the
pretense of clearing her eyes.  "Are we nearly there?" she asked.

"Nearly.  You know," he added with the same half-mischievous, half-
sympathizing gayety, "it's not exactly a palace you're coming to.
Hardly.  It's the old casa that has been deserted for years, but I
thought it better you should go into possession there than take up
your abode at the shanty where your husband's farm-hands are.  No
one will know when you take possession of the casa, while the very
hour of your arrival at the shanty would be known; and if they
should make any trouble--"

"If they should make any trouble?" repeated Mrs. Tucker, lifting
her frank, inquiring eyes to Poindexter.

His horse suddenly rearing from an apparently accidental prick of
the spur, it was a minute or two before he was able to explain.  "I
mean if this ever comes up as a matter of evidence, you know.  But
here we are!"

What had seemed to be an overgrown mound rising like an island out
of the dead level of the grassy sea now resolved itself into a
collection of adobe walls, eaten and incrusted with shrubs and
vines, that bore some resemblance to the usual uninhabited-looking
exterior of a Spanish-American dwelling.  Apertures that might have
been lance-shaped windows or only cracks and fissures in the walls
were choked up with weeds and grass, and gave no passing glimpse of
the interior.  Entering a ruinous corral they came to a second
entrance, which proved to be the patio or courtyard.  The deserted
wooden corridor, with beams, rafters, and floors whitened by the
eternal sun and wind, contained a few withered leaves, dryly
rotting skins, and thongs of leather, as if undisturbed by human
care.  But among these scattered debris of former life and
habitation there was no noisome or unclean suggestion of decay.  A
faint, spiced odor of desiccation filled the bare walls.  There was
no slime on stone or sun-dried brick.  In place of fungus or
discolored moisture the dust of efflorescence whitened in the
obscured corners.  The elements had picked clean the bones of the
crumbling tenement ere they should finally absorb it.

A withered old peon woman, who in dress, complexion, and fibrous
hair might have been an animated fragment of the debris, rustled
out of a low vaulted passage and welcomed them with a feeble
crepitation.  Following her into the dim interior Mrs. Tucker was
surprised to find some slight attempt at comfort and even adornment
in the two or three habitable apartments.  They were scrupulously
clean and dry, two qualities which in her feminine eyes atoned for
poverty of material.

"I could not send anything from San Bruno, the nearest village,
without attracting attention," explained Poindexter; "but if you
can manage to picnic here for a day longer, I'll get one of our
Chinese friends here," he pointed to the slough, "to bring over,
for his return cargo from across the bay, any necessaries you may
want.  There is no danger of his betraying you," he added, with an
ironical smile; "Chinamen and Indians are, by an ingenious
provision of the statute of California, incapable of giving
evidence against a white person.  You can trust your handmaiden
perfectly--even if she can't trust YOU.  That is your sacred
privilege under the constitution.  And now, as I expect to catch
the up boat ten miles from hence, I must say 'good-by' until to-
morrow night.  I hope to bring you then some more definite plans
for the future.  The worst is over."  He held her hand for a
moment, and with a graver voice continued, "You have done it very
well--do you know--very well!"

In the slight embarrassment produced by his sudden change of manner
she felt that her thanks seemed awkward and restrained.  "Don't
thank me," he laughed, with a prompt return of his former levity,
"that's my trade.  I only advised.  You have saved yourself like a
plucky woman--shall I say like Blue Grass?  Good-by!"  He mounted
his horse, but, as if struck by an after-thought, wheeled and drew
up by her side again.  "If I were you I wouldn't see many strangers
for a day or two, and listen to as little news as a woman possibly
can."  He laughed again, waved her a half-gallant, half-military
salute, and was gone.  The question she had been trying to frame,
regarding the probability of communication with her husband,
remained unasked.  At least she had saved her pride before him.

Addressing herself to the care of her narrow household, she
mechanically put away the few things she had brought with her, and
began to readjust the scant furniture.  She was a little
discomposed at first at the absence of bolts, locks, and even
window-fastenings until assured, by Concha's evident inability to
comprehend her concern, that they were quite unknown at Los
Cuervos.  Her slight knowledge of Spanish was barely sufficient to
make her wants known, so that the relief of conversation with her
only companion was debarred her, and she was obliged to content
herself with the sapless, crackling smiles and withered
genuflexions that the old woman dropped like dead leaves in her
path.  It was staring noon when, the house singing like an empty
shell in the monotonous wind, she felt she could stand the solitude
no longer, and, crossing the glaring patio and whistling corridor,
made her way to the open gateway.

But the view without seemed to intensify her desolation.  The broad
expanse of the shadowless plain reached apparently to the Coast
Range, trackless and unbroken save by one or two clusters of
dwarfed oaks, which at that distance were but mossy excrescences on
the surface, barely raised above the dead level.  On the other side
the marsh took up the monotony and carried it, scarcely interrupted
by undefined water-courses, to the faintly marked out horizon line
of the remote bay.  Scattered and apparently motionless black spots
on the meadows that gave a dreary significance to the title of "the
Crows" which the rancho bore, and sudden gray clouds of sand-pipers
on the marshes, that rose and vanished down the wind, were the only
signs of life.  Even the white sail of the early morning was gone.

She stood there until the aching of her straining eyes and the
stiffening of her limbs in the cold wind compelled her to seek the
sheltered warmth of the courtyard.  Here she endeavored to make
friends with a bright-eyed lizard, who was sunning himself in the
corridor; a graceful little creature in blue and gold, from whom
she felt at other times she might have fled, but whose beauty and
harmlessness solitude had made known to her.  With misplaced
kindness she tempted it with bread-crumbs, with no other effect
than to stiffen it into stony astonishment.  She wondered if she
should become like the prisoners she had read of in books, who
poured out their solitary affections on noisome creatures, and she
regretted even the mustang, which with the buggy had disappeared
under the charge of some unknown retainer on her arrival.  Was she
not a prisoner?  The shutterless windows, yawning doors, and open
gate refuted her suggestion, but the encompassing solitude and
trackless waste still held her captive.  Poindexter had told her it
was four miles to the shanty; she might walk there.  Why had she
given her word that she would remain at the rancho until he
returned?

The long day crept monotonously away, and she welcomed the night
which shut out the dreary prospect.  But it brought no cessation of
the harassing wind without, nor surcease of the nervous irritation
its perpetual and even activity wrought upon her.  It haunted her
pillow even in her exhausted sleep, and seemed to impatiently
beckon her to rise and follow it.  It brought her feverish dreams
of her husband, footsore and weary, staggering forward under its
pitiless lash and clamorous outcry; she would have gone to his
assistance, but when she reached his side and held out her arms to
him it hurried her past with merciless power, and, bearing her
away, left him hopelessly behind.  It was broad day when she awoke.
The usual night showers of the waning rainy season had left no
trace in sky or meadow; the fervid morning sun had already dried
the patio; only the restless, harrying wind remained.

Mrs. Tucker arose with a resolve.  She had learned from Concha on
the previous evening that a part of the shanty was used as a tienda
or shop for the laborers and rancheros.  Under the necessity of
purchasing some articles, she would go there and for a moment
mingle with those people, who would not recognize her.  Even if
they did, her instinct told her it would be less to be feared than
the hopeless uncertainty of another day.  As she left the house the
wind seemed to seize her as in her dream, and hurry her along with
it, until in a few moments the walls of the low casa sank into the
earth again and she was alone, but for the breeze on the solitary
plain.  The level distance glittered in the sharp light, a few
crows with slant wings dipped and ran down the wind before her, and
a passing gleam on the marsh was explained by the far-off cry of a
curlew.

She had walked for an hour, upheld by the stimulus of light and
morning air, when the cluster of scrub oaks, which was her
destination, opened enough to show two rambling sheds, before one
of which was a wooden platform containing a few barrels and bones.
As she approached nearer, she could see that one or two horses were
tethered under the trees, that their riders were lounging by a
horse-trough, and that over an open door the word Tienda was rudely
painted on a board, and as rudely illustrated by the wares
displayed at door and window.  Accustomed as she was to the poverty
of frontier architecture, even the crumbling walls of the old
hacienda she had just left seemed picturesque to the rigid angles
of the thin, blank, unpainted shell before her.  One of the
loungers, who was reading a newspaper aloud as she advanced, put it
aside and stared at her; there was an evident commotion in the shop
as she stepped upon the platform, and when she entered, with
breathless lips and beating heart, she found herself the object of
a dozen curious eyes.  Her quick pride resented the scrutiny and
recalled her courage, and it was with a slight coldness in her
usual lazy indifference that she leaned over the counter and asked
for the articles she wanted.

The request was followed by a dead silence.  Mrs. Tucker repeated
it with some hauteur.

"I reckon you don't seem to know this store is in the hands of the
sheriff," said one of the loungers.

Mrs. Tucker was not aware of it.

"Well, I don't know any one who's a better right to know than
Spence Tucker's wife," said another with a coarse laugh.  The laugh
was echoed by the others.  Mrs. Tucker saw the pit into which she
had deliberately walked, but did not flinch.

"Is there any one to serve here?" she asked, turning her clear eyes
full upon the bystanders.

"You'd better ask the sheriff.  He was the last one to SARVE here.
He sarved an attachment," replied the inevitable humorist of all
Californian assemblages.

"Is he here?" asked Mrs. Tucker, disregarding the renewed laughter
which followed this subtle witticism.

The loungers at the door made way for one of their party, who was
half dragged, half pushed into the shop.  "Here he is," said half a
dozen eager voices, in the fond belief that his presence might
impart additional humor to the situation.  He cast a deprecating
glance at Mrs. Tucker and said, "It's so, madam!  This yer place is
attached; but if there's anything you're wanting, why I reckon,
boys,"--he turned half appealingly to the crowd,--"we could oblige
a lady."  There was a vague sound of angry opposition and
remonstrance from the back door of the shop, but the majority,
partly overcome by Mrs. Tucker's beauty, assented.  "Only,"
continued the officer explanatorily, "ez these yer goods are in the
hands of the creditors, they ought to be represented by an
equivalent in money.  If you're expecting they should be charged--"

"But I wish to PAY for them," interrupted Mrs. Tucker, with a
slight flush of indignation; "I have the money."

"Oh, I bet you have!" screamed a voice, as, overturning all
opposition, the malcontent at the back door, in the shape of an
infuriated woman, forced her way into the shop.  "I'll bet you have
the money!  Look at her, boys!  Look at the wife of the thief, with
the stolen money in diamonds in her ears and rings on her fingers.
SHE'S got money if WE'VE none.  SHE can pay for what she fancies,
if we haven't a cent to redeem the bed that's stolen from under us.
Oh yes, buy it all, Mrs. Spencer Tucker! buy the whole shop, Mrs.
Spencer Tucker, do you hear?  And if you ain't satisfied then, buy
my clothes, my wedding ring, the only things your husband hasn't
stolen."

"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Tucker coldly, turning towards
the door.  But with a flying leap across the counter her relentless
adversary stood between her and retreat.

"You don't understand!  Perhaps you don't understand that your
husband not only stole the hard labor of these men, but even the
little money they brought here and trusted to his thieving hands.
Perhaps you don't know that he stole my husband's hard earnings,
mortgaged these very goods you want to buy, and that he is to-day a
convicted thief, a forger, and a runaway coward.  Perhaps, if you
can't understand ME, you can read the newspaper.  Look!"  She
exultingly opened the paper the sheriff had been reading aloud, and
pointed to the displayed headlines.  "Look! there are the very
words, 'Forgery, Swindling, Embezzlement!'  Do you see?  And
perhaps you can't understand this.  Look!  'Shameful Flight.
Abandons his Wife.  Runs off with a Notorious--'"

"Easy, old gal, easy now.  D--n it!  Will you dry up?  I say.
STOP!"

It was too late!

The sheriff had dashed the paper from the woman's hand, but not
until Mrs. Tucker had read a single line, a line such as she had
sometimes turned from with weary scorn in her careless perusal of
the daily shameful chronicle of domestic infelicity.  Then she had
coldly wondered if there could be any such men and women; and now!
The crowd fell back before her; even the virago was silenced as she
looked at her face.  The humorist's face was as white, but not as
immobile, as he gasped, "Christ! if I don't believe she knew
nothin' of it!"

For a moment the full force of such a supposition, with all its
poignancy, its dramatic intensity, and its pathos, possessed the
crowd.  In the momentary clairvoyance of enthusiasm they caught a
glimpse of the truth, and by one of the strange reactions of human
passion they only waited for a word of appeal or explanation from
her lips to throw themselves at her feet.  Had she simply told her
story they would have believed her; had she cried, fainted, or gone
into hysterics, they would have pitied her.  She did neither.
Perhaps she thought of neither, or indeed of anything that was then
before her eyes.  She walked erect to the door and turned upon the
threshold.  "I mean what I say," she said calmly.  "I don't
understand you.  But whatever just claims you have upon my husband
will be paid by me, or by his lawyer, Captain Poindexter."

She had lost the sympathy but not the respect of her hearers.  They
made way for her with sullen deference as she passed out on the
platform.  But her adversary, profiting by the last opportunity,
burst into an ironical laugh.

"Captain Poindexter, is it?  Well, perhaps he's safe to pay YOUR
bill, but as for your husband's--"

"That's another matter," interrupted a familiar voice with the
greatest cheerfulness; "that's what you were going to say, wasn't
it?  Ha! ha!  Well, Mrs. Patterson," continued Poindexter, stepping
from his buggy, "you never spoke a truer word in your life.  One
moment, Mrs. Tucker.  Let me send you back in the buggy.  Don't
mind ME.  I can get a fresh horse of the sheriff.  I'm quite at
home here.  I say, Patterson, step a few paces this way, will you?
A little further from your wife, please.  That'll do.  You've got a
claim of five thousand dollars against the property, haven't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, that woman just driving away is your one solitary chance of
getting a cent of it.  If your wife insults her again, that chance
is gone.  And if YOU do--"

"Well?"

"As sure as there is a God in Israel and a Supreme Court of the
State of California, I'll kill you in your tracks! . . .  Stay!"

Patterson turned.  The irrepressible look of humorous tolerance of
all human frailty had suffused Poindexter's black eyes with
mischievous moisture.  "If you think it quite safe to confide to
your wife this prospect of her improvement by widowhood, you may!"


CHAPTER III


Mr. Patterson did not inform his wife of the lawyer's personal
threat to himself.  But he managed, after Poindexter had left, to
make her conscious that Mrs. Tucker might be a power to be placated
and feared.  "You've shot off your mouth at her," he said
argumentatively, "and whether you've hit the mark or not you've had
your say.  Ef you think it's worth a possible five thousand dollars
and interest to keep on, heave ahead.  Ef you rather have the
chance of getting the rest in cash, you'll let up on her."  "You
don't suppose," returned Mrs. Patterson contemptuously, "that she's
got anything but what that man of hers--Poindexter--lets her have?"
"The sheriff says," retorted Patterson surlily, "that she's
notified him that she claims the rancho as a gift from her husband
three years ago, and she's in POSSESSION now, and was so when the
execution was out.  It don't make no matter," he added, with gloomy
philosophy, "who's got a full hand as long as WE ain't got the
cards to chip in.  I wouldn't 'a' minded it," he continued
meditatively, "ef Spence Tucker had dropped a hint to me afore he
put out."  "And I suppose," said Mrs. Patterson angrily, "you'd
have put out too?"  "I reckon," said Patterson simply.

Twice or thrice during the evening he referred, more or less
directly, to this lack of confidence shown by his late debtor and
employer, and seemed to feel it more keenly than the loss of
property.  He confided his sentiments quite openly to the sheriff
in possession, over the whiskey and euchre with which these
gentlemen avoided the difficulties of their delicate relations.  He
brooded over it as he handed the keys of the shop to the sheriff
when they parted for the night, and was still thinking of it when
the house was closed, everybody gone to bed, and he was fetching a
fresh jug of water from the well.  The moon was at times obscured
by flying clouds, the avant-couriers of the regular evening shower.
He was stooping over the well, when he sprang suddenly to his feet
again.  "Who's there?" he demanded sharply.

"Hush!" said a voice so low and faint it might have been a whisper
of the wind in the palisades of the corral.  But, indistinct as it
was, it was the voice of the man he was thinking of as far away,
and it sent a thrill of alternate awe and pleasure through his
pulses.

He glanced quickly around.  The moon was hidden by a passing cloud,
and only the faint outlines of the house he had just quitted were
visible.  "Is that you, Spence?" he said tremulously.

"Yes," replied the voice, and a figure dimly emerged from the
corner of the corral.

"Lay low, lay low, for God's sake," said Patterson, hurriedly
throwing himself upon the apparition.  "The sheriff and his posse
are in there."

"But I must speak to you a moment," said the figure.

"Wait," said Patterson, glancing towards the building.  Its blank,
shutterless windows revealed no inner light; a profound silence
encompassed it.  "Come quick," he whispered.  Letting his grasp
slip down to the unresisting hand of the stranger, he half-dragged,
half-led him, brushing against the wall, into the open door of the
deserted bar-room he had just quitted, locked the inner door,
poured a glass of whiskey from a decanter, gave it to him, and then
watched him drain it at a single draught.  The moon came out, and,
falling through the bare windows full upon the stranger's face,
revealed the artistic but slightly disheveled curls and moustache
of the fugitive, Spencer Tucker.

Whatever may have been the real influence of this unfortunate man
upon his fellows, it seemed to find expression in a singular
unanimity of criticism.  Patterson looked at him with a half-
dismal, half-welcoming smile.  "Well, you are a h-ll of a fellow,
ain't you?"

Spencer Tucker passed his hand through his hair and lifted it from
his forehead, with a gesture at once emotional and theatrical.  "I
am a man with a price on me!" he said bitterly.  "Give me up to the
sheriff, and you'll get five thousand dollars.  Help me, and you'll
get nothing.  That's my d----d luck, and yours too, I suppose."

"I reckon you're right there," said Patterson gloomily.  "But I
thought you got clean away.  Went off in a ship--"

"Went off in a boat to a ship," interrupted Tucker savagely; "went
off to a ship that had all my things on board--everything.  The
cursed boat capsized in a squall just off the Heads.  The ship,
d--n her, sailed away, the men thinking I was drowned, likely,
and that they'd make a good thing off my goods, I reckon."

"But the girl, Inez, who was with you, didn't she make a row?"

"Quien sabe?" returned Tucker, with a reckless laugh.  "Well, I
hung on like grim death to that boat's keel until one of those
Chinese fishermen, in a 'dug-out,' hauled me in opposite Saucelito.
I chartered him and his dug-out to bring me down here."

"Why here?" asked Patterson, with a certain ostentatious caution
that ill-concealed his pensive satisfaction.

"You may well ask," returned Tucker, with an equal ostentation of
bitterness, as he slightly waved his companion away.  "But I
reckoned I could trust a white man that I'd been kind to, and who
wouldn't go back on me.  No, no, let me go!  Hand me over to the
sheriff!"

Patterson had suddenly grasped both the hands of the picturesque
scamp before him, with an affection that for an instant almost
shamed the man who had ruined him.  But Tucker's egotism whispered
that this affection was only a recognition of his own superiority,
and felt flattered.  He was beginning to believe that he was really
the injured party.

"What I HAVE and what I have HAD is yours, Spence," returned
Patterson, with a sad and simple directness that made any further
discussion a gratuitous insult.  "I only wanted to know what you
reckoned to do here."

"I want to get over across the Coast Range to Monterey," said
Tucker.  "Once there, one of those coasting schooners will bring me
down to Acapulco, where the ship will put in."

Patterson remained silent for a moment.  "There's a mustang in the
corral you can take--leastways, I shan't know that it's gone--until
to-morrow afternoon.  In an hour from now," he added, looking from
the window, "these clouds will settle down to business.  It will
rain; there will be light enough for you to find your way by the
regular trail over the mountain, but not enough for any one to know
you.  If you can't push through to-night, you can lie over at the
posada on the summit.  Them greasers that keep it won't know you,
and if they did they won't go back on you.  And if they did go back
on you, nobody would believe them.  It's mighty curious," he added,
with gloomy philosophy, "but I reckon it's the reason why
Providence allows this kind of cattle to live among white men and
others made in his image.  Take a piece of pie, won't you?"  He
continued, abandoning this abstract reflection and producing half a
flat pumpkin pie from the bar.  Spencer Tucker grasped the pie with
one hand and his friend's fingers with the other, and for a few
moments was silent from the hurried deglutition of viand and
sentiment.  "YOU'RE a white man, Patterson, anyway," he resumed.
"I'll take your horse, and put it down in our account, at your own
figure.  As soon as this cursed thing is blown over, I'll be back
here and see you through, you bet.  I don't desert my friends,
however rough things go with me."

"I see you don't," returned Patterson, with an unconscious and
serious simplicity that had the effect of the most exquisite irony.
"I was only just saying to the sheriff that if there was anything I
could have done for you, you wouldn't have cut away without letting
me know."  Tucker glanced uneasily at Patterson, who continued, "Ye
ain't wanting anything else?"  Then observing that his former
friend and patron was roughly but newly clothed, and betrayed no
trace of his last escapade, he added, "I see you've got a fresh
harness."

"That d----d Chinaman bought me these at the landing; they're not
much in style or fit," he continued, trying to get a moonlight view
of himself in the mirror behind the bar, "but that don't matter
here."  He filled another glass of spirits, jauntily settled
himself back in his chair, and added, "I don't suppose there are
any girls around, anyway."

"'Cept your wife; she was down here this afternoon," said Patterson
meditatively.

Mr. Tucker paused with the pie in his hand.  "Ah, yes!"  He essayed
a reckless laugh, but that evident simulation failed before
Patterson's melancholy.  With an assumption of falling in with his
friend's manner, rather than from any personal anxiety, he
continued, "Well?"

"That man Poindexter was down here with her.  Put her in the
hacienda to hold possession afore the news came out."

"Impossible!" said Tucker, rising hastily.  "It don't belong--that
is--" he hesitated.

"Yer thinking the creditors 'll get it, mebbe," returned Patterson,
gazing at the floor.  "Not as long as she's in it; no sir!  Whether
it's really hers, or she's only keeping house for Poindexter, she's
a fixture, you bet.  They're a team when they pull together, they
are!"

The smile slowly faded from Tucker's face, that now looked quite
rigid in the moonlight.  He put down his glass and walked to the
window as Patterson gloomily continued, "But that's nothing to you.
You've got ahead of 'em both, and had your revenge by going off
with the gal.  That's what I said all along.  When folks--
especially women folks--wondered how you could leave a woman like
your wife, and go off with a scallawag like that gal, I allers said
they'd find out there was a reason.  And when your wife came
flaunting down here with Poindexter before she'd quite got quit of
you, I reckon they began to see the whole little game.  No sir!  I
knew it wasn't on account of the gal!  Why, when you came here to-
night and told me quite nat'ral-like and easy how she went off in
the ship, and then calmly ate your pie and drank your whiskey after
it, I knew you didn't care for her.  There's my hand, Spence;
you're a trump, even if you are a little looney, eh?  Why, what's
up?"

Shallow and selfish as Tucker was, Patterson's words seemed like a
revelation that shocked him as profoundly as it might have shocked
a nobler nature.  The simple vanity and selfishness that made him
unable to conceive any higher reason for his wife's loyalty than
his own personal popularity and success, now that he no longer
possessed that eclat, made him equally capable of the lowest
suspicions.  He was a dishonored fugitive, broken in fortune and
reputation--why should she not desert him!  He had been unfaithful
to her from wildness, from caprice, from the effect of those
fascinating qualities; it seemed to him natural that she should be
disloyal from more deliberate motives, and he hugged himself with
that belief.  Yet there was enough doubt, enough of haunting
suspicion that he had lost or alienated a powerful affection, to
make him thoroughly miserable.  He returned his friend's grasp
convulsively and buried his face upon his shoulder.  But he was not
above feeling a certain exultation in the effect of his misery upon
the dog-like, unreasoning affection of Patterson, nor could he
entirely refrain from slightly posing his affliction before that
sympathetic but melancholy man.  Suddenly he raised his head, drew
back, and thrust his hand into his bosom with a theatrical gesture.

"What's to keep me from killing Poindexter in his tracks?" he said
wildly.

"Nothin' but HIS shooting first," returned Patterson, with dismal
practicality.  "He's mighty quick, like all them army men.  It's
about even, I reckon, that he don't get ME first," he added in an
ominous voice.

"No!" returned Tucker, grasping his hand again.  "This is not your
affair, Patterson; leave him to me when I come back."

"If he ever gets the drop on me, I reckon he won't wait," continued
Patterson lugubriously.  "He seems to object to my passin'
criticism on your wife, as if she was a queen or an angel."

The blood came to Spencer's cheek, and he turned uneasily to the
window.  "It's dark enough now for a start," he said hurriedly,
"and if I could get across the mountain without lying over at the
summit, it would be a day gained."

Patterson arose without a word, filled a flask of spirit, handed it
to his friend, and silently led the way through the slowly falling
rain and the now settled darkness.  The mustang was quickly secured
and saddled, a heavy poncho afforded Tucker a disguise as well as a
protection from the rain.  With a few hurried, disconnected words,
and an abstracted air, he once more shook his friend's hand and
issued cautiously from the corral.  When out of earshot from the
house he put spurs to the mustang, and dashed into a gallop.

To intersect the mountain road he was obliged to traverse part of
the highway his wife had walked that afternoon, and to pass within
a mile of the casa where she was.  Long before he reached that
point his eyes were straining the darkness in that direction for
some indication of the house which was to him familiar.  Becoming
now accustomed to the even obscurity, less trying to the vision
than the alternate light and shadow of cloud or the full glare of
the moonlight, he fancied he could distinguish its low walls over
the monotonous level.  One of those impulses which had so often
taken the place of resolution in his character suddenly possessed
him to diverge from his course and approach the house.  Why, he
could not have explained.  It was not from any feeling of jealous
suspicion or contemplated revenge--that had passed with the
presence of Patterson; it was not from any vague lingering
sentiment for the woman he had wronged--he would have shrunk from
meeting her at that moment.  But it was full of these and more
possibilities by which he might or might not be guided, and was at
least a movement towards some vague end, and a distraction from
certain thoughts he dared not entertain and could not entirely
dismiss.  Inconceivable and inexplicable to human reason, it might
have been acceptable to the Divine omniscience for its predestined
result.

He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the
meadow, familiar to him already as near the spot where he had
embarked from the Chinaman's boat the day before.  He remembered
that the walls of the hacienda were distinctly visible from the
tules where he had hidden all day, and he now knew that the figures
he had observed near the building, which had deterred his first
attempts at landing, must have been his wife and his friend.  He
knew that a long tongue of the slough filled by the rising tide
followed the marsh, and lay between him and the hacienda.  The
sinking of his horse's hoofs in the spongy soil determined its
proximity, and he made a detour to the right to avoid it.  In doing
so, a light suddenly rose above the distant horizon ahead of him,
trembled faintly, and then burned with a steady lustre.  It was a
light at the hacienda.  Guiding his horse half abstractedly in this
direction, his progress was presently checked by the splashing of
the animal's hoofs in the water.  But the turf below was firm, and
a salt drop that had spattered to his lips told him that it was
only the encroaching of the tide in the meadow.  With his eyes on
the light, he again urged his horse forward.  The rain lulled, the
clouds began to break, the landscape alternately lightened and grew
dark; the outlines of the crumbling hacienda walls that enshrined
the light grew more visible.  A strange and dreamy resemblance to
the long blue-grass plain before his wife's paternal house, as seen
by him during his evening rides to courtship, pressed itself upon
him.  He remembered, too, that she used to put a light in the
window to indicate her presence.  Following this retrospect, the
moon came boldly out, sparkled upon the overflow of silver at his
feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow beyond for a moment,
and then disappeared.  It was dark now, but the lesser earthly star
still shone before him as a guide, and pushing towards it, he
passed in the all-embracing shadow.


CHAPTER IV


As Mrs. Tucker, erect, white, and rigid, drove away from the
tienda, it seemed to her to sink again into the monotonous plain,
with all its horrible realities.  Except that there was now a new
and heart-breaking significance to the solitude and loneliness of
the landscape, all that had passed might have been a dream.  But as
the blood came back to her cheek, and little by little her tingling
consciousness returned, it seemed as if her life had been the
dream, and this last scene the awakening reality.  With eyes
smarting with the moisture of shame, the scarlet blood at times
dyeing her very neck and temples, she muffled her lowered crest in
her shawl and bent over the reins.  Bit by bit she recalled, in
Poindexter's mysterious caution and strange allusions, the
corroboration of her husband's shame and her own disgrace.  This
was why she was brought hither--the deserted wife, and abandoned
confederate!  The mocking glitter of the concave vault above her,
scoured by the incessant wind, the cold stare of the shining pools
beyond, the hard outlines of the Coast Range, and the jarring
accompaniment of her horse's hoofs and rattling buggy wheels
alternately goaded and distracted her.  She found herself repeating
"No! no! no!" with the dogged reiteration of fever.  She scarcely
knew when or how she reached the hacienda.  She was only conscious
that as she entered the patio the dusty solitude that had before
filled her with unrest now came to her like balm.  A benumbing
peace seemed to fall from the crumbling walls; the peace of utter
seclusion, isolation, oblivion, death!  Nevertheless, an hour
later, when the jingle of spurs and bridle were again heard in the
road, she started to her feet with bent brows and a kindling eye,
and confronted Captain Poindexter in the corridor.

"I would not have intruded upon you so soon again," he said
gravely, "but I thought I might perhaps spare you a repetition of
the scene of this morning.  Hear me out, please," he added, with a
gentle, half-deprecating gesture, as she lifted the beautiful scorn
of her eyes to his.  "I have just heard that your neighbor, Don
Jose Santierra, of Los Gatos, is on his way to this house.  He once
claimed this land, and hated your husband, who bought of the rival
claimant, whose grant was confirmed.  I tell you this," he added,
slightly flushing as Mrs. Tucker turned impatiently away, "only to
show you that legally he has no rights, and you need not see him
unless you choose.  I could not stop his coming without perhaps
doing you more harm than good; but when he does come, my presence
under this roof as your legal counsel will enable you to refer him
to me."  He stopped.  She was pacing the corridor with short,
impatient steps, her arms dropped, and her hands clasped rigidly
before her.  "Have I your permission to stay?"

She suddenly stopped in her walk, approached him rapidly, and
fixing her eyes on his, said,--

"Do I know ALL, now--everything?"

He could only reply that she had not yet told him what she had
heard.

"Well," she said scornfully, "that my husband has been cruelly
imposed upon--imposed upon by some wretched woman, who has made him
sacrifice his property, his friends, his honor--everything but me?"

"Everything but whom?" gasped Poindexter.

"But ME!"

Poindexter gazed at the sky, the air, the deserted corridor, the
stones of the patio itself, and then at the inexplicable woman
before him.  Then he said gravely, "I think you know everything."

"Then if my husband has left me all he could--this property," she
went on rapidly, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers, "I
can do with it what I like, can't I?"

"You certainly can."

"Then sell it," she said, with passionate vehemence.  "Sell it--
all! everything!  And sell these."  She darted into her bedroom,
and returned with the diamond rings she had torn from her fingers
and ears when she entered the house.  "Sell them for anything
they'll bring, only sell them at once."

"But for what?" asked Poindexter, with demure lips but twinkling
eyes.

"To pay the debts that this--this--woman has led him into; to
return the money she has stolen!" she went on rapidly, "to keep him
from sharing her infamy!  Can't you understand?"

"But, my dear madam," began Poindexter, "even if this could be
done--"

"Don't tell me 'if it could'--it MUST be done.  Do you think I
could sleep under this roof, propped up by the timbers of that
ruined tienda?  Do you think I could wear those diamonds again,
while that termagant shop-woman can say that her money bought them?
No.  If you are my husband's friend you will do this--for--for his
sake."  She stopped, locked and interlocked her cold fingers before
her, and said, hesitating and mechanically, "You meant well,
Captain Poindexter, in bringing me here, I know!  You must not
think that I blame you for it, or for the miserable result of it
that you have just witnessed.  But if I have gained anything by it,
for God's sake let me reap it quickly, that I may give it to these
people and go!  I have a friend who can aid me to get to my husband
or to my home in Kentucky, where Spencer will yet find me, I know.
I want nothing more."  She stopped again.  With another woman the
pause would have been one of tears.  But she kept her head above
the flood that filled her heart, and the clear eyes fixed upon
Poindexter, albeit pained, were undimmed.

"But this would require time," said Poindexter, with a smile of
compassionate explanation; "you could not sell now, nobody would
buy.  You are safe to hold this property while you are in actual
possession, but you are not strong enough to guarantee it to
another.  There may still be litigation; your husband has other
creditors than these people you have talked with.  But while nobody
could oust you--the wife who would have the sympathies of judge and
jury--it might be a different case with any one who derived title
from you.  Any purchaser would know that you could not sell, or if
you did, it would be at a ridiculous sacrifice."

She listened to him abstractedly, walked to the end of the
corridor, returned, and without looking up, said,--

"I suppose you know her?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"This woman.  You have seen her?"

"Never, to my knowledge."

"And you are his friend!  That's strange."  She raised her eyes to
his.  "Well," she continued impatiently, "who is she? and what is
she?  You know that surely?"

"I know no more of her than what I have said," said Poindexter.
"She is a notorious woman."

The swift color came to Mrs. Tucker's face as if the epithet had
been applied to herself.  "I suppose," she said in a dry voice, as
if she were asking a business question, but with an eye that showed
her rising anger,--"I suppose there is some law by which creatures
of this kind can be followed and brought to justice--some law that
would keep innocent people from suffering for their crimes?"

"I am afraid," said Poindexter, "that arresting her would hardly
help these people over in the tienda."

"I am not speaking of them," responded Mrs. Tucker, with a sudden
sublime contempt for the people whose cause she had espoused: "I am
talking of my husband."

Poindexter bit his lip.  "You'd hardly think of bringing back the
strongest witness against him," he said bluntly.

Mrs. Tucker dropped her eyes and was silent.  A sudden shame
suffused Poindexter's cheek; he felt as if he had struck that woman
a blow.  "I beg your pardon," he said hastily, "I am talking like a
lawyer to a lawyer."  He would have taken any other woman by the
hand in the honest fullness of his apology, but something
restrained him here.  He only looked down gently on her lowered
lashes, and repeated his question if he should remain during the
coming interview with Don Jose: "I must beg you to determine
quickly," he added, "for I already hear him entering the gate."

"Stay," said Mrs. Tucker, as the ringing of spurs and clatter of
hoofs came from the corral.  "One moment."  She looked up suddenly,
and said, "How long had he known her?"  But before he could reply
there was a step in the doorway, and the figure of Don Jose
Santierra emerged from the archway.

He was a man slightly past middle age, fair and well shaven,
wearing a black broadcloth serape, the deeply embroidered opening
of which formed a collar of silver rays around his neck, while a
row of silver buttons down the side seams of his riding trousers,
and silver spurs, completed his singular equipment.  Mrs. Tucker's
swift feminine glance took in these details, as well as the deep
salutation, more formal than the exuberant frontier politeness she
was accustomed to, with which he greeted her.  It was enough to
arrest her first impulse to retreat.  She hesitated and stopped as
Poindexter stepped forward, partly interposing between them,
acknowledging Don Jose's distant recognition of himself with an
ironical accession of his usual humorous tolerance.  The Spaniard
did not seem to notice it, but remained gravely silent before Mrs.
Tucker, gazing at her with an expression of intent and unconscious
absorption.

"You are quite right, Don Jose," said Poindexter, with ironical
concern, "it is Mrs. Tucker.  Your eyes do NOT deceive you.  She
will be glad to do the honors of her house," he continued, with a
simulation of appealing to her, "unless you visit her on business,
when I need not say I shall be only too happy, to attend you, as
before."

Don Jose, with a slight lifting of the eyebrows, allowed himself to
become conscious of the lawyer's meaning.  "It is not of business
that I come to kiss the Senora's hand to-day," he replied, with a
melancholy softness; "it is as her neighbor, to put myself at her
disposition.  Ah! the what have we here for a lady?" he continued,
raising his eyes in deprecation of the surroundings; "a house of
nothing, a place of winds and dry bones, without refreshments, or
satisfaction, or delicacy.  The Senora will not refuse to make us
proud this day to send her of that which we have in our poor home
at Los Gatos, to make her more complete.  Of what shall it be?  Let
her make choice.  Or if she would commemorate this day by accepting
of our hospitality at Los Gatos, until she shall arrange herself
the more to receive us here, we shall have too much honor."

"The Senora would only find it the more difficult to return to this
humble roof again, after once leaving it for Don Jose's hospitality,"
said Poindexter, with a demure glance at Mrs. Tucker.  But the
innuendo seemed to lapse equally unheeded by his fair client and
the stranger.  Raising her eyes with a certain timid dignity which
Don Jose's presence seemed to have called out, she addressed herself
to him.

"You are very kind and considerate, Mister Santierra, and I thank
you.  I know that my husband"--she let the clear beauty of her
translucent eyes rest full on both men--"would thank you too.  But
I shall not be here long enough to accept your kindness in this
house or in your own.  I have but one desire and object now.  It is
to dispose of this property, and indeed all I possess, to pay the
debt of my husband.  It is in your power, perhaps, to help me.  I
am told that you wish to possess Los Cuervos," she went on, equally
oblivious of the consciousness that appeared in Don Jose's face,
and a humorous perplexity on the brow of Poindexter.  "If you can
arrange it with Mr. Poindexter, you will find me a liberal vendor.
That much you can do, and I know you will believe I shall be
grateful.  You can do no more, unless it be to say to your friends
that Mrs. Belle Tucker remains here only for that purpose, and to
carry out what she knows to be the wishes of her husband."  She
paused, bent her pretty crest, dropped a quaint curtsey to the
superior age, the silver braid, and the gentlemanly bearing of Don
Jose, and with the passing sunshine of a smile disappeared from the
corridor.

The two men remained silent for a moment, Don Jose gazing
abstractedly on the door through which she had vanished, until
Poindexter, with a return of his tolerant smile, said, "You have
heard the views of Mrs. Tucker.  You know the situation as well as
she does."

"Ah, yes; possibly better."

Poindexter darted a quick glance at the grave, sallow face of Don
Jose, but detecting no unusual significance in his manner,
continued, "As you see, she leaves this matter in my hands.  Let us
talk like business men.  Have you any idea of purchasing this
property?"

"Of purchasing, ah, no."

Poindexter bent his brows, but quickly relaxed them with a smile of
humorous forgiveness.  "If you have any other idea, Don Jose, I
ought to warn you, as Mrs. Tucker's lawyer, that she is in legal
possession here, and that nothing but her own act can change that
position."

"Ah, so."

Irritated at the shrug which accompanied this, Poindexter continued
haughtily, "If I am to understand, you have nothing to say--"

"To say, ah, yes, possibly.  But"--he glanced toward the door of
Mrs. Tucker's room--"not here."  He stopped, appeared to recall
himself, and with an apologetic smile and a studied but graceful
gesture of invitation, he motioned to the gateway, and said, "Will
you ride?"

"What can the fellow be up to?" muttered Poindexter, as with an
assenting nod he proceeded to remount his horse.  "If he wasn't an
old hidalgo, I'd mistrust him.  No matter! here goes!"

The Don also remounted his half-broken mustang; they proceeded in
solemn silence through the corral, and side by side emerged on the
open plain.  Poindexter glanced around; no other being was in
sight.  It was not until the lonely hacienda had also sunk behind
them that Don Jose broke the silence.

"You say just now we shall speak as business men.  I say no, Don
Marco; I will not.  I shall speak, we shall speak, as gentlemen."

"Go on," said Poindexter, who was beginning to be amused.

"I say just now I will not purchase the rancho from the Senora.
And why?  Look you, Don Marco;" he reined in his horse, thrust his
hand under his serape, and drew out a folded document: "this is
why."

With a smile, Poindexter took the paper from his hand and opened
it.  But the smile faded from his lips as he read.  With blazing
eyes he spurred his horse beside the Spaniard, almost unseating
him, and said sternly, "What does this mean?"

"What does it mean?" repeated Don Jose, with equally flashing eyes,
"I'll tell you.  It means that your client, this man Spencer
Tucker, is a Judas, a traitor!  It means that he gave Los Cuervos
to his mistress a year ago, and that she sold it to me--to me, you
hear!--ME, Jose Santierra, the day before she left!  It means that
the coyote of a Spencer, the thief, who bought these lands of a
thief, and gave them to a thief, has tricked you all.  Look," he
said, rising in his saddle, holding the paper like a baton, and
defining with a sweep of his arm the whole level plain, "all these
lands were once mine, they are mine again to-day.  Do I want to
purchase Los Cuervos? you ask, for you will speak of the BUSINESS.
Well, listen.  I HAVE purchased Los Cuervos, and here is the deed."

"But it has never been recorded," said Poindexter, with a
carelessness he was far from feeling.

"Of a verity, no.  Do you wish that I should record it?" asked Don
Jose, with a return of his simple gravity.

Poindexter bit his lip.  "You said we were to talk like gentlemen,"
he returned.  "Do you think you have come into possession of this
alleged deed like a gentleman?"

Don Jose shrugged his shoulders.  "I found it tossed in the lap of
a harlot.  I bought it for a song.  Eh, what would you?"

"Would you sell it again for a song?" asked Poindexter.

"Ah! what is this?" said Don Jose, lifting his iron-gray brows;
"but a moment ago we would sell everything, for any money.  Now we
would buy.  Is it so?"

"One moment, Don Jose," said Poindexter, with a baleful light in
his dark eyes.  "Do I understand that you are the ally of Spencer
Tucker and his mistress, that you intend to turn this doubly
betrayed wife from the only roof she has to cover her?"

"Ah, I comprehend not.  You heard her say she wished to go.
Perhaps it may please ME to distribute largess to these cattle
yonder, I do not say no.  More she does not ask.  But YOU, Don
Marco, of whom are you advocate?  You abandon your client's
mistress for the wife, is it so?"

"What I may do you will learn hereafter," said Poindexter, who had
regained his composure, suddenly reining up his horse.  "As our
paths seem likely to diverge, they had better begin now.  Good
morning."

"Patience, my friend, patience!  Ah, blessed St. Anthony, what
these Americans are!  Listen.  For what YOU shall do, I do not
inquire.  The question is to me what I"--he emphasized the pronoun
by tapping himself on the breast--"I, Jose Santierra, will do.
Well, I shall tell you.  To-day, nothing.  To-morrow, nothing.  For
a week, for a month, nothing!  After, we shall see."

Poindexter paused thoughtfully.  "Will you give your word, Don
Jose, that you will not press the claim for a month?"

"Truly, on one condition.  Observe!  I do not ask you for an equal
promise, that you will not take this time to defend yourself."  He
shrugged his shoulders.  "No!  It is only this.  You shall promise
that during that time the Senora Tucker shall remain ignorant of
this document."

Poindexter hesitated a moment.  "I promise," he said at last.

"Good.  Adios, Don Marco."

"Adios, Don Jose."

The Spaniard put spurs to his mustang and galloped off in the
direction of Los Gatos.  The lawyer remained for a moment gazing on
his retreating but victorious figure.  For the first time the old
look of humorous toleration with which Mr. Poindexter was in the
habit of regarding all human infirmity gave way to something like
bitterness.  "I might have guessed it," he said, with a slight rise
of color.  "He's an old fool; and she--well, perhaps it's all the
better for her!"  He glanced backwards almost tenderly in the
direction of Los Cuervos, and then turned his head towards the
embarcadero.

As the afternoon wore on, a creaking, antiquated ox-cart arrived at
Los Cuervos, bearing several articles of furniture, and some
tasteful ornaments from Los Gatos, at the same time that a young
Mexican girl mysteriously appeared in the kitchen, as a temporary
assistant to the decrepit Concha.  These were both clearly
attributable to Don Jose, whose visit was not so remote but that
these delicate attentions might have been already projected before
Mrs. Tucker had declined them, and she could not, without marked
discourtesy, return them now.  She did not wish to seem
discourteous; she would like to have been more civil to this old
gentleman, who still retained the evidences of a picturesque and
decorous past, and a repose so different from the life that was
perplexing her.  Reflecting that if he bought the estate these
things would be ready to his hand, and with a woman's instinct
recognizing their value in setting off the house to other
purchasers' eyes, she took a pleasure in tastefully arranging them,
and even found herself speculating how she might have enjoyed them
herself had she been able to keep possession of the property.
After all, it would not have been so lonely if refined and gentle
neighbors, like this old man, would have sympathized with her; she
had an instinctive feeling that, in their own hopeless decay and
hereditary unfitness for this new civilization, they would have
been more tolerant of her husband's failure than his own kind.  She
could not believe that Don Jose really hated her husband for buying
of the successful claimant, as there was no other legal title.
Allowing herself to become interested in the guileless gossip of
the new handmaiden, proud of her broken English, she was drawn into
a sympathy with the grave simplicity of Don Jose's character, a
relic of that true nobility which placed this descendant of the
Castilians and the daughter of a free people on the same level.

In this way the second day of her occupancy of Los Cuervos closed,
with dumb clouds along the gray horizon, and the paroxysms of
hysterical wind growing fainter and fainter outside the walls; with
the moon rising after nightfall, and losing itself in silent and
mysterious confidences with drifting scud.  She went to bed early,
but woke past midnight, hearing, as she thought, her own name
called.  The impression was so strong upon her that she rose, and,
hastily enwrapping herself, went to the dark embrasures of the
oven-shaped windows, and looked out.  The dwarfed oak beside the
window was still dropping from a past shower, but the level waste
of marsh and meadow beyond seemed to advance and recede with the
coming and going of the moon.  Again she heard her name called, and
this time in accents so strangely familiar that with a slight cry
she ran into the corridor, crossed the patio, and reached the open
gate.  The darkness that had, even in this brief interval, again
fallen upon the prospect she tried in vain to pierce with eye and
voice.  A blank silence followed.  Then the veil was suddenly
withdrawn; the vast plain, stretching from the mountain to the sea,
shone as clearly as in the light of day; the moving current of the
channel glittered like black pearls, the stagnant pools like molten
lead; but not a sign of life nor motion broke the monotony of the
broad expanse.  She must have surely dreamed it.  A chill wind
drove her back to the house again; she entered her bedroom, and in
half an hour she was in a peaceful sleep.


CHAPTER V


The two men kept their secret.  Mr. Poindexter convinced Mrs.
Tucker that the sale of Los Cuervos could not be effected until the
notoriety of her husband's flight had been fairly forgotten, and
she was forced to accept her fate.  The sale of her diamonds, which
seemed to her to have realized a singularly extravagant sum,
enabled her to quietly reinstate the Pattersons in the tienda and
to discharge in full her husband's liabilities to the rancheros and
his humbler retainers.

Meanwhile the winter rains had ceased.  It seemed to her as if the
clouds had suddenly one night struck their white tents and stolen
away, leaving the unvanquished sun to mount the vacant sky the next
morning alone, and possess it thenceforward unchallenged.  One
afternoon she thought the long sad waste before her window had
caught some tint of gayer color from the sunset; a week later she
found it a blazing landscape of poppies, broken here and there by
blue lagoons of lupine, by pools of daisies, by banks of dog-roses,
by broad outlying shores of dandelions that scattered their lavish
gold to the foot of the hills, where the green billows of wild oats
carried it on and upwards to the darker crest of pines.  For two
months she was dazzled and bewildered with color.  She had never
before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian Flora,
in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like prodigality.
The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath her feet; the
few circuits of a plough around the outlying corral were enough to
call out a jungle growth of giant grain that almost hid the low
walls of the hacienda.  In this glorious fecundity of the earth, in
this joyous renewal of life and color, in this opulent youth and
freshness of soil and sky, it alone remained, the dead and sterile
Past, left in the midst of buoyant rejuvenescence and resurrection,
like an empty churchyard skull upturned on the springing turf.  Its
bronzed adobe walls mocked the green vine that embraced them, the
crumbling dust of its courtyard remained ungerminating and
unfruitful; to the thousand stirring voices without, its dry lips
alone remained mute, unresponsive and unchanged.

During this time Don Jose had become a frequent visitor at Los
Cuervos, bringing with him at first his niece and sister in a
stately precision of politeness that was not lost on the proud Blue
Grass stranger.  She returned their visit at Los Gatos, and there
made the formal acquaintance of Don Jose's grandmother, a lady who
still regarded the decrepit Concha as a giddy muchacha, and who
herself glittered as with the phosphorescence of refined decay.
Through this circumstance she learned that Don Jose was not yet
fifty, and that his gravity of manner and sedateness was more the
result of fastidious isolation and temperament than years.  She
could not tell why the information gave her a feeling of annoyance,
but it caused her to regret the absence of Poindexter, and to
wonder, also somewhat nervously, why he had lately avoided her
presence.  The thought that he might be doing so from a recollection
of the innuendoes of Mrs. Patterson caused a little tremor of
indignation in her pulses.  "As if--" but she did not finish the
sentence even to herself, and her eyes filled with bitter tears.

Yet she had thought of the husband who had so cruelly wronged her
less feverishly, less impatiently than before.  For she thought she
loved him now the more deeply, because, although she was not
reconciled to his absence, it seemed to keep alive the memory of
what he had been before his one wild act separated them.  She had
never seen the reflection of another woman's eyes in his; the past
contained no haunting recollection of waning or alienated
affection; she could meet him again, and, clasping her arms around
him, awaken as if from a troubled dream without reproach or
explanation.  Her strong belief in this made her patient; she no
longer sought to know the particulars of his flight, and never
dreamed that her passive submission to his absence was partly due
to a fear that something in his actual presence at that moment
would have destroyed that belief forever.

For this reason the delicate reticence of the people at Los Gatos,
and their seclusion from the world which knew of her husband's
fault, had made her encourage the visits of Don Jose, until from
the instinct already alluded to she one day summoned Poindexter to
Los Cuervos, on the day that Don Jose usually called.  But to her
surprise the two men met more or less awkwardly and coldly, and her
tact as hostess was tried to the utmost to keep their evident
antagonism from being too apparent.  The effort to reconcile their
mutual discontent, and some other feeling she did not quite
understand, produced a nervous excitement which called the blood to
her cheek and gave a dangerous brilliancy to her eyes, two
circumstances not unnoticed nor unappreciated by her two guests.
But instead of reuniting them, the prettier Mrs. Tucker became, the
more distant and reserved grew the men, until Don Jose rose before
the usual hour, and with more than usual ceremoniousness departed.

"Then my business does not seem to be with HIM?" said Poindexter,
with quiet coolness, as Mrs. Tucker turned her somewhat mystified
face towards him.  "Or have you anything to say to me about him in
private?"

"I am sure I don't know what you both mean," she returned with a
slight tremor of voice.  "I had no idea you were not on good terms.
I thought you were!  It's very awkward."  Without coquetry and
unconsciously she raised her blue eyes under her lids until the
clear pupils coyly and softly hid themselves in the corners of the
brown lashes, and added, "You have both been so kind to me."

"Perhaps that is the reason," said Poindexter, gravely.  But Mrs.
Tucker refused to accept the suggestion with equal gravity, and
began to laugh.  The laugh, which was at first frank, spontaneous,
and almost child-like, was becoming hysterical and nervous as she
went on, until it was suddenly checked by Poindexter.

"I have had no difficulties with Don Jose Santierra," he said,
somewhat coldly ignoring her hilarity, "but perhaps he is not
inclined to be as polite to the friend of the husband as he is to
the wife."

"Mr. Poindexter!" said Mrs. Tucker quickly, her face becoming pale
again.

"I beg your pardon!" said Poindexter, flushing; "but--"

"You want to say," she interrupted coolly, "that you are not
friends, I see.  Is that the reason why you have avoided this
house?" she continued gently.

"I thought I could be of more service to you elsewhere," he replied
evasively.  "I have been lately following up a certain clue rather
closely.  I think I am on the track of a confidante of--of--that
woman."

A quick shadow passed over Mrs. Tucker's face.  "Indeed!" she said
coldly.  "Then I am to believe that you prefer to spend your
leisure moments in looking after that creature to calling here?"

Poindexter was stupefied.  Was this the woman who only four months
ago was almost vindictively eager to pursue her husband's paramour!
There could be but one answer to it--Don Jose!  Four months ago he
would have smiled compassionately at it from his cynical pre-
eminence.  Now he managed with difficulty to stifle the bitterness
of his reply.

"If you do not wish the inquiry carried on," he began, "of course--"

"I?  What does it matter to me?" she said coolly.  "Do as you
please."

Nevertheless, half an hour later, as he was leaving, she said, with
a certain hesitating timidity, "Do not leave me so much alone here,
and let that woman go."

This was not the only unlooked-for sequel to her innocent desire to
propitiate her best friends.  Don Jose did not call again upon his
usual day, but in his place came Dona Clara, his younger sister.
When Mrs. Tucker had politely asked after the absent Don Jose, Dona
Clara wound her swarthy arms around the fair American's waist and
replied, "But why did you send for the abogado Poindexter when my
brother called?"

"But Captain Poindexter calls as one of my friends," said the
amazed Mrs. Tucker.  "He is a gentleman, and has been a soldier and
an officer," she added with some warmth.

"Ah, yes, a soldier of the law, what you call an oficial de
policia, a chief of gendarmes, my sister, but not a gentleman--a
camarero to protect a lady."

Mrs. Tucker would have uttered a hasty reply, but the perfect and
good-natured simplicity of Dona Clara withheld her.  Nevertheless,
she treated Don Jose with a certain reserve at their next meeting,
until it brought the simple-minded Castilian so dangerously near
the point of demanding an explanation which implied too much that
she was obliged to restore him temporarily to his old footing.
Meantime she had a brilliant idea.  She would write to Calhoun
Weaver, whom she had avoided since that memorable day.  She would
say she wished to consult him.  He would come to Los Cuervos; he
might suggest something to lighten this weary waiting; at least she
would show them all that she had still old friends.  Yet she did
not dream of returning to her Blue Grass home; her parents had died
since she left; she shrank from the thought of dragging her ruined
life before the hopeful youth of her girlhood's companions.

Mr. Calhoun Weaver arrived promptly, ostentatiously, oracularly,
and cordially, but a little coarsely.  He had--did she remember?--
expected this from the first.  Spencer had lost his head through
vanity, and had attempted too much.  It required foresight and
firmness, as he himself--who had lately made successful
"combinations" which she might perhaps have heard of--well knew.
But Spencer had got the "big head."  "As to that woman--a devilish
handsome woman too!--well, everybody knew that Spencer always had a
weakness that way, and he would say--but if she didn't care to hear
any more about her--well, perhaps she was right.  That was the best
way to take it."  Sitting before her, prosperous, weak,
egotistical, incompetent, unavailable, and yet filled with a vague
kindliness of intent, Mrs. Tucker loathed him.  A sickening
perception of her own weakness in sending for him, a new and aching
sense of her utter isolation and helplessness, seemed to paralyze
her.

"Nat'rally you feel bad," he continued, with the large air of a
profound student of human nature.  "Nat'rally, nat'rally you're
kept in an uncomfortable state, not knowing jist how you stand.
There ain't but one thing to do.  Jist rise up, quiet like, and get
a divorce agin Spencer.  Hold on!  There ain't a judge or jury in
California that wouldn't give it to you right off the nail, without
asking questions.  Why, you 'ld get it by default if you wanted to;
you 'ld just have to walk over the course!  And then, Belle," he
drew his chair still nearer her, "when you've settled down again--
well!--I don't mind renewing that offer I once made ye, before
Spencer ever came round ye--I don't mind, Belle, I swear I don't!
Honest Injin!  I'm in earnest, there's my hand!"

Mrs. Tucker's reply has not been recorded.  Enough that half an
hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of
tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other
evidence of mental and moral disturbance.  His cordiality and
oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to
suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with
an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress
in the doorway, who waved to him a silent but half-compassionate
farewell.

At about this time a slight change in her manner was noticed by the
few who saw her more frequently.  Her apparently invincible
girlishness of spirit had given way to a certain matronly
seriousness.  She applied herself to her household cares and the
improvement of the hacienda with a new sense of duty and a settled
earnestness, until by degrees she wrought into it not only her
instinctive delicacy and taste, but part of her own individuality.
Even the rude rancheros and tradesmen who were permitted to enter
the walls in the exercise of their calling began to speak
mysteriously of the beauty of this garden of the almarjal.  She
went out but seldom, and then accompanied by the one or the other
of her female servants, in long drives on unfrequented roads.  On
Sundays she sometimes drove to the half-ruined mission church of
Santa Inez, and hid herself, during mass, in the dim monastic
shadows of the choir.  Gradually the poorer people whom she met in
these journeys began to show an almost devotional reverence for
her, stopping in the roads with uncovered heads for her to pass, or
making way for her in the tienda or plaza of the wretched town with
dumb courtesy.  She began to feel a strange sense of widowhood,
that, while it at times brought tears to her eyes, was, not without
a certain tender solace.  In the sympathy and simpleness of this
impulse she went as far as to revive the mourning she had worn for
her parents, but with such a fatal accenting of her beauty, and
dangerous misinterpreting of her condition to eligible bachelors
strange to the country, that she was obliged to put it off again.
Her reserve and dignified manner caused others to mistake her
nationality for that of the Santierras, and in "Dona Bella" the
simple Mrs. Tucker was for a while forgotten.  At times she even
forgot it herself.  Accustomed now almost entirely to the accents
of another language and the features of another race, she would sit
for hours in the corridor, whose massive bronzed inclosure even her
tasteful care could only make an embowered mausoleum of the Past,
or gaze abstractedly from the dark embrasures of her windows across
the stretching almarjal to the shining lagoon beyond that
terminated the estuary.  She had a strange fondness for this
tranquil mirror, which under sun or stars always retained the
passive reflex of the sky above, and seemed to rest her weary eyes.
She had objected to one of the plans projected by Poindexter to
redeem the land and deepen the water at the embarcadero, as it
would have drained the lagoon, and the lawyer had postponed the
improvement to gratify her fancy.  So she kept it through the long
summer unchanged save by the shadows of passing wings or the lazy
files of sleeping sea-fowl.

On one of these afternoons she noticed a slowly moving carriage
leave the high road and cross the almarjal skirting the edge of the
lagoon.  If it contained visitors for Los Cuervos they had
evidently taken a shorter cut without waiting to go on to the
regular road which intersected the highway at right angles a mile
farther on.  It was with some sense of annoyance and irritation
that she watched the trespass, and finally saw the vehicle approach
the house.  A few moments later the servant informed her that Mr.
Patterson would like to see her alone.  When she entered the
corridor, which in the dry season served as a reception hall, she
was surprised to see that Patterson was not alone.  Near him stood
a well-dressed handsome woman, gazing about her with good-humored
admiration of Mrs. Tucker's taste and ingenuity.

"It don't look much like it did two years ago," said the stranger
cheerfully.  "You've improved it wonderfully."

Stiffening slightly, Mrs. Tucker turned inquiringly to Mr.
Patterson.  But that gentleman's usual profound melancholy appeared
to be intensified by the hilarity of his companion.  He only sighed
deeply and rubbed his leg with the brim of his hat in gloomy
abstraction.

"Well! go on, then," said the woman, laughing and nudging him.  "Go
on--introduce me--can't you?  Don't stand there like a tombstone.
You won't?  Well, I'll introduce myself."  She laughed again, and
then, with an excellent imitation of Patterson's lugubrious
accents, said, "Mr. Spencer Tucker's wife that IS, allow me to
introduce you to Mr. Spencer Tucker's sweetheart that WAS!  Hold
on!  I said THAT WAS.  For true as I stand here, ma'am--and I
reckon I wouldn't stand here if it wasn't true--I haven't set eyes
on him since the day he left you."

"It's the Gospel truth, every word," said Patterson, stirred into a
sudden activity by Mrs. Tucker's white and rigid face.  "It's the
frozen truth, and I kin prove it.  For I kin swear that when that
there young woman was sailin' outer the Golden Gate, Spencer Tucker
was in my bar room; I kin swear that I fed him, lickered him, give
him a hoss and set him in his road to Monterey that very night."

"Then, where is he now?" said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly facing them.

They looked at each other, and then looked at Mrs. Tucker.  Then
both together replied slowly and in perfect unison, "That's--what--
we--want--to--know."  They seemed so satisfied with this effect
that they as deliberately repeated, "Yes--that's--what--we--want--
to--know."

Between the shock of meeting the partner of her husband's guilt and
the unexpected revelation to her inexperience, that in suggestion
and appearance there was nothing beyond the recollection of that
guilt that was really shocking in the woman--between the
extravagant extremes of hope and fear suggested by their words,
there was something so grotesquely absurd in the melodramatic
chorus that she with difficulty suppressed a hysterical laugh.

"That's the way to take it," said the woman, putting her own good-
humored interpretation upon Mrs. Tucker's expression.  "Now, look
here!  I'll tell you all about it."  She carefully selected the
most comfortable chair, and sitting down, lightly crossed her hands
in her lap.  "Well, I left here on the 13th of last January on the
ship Argo, calculating that your husband would join the ship just
inside the Heads.  That was our arrangement, but if anything
happened to prevent him, he was to join me in Acapulco.  Well!  He
didn't come aboard, and we sailed without him.  But it appears now
he did attempt to join the ship, but his boat was capsized.  There,
now, don't be alarmed! he wasn't drowned, as Patterson can swear
to--no, catch HIM! not a hair of him was hurt; but I--I was bundled
off to the end of the earth in Mexico, alone, without a cent to
bless me.  For true as you live, that hound of a captain, when he
found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated
all his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch.  If I hadn't
met a man down there that offered to marry me and brought me here,
I might have died there, I reckon.  But I did, and here I am.  I
went down there as your husband's sweetheart, I've come back as the
wife of an honest man, and I reckon it's about square!"

There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-
satisfied, so contagiously good-humored in the woman's perfect
moral unconsciousness, that even if Mrs. Tucker had been less
preoccupied her resentment would have abated.  But her eyes were
fixed on the gloomy face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock
the sepulchres of his memory and disinter his deeply buried
thoughts.

"You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs. Capting Baxter--ez
used to be French Inez of New Orleans--hez told ye.  Ye kin take
everything she's unloaded.  And it's only doin' the square thing to
her to say, she hain't done it out o' no cussedness, but just to
satisfy herself, now she's a married woman and past such
foolishness.  But that ain't neither here nor there.  The gist of
the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was at the tienda the day
after she sailed and after his boat capsized."  He then gave a
detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary but
truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already
known that the following week he visited the Summit House and was
surprised to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he
ever sailed from Monterey.

"But why was this not told to me before?" said Mrs. Tucker,
suddenly.  "Why not at the time?  Why," she demanded almost
fiercely, turning from the one to the other, "has this been kept
from me?"

"I'll tell ye why," said Patterson, sinking with crushed submission
into a chair.  "When I found he wasn't where he ought to be, I got
to lookin' elsewhere.  I knew the track of the hoss I lent him by a
loose shoe.  I examined; and found he had turned off the high road
somewhere beyond the lagoon, jist as if he was makin' a bee line
here."

"Well," said Mrs. Tucker, breathlessly.

"Well," said Patterson, with the resigned tone of an accustomed
martyr, "mebbe I'm a God-forsaken idiot, but I reckon he DID come
yer.  And mebbe I'm that much of a habitooal lunatic, but thinking
so, I calkilated you'ld know it without tellin'."

With their eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Tucker felt the quick blood
rush to her cheeks, although she knew not why.  But they were
apparently satisfied with her ignorance, for Patterson resumed,
yet more gloomily:--

"Then if he wasn't hidin' here beknownst to you, he must have
changed his mind agin and got away by the embarcadero.  The only
thing wantin' to prove that idea is to know how he got a boat,
and what he did with the hoss.  And thar's one more idea, and ez
that can't be proved," continued Patterson, sinking his voice
still lower, "mebbe it's accordin' to God's laws."

Unsympathetic to her as the speaker had always been and still
was, Mrs. Tucker felt a vague chill creep over her that seemed
to be the result of his manner more than his words.  "And that
idea is . . . ?" she suggested with pale lips.

"It's this!  Fust, I don't say it means much to anybody but me.
I've heard of these warnings afore now, ez comin' only to folks ez
hear them for themselves alone, and I reckon I kin stand it, if
it's the will o' God.  The idea is then--that--Spencer Tucker--WAS
DROWNDED in that boat; the idea is"--his voice was almost lost in a
hoarse whisper--"that it was no living man that kem to me that
night, but a spirit that kem out of the darkness and went back into
it!  No eye saw him but mine--no ears heard him but mine.  I reckon
it weren't intended it should."  He paused, and passed the flap of
his hat across his eyes.  "The pie, you'll say, is agin it," he
continued in the same tone of voice,--"the whiskey is agin it--a
few cuss words that dropped from him, accidental like, may have
been agin it.  All the same they mout have been only the little
signs and tokens that it was him."

But Mrs. Baxter's ready laugh somewhat rudely dispelled the
infection of Patterson's gloom.  "I reckon the only spirit was that
which you and Spencer consumed," she said, cheerfully.  "I don't
wonder you're a little mixed.  Like as not you've misunderstood his
plans."  Patterson shook his head.  "He'll turn up yet, alive and
kicking!  Like as not, then, Poindexter knows where he is all the
time."

"Impossible!  He would have told me," said Mrs. Tucker, quickly.

Mrs. Baxter looked at Patterson without speaking.  Patterson
replied by a long lugubrious whistle.

"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Tucker, drawing back with cold
dignity.

"You don't?" returned Mrs. Baxter.  "Bless your innocent heart!
Why was he so keen to hunt me up at first, shadowing my friends and
all that, and why has he dropped it now he knows I'm here, if he
didn't know where Spencer was?"

"I can explain that," interrupted Mrs. Tucker, hastily, with a
blush of confusion.  "That is--I--"

"Then mebbe you kin explain too," broke in Patterson with gloomy
significance, "why he has bought up most of Spencer's debts
himself, and perhaps you're satisfied it ISN'T to hold the whip
hand of him and keep him from coming back openly.  Pr'aps you know
why he's movin' heaven and earth to make Don Jose Santierra sell
the ranch, and why the Don don't see it all."

"Don Jose sell Los Cuervos!  Buy it, you mean?" said Mrs. Tucker.
"I offered to sell it to him."

Patterson arose from the chair, looked despairingly around him,
passed his hand sadly across his forehead, and said: "It's come!  I
knew it would.  It's the warning!  It's suthing betwixt jim-jams
and doddering idjiocy.  Here I'd hev been willin' to swear that
Mrs. Baxter here told me SHE had sold this yer ranch nearly two
years ago to Don Jose, and now you--"

"Stop!" said Mrs. Tucker, in a voice that chilled them.

She was standing upright and rigid, as if stricken to stone.  "I
command you to tell me what this means!" she said, turning only her
blazing eyes upon the woman.

Even the ready smile faded from Mrs. Baxter's lips as she replied
hesitatingly and submissively: "I thought you knew already that
Spencer had given this ranch to me.  I sold it to Don Jose to get
the money for us to go away with.  It was Spencer's idea--"

"You lie!" said Mrs. Tucker.

There was a dead silence.  The wrathful blood that had quickly
mounted to Mrs. Baxter's cheek, to Patterson's additional
bewilderment, faded as quickly.  She did not lift her eyes again to
Mrs. Tucker's, but, slowly raising herself from her seat, said, "I
wish to God I did lie; but it's true.  And it's true that I never
touched a cent of the money, but gave it all to him!"  She laid her
hand on Patterson's arm, and said, "Come! let us go," and led him a
few steps towards the gateway.  But here Patterson paused, and
again passed his hand over his melancholy brow.  The necessity of
coherently and logically closing the conversation impressed itself
upon his darkening mind.  "Then you don't happen to have heard
anything of Spencer?" he said sadly, and vanished with Mrs. Baxter
through the gate.

Left alone to herself, Mrs. Tucker raised her hands above her head
with a little cry, interlocked her rigid fingers, and slowly
brought her palms down upon her upturned face and eyes, pressing
hard as if to crush out all light and sense of life before her.
She stood thus for a moment motionless and silent, with the rising
wind whispering without and flecking her white morning dress with
gusty shadows from the arbor.  Then, with closed eyes, dropping her
hands to her breast, still pressing hard, she slowly passed them
down the shapely contours of her figure to the waist, and with
another cry cast them off as if she were stripping herself of some
loathsome garment.  Then she walked quickly to the gateway, looked
out, returned to the corridor, unloosening and taking off her
wedding-ring from her finger as she walked.  Here she paused, then
slowly and deliberately rearranged the chairs and adjusted the gay-
colored rugs that draped them, and quietly re-entered her chamber.


Two days afterwards the sweating steed of Captain Poindexter was
turned loose in the corral, and a moment later the captain entered
the corridor.  Handing a letter to the decrepit Concha, who seemed
to be utterly disorganized by its contents, and the few curt words
with which it was delivered, he gazed silently upon the vacant
bower, still fresh and redolent with the delicacy and perfume of
its graceful occupant, until his dark eyes filled with unaccustomed
moisture.  But his reverie was interrupted by the sound of jingling
spurs without, and the old humor struggled back in his eyes as Don
Jose impetuously entered.  The Spaniard started back, but instantly
recovered himself.

"So I find you here.  Ah! it is well!" he said passionately,
producing a letter from his bosom.  "Look!  Do you call this honor?
Look how you keep your compact!"

Poindexter coolly took the letter.  It contained a few words of
gentle dignity from Mrs. Tucker, informing Don Jose that she had
only that instant learned of his just claims upon Los Cuervos,
tendering him her gratitude for his delicate intentions, but
pointing out with respectful firmness that he must know that a
moment's further acceptance of his courtesy was impossible.

"She has gained this knowledge from no word of mine," said
Poindexter, calmly.  "Right or wrong, I have kept my promise to
you.  I have as much reason to accuse you of betraying my secret in
this," he added coldly, as he took another letter from his pocket
and handed it to Don Jose.

It seemed briefer and colder, but was neither.  It reminded
Poindexter that as he had again deceived her she must take the
government of her affairs in her own hands henceforth.  She
abandoned all the furniture and improvements she had put in Los
Cuervos to him, to whom she now knew she was indebted for them.
She could not thank him for what his habitual generosity
impelled him to do for any woman, but she could forgive him for
misunderstanding her like any other woman, perhaps she should say,
like a child.  When he received this she would be already on her
way to her old home in Kentucky, where she still hoped to be able
by her own efforts to amass enough to discharge her obligations to
him.

"She does not speak of her husband, this woman," said Don Jose,
scanning Poindexter's face.  "It is possible she rejoins him, eh?"

"Perhaps in one way she has never left him, Don Jose," said
Poindexter, with grave significance.

Don Jose's face flushed, but he returned carelessly, "And the
rancho, naturally you will not buy it now?"

"On the contrary, I shall abide by my offer," said Poindexter,
quietly.

Don Jose eyed him narrowly, and then said, "Ah, we shall consider
of it."

He did consider it, and accepted the offer.  With the full control
of the land, Captain Poindexter's improvements, so indefinitely
postponed, were actively pushed forward.  The thick walls of the
hacienda were the first to melt away before them; the low lines of
corral were effaced, and the early breath of the summer trade winds
swept uninterruptedly across the now leveled plain to the
embarcadero, where a newer structure arose.  A more vivid green
alone marked the spot where the crumbling adobe walls of the casa
had returned to the parent soil that gave it.  The channel was
deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic
mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue
Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lustreless, an opaque quagmire of
noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man
forever.  On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los
Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and going in
mysterious clouds, or laboring in thick and writhing masses, as if
they were continuing the work of improvement begun by human agency.
So well had they done the work that by the end of a week only a few
scattered white objects remained glittering on the surface of the
quickly drying soil.  But they were the bones of the missing
outcast, Spencer Tucker!

       .        .        .        .        .        .

The same spring a breath of war swept over a foul, decaying
quagmire of the whole land, before which such passing deeds as
these were blown as vapor.  It called men of all rank and condition
to battle for a nation's life, and among the first to respond were
those into whose boyish hands had been placed the nation's honor.
It returned the epaulets to Poindexter's shoulder with the addition
of a double star, carried him triumphantly to the front, and left
him, at the end of a summer's day and a hard-won fight, sorely
wounded, at the door of a Blue Grass farmhouse.  And the woman who
sought him out and ministered to his wants said timidly, as she
left her hand in his, "I told you I should live to repay you."



LEFT OUT ON LONE STAR MOUNTAIN.


CHAPTER I


There was little doubt that the Lone Star claim was "played out."
Not dug out, worked out, washed out, but PLAYED out.  For two years
its five sanguine proprietors had gone through the various stages
of mining enthusiasm; had prospected and planned, dug and doubted.
They had borrowed money with hearty but unredeeming frankness,
established a credit with unselfish abnegation of all responsibility,
and had borne the disappointment of their creditors with a cheerful
resignation which only the consciousness of some deep Compensating
Future could give.  Giving little else, however, a singular
dissatisfaction obtained with the traders, and, being accompanied
with a reluctance to make further advances, at last touched the
gentle stoicism of the proprietors themselves.  The youthful
enthusiasm which had at first lifted the most ineffectual trial, the
most useless essay, to the plane of actual achievement, died out,
leaving them only the dull, prosaic record of half-finished
ditches, purposeless shafts, untenable pits, abandoned engines, and
meaningless disruptions of the soil upon the Lone Star claim, and
empty flour sacks and pork barrels in the Lone Star cabin.

They had borne their poverty, if that term could be applied to a
light renunciation of all superfluities in food, dress, or
ornament, ameliorated by the gentle depredations already alluded
to, with unassuming levity.  More than that: having segregated
themselves from their fellow-miners of Red Gulch, and entered upon
the possession of the little manzanita-thicketed valley five miles
away, the failure of their enterprise had assumed in their eyes
only the vague significance of the decline and fall of a general
community, and to that extent relieved them of individual
responsibility.  It was easier for them to admit that the Lone Star
claim was "played out" than confess to a personal bankruptcy.
Moreover, they still retained the sacred right of criticism of
government, and rose superior in their private opinions to their
own collective wisdom.  Each one experienced a grateful sense of
the entire responsibility of the other four in the fate of their
enterprise.

On December 24, 1863, a gentle rain was still falling over the
length and breadth of the Lone Star claim.  It had been falling for
several days, had already called a faint spring color to the wan
landscape, repairing with tender touches the ravages wrought by the
proprietors, or charitably covering their faults.  The ragged seams
in gulch and canyon lost their harsh outlines, a thin green mantle
faintly clothed the torn and abraded hillside.  A few weeks more,
and a veil of forgetfulness would be drawn over the feeble failures
of the Lone Star claim.  The charming derelicts themselves,
listening to the raindrops on the roof of their little cabin, gazed
philosophically from the open door, and accepted the prospect as a
moral discharge from their obligations.  Four of the five partners
were present.  The Right and Left Bowers, Union Mills, and the
Judge.

It is scarcely necessary to say that not one of these titles was
the genuine name of its possessor.  The Right and Left Bowers were
two brothers; their sobriquets, a cheerful adaptation from the
favorite game of euchre, expressing their relative value in the
camp.  The mere fact that Union Mills had at one time patched his
trousers with an old flour sack legibly bearing that brand of its
fabrication, was a tempting baptismal suggestion that the other
partners could not forego.  The Judge, a singularly inequitable
Missourian, with no knowledge whatever of the law, was an
inspiration of gratuitous irony.

Union Mills, who had been for some time sitting placidly on the
threshold with one leg exposed to the rain, from a sheer indolent
inability to change his position, finally withdrew that weather-
beaten member, and stood up.  The movement more or less deranged
the attitudes of the other partners, and was received with cynical
disfavor.  It was somewhat remarkable that, although generally
giving the appearance of healthy youth and perfect physical
condition, they one and all simulated the decrepitude of age and
invalidism, and after limping about for a few moments, settled back
again upon their bunks and stools in their former positions.  The
Left Bower lazily replaced a bandage that he had worn around his
ankle for weeks without any apparent necessity, and the Judge
scrutinized with tender solicitude the faded cicatrix of a scratch
upon his arm.  A passive hypochondria, born of their isolation, was
the last ludicrously pathetic touch to their situation.

The immediate cause of this commotion felt the necessity of an
explanation.

"It would have been just as easy for you to have stayed outside
with your business leg, instead of dragging it into private life in
that obtrusive way," retorted the Right Bower; "but that exhaustive
effort isn't going to fill the pork barrel.  The grocery man at
Dalton says--what's that he said?" he appealed lazily to the Judge.

"Said he reckoned the Lone Star was about played out, and he didn't
want any more in his--thank you!" repeated the Judge with a
mechanical effort of memory utterly devoid of personal or present
interest.

"I always suspected that man, after Grimshaw begun to deal with
him," said the Left Bower.  "They're just mean enough to join hands
against us."  It was a fixed belief of the Lone Star partners that
they were pursued by personal enmities.

"More than likely those new strangers over in the Fork have been
paying cash and filled him up with conceit," said Union Mills,
trying to dry his leg by alternately beating it or rubbing it
against the cabin wall.  "Once begin wrong with that kind of snipe
and you drag everybody down with you."

This vague conclusion was received with dead silence.  Everybody
had become interested in the speaker's peculiar method of drying
his leg, to the exclusion of the previous topic.  A few offered
criticism, no one assistance.

"Who did the grocery man say that to?" asked the Right Bower,
finally returning to the question.

"The Old man," answered the Judge.

"Of course," ejaculated the Right Bower sarcastically.

"Of course," echoed the other partners together.  "That's like him.
The Old Man all over!"

It did not appear exactly what was like the Old Man, or why it was
like him, but generally that he alone was responsible for the
grocery man's defection.  It was put more concisely by Union Mills.

"That comes of letting him go there!  It's just a fair provocation
to any man to have the Old Man sent to him.  They can't, sorter,
restrain themselves at him.  He's enough to spoil the credit of the
Rothschilds."

"That's so," chimed in the Judge.  "And look at his prospecting.
Why, he was out two nights last week, all night, prospecting in the
moonlight for blind leads, just out of sheer foolishness."

"It was quite enough for me," broke in the Left Bower, "when the
other day, you remember when, he proposed to us white men to settle
down to plain ground sluicing, making 'grub' wages just like any
Chinaman.  It just showed his idea of the Lone Star claim."

"Well, I never said it afore," added Union Mills, "but when that
one of the Mattison boys came over here to examine the claim with
an eye to purchasin', it was the Old Man that took the conceit out
of him.  He just as good as admitted that a lot of work had got to
be done afore any pay ore could be realized.  Never even asked him
over to the shanty here to jine us in a friendly game; just kept
him, so to speak, to himself.  And naturally the Mattisons didn't
see it."

A silence followed, broken only by the rain monotonously falling on
the roof, and occasionally through the broad adobe chimney, where
it provoked a retaliating hiss and splutter from the dying embers
of the hearth.  The Right Bower, with a sudden access of energy,
drew the empty barrel before him, and taking a pack of well-worn
cards from his pocket, began to make a "solitaire" upon the lid.
The others gazed at him with languid interest.

"Makin' it for anythin'?" asked Mills.

The Right Bower nodded.

The Judge and Left Bower, who were partly lying in their respective
bunks, sat up to get a better view of the game.  Union Mills slowly
disengaged himself from the wall and leaned over the "solitaire"
player.  The Right Bower turned the last card in a pause of almost
thrilling suspense, and clapped it down on the lid with fateful
emphasis.

"It went!" said the Judge in a voice of hushed respect.  "What did
you make it for?" he almost whispered.

"To know if we'd make the break we talked about and vamose the
ranch.  It's the FIFTH time today," continued the Right Bower in a
voice of gloomy significance.  "And it went agin bad cards too."

"I ain't superstitious," said the Judge, with awe and fatuity
beaming from every line of his credulous face, "but it's flyin' in
the face of Providence to go agin such signs as that."

"Make it again, to see if the Old Man must go," suggested the Left
Bower.

The suggestion was received with favor, the three men gathering
breathlessly around the player.  Again the fateful cards were
shuffled deliberately, placed in their mysterious combination, with
the same ominous result.  Yet everybody seemed to breathe more
freely, as if relieved from some responsibility, the Judge
accepting this manifest expression of Providence with resigned
self-righteousness.

"Yes, gentlemen," resumed the Left Bower, serenely, as if a calm
legal decision had just been recorded, "we must not let any
foolishness or sentiment get mixed up with this thing, but look at
it like business men.  The only sensible move is to get up and get
out of the camp."

"And the Old Man?" queried the Judge.

"The Old Man--hush! he's coming."

The doorway was darkened by a slight lissome shadow.  It was the
absent partner, otherwise known as "the Old Man."  Need it be added
that he was a BOY of nineteen, with a slight down just clothing his
upper lip!

"The creek is up over the ford, and I had to 'shin' up a willow on
the bank and swing myself across," he said, with a quick, frank
laugh; "but all the same, boys, it's going to clear up in about an
hour, you bet.  It's breaking away over Bald Mountain, and there's
a sun flash on a bit of snow on Lone Peak.  Look! you can see it
from here.  It's for all the world like Noah's dove just landed on
Mount Ararat.  It's a good omen."

From sheer force of habit the men had momentarily brightened up at
the Old Man's entrance.  But the unblushing exhibition of degrading
superstition shown in the last sentence recalled their just
severity.  They exchanged meaning glances.  Union Mills uttered
hopelessly to himself: "Hell's full of such omens."

Too occupied with his subject to notice this ominous reception, the
Old Man continued: "I reckon I struck a fresh lead in the new
grocery man at the Crossing.  He says he'll let the Judge have a
pair of boots on credit, but he can't send them over here; and
considering that the Judge has got to try them anyway, it don't
seem to be asking too much for the Judge to go over there.  He says
he'll give us a barrel of pork and a bag of flour if we'll give him
the right of using our tail-race and clean out the lower end of it."

"It's the work of a Chinaman, and a four days' job," broke in the
Left Bower.

"It took one white man only two hours to clean out a third of it,"
retorted the Old Man triumphantly, "for I pitched in at once with a
pick he let me have on credit, and did that amount of work this
morning, and told him the rest of you boys would finish it this
afternoon."

A slight gesture from the Right Bower checked an angry exclamation
from the Left.  The Old Man did not notice either, but, knitting
his smooth young brow in a paternally reflective fashion, went on:
"You'll have to get a new pair of trousers, Mills, but as he
doesn't keep clothing, we'll have to get some canvas and cut you
out a pair.  I traded off the beans he let me have for some tobacco
for the Right Bower at the other shop, and got them to throw in a
new pack of cards.  These are about played out.  We'll be wanting
some brushwood for the fire; there's a heap in the hollow.  Who's
going to bring it in?  It's the Judge's turn, isn't it?  Why,
what's the matter with you all?"

The restraint and evident uneasiness of his companions had at last
touched him.  He turned his frank young eyes upon them; they
glanced helplessly at each other.  Yet his first concern was for
them, his first instinct paternal and protecting.  He ran his eyes
quickly over them; they were all there and apparently in their
usual condition.  "Anything wrong with the claim?" he suggested.

Without looking at him the Right Bower rose, leaned against the
open door with his hands behind him and his face towards the
landscape, and said, apparently to the distant prospect: "The
claim's played out, the partnership's played out, and the sooner we
skedaddle out of this the better.  If," he added, turning to the
Old Man, "if YOU want to stay, if you want to do Chinaman's work at
Chinaman's wages, if you want to hang on to the charity of the
traders at the Crossing, you can do it, and enjoy the prospects and
the Noah's doves alone.  But we're calculatin' to step out of it."

"But I haven't said I wanted to do it ALONE," protested the Old Man
with a gesture of bewilderment.

"If these are your general ideas of the partnership," continued the
Right Bower, clinging to the established hypothesis of the other
partners for support, "it ain't ours, and the only way we can prove
it is to stop the foolishness right here.  We calculated to
dissolve the partnership and strike out for ourselves elsewhere.
You're no longer responsible for us, nor we for you.  And we reckon
it's the square thing to leave you the claim and the cabin, and all
it contains.  To prevent any trouble with the traders, we've drawn
up a paper here--"

"With a bonus of fifty thousand dollars each down, and the rest to
be settled on my children," interrupted the Old Man, with a half-
uneasy laugh.  "Of course.  But--" he stopped suddenly, the blood
dropped from his fresh cheek, and he again glanced quickly round
the group.  "I don't think--I--I quite sabe, boys," he added, with
a slight tremor of voice and lip.  "If it's a conundrum, ask me an
easier one."

Any lingering doubt he might have had of their meaning was
dispelled by the Judge.  "It's about the softest thing you kin drop
into, Old Man," he said confidentially; "if I hadn't promised the
other boys to go with them, and if I didn't need the best medical
advice in Sacramento for my lungs, I'd just enjoy staying with
you."

"It gives a sorter freedom to a young fellow like you, Old Man,
like goin' into the world on your own capital, that every
Californian boy hasn't got," said Union Mills, patronizingly.

"Of course it's rather hard papers on us, you know, givin' up
everything, so to speak; but it's for your good, and we ain't goin'
back on you," said the Left Bower, "are we, boys?"

The color had returned to the Old Man's face a little more quickly
and freely than usual.  He picked up the hat he had cast down, put
it on carefully over his brown curls, drew the flap down on the
side towards his companions, and put his hands in his pockets.
"All right," he said, in a slightly altered voice.  "When do you
go?"

"To-day," answered the Left Bower.  "We calculate to take a
moonlight pasear over to the Cross Roads and meet the down stage at
about twelve to-night.  There's plenty of time yet," he added, with
a slight laugh; "it's only three o'clock now."

There was a dead silence.  Even the rain withheld its continuous
patter, a dumb, gray film covered the ashes of the hushed hearth.
For the first time the Right Bower exhibited some slight
embarrassment.

"I reckon it's held up for a spell," he said, ostentatiously
examining the weather, "and we might as well take a run round the
claim to see if we've forgotten nothing.  Of course, we'll be back
again," he added hastily, without looking at the Old Man, "before
we go, you know."

The others began to look for their hats, but so awkwardly and with
such evident preoccupation of mind that it was not at first
discovered that the Judge had his already on.  This raised a laugh,
as did also a clumsy stumble of Union Mills against the pork
barrel, although that gentleman took refuge from his confusion and
secured a decent retreat by a gross exaggeration of his lameness,
as he limped after the Right Bower.  The Judge whistled feebly.
The Left Bower, in a more ambitious effort to impart a certain
gayety to his exit, stopped on the threshold and said, as if in
arch confidence to his companions, "Darned if the Old Man don't
look two inches higher since he became a proprietor," laughed
patronizingly, and vanished.

If the newly-made proprietor had increased in stature, he had not
otherwise changed his demeanor.  He remained in the same attitude
until the last figure disappeared behind the fringe of buckeye that
hid the distant highway.  Then he walked slowly to the fire-place,
and, leaning against the chimney, kicked the dying embers together
with his foot.  Something dropped and spattered in the film of hot
ashes.  Surely the rain had not yet ceased!

His high color had already fled except for a spot on either cheek-
bone that lent a brightness to his eyes.  He glanced around the
cabin.  It looked familiar and yet strange.  Rather, it looked
strange BECAUSE still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the
new atmosphere that surrounded it--discordant with the echo of
their last meeting, and painfully accenting the change.  There were
the four "bunks," or sleeping berths, of his companions, each still
bearing some traces of the individuality of its late occupant with
a dumb loyalty that seemed to make their light-hearted defection
monstrous.  In the dead ashes of the Judge's pipe, scattered on his
shelf, still lived his old fire; in the whittled and carved edges
of the Left Bower's bunk still were the memories of bygone days of
delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes clustered round a knot of
one of the beams there was still the record of the Right Bower's
old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings of female
loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of their
old extravagant devotion--all a mute protest to the change.

He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted
into their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up
truancy like his own, and became one of that gypsy family.  How
they had taken the place of relations and household in his boyish
fancy, filling it with the unsubstantial pageantry of a child's
play at grown-up existence, he knew only too well.  But how, from
being a pet and protege, he had gradually and unconsciously
asserted his own individuality and taken upon his younger shoulders
not only a poet's keen appreciation of that life, but its actual
responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he never suspected.  He
had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their ways, a novice
in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had encouraged
it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an excuse
for a renunciation of HIM.  The poetry that had for two years
invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their
existence was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled.
The lesson of those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are
apt to fail; their discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising
indignation, stirred by a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and
eyes.  It was slow to come, but was none the less violent that it
had been preceded by the benumbing shock of shame and pride.

I hope I shall not prejudice the reader's sympathies if my duty as
a simple chronicler compels me to state, therefore, that the sober
second thought of this gentle poet was to burn down the cabin on
the spot with all its contents.  This yielded to a milder counsel--
waiting for the return of the party, challenging the Right Bower, a
duel to the death, perhaps himself the victim, with a crushing
explanation in extremis, "It seems we are ONE too many.  No matter;
it is settled now.  Farewell!"  Dimly remembering, however, that
there was something of this in the last well-worn novel they had
read together, and that his antagonist might recognize it, or even
worse, anticipate it himself, the idea was quickly rejected.
Besides, the opportunity for an apotheosis of self-sacrifice was
past.  Nothing remained now but to refuse the proffered bribe of
claim and cabin by letter, for he must not wait their return.  He
tore a leaf from a blotted diary, begun and abandoned long since,
and essayed to write.  Scrawl after scrawl was torn up, until his
fury had cooled down to a frigid third personality.  "Mr. John Ford
regrets to inform his late partners that their tender of house, of
furniture," however, seemed too inconsistent with the pork-barrel
table he was writing on; a more eloquent renunciation of their
offer became frivolous and idiotic from a caricature of Union
Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the other side of
the leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and
impassioned exposition of his feelings, the legible addendum of
"Oh, ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness!"--the forgotten
first line of a popular song, which no scratching would erase--
seemed too like an ironical postscript to be thought of for a
moment.  He threw aside his pen and cast the discordant record of
past foolish pastime into the dead ashes of the hearth.

How quiet it was.  With the cessation of the rain the wind too had
gone down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door.
He walked to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect.  In
this listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant
reverberation, a mere phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a
distant blast in the hills--that left the silence more marked and
oppressive.  As he turned again into the cabin a change seemed to
have come over it.  It already looked old and decayed.  The
loneliness of years of desertion seemed to have taken possession of
it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in the beams and rafters.  To his
excited fancy the few disordered blankets and articles of clothing
seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks there was a hideous
resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to a withered and
mummied corpse.  So it might look in after years when some passing
stranger--but he stopped.  A dread of the place was beginning to
creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous
sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the long,
long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude;
summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing
around that empty shell and voice its desolation.  He gathered
together hastily a few articles that were especially his own--
rather that the free communion of the camp, from indifference or
accident, had left wholly to him.  He hesitated for a moment over
his rifle, but, scrupulous in his wounded pride, turned away and
left the familiar weapon that in the dark days had so often
provided the dinner or breakfast of the little household.  Candor
compels me to state that his equipment was not large nor eminently
practical.  His scant pack was a light weight for even his young
shoulders, but I fear he thought more of getting away from the Past
than providing for the Future.

With this vague but sole purpose he left the cabin, and almost
mechanically turned his steps towards the creek he had crossed that
morning.  He knew that by this route he would avoid meeting his
companions; its difficulties and circuitousness would exercise his
feverish limbs and give him time for reflection.  He had determined
to leave the claim, but whence he had not yet considered.  He
reached the bank of the creek where he had stood two hours before;
it seemed to him two years.  He looked curiously at his reflection
in one of the broad pools of overflow, and fancied he looked older.
He watched the rush and outset of the turbid current hurrying to
meet the South Fork, and to eventually lose itself in the yellow
Sacramento.  Even in his preoccupation he was impressed with a
likeness to himself and his companions in this flood that had burst
its peaceful boundaries.  In the drifting fragments of one of their
forgotten flumes washed from the bank, he fancied he saw an omen of
the disintegration and decay of the Lone Star claim.

The strange hush in the air that he had noticed before--a calm so
inconsistent with that hour and the season as to seem portentous--
became more marked in contrast to the feverish rush of the
turbulent water-course.  A few clouds lazily huddled in the west
apparently had gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent
poppies.  There was a gleam as of golden water everywhere along the
horizon, washing out the cold snowpeaks, and drowning even the
rising moon.  The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim
irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless
engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully
created to direct and carry.  But by some peculiar trick of the
atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was
lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star
mountain.  That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim, the
gaunt monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening
splendor, kept its radiance unquenched long after the glow had
fallen from the encompassing skies, and when at last the rising
moon, step by step, put out the fires along the winding valley and
plains, and crept up the bosky sides of the canyon, the vanishing
sunset was lost only to reappear as a golden crown.

The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a
momentary picturesque interest.  It had been the favorite ground of
his prospecting exploits, its lowest flank had been scarred in the
old enthusiastic days with hydraulic engines, or pierced with
shafts, but its central position in the claim and its superior
height had always given it a commanding view of the extent of their
valley and its approaches, and it was this practical pre-eminence
that alone attracted him at that moment.  He knew that from its
crest he would be able to distinguish the figures of his companions,
as they crossed the valley near the cabin, in the growing moonlight.
Thus he could avoid encountering them on his way to the high road,
and yet see them, perhaps, for the last time.  Even in his sense of
injury there was a strange satisfaction in the thought.

The ascent was toilsome, but familiar.  All along the dim trail he
was accompanied by gentler memories of the past, that seemed, like
the faint odor of spiced leaves and fragrant grasses wet with the
rain and crushed beneath his ascending tread, to exhale the sweeter
perfume in his effort to subdue or rise above them.  There was the
thicket of manzanita, where they had broken noonday bread together;
here was the rock beside their maiden shaft, where they had poured
a wild libation in boyish enthusiasm of success; and here the ledge
where their first flag, a red shirt heroically sacrificed, was
displayed from a long-handled shovel to the gaze of admirers below.
When he at last reached the summit, the mysterious hush was still
in the air, as if in breathless sympathy with his expedition.  In
the west, the plain was faintly illuminated, but disclosed no
moving figures.  He turned towards the rising moon, and moved
slowly to the eastern edge.  Suddenly he stopped.  Another step
would have been his last!  He stood upon the crumbling edge of a
precipice.  A landslip had taken place on the eastern flank,
leaving the gaunt ribs and fleshless bones of Lone Star mountain
bare in the moonlight.  He understood now the strange rumble and
reverberation he had heard; he understood now the strange hush of
bird and beast in brake and thicket!

Although a single rapid glance convinced him that the slide had
taken place in an unfrequented part of the mountain, above an
inaccessible canyon, and reflection assured him his companions
could not have reached that distance when it took place, a feverish
impulse led him to descend a few rods in the track of the
avalanche.  The frequent recurrence of outcrop and angle made this
comparatively easy.  Here he called aloud; the feeble echo of his
own voice seemed only a dull impertinence to the significant
silence.  He turned to reascend; the furrowed flank of the mountain
before him lay full in the moonlight.  To his excited fancy, a
dozen luminous star-like points in the rocky crevices started into
life as he faced them.  Throwing his arm over the ledge above him,
he supported himself for a moment by what appeared to be a
projection of the solid rock.  It trembled slightly.  As he raised
himself to its level, his heart stopped beating.  It was simply a
fragment detached from the outcrop, lying loosely on the ledge but
upholding him by ITS OWN WEIGHT ONLY.  He examined it with
trembling fingers; the encumbering soil fell from its sides and
left its smoothed and worn protuberances glistening in the
moonlight.  It was virgin gold!

Looking back upon that moment afterwards, he remembered that he was
not dazed, dazzled, or startled.  It did not come to him as a
discovery or an accident, a stroke of chance or a caprice of
fortune.  He saw it all in that supreme moment; Nature had worked
out their poor deduction.  What their feeble engines had essayed
spasmodically and helplessly against the curtain of soil that hid
the treasure, the elements had achieved with mightier but more
patient forces.  The slow sapping of the winter rains had loosened
the soil from the auriferous rock, even while the swollen stream
was carrying their impotent and shattered engines to the sea.

What mattered that his single arm could not lift the treasure he
had found!  What mattered that to unfix those glittering stars
would still tax both skill and patience!  The work was done, the
goal was reached! even his boyish impatience was content with that.
He rose slowly to his feet, unstrapped his long-handled shovel from
his back, secured it in the crevice, and quietly regained the
summit.

It was all his own!  His own by right of discovery under the law of
the land, and without accepting a favor from THEM.  He recalled
even the fact that it was HIS prospecting on the mountain that
first suggested the existence of gold in the outcrop and the use of
the hydraulic.  HE had never abandoned that belief, whatever the
others had done.  He dwelt somewhat indignantly to himself on this
circumstance, and half unconsciously faced defiantly towards the
plain below.  But it was sleeping peacefully in the full sight of
the moon, without life or motion.  He looked at the stars; it was
still far from midnight.  His companions had no doubt long since
returned to the cabin to prepare for their midnight journey.  They
were discussing him, perhaps laughing at him, or worse, pitying him
and his bargain.  Yet here was his bargain!  A slight laugh he gave
vent to here startled him a little, it sounded so hard and so
unmirthful, and so unlike, as he oddly fancied, what he really
THOUGHT.  But WHAT did he think?

Nothing mean or revengeful; no, they never would say THAT.  When he
had taken out all the surface gold and put the mine in working
order, he would send them each a draft for a thousand dollars.  Of
course, if they were ever ill or poor he would do more.  One of the
first, the very first things he should do would be to send them
each a handsome gun and tell them that he only asked in return the
old-fashioned rifle that once was his.  Looking back at the moment
in after years, he wondered that, with this exception, he made no
plans for his own future, or the way he should dispose of his newly
acquired wealth.  This was the more singular as it had been the
custom of the five partners to lie awake at night, audibly
comparing with each other what they would do in case they made a
strike.  He remembered how, Alnaschar-like, they nearly separated
once over a difference in the disposal of a hundred thousand
dollars that they never had, nor expected to have.  He remembered
how Union Mills always began his career as a millionnaire by a
"square meal" at Delmonico's; how the Right Bower's initial step
was always a trip home "to see his mother"; how the Left Bower
would immediately placate the parents of his beloved with priceless
gifts (it may be parenthetically remarked that the parents and the
beloved one were as hypothetical as the fortune); and how the Judge
would make his first start as a capitalist by breaking a certain
faro bank in Sacramento.  He himself had been equally eloquent in
extravagant fancy in those penniless days, he who now was quite
cold and impassive beside the more extravagant reality.

How different it might have been!  If they had only waited a day
longer! if they had only broken their resolves to him kindly and
parted in good will!  How he would long ere this have rushed to
greet them with the joyful news!  How they would have danced around
it, sung themselves hoarse, laughed down their enemies, and run up
the flag triumphantly on the summit of the Lone Star Mountain!  How
they would have crowned him "the Old Man," "the hero of the camp!"
How he would have told them the whole story; how some strange
instinct had impelled him to ascend the summit, and how another
step on that summit would have precipitated him into the canyon!
And how--but what if somebody else, Union Mills or the Judge, had
been the first discoverer?  Might they not have meanly kept the
secret from him; have selfishly helped themselves and done--

"What YOU are doing now."

The hot blood rushed to his cheek, as if a strange voice were at
his ear.  For a moment he could not believe that it came from his
own pale lips until he found himself speaking.  He rose to his
feet, tingling with shame, and began hurriedly to descend the
mountain.

He would go to them, tell them of his discovery, let them give him
his share, and leave them forever.  It was the only thing to be
done, strange that he had not thought of it at once.  Yet it was
hard, very hard and cruel to be forced to meet them again.  What
had he done to suffer this mortification?  For a moment he actually
hated this vulgar treasure that had forever buried under its gross
ponderability the light and careless past, and utterly crushed out
the poetry of their old, indolent, happy existence.

He was sure to find them waiting at the Cross Roads where the coach
came past.  It was three miles away, yet he could get there in time
if he hastened.  It was a wise and practical conclusion of his
evening's work, a lame and impotent conclusion to his evening's
indignation.  No matter.  They would perhaps at first think he had
come to weakly follow them, perhaps they would at first doubt his
story.  No matter.  He bit his lips to keep down the foolish rising
tears, but still went blindly forward.

He saw not the beautiful night, cradled in the dark hills, swathed
in luminous mists, and hushed in the awe of its own loveliness!
Here and there the moon had laid her calm face on lake and
overflow, and gone to sleep embracing them, until the whole plain
seemed to be lifted into infinite quiet.  Walking on as in a dream,
the black, impenetrable barriers of skirting thickets opened and
gave way to vague distances that it appeared impossible to reach,
dim vistas that seemed unapproachable.  Gradually he seemed himself
to become a part of the mysterious night.  He was becoming as
pulseless, as calm, as passionless.

What was that?  A shot in the direction of the cabin! yet so faint,
so echoless, so ineffective in the vast silence, that he would have
thought it his fancy but for the strange instinctive jar upon his
sensitive nerves.  Was it an accident, or was it an intentional
signal to him?  He stopped; it was not repeated, the silence
reasserted itself, but this time with an ominous death-like
suggestion.  A sudden and terrible thought crossed his mind.  He
cast aside his pack and all encumbering weight, took a deep breath,
lowered his head and darted like a deer in the direction of the
challenge.


CHAPTER II


The exodus of the seceding partners of the Lone Star claim had been
scarcely an imposing one.  For the first five minutes after
quitting the cabin, the procession was straggling and vagabond.
Unwonted exertion had exaggerated the lameness of some, and
feebleness of moral purpose had predisposed the others to obtrusive
musical exhibition.  Union Mills limped and whistled with affected
abstraction; the Judge whistled and limped with affected
earnestness.  The Right Bower led the way with some show of
definite design; the Left Bower followed with his hands in his
pockets.  The two feebler natures, drawn together in unconscious
sympathy, looked vaguely at each other for support.

"You see," said the Judge, suddenly, as if triumphantly concluding
an argument, "there ain't anything better for a young fellow than
independence.  Nature, so to speak, points the way.  Look at the
animals."

"There's a skunk hereabouts," said Union Mills, who was supposed to
be gifted with aristocratically sensitive nostrils, "within ten
miles of this place; like as not crossing the Ridge.  It's always
my luck to happen out just at such times.  I don't see the
necessity anyhow of trapesing round the claim now, if we calculate
to leave it to-night."

Both men waited to observe if the suggestion was taken up by the
Right and Left Bower moodily plodding ahead.  No response
following, the Judge shamelessly abandoned his companion.

"You wouldn't stand snoopin' round instead of lettin' the Old Man
get used to the idea alone?  No; I could see all along that he was
takin' it in, takin' it in, kindly but slowly, and I reckoned the
best thing for us to do was to git up and git until he'd got round
it."  The Judge's voice was slightly raised for the benefit of the
two before him.

"Didn't he say," remarked the Right Bower, stopping suddenly and
facing the others, "didn't he say that that new trader was goin' to
let him have some provisions anyway?"

Union Mills turned appealingly to the Judge; that gentleman was
forced to reply, "Yes; I remember distinctly he said it.  It was
one of the things I was particular about on his account," responded
the Judge, with the air of having arranged it all himself with the
new trader.  "I remember I was easier in my mind about it."

"But didn't he say," queried the Left Bower, also stopping short,
"suthin' about it's being contingent on our doing some work on the
race?"

The Judge turned for support to Union Mills, who, however, under
the hollow pretense of preparing for a long conference, had
luxuriously seated himself on a stump.  The Judge sat down also,
and replied, hesitatingly, "Well, yes!  Us or him."

"Us or him," repeated the Right Bower, with gloomy irony.  "And you
ain't quite clear in your mind, are you, if YOU haven't done the
work already?  You're just killing yourself with this spontaneous,
promiscuous, and premature overwork; that's what's the matter with
you."

"I reckon I heard somebody say suthin' about it's being a
Chinaman's three-day job," interpolated the Left Bower, with equal
irony, "but I ain't quite clear in my mind about that."

"It'll be a sorter distraction for the Old Man," said Union Mills,
feebly--"kinder take his mind off his loneliness."

Nobody taking the least notice of the remark, union Mills stretched
out his legs more comfortably and took out his pipe.  He had
scarcely done so when the Right Bower, wheeling suddenly, set off
in the direction of the creek.  The Left Bower, after a slight
pause, followed without a word.  The Judge, wisely conceiving it
better to join the stronger party, ran feebly after him, and left
Union Mills to bring up a weak and vacillating rear.

Their course, diverging from Lone Star Mountain, led them now
directly to the bend of the creek, the base of their old
ineffectual operations.  Here was the beginning of the famous tail-
race that skirted the new trader's claim, and then lost its way in
a swampy hollow.  It was choked with debris; a thin, yellow stream
that once ran through it seemed to have stopped work when they did,
and gone into greenish liquidation.

They had scarcely spoken during this brief journey, and had
received no other explanation from the Right Bower, who led them,
than that afforded by his mute example when he reached the race.
Leaping into it without a word, he at once began to clear away the
broken timbers and driftwood.  Fired by the spectacle of what
appeared to be a new and utterly frivolous game, the men gayly
leaped after him, and were soon engaged in a fascinating struggle
with the impeded race.  The Judge forgot his lameness in springing
over a broken sluice-box; Union Mills forgot his whistle in a happy
imitation of a Chinese coolie's song.  Nevertheless, after ten
minutes of this mild dissipation, the pastime flagged; Union Mills
was beginning to rub his leg when a distant rumble shook the earth.
The men looked at each other; the diversion was complete; a languid
discussion of the probabilities of its being an earthquake or a
blast followed, in the midst of which the Right Bower, who was
working a little in advance of the others, uttered a warning cry
and leaped from the race.  His companions had barely time to follow
before a sudden and inexplicable rise in the waters of the creek
sent a swift irruption of the flood through the race.  In an
instant its choked and impeded channel was cleared, the race was
free, and the scattered debris of logs and timber floated upon its
easy current.  Quick to take advantage of this labor-saving
phenomenon, the Lone Star partners sprang into the water, and by
disentangling and directing the eddying fragments completed their
work.

"The Old Man oughter been here to see this," said the Left Bower;
"it's just one o' them climaxes of poetic justice he's always
huntin' up.  It's easy to see what's happened.  One o' them high-
toned shrimps over in the Excelsior claim has put a blast in too
near the creek.  He's tumbled the bank into the creek and sent the
back water down here just to wash out our race.  That's what I call
poetical retribution."

"And who was it advised us to dam the creek below the race and make
it do the thing?" asked the Right Bower, moodily.

"That was one of the Old Man's ideas, I reckon," said the Left
Bower, dubiously.

"And you remember," broke in the Judge with animation, "I allus
said, 'Go slow, go slow.  You just hold on and suthin' will
happen.'  And," he added, triumphantly, "you see suthin' has
happened.  I don't want to take credit to myself, but I reckoned on
them Excelsior boys bein' fools, and took the chances."

"And what if I happen to know that the Excelsior boys ain't
blastin' to-day?" said the Right Bower, sarcastically.

As the Judge had evidently based his hypothesis on the alleged fact
of a blast, he deftly evaded the point.  "I ain't saying the Old
Man's head ain't level on some things; he wants a little more sabe
of the world.  He's improved a good deal in euchre lately, and in
poker--well! he's got that sorter dreamy, listenin'-to-the-angels
kind o' way that you can't exactly tell whether he's bluffin' or
has got a full hand.  Hasn't he?" he asked, appealing to Union
Mills.

But that gentleman, who had been watching the dark face of the
Right Bower, preferred to take what he believed to be his cue from
him.  "That ain't the question," he said virtuously; "we ain't
takin' this step to make a card sharp out of him.  We're not doin'
Chinamen's work in this race to-day for that.  No, sir!  We're
teachin' him to paddle his own canoe."  Not finding the sympathetic
response he looked for in the Right Bower's face, he turned to the
Left.

"I reckon we were teachin' him our canoe was too full," was the
Left Bower's unexpected reply.  "That's about the size of it."

The Right Bower shot a rapid glance under his brows at his brother.
The latter, with his hands in his pockets, stared unconsciously at
the rushing waters, and then quietly turned away.  The Right Bower
followed him.  "Are you goin' back on us?" he asked.

"Are you?" responded the other.

"No!"

"NO, then it is," returned the Left Bower quietly.  The elder
brother hesitated in half-angry embarrassment.

"Then what did you mean by saying we reckoned our canoe was too
full?"

"Wasn't that our idea?" returned the Left Bower, indifferently.
Confounded by this practical expression of his own unformulated
good intentions, the Right Bower was staggered.

"Speakin' of the Old Man," broke in the Judge, with characteristic
infelicity, "I reckon he'll sort o' miss us, times like these.  We
were allers runnin' him and bedevilin' him, after work, just to get
him excited and amusin', and he'll kinder miss that sort o'
stimulatin'.  I reckon we'll miss it too, somewhat.  Don't you
remember, boys, the night we put up that little sell on him and
made him believe we'd struck it rich in the bank of the creek, and
got him so conceited, he wanted to go off and settle all our debts
at once?"

"And how I came bustin' into the cabin with a pan full of iron
pyrites and black sand," chuckled Union Mills, continuing the
reminiscences, "and how them big gray eyes of his nearly bulged out
of his head.  Well, it's some satisfaction to know we did our duty
by the young fellow even in those little things."  He turned for
confirmation of their general disinterestedness to the Right Bower,
but he was already striding away, uneasily conscious of the lazy
following of the Left Bower, like a laggard conscience at his back.
This movement again threw Union Mills and the Judge into feeble
complicity in the rear, as the procession slowly straggled homeward
from the creek.

Night had fallen.  Their way lay through the shadow of Lone Star
Mountain, deepened here and there by the slight, bosky ridges that,
starting from its base, crept across the plain like vast roots of
its swelling trunk.  The shadows were growing blacker as the moon
began to assert itself over the rest of the valley, when the Right
Bower halted suddenly on one of these ridges.  The Left Bower
lounged up to him, and stopped also, while the two others came up
and completed the group.

"There's no light in the shanty," said the Right Bower in a low
voice, half to himself and, half in answer to their inquiring
attitude.  The men followed the direction of his finger.  In the
distance the black outline of the Lone Star cabin stood out
distinctly in the illumined space.  There was the blank, sightless,
external glitter of moonlight on its two windows that seemed to
reflect its dim vacancy, empty alike of light, and warmth, and
motion.

"That's sing'lar," said the Judge in an awed whisper.

The Left Bower, by simply altering the position of his hands in his
trousers' pockets, managed to suggest that he knew perfectly the
meaning of it, had always known it; but that being now, so to
speak, in the hands of Fate, he was callous to it.  This much, at
least, the elder brother read in his attitude.  But anxiety at that
moment was the controlling impulse of the Right Bower, as a certain
superstitious remorse was the instinct of the two others, and
without heeding the cynic, the three started at a rapid pace for
the cabin.

They reached it silently, as the moon, now riding high in the
heavens, seemed to touch it with the tender grace and hushed repose
of a tomb.  It was with something of this feeling that the Right
Bower softly pushed open the door; it was with something of this
dread that the two others lingered on the threshold, until the
Right Bower, after vainly trying to stir the dead embers on the
hearth into life with his foot, struck a match and lit their
solitary candle.  Its flickering light revealed the familiar
interior unchanged in aught but one thing.  The bunk that the Old
Man had occupied was stripped of its blankets; the few cheap
ornaments and photographs were gone; the rude poverty of the bare
boards and scant pallet looked up at them unrelieved by the bright
face and gracious youth that had once made them tolerable.  In the
grim irony of that exposure, their own penury was doubly conscious.
The little knapsack, the teacup and coffee-pot that had hung near
his bed, were gone also.  The most indignant protest, the most
pathetic of the letters he had composed and rejected, whose torn
fragments still littered the floor, could never have spoken with
the eloquence of this empty space!  The men exchanged no words: the
solitude of the cabin, instead of drawing them together, seemed to
isolate each one in selfish distrust of the others.  Even the
unthinking garrulity of Union Mills and the Judge was checked.  A
moment later, when the Left Bower entered the cabin, his presence
was scarcely noticed.

The silence was broken by a joyous exclamation from the Judge.  He
had discovered the Old Man's rifle in the corner, where it had been
at first overlooked.  "He ain't gone yet, gentlemen--for yer's his
rifle," he broke in, with a feverish return of volubility, and a
high excited falsetto.  "He wouldn't have left this behind.  No!  I
knowed it from the first.  He's just outside a bit, foraging for
wood and water.  No, sir!  Coming along here I said to Union Mills--
didn't I?--'Bet your life the Old Man's not far off, even if he
ain't in the cabin.'  Why, the moment I stepped foot--"

"And I said coming along," interrupted Union Mills, with equally
reviving mendacity, 'Like as not he's hangin' round yer and lyin'
low just to give us a surprise.'  He! ho!"

"He's gone for good, and he left that rifle here on purpose," said
the Left Bower in a low voice, taking the weapon almost tenderly in
his hands.

"Drop it, then!" said the Right Bower.  The voice was that of his
brother, but suddenly changed with passion.  The two other partners
instinctively drew back in alarm.

"I'll not leave it here for the first comer," said the Left Bower,
calmly, "because we've been fools and he too.  It's too good a
weapon for that."

"Drop it, I say!" said the Right Bower, with a savage stride
towards him.

The younger brother brought the rifle to a half charge with a white
face but a steady eye.

"Stop where you are!" he said collectedly.  "Don't row with ME,
because you haven't either the grit to stick to your ideas or the
heart to confess them wrong.  We've followed your lead, and--here
we are!  The camp's broken up--the Old Man's gone--and we're going.
And as for the d----d rifle--"

"Drop it, do you hear!" shouted the Right Bower, clinging to that
one idea with the blind pertinacity of rage and a losing cause.
"Drop it!"

The Left Bower drew back, but his brother had seized the barrel
with both hands.  There was a momentary struggle, a flash through
the half-lighted cabin, and a shattering report.  The two men fell
back from each other; the rifle dropped on the floor between them.

The whole thing was over so quickly that the other two partners had
not had time to obey their common impulse to separate them, and
consequently even now could scarcely understand what had passed.
It was over so quickly that the two actors themselves walked back
to their places, scarcely realizing their own act.

A dead silence followed.  The Judge and Union Mills looked at each
other in dazed astonishment, and then nervously set about their
former habits, apparently in that fatuous belief common to such
natures, that they were ignoring a painful situation.  The Judge
drew the barrel towards him, picked up the cards, and began
mechanically to "make a patience," on which Union Mills gazed with
ostentatious interest, but with eyes furtively conscious of the
rigid figure of the Right Bower by the chimney and the abstracted
face of the Left Bower at the door.  Ten minutes had passed in this
occupation, the Judge and Union Mills conversing in the furtive
whispers of children unavoidably but fascinatedly present at a
family quarrel, when a light step was heard upon the crackling
brushwood outside, and the bright panting face of the Old Man
appeared upon the threshold.  There was a shout of joy; in another
moment he was half-buried in the bosom of the Right Bower's shirt,
half-dragged into the lap of the Judge, upsetting the barrel, and
completely encompassed by the Left Bower and Union Mills.  With the
enthusiastic utterance of his name the spell was broken.

Happily unconscious of the previous excitement that had provoked
this spontaneous unanimity of greeting, the Old Man, equally
relieved, at once broke into a feverish announcement of his
discovery.  He painted the details, with, I fear, a slight
exaggeration of coloring, due partly to his own excitement, and
partly to justify their own.  But he was strangely conscious that
these bankrupt men appeared less elated with their personal interest
in their stroke of fortune than with his own success.  "I told you
he'd do it," said the Judge, with a reckless unscrupulousness of
statement that carried everybody with it; "look at him! the game
little pup."  "Oh no! he ain't the right breed, is he?" echoed Union
Mills with arch irony, while the Right and Left Bower, grasping
either hand, pressed a proud but silent greeting that was half new
to him, but wholly delicious.  It was not without difficulty that he
could at last prevail upon them to return with him to the scene of
his discovery, or even then restrain them from attempting to carry
him thither on their shoulders on the plea of his previous prolonged
exertions.  Once only there was a momentary embarrassment.  "Then
you fired that shot to bring me back?" said the Old Man, gratefully.
In the awkward silence that followed, the hands of the two brothers
sought and grasped each other, penitently.  "Yes," interposed the
Judge, with delicate tact, "ye see the Right and Left Bower almost
quarreled to see which should be the first to fire for ye.  I
disremember which did"--"I never touched the trigger," said the Left
Bower, hastily.  With a hurried backward kick, the Judge resumed,
"It went off sorter spontaneous."

The difference in the sentiment of the procession that once more
issued from the Lone Star cabin did not fail to show itself in each
individual partner according to his temperament.  The subtle tact
of Union Mills, however, in expressing an awakened respect for
their fortunate partner by addressing him, as if unconsciously, as
"Mr. Ford" was at first discomposing, but even this was forgotten
in their breathless excitement as they neared the base of the
mountain.  When they had crossed the creek the Right Bower stopped
reflectively.

"You say you heard the slide come down before you left the cabin?"
he said, turning to the Old Man.

"Yes; but I did not know then what it was.  It was about an hour
and a half after you left," was the reply.

"Then look here, boys," continued the Right Bower with superstitious
exultation; "it was the SLIDE that tumbled into the creek, overflowed
it, and helped US clear out the race!"

It seemed so clear that Providence had taken the partners of the
Lone Star directly in hand that they faced the toilsome ascent of
the mountain with the assurance of conquerors.  They paused only on
the summit to allow the Old Man to lead the way to the slope that
held their treasure.  He advanced cautiously to the edge of the
crumbling cliff, stopped, looked bewildered, advanced again, and
then remained white and immovable.  In an instant the Right Bower
was at his side.

"Is anything the matter?  Don't--don't look so, Old Man, for God's
sake!"

The Old Man pointed to the dull, smooth, black side of the
mountain, without a crag, break, or protuberance, and said with
ashen lips:--

"It's gone!"

       .        .        .        .        .        .

And it was gone!  A SECOND slide had taken place, stripping the
flank of the mountain, and burying the treasure and the weak
implement that had marked its side deep under a chaos of rock and
debris at its base.

"Thank God!"  The blank faces of his companions turned quickly to
the Right Bower.  "Thank God!" he repeated, with his arm round the
neck of the Old Man.  "Had he stayed behind he would have been
buried too."  He paused, and, pointing solemnly to the depths
below, said, "And thank God for showing us where we may yet labor
for it in hope and patience like honest men."

The men silently bowed their heads and slowly descended the
mountain.  But when they had reached the plain one of them called
out to the others to watch a star that seemed to be rising and
moving towards them over the hushed and sleeping valley.

"It's only the stage coach, boys," said the Left Bower, smiling;
"the coach that was to take us away."

In the security of their new-found fraternity they resolved to wait
and see it pass.  As it swept by with flash of light, beat of
hoofs, and jingle of harness, the only real presence in the dreamy
landscape, the driver shouted a hoarse greeting to the phantom
partners, audible only to the Judge, who was nearest the vehicle.

"Did you hear--DID you hear what he said, boys?" he gasped, turning
to his companions.  "No!  Shake hands all round, boys!  God bless
you all, boys!  To think we didn't know it all this while!"

"Know what?"

"Merry Christmas!"





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of On the Frontier, by Bret Harte

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