THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH and Other Tales


by

Bret Harte




CONTENTS.

  THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH
  A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOT-HILLS
  A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL
  CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND



THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH.

I.

The sun was going down on the Dedlow Marshes.  The tide was following
it fast as if to meet the reddening lines of sky and water in the west,
leaving the foreground to grow blacker and blacker every moment, and to
bring out in startling contrast the few half-filled and half-lit pools
left behind and forgotten.  The strong breath of the Pacific fanning
their surfaces at times kindled them into a dull glow like dying
embers.  A cloud of sand-pipers rose white from one of the nearer
lagoons, swept in a long eddying ring against the sunset, and became a
black and dropping rain to seaward.  The long sinuous line of channel,
fading with the light and ebbing with the tide, began to give off here
and there light puffs of gray-winged birds like sudden exhalations.
High in the darkening sky the long arrow-headed lines of geese and
'brant' pointed towards the upland.  As the light grew more uncertain
the air at times was filled with the rush of viewless and melancholy
wings, or became plaintive with far-off cries and lamentations.  As the
Marshes grew blacker the far-scattered tussocks and accretions on its
level surface began to loom in exaggerated outline, and two human
figures, suddenly emerging erect on the bank of the hidden channel,
assumed the proportion of giants.

When they had moored their unseen boat, they still appeared for some
moments to be moving vaguely and aimlessly round the spot where they
had disembarked.  But as the eye became familiar with the darkness it
was seen that they were really advancing inland, yet with a slowness of
progression and deviousness of course that appeared inexplicable to the
distant spectator.  Presently it was evident that this seemingly even,
vast, black expanse was traversed and intersected by inky creeks and
small channels, which made human progression difficult and dangerous.
As they appeared nearer and their figures took more natural
proportions, it could be seen that each carried a gun; that one was a
young girl, although dressed so like her companion in shaggy pea-jacket
and sou'wester as to be scarcely distinguished from him above the short
skirt that came halfway down her high india-rubber fishing-boots.  By
the time they had reached firmer ground, and turned to look back at the
sunset, it could be also seen that the likeness between their faces was
remarkable.  Both, had crisp, black, tightly curling hair; both had
dark eyes and heavy eyebrows; both had quick vivid complexions,
slightly heightened by the sea and wind.  But more striking than their
similarity of coloring was the likeness of expression and bearing.
Both wore the same air of picturesque energy; both bore themselves with
a like graceful effrontery and self-possession.

The young man continued his way.  The young girl lingered for a moment
looking seaward, with her small brown hand lifted to shade her eyes,--a
precaution which her heavy eyebrows and long lashes seemed to render
utterly gratuitous.

"Come along, Mag.  What are ye waitin' for?" said the young man
impatiently.

"Nothin'.  Lookin' at that boat from the Fort."  Her clear eyes were
watching a small skiff, invisible to less keen-sighted observers,
aground upon a flat near the mouth of the channel. "Them chaps will
have a high ole time gunnin' thar, stuck in the mud, and the tide goin'
out like sixty!"

"Never you mind the sodgers," returned her companion, aggressively,
"they kin take care o' their own precious skins, or Uncle Sam will do
it for 'em, I reckon.  Anyhow the people--that's you and me, Mag--is
expected to pay for their foolishness.  That's what they're sent yer
for.  Ye oughter to be satisfied with that," he added with deep sarcasm.

"I reckon they ain't expected to do much off o' dry land, and they
can't help bein' queer on the water," returned the young girl with a
reflecting sense of justice.

"Then they ain't no call to go gunnin', and wastin' Guv'nment powder on
ducks instead o' Injins."

"Thet's so," said the girl thoughtfully.  "Wonder ef Guv'nment pays for
them frocks the Kernel's girls went cavortin' round Logport in last
Sunday--they looked like a cirkis."

"Like ez not the old Kernel gets it outer contracts--one way or
another.  WE pay for it all the same," he added gloomily.

"Jest the same ez if they were MY clothes," said the girl, with a
quick, fiery, little laugh, "ain't it?  Wonder how they'd like my
sayin' that to 'em when they was prancin' round, eh, Jim?"

But her companion was evidently unprepared for this sweeping feminine
deduction, and stopped it with masculine promptitude.

"Look yer--instead o' botherin' your head about what the Fort girls
wear, you'd better trot along a little more lively.  It's late enough
now."

"But these darned boots hurt like pizen," said the girl, limping. "They
swallowed a lot o' water over the tops while I was wadin' down there,
and my feet go swashin' around like in a churn every step."

"Lean on me, baby," he returned, passing his arm around her waist, and
dropping her head smartly on his shoulder.  "Thar!"  The act was
brotherly and slightly contemptuous, but it was sufficient to at once
establish their kinship.

They continued on thus for some moments in silence, the girl, I fear,
after the fashion of her sex, taking the fullest advantage of this
slightly sentimental and caressing attitude.  They were moving now
along the edge of the Marsh, parallel with the line of rapidly fading
horizon, following some trail only known to their keen youthful eyes.
It was growing darker and darker.  The cries of the sea-birds had
ceased; even the call of a belated plover had died away inland; the
hush of death lay over the black funereal pall of marsh at their side.
The tide had run out with the day.  Even the sea-breeze had lulled in
this dead slack-water of all nature, as if waiting outside the bar with
the ocean, the stars, and the night.

Suddenly the girl stopped and halted her companion.  The faint far
sound of a bugle broke the silence, if the idea of interruption could
have been conveyed by the two or three exquisite vibrations that seemed
born of that silence itself, and to fade and die in it without break or
discord.  Yet it was only the 'retreat' call from the Fort two miles
distant and invisible.

The young girl's face had become irradiated, and her small mouth half
opened as she listened.  "Do you know, Jim," she said with a
confidential sigh, "I allus put words to that when I hear it--it's so
pow'ful pretty.  It allus goes to me like this: 'Goes the day, Far
away, With the light, And the night Comes along--Comes along--Comes
along--Like a-a so-o-ong.'"  She here lifted her voice, a sweet, fresh,
boyish contralto, in such an admirable imitation of the bugle that her
brother, after the fashion of more select auditors, was for a moment
quite convinced that the words meant something.  Nevertheless, as a
brother, it was his duty to crush this weakness.  "Yes; and it
says:'shut your head, Go to bed,'" he returned irascibly; "and YOU'D
better come along, if we're goin' to hev any supper.  There's Yeller
Bob hez got ahead of us over there with the game already."

The girl glanced towards a slouching burdened figure that now appeared
to be preceding them, straightened herself suddenly, and then looked
attentively towards the Marsh.

"Not the sodgers again?" said her brother impatiently.

"No," she said quickly; "but if that don't beat anythin'!  I'd hev
sworn, Jim, that Yeller Bob was somewhere behind us.  I saw him only
jest now when 'Taps' sounded, somewhere over thar."  She pointed with a
half-uneasy expression in quite another direction from that in which
the slouching Yellow Bob had just loomed.

"Tell ye what, Mag, makin' poetry outer bugle calls hez kinder muddled
ye.  THAT'S Yeller Bob ahead, and ye orter know Injins well enuff by
this time to remember that they allus crop up jest when ye don't expect
them.  And there's the bresh jest afore us.  Come!"

The 'bresh,' or low bushes, was really a line of stunted willows and
alders that seemed to have gradually sunk into the level of the plain,
but increased in size farther inland, until they grew to the height and
density of a wood.  Seen from the channel it had the appearance of a
green cape or promontory thrust upon the Marsh. Passing through its
tangled recesses, with the aid of some unerring instinct, the two
companions emerged upon another and much larger level that seemed as
illimitable as the bay.  The strong breath of the ocean lying just
beyond the bar and estuary they were now facing came to them salt and
humid as another tide.  The nearer expanse of open water reflected the
after-glow, and lightened the landscape.  And between the two wayfarers
and the horizon rose, bleak and startling, the strange outlines of
their home.

At first it seemed a ruined colonnade of many pillars, whose base and
pediment were buried in the earth, supporting a long parallelogram of
entablature and cornices.  But a second glance showed it to be a
one-storied building, upheld above the Marsh by numberless piles placed
at regular distances; some of them sunken or inclined from the
perpendicular, increasing the first illusion. Between these pillars,
which permitted a free circulation of air, and, at extraordinary tides,
even the waters of the bay itself, the level waste of marsh, the bay,
the surges of the bar, and finally the red horizon line, were
distinctly visible.  A railed gallery or platform, supported also on
piles, and reached by steps from the Marsh, ran around the building,
and gave access to the several rooms and offices.

But if the appearance of this lacustrine and amphibious dwelling was
striking, and not without a certain rude and massive grandeur, its
grounds and possessions, through which the brother and sister were
still picking their way, were even more grotesque and remarkable.  Over
a space of half a dozen acres the flotsam and jetsam of years of tidal
offerings were collected, and even guarded with a certain care.  The
blackened hulks of huge uprooted trees, scarcely distinguishable from
the fragments of genuine wrecks beside them, were securely fastened by
chains to stakes and piles driven in the marsh, while heaps of broken
and disjointed bamboo orange crates, held together by ropes of fibre,
glistened like ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley.  Masts,
spars, fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and
galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had ceased
their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the sea.  The
legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow, served for
mortuary inscription.  Wailed over by the trade winds, mourned by
lamenting sea-birds, once every year the tide visited its lost dead and
left them wet with its tears.

To such a spot and its surroundings the atmosphere of tradition and
mystery was not wanting.  Six years ago Boone Culpepper had built the
house, and brought to it his wife--variously believed to be a gypsy, a
Mexican, a bright mulatto, a Digger Indian, a South Sea princess from
Tahiti, somebody else's wife--but in reality a little Creole woman from
New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a marriage, with other
gambling debts, during a winter's vacation from his home in Virginia.
At the end of two years she had died, succumbing, as differently
stated, from perpetual wet feet, or the misanthropic idiosyncrasies of
her husband, and leaving behind her a girl of twelve and a boy of
sixteen to console him.  How futile was this bequest may be guessed
from a brief summary of Mr. Culpepper's peculiarities.  They were the
development of a singular form of aggrandizement and misanthropy.  On
his arrival at Logport he had bought a part of the apparently valueless
Dedlow Marsh from the Government at less than a dollar an acre,
continuing his singular investment year by year until he was the owner
of three leagues of amphibious domain.  It was then discovered that
this property carried with it the WATER FRONT of divers valuable and
convenient sites for manufactures and the commercial ports of a noble
bay, as well as the natural embarcaderos of some 'lumbering' inland
settlements.  Boone Culpepper would not sell.  Boone Culpepper would
not rent or lease.  Boone Culpepper held an invincible blockade of his
neighbors, and the progress and improvement he despised--granting only,
after a royal fashion, occasional license, revocable at pleasure, in
the shape of tolls, which amply supported him, with the game he shot in
his kingfisher's eyrie on the Marsh.  Even the Government that had made
him powerful was obliged to 'condemn' a part of his property at an
equitable price for the purposes of Fort Redwood, in which the adjacent
town of Logport shared.  And Boone Culpepper, unable to resist the act,
refused to receive the compensation or quit-claim the town.  In his
scant intercourse with his neighbors he always alluded to it as his
own, showed it to his children as part of their strange inheritance,
and exhibited the starry flag that floated from the Fort as a flaunting
insult to their youthful eyes. Hated, feared, and superstitiously
shunned by some, regarded as a madman by others, familiarly known as
'The Kingfisher of Dedlow,' Boone Culpepper was one day found floating
dead in his skiff, with a charge of shot through his head and
shoulders.  The shot-gun lying at his feet at the bottom of the boat
indicated the 'accident' as recorded in the verdict of the coroner's
jury--but not by the people.  A thousand rumors of murder or suicide
prevailed, but always with the universal rider, 'Served him right.' So
invincible was this feeling that but few attended his last rites, which
took place at high water.  The delay of the officiating clergyman lost
the tide; the homely catafalque--his own boat--was left aground on the
Marsh, and deserted by all mourners except the two children.  Whatever
he had instilled into them by precept and example, whatever took place
that night in their lonely watch by his bier on the black marshes, it
was certain that those who confidently looked for any change in the
administration of the Dedlow Marsh were cruelly mistaken.  The old
Kingfisher was dead, but he had left in the nest two young birds, more
beautiful and graceful, it was true, yet as fierce and tenacious of
beak and talon.


II.

Arriving at the house, the young people ascended the outer flight of
wooden steps, which bore an odd likeness to the companion-way of a
vessel, and the gallery, or 'deck,' as it was called--where a number of
nets, floats, and buoys thrown over the railing completed the nautical
resemblance.  This part of the building was evidently devoted to
kitchen, dining-room, and domestic offices; the principal room in the
centre serving as hall or living-room, and communicating on the other
side with two sleeping apartments.  It was of considerable size, with
heavy lateral beams across the ceiling--built, like the rest of the
house, with a certain maritime strength--and looked not unlike a saloon
cabin.  An enormous open Franklin stove between the windows, as large
as a chimney, blazing with drift-wood, gave light and heat to the
apartment, and brought into flickering relief the boarded walls hung
with the spoils of sea and shore, and glittering with gun-barrels.
Fowling-pieces of all sizes, from the long ducking-gun mounted on a
swivel for boat use to the light single-barrel or carbine, stood in
racks against the walls; game-bags, revolvers in their holsters,
hunting and fishing knives in their sheaths, depended from hooks above
them. In one corner stood a harpoon; in another, two or three Indian
spears for salmon.  The carpetless floor and rude chairs and settles
were covered with otter, mink, beaver, and a quantity of valuable
seal-skins, with a few larger pelts of the bear and elk. The only
attempt at decoration was the displayed wings and breasts of the wood
and harlequin duck, the muir, the cormorant, the gull, the gannet, and
the femininely delicate half-mourning of petrel and plover, nailed
against the wall.  The influence of the sea was dominant above all, and
asserted its saline odors even through the spice of the curling
drift-wood smoke that half veiled the ceiling.

A berry-eyed old Indian woman with the complexion of dried salmon; her
daughter, also with berry eyes, and with a face that seemed wholly made
of a moist laugh; 'Yellow Bob,' a Digger 'buck,' so called from the
prevailing ochre markings of his cheek, and 'Washooh,' an ex-chief; a
nondescript in a blanket, looking like a cheap and dirty doll whose
fibrous hair was badly nailed on his carved wooden head, composed the
Culpepper household.  While the two former were preparing supper in the
adjacent dining-room, Yellow Bob, relieved of his burden of game,
appeared on the gallery and beckoned mysteriously to his master through
the window.  James Culpepper went out, returned quickly, and after a
minute's hesitation and an uneasy glance towards his sister, who had
meantime pushed back her sou'wester from her forehead, and without
taking off her jacket had dropped into a chair before the fire with her
back towards him, took his gun noiselessly from the rack, and saying
carelessly that he would be back in a moment, disappeared.

Left to herself, Maggie coolly pulled off her long boots and stockings,
and comfortably opposed to the fire two very pretty feet and ankles,
whose delicate purity was slightly blue-bleached by confinement in the
tepid sea-water.  The contrast of their waxen whiteness with her blue
woolen skirt, and with even the skin of her sunburnt hands and wrists,
apparently amused her, and she sat for some moments with her elbows on
her knees, her skirts slightly raised, contemplating them, and curling
her toes with evident satisfaction.  The firelight playing upon the
rich coloring of her face, the fringe of jet-black curls that almost
met the thick sweep of eyebrows, and left her only a white strip of
forehead, her short upper lip and small chin, rounded but resolute,
completed a piquant and striking figure.  The rich brown shadows on the
smoke-stained walls and ceiling, the occasional starting into relief of
the scutcheons of brilliant plumage, and the momentary glitter of the
steel barrels, made a quaint background to this charming picture.
Sitting there, and following some lingering memory of her tramp on the
Marsh, she hummed to herself a few notes of the bugle call that had
impressed her--at first softly, and finally with the full pitch of her
voice.

Suddenly she stopped.

There was a faint and unmistakable rapping on the floor beneath her.
It was distinct, but cautiously given, as if intended to be audible to
her alone.  For a moment she stood upright, her feet still bare and
glistening, on the otter skin that served as a rug. There were two
doors to the room, one from which her brother had disappeared, which
led to the steps, the other giving on the back gallery, looking inland.
With a quick instinct she caught up her gun and ran to that one, but
not before a rapid scramble near the railing was followed by a cautious
opening of the door.  She was just in time to shut it on the extended
arm and light blue sleeve of an army overcoat that protruded through
the opening, and for a moment threw her whole weight against it.

"A dhrop of whiskey, Miss, for the love of God."

She retained her hold, cocked her weapon, and stepped back a pace from
the door.  The blue sleeve was followed by the rest of the overcoat,
and a blue cap with the infantry blazoning, and the letter H on its
peak.  They were for the moment more distinguishable than the man
beneath them--grimed and blackened with the slime of the Marsh.  But
what could be seen of his mud-stained face was more grotesque than
terrifying.  A combination of weakness and audacity, insinuation and
timidity struggled through the dirt for expression.  His small blue
eyes were not ill-natured, and even the intruding arm trembled more
from exhaustion than passion.

"On'y a dhrop, Miss," he repeated piteously, "and av ye pleeze, quick!
afore I'm stharved with the cold entoirely."

She looked at him intently--without lowering her gun.

"Who are you?"

"Thin, it's the truth I'll tell ye, Miss--whisth then!" he said in a
half-whisper; "I'm a desarter!"

"Then it was YOU that was doggin' us on the Marsh?"

"It was the sarjint I was lavin', Miss."

She looked at him hesitatingly.

"Stay outside there; if you move a step into the room, I'll blow you
out of it."

He stepped back on the gallery.  She closed the door, bolted it, and
still holding the gun, opened a cupboard, poured out a glass of
whiskey, and returning to the door, opened it and handed him the liquor.

She watched him drain it eagerly, saw the fiery stimulant put life into
his shivering frame, trembling hands, and kindle his dull
eye--and--quietly raised her gun again.

"Ah, put it down, Miss, put it down!  Fwhot's the use?  Sure the
bullets yee carry in them oiyes of yours is more deadly!  It's out here
oi'll sthand, glory be to God, all night, without movin' a fut till the
sarjint comes to take me, av ye won't levil them oiyes at me like that.
Ah, whirra! look at that now! but it's a gooddess she is--the livin'
Jaynus of warr, standin' there like a statoo, wid her alybaster fut put
forward."

In her pride and conscious superiority, any suggestion of shame at thus
appearing before a common man and a mendicant was as impossible to her
nature as it would have been to a queen or the goddess of his simile.
His presence and his compliment alike passed her calm modesty
unchallenged.  The wretched scamp recognized the fact and felt its
power, and it was with a superstitious reverence asserting itself
through his native extravagance that he raised his grimy hand to his
cap in military salute and became respectfully rigid.

"Then the sodgers were huntin' YOU?" she said thoughtfully, lowering
her weapon.

"Thrue for you, Miss--they worr, and it's meself that was lyin' flat in
the ditch wid me faytures makin' an illigant cast in the mud--more
betoken, as ye see even now--and the sarjint and his daytail thrampin'
round me.  It was thin that the mortial cold sthruck thro' me mouth,
and made me wake for the whiskey that would resthore me."

"What did you desert fer?"

"Ah, list to that now!  Fwhat did I desart fer?  Shure ev there was the
ghost of an inemy round, it's meself that would be in the front now!
But it was the letthers from me ould mother, Miss, that is sthruck wid
a mortial illness--long life to her!--in County Clare, and me sisthers
in Ninth Avenue in New York, fornint the daypo, that is brekken their
harruts over me listin' in the Fourth Infanthry to do duty in a haythen
wilderness.  Av it was the cavalry--and it's me own father that was in
the Innishkillen Dthragoons, Miss--oi wouldn't moind.  Wid a horse
betune me legs, it's on parade oi'd be now, Miss, and not wandhering
over the bare flure of the Marsh, stharved wid the cold, the thirst,
and hunger, wid the mud and the moire thick on me; facin' an illigant
young leddy as is the ekal ov a Fayld Marshal's darter--not to sphake
ov Kernal Preston's--ez couldn't hold a candle to her."

Brought up on the Spanish frontier, Maggie Culpepper was one of the few
American girls who was not familiar with the Irish race.  The rare
smile that momentarily lit up her petulant mouth seemed to justify the
intruder's praise.  But it passed quickly, and she returned dryly:

"That means you want more drink, suthin' to eat, and clothes. Suppose
my brother comes back and ketches you here?"

"Shure, Miss, he's just now hunten me, along wid his two haythen
Diggers, beyond the laygoon there.  It worr the yellar one that
sphotted me lyin' there in the ditch; it worr only your own oiyes,
Miss--more power to their beauty for that!--that saw me folly him
unbeknownst here; and that desaved them, ye see!"

The young girl remained for an instant silent and thoughtful.

"We're no friends of the Fort," she said finally, "but I don't reckon
for that reason my brother will cotton to YOU.  Stay out thar where ye
are, till I come to ye.  If you hear me singin' again, you'll know he's
come back, and ye'd better scoot with what you've already got, and be
thankful."

She shut the door again and locked it, went into the dining-room,
returned with some provisions wrapped in paper, took a common wicker
flask from the wall, passed into her brother's bedroom, and came out
with a flannel shirt, overalls, and a coarse Indian blanket, and,
reopening the door, placed them before the astonished and delighted
vagabond.  His eye glistened; he began, "Glory be to God," but for once
his habitual extravagance failed him.  Nature triumphed with a more
eloquent silence over his well-worn art.  He hurriedly wiped his
begrimed face and eyes with the shirt she had given him, and catching
the sleeve of her rough pea-jacket in his dirty hand, raised it to his
lips.

"Go!" she said imperiously.  "Get away while you can."

"Av it vas me last words--it's speechless oi am," he stammered, and
disappeared over the railing.

She remained for a moment holding the door half open, and gazing into
the darkness that seemed to flow in like a tide.  Then she shut it, and
going into her bedroom resumed her interrupted toilette.  When she
emerged again she was smartly stockinged and slippered, and even the
blue serge skirt was exchanged for a bright print, with a white fichu
tied around her throat.  An attempt to subdue her rebellious curls had
resulted in the construction from their ruins of a low Norman arch
across her forehead with pillared abutments of ringlets.  When her
brother returned a few moments later she did not look up, but remained,
perhaps a little ostentatiously, bending over the fire.

"Bob allowed that the Fort boat was huntin' MEN--deserters, I reckon,"
said Jim aggrievedly.  "Wanted me to believe that he SAW one on the
Marsh hidin'.  On'y an Injin lie, I reckon, to git a little extra
fire-water, for toting me out to the bresh on a fool's errand."

"Oh, THAT'S where you went!" said Maggie, addressing the fire. "Since
when hev you tuk partnership with the Guv'nment and Kernel Preston to
hunt up and take keer of their property?"

"Well, I ain't goin' to hev such wreckage as they pick up and enlist
set adrift on our marshes, Mag," said Jim decidedly.

"What would you hev done had you ketched him?" said Maggie, looking
suddenly into her brother's face.

"Given him a dose of snipe-shot that he'd remember, and be thankful it
wasn't slugs," said Jim promptly.  Observing a deeper seriousness in
her attitude, he added, "Why, if it was in war-time he'd get a BALL
from them sodgers on sight."

"Yes; but YOU ain't got no call to interfere," said Maggie.

"Ain't I?  Why, he's no better than an outlaw.  I ain't sure that he
hasn't been stealin' or killin' somebody over theer."

"Not that man!" said Maggie impulsively.

"Not what man?" said her brother, facing her quickly.

"Why," returned Maggie, repairing her indiscretion with feminine
dexterity, "not ANY man who might have knocked you and me over on the
marshes in the dusk, and grabbed our guns."

"Wish he'd hev tried it," said the brother, with a superior smile, but
a quickly rising color.  "Where d'ye suppose I'D hev been all the
while?"

Maggie saw her mistake, and for the first time in her life resolved to
keep a secret from her brother--overnight.  "Supper's gettin' cold,"
she said, rising.

They went into the dining-room--an apartment as plainly furnished as
the one they had quitted, but in its shelves, cupboards, and closely
fitting boarding bearing out the general nautical suggestion of the
house--and seated themselves before a small table on which their frugal
meal was spread.  In this tete-a-tete position Jim suddenly laid down
his knife and fork and stared at his sister.

"Hello!"

"What's the matter?" said Maggie, starting slightly.  "How you do skeer
one."

"Who's been prinkin', eh?"

"My ha'r was in kinks all along o' that hat," said Maggie, with a
return of higher color, "and I had to straighten it.  It's a boy's hat,
not a girl's."

"But that necktie and that gown--and all those frills and tuckers?"
continued Jim generalizing, with a rapid twirling of his fingers over
her.  "Are you expectin' Judge Martin, or the Expressman this evening?"

Judge Martin was the lawyer of Logport, who had proven her father's
will, and had since raved about his single interview with the
Kingfisher's beautiful daughter; the Expressman was a young fellow who
was popularly supposed to have left his heart while delivering another
valuable package on Maggie in person, and had "never been the same man
since."  It was a well-worn fraternal pleasantry that had done duty
many a winter's evening, as a happy combination of moral admonition and
cheerfulness.  Maggie usually paid it the tribute of a quick little
laugh and a sisterly pinch, but that evening those marks of approbation
were withheld.

"Jim dear," said she, when their Spartan repast was concluded and they
were reestablished before the living-room fire.  "What was it the
Redwood Mill Kempany offered you for that piece near Dead Man's Slough?"

Jim took his pipe from his lips long enough to say, "Ten thousand
dollars," and put it back again.

"And what do ye kalkilate all our property, letting alone this yer
house, and the driftwood front, is worth all together?"

"Includin' wot the Gov'nment owes us?--for that's all ours, ye know?"
said Jim quickly.

"No--leavin' that out--jest for greens, you know," suggested Maggie.

"Well nigh onter a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, I reckon,
by and large."

"That's a heap o' money, Jim!  I reckon old Kernel Preston wouldn't
raise that in a hundred years," continued Maggie, warming her knees by
the fire.

"In five million years," said Jim, promptly sweeping away further
discussion.  After a pause he added, "You and me, Mag, kin see
anybody's pile, and go 'em fifty thousand better."

There were a few moments of complete silence, in which Maggie smoothed
her knees, and Jim's pipe, which seemed to have become gorged and
apoplectic with its owner's wealth, snored unctuously.

"Jim dear, what if--it's on'y an idea of mine, you know--what if you
sold that piece to the Redwood Mill, and we jest tuk that money
and--and--and jest lifted the ha'r offer them folks at Logport? Jest
astonished 'em!  Jest tuk the best rooms in that new hotel, got a hoss
and buggy, dressed ourselves, you and me, fit to kill, and made them
Fort people take a back seat in the Lord's Tabernacle, oncet for all.
You see what I mean, Jim," she said hastily, as her brother seemed to
be succumbing, like his pipe, in apoplectic astonishment, "jest on'y to
SHOW 'em what we COULD do if we keerd.  Lord! when we done it and spent
the money we'd jest snap our fingers and skip back yer ez nat'ral ez
life!  Ye don't think, Jim," she said, suddenly turning half fiercely
upon him, "that I'd allow to LIVE among 'em--to stay a menet after
that!"

Jim laid down his pipe and gazed at his sister with stony deliberation.
"And--what--do--you--kalkilate--to make by all that?" he said with
scornful distinctness.

"Why, jest to show 'em we HAVE got money, and could buy 'em all up if
we wanted to," returned Maggie, sticking boldly to her guns, albeit
with a vague conviction that her fire was weakened through elevation,
and somewhat alarmed at the deliberation of the enemy.

"And you mean to say they don't know it now," he continued with slow
derision.

"No," said Maggie.  "Why, theer's that new school-marm over at Logport,
you know, Jim, the one that wanted to take your picter in your boat for
a young smuggler or fancy pirate or Eyetalian fisherman, and allowed
that you'r handsomed some, and offered to pay you for sittin'--do you
reckon SHE'D believe you owned the land her schoolhouse was built on.
No!  Lots of 'em don't.  Lots of 'em thinks we're poor and low
down--and them ez doesn't, thinks"--

"What?" asked her brother sharply.

"That we're MEAN."

The quick color came to Jim's cheek.  "So," he said, facing her
quickly, "for the sake of a lot of riff-raff and scum that's drifted
here around us--jest for the sake of cuttin' a swell before
them--you'll go out among the hounds ez allowed your mother was a
Spanish nigger or a kanaka, ez called your father a pirate and
landgrabber, ez much as allowed he was shot by some one or killed
himself a purpose, ez said you was a heathen and a looney because you
didn't go to school or church along with their trash, ez kept away from
Maw's sickness ez if it was smallpox, and Dad's fun'ral ez if he was a
hoss-thief, and left you and me to watch his coffin on the marshes all
night till the tide kem back.  And now you--YOU that jined hands with
me that night over our father lyin' there cold and despised--ez if he
was a dead dog thrown up by the tide--and swore that ez long ez that
tide ebbed and flowed it couldn't bring you to them, or them to you
agin!  You now want--what?  What? Why, to go and cast your lot among
'em, and live among 'em, and join in their God-forsaken holler
foolishness, and--and--and"--

"Stop!  It's a lie!  I DIDN'T say that.  Don't you dare to say it!"
said the girl, springing to her feet, and facing her brother in turn,
with flashing eyes.

For a moment the two stared at each other--it might have been as in a
mirror, so perfectly were their passions reflected in each line, shade,
and color of the other's face.  It was as if they had each confronted
their own passionate and willful souls, and were frightened.  It had
often occurred before, always with the same invariable ending.  The
young man's eyes lowered first; the girl's filled with tears.

"Well, ef ye didn't mean that, what did ye mean?" said Jim, sinking,
with sullen apology, back into his chair.

"I--only--meant it--for--for--revenge!" sobbed Maggie.

"Oh!" said Jim, as if allowing his higher nature to be touched by this
noble instinct.  "But I didn't jest see where the revenge kem in."

"No?  But, never mind now, Jim," said Maggie, ostentatiously ignoring,
after the fashion of her sex, the trouble she had provoked; "but to
think--that--that--you thought"--(sobbing).

"But I didn't, Mag"--(caressingly).

With this very vague and impotent conclusion, Maggie permitted herself
to be drawn beside her brother, and for a few moments they plumed each
other's ruffled feathers, and smoothed each other's lifted crests, like
two beautiful young specimens of that halcyon genus to which they were
popularly supposed to belong.  At the end of half an hour Jim rose,
and, yawning slightly, said in a perfunctory way:

"Where's the book?"

The book in question was the Bible.  It had been the self-imposed
custom of these two young people to read aloud a chapter every night as
their one vague formula of literary and religious discipline.  When it
was produced, Maggie, presuming on his affectionate and penitential
condition, suggested that to-night he should pick out "suthin'
interestin'."  But this unorthodox frivolity was sternly put aside by
Jim--albeit, by way of compromise, he agreed to "chance it," i. e.,
open its pages at random.

He did so.  Generally he allowed himself a moment's judicious pause for
a certain chaste preliminary inspection necessary before reading aloud
to a girl.  To-night he omitted that modest precaution, and in a
pleasant voice, which in reading was singularly free from colloquial
infelicities of pronunciation, began at once:

"'Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the
inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to
the help of the Lord against the mighty.'"

"Oh, you looked first," said Maggie.

"I didn't now--honest Injin!  I just opened."

"Go on," said Maggie, eagerly shoving him and interposing her neck over
his shoulder.

And Jim continued Deborah's wonderful song of Jael and Sisera to the
bitter end of its strong monosyllabic climax.

"There," he said, closing the volume, "that's what I call revenge.
That's the real Scripture thing--no fancy frills theer."

"Yes; but, Jim dear, don't you see that she treated him first--sorter
got round him with free milk and butter, and reg'larly blandished him,"
argued Maggie earnestly.

But Jim declined to accept this feminine suggestion, or to pursue the
subject further, and after a fraternal embrace they separated for the
night.  Jim lingered long enough to look after the fastening of the
door and windows, and Maggie remained for some moments at her casement,
looking across the gallery to the Marsh beyond.

The moon had risen, the tide was half up.  Whatever sign or trace of
alien footprint or occupation had been there was already smoothly
obliterated; even the configuration of the land had changed.  A black
cape had disappeared, a level line of shore had been eaten into by
teeth of glistening silver.  The whole dark surface of the Marsh was
beginning to be streaked with shining veins as if a new life was
coursing through it.  Part of the open bay before the Fort, encroaching
upon the shore, seemed in the moonlight to be reaching a white and
outstretched arm towards the nest of the Kingfisher.


III.

The reveille at Fort Redwood had been supplemented full five minutes by
the voice of Lieutenant George Calvert's servant, before that young
officer struggled from his bed.  His head was splitting, his tongue and
lips were dry and feverish, his bloodshot eyes were shrinking from the
insufferable light of the day, his mind a confused medley of the past
night and the present morning, of cards and wild revelry, and the
vision of a reproachfully trim orderly standing at his door with
reports and orders which he now held composedly in his hand.  For
Lieutenant Calvert had been enjoying a symposium variously known as
"Stag Feed" and "A Wild Stormy Night" with several of his brother
officers, and a sickening conviction that it was not the first or the
last time he had indulged in these festivities.  At that moment he
loathed himself, and then after the usual derelict fashion cursed the
fate that had sent him, after graduating, to a frontier garrison--the
dull monotony of whose duties made the Border horse-play of dissipation
a relief.  Already he had reached the miserable point of envying the
veteran capacities of his superiors and equals.  "If I could drink like
Kirby or Crowninshield, or if there was any other cursed thing a man
could do in this hole," he had wretchedly repeated to himself, after
each misspent occasion, and yet already he was looking forward to them
as part of a 'sub's' duty and worthy his emulation. Already the dream
of social recreation fostered by West Point had been rudely dispelled.
Beyond the garrison circle of Colonel Preston's family and two
officers' wives, there was no society. The vague distrust and civil
jealousy with which some frontier communities regard the Federal power,
heightened in this instance by the uncompromising attitude the
Government had taken towards the settlers' severe Indian policy, had
kept the people of Logport aloof from the Fort.  The regimental band
might pipe to them on Saturdays, but they would not dance.

Howbeit, Lieutenant Calvert dressed himself with uncertain hands but
mechanical regularity and neatness, and, under the automatic training
of discipline and duty, managed to button his tunic tightly over his
feelings, to pull himself together with his sword-belt, compressing a
still cadet-like waist, and to present that indescribable combination
of precision and jauntiness which his brother officers too often
allowed to lapse into frontier carelessness.  His closely clipped light
hair, yet dripping from a plunge in the cold water, had been brushed
and parted with military exactitude, and when surmounted by his cap,
with the peak in an artful suggestion of extra smartness tipped forward
over his eyes, only his pale face--a shade lighter than his little
blonde moustache--showed his last night's excesses.  He was
mechanically reaching for his sword and staring confusedly at the
papers on his table when his servant interrupted:

"Major Bromley arranged that Lieutenant Kirby takes your sash this
morning, as you're not well, sir; and you're to report for special to
the colonel," he added, pointing discreetly to the envelope.

Touched by this consideration of his superior, Major Bromley, who had
been one of the veterans of last night's engagement, Calvert mastered
the contents of the envelope without the customary anathema of
specials, said, "Thank you, Parks," and passed out on the veranda.

The glare of the quiet sunlit quadrangle, clean as a well-swept floor,
the whitewashed walls and galleries of the barrack buildings beyond,
the white and green palisade of officers' cottages on either side, and
the glitter of a sentry's bayonet, were for a moment intolerable to
him.  Yet, by a kind of subtle irony, never before had the genius and
spirit of the vocation he had chosen seemed to be as incarnate as in
the scene before him.  Seclusion, self-restraint, cleanliness,
regularity, sobriety, the atmosphere of a wholesome life, the austere
reserve of a monastery without its mysterious or pensive meditation,
were all there.  To escape which, he had of his own free will
successively accepted a fool's distraction, the inevitable result of
which was, the viewing of them the next morning with tremulous nerves
and aching eyeballs.

An hour later, Lieutenant George Calvert had received his final
instructions from Colonel Preston to take charge of a small detachment
to recover and bring back certain deserters, but notably one, Dennis
M'Caffrey of Company H, charged additionally with mutinous solicitation
and example.  As Calvert stood before his superior, that distinguished
officer, whose oratorical powers had been considerably stimulated
through a long course of "returning thanks for the Army," slightly
expanded his chest and said paternally:

"I am aware, Mr. Calvert, that duties of this kind are somewhat
distasteful to young officers, and are apt to be considered in the
light of police detail; but I must remind you that no one part of a
soldier's duty can be held more important or honorable than another,
and that the fulfilment of any one, however trifling, must, with honor
to himself and security to his comrades, receive his fullest devotion.
A sergeant and a file of men might perform your duty, but I require, in
addition, the discretion, courtesy, and consideration of a gentleman
who will command an equal respect from those with whom his duty brings
him in contact.  The unhappy prejudices which the settlers show to the
military authority here render this, as you are aware, a difficult
service, but I believe that you will, without forgetting the respect
due to yourself and the Government you represent, avoid arousing these
prejudices by any harshness, or inviting any conflict with the civil
authority. The limits of their authority you will find in your written
instructions; but you might gain their confidence, and impress them,
Mr. Calvert, with the idea of your being their AUXILIARY in the
interests of justice--you understand.  Even if you are unsuccessful in
bringing back the men, you will do your best to ascertain if their
escape has been due to the sympathy of the settlers, or even with their
preliminary connivance.  They may not be aware that inciting enlisted
men to desert is a criminal offence; you will use your own discretion
in informing them of the fact or not, as occasion may serve you.  I
have only to add, that while you are on the waters of this bay and the
land covered by its tides, you have no opposition of authority, and are
responsible to no one but your military superiors.  Good-bye, Mr.
Calvert.  Let me hear a good account of you."

Considerably moved by Colonel Preston's manner, which was as paternal
and real as his rhetoric was somewhat perfunctory, Calvert half forgot
his woes as he stepped from the commandant's piazza. But he had to face
a group of his brother officers, who were awaiting him.

"Good-bye, Calvert," said Major Bromley; "a day or two out on grass
won't hurt you--and a change from commissary whiskey will put you all
right.  By the way, if you hear of any better stuff at Westport than
they're giving us here, sample it and let us know.  Take care of
yourself.  Give your men a chance to talk to you now and then, and you
may get something from them, especially Donovan.  Keep your eye on
Ramon.  You can trust your sergeant straight along."

"Good-bye, George," said Kirby.  "I suppose the old man told you that,
although no part of a soldier's duty was better than another, your
service was a very delicate one, just fitted for you, eh?  He always
does when he's cut out some hellish scrub-work for a chap. And told
you, too, that as long as you didn't go ashore, and kept to a
dispatch-boat, or an eight-oared gig, where you couldn't deploy your
men, or dress a line, you'd be invincible."

"He did say something like that," smiled Calvert, with an uneasy
recollection, however, that it was THE part of his superior's speech
that particularly impressed him.

"Of course," said Kirby gravely, "THAT, as an infantry officer, is
clearly your duty."

"And don't forget, George," said Rollins still more gravely, "that,
whatever may befall you, you belong to a section of that numerically
small but powerfully diversified organization--the American Army.
Remember that in the hour of peril you can address your men in any
language, and be perfectly understood.  And remember that when you
proudly stand before them, the eyes not only of your own country, but
of nearly all the others, are upon you! Good-bye, Georgey.  I heard the
major hint something about whiskey. They say that old pirate,
Kingfisher Culpepper, had a stock of the real thing from Robertson
County laid in his shebang on the Marsh just before he died.  Pity we
aren't on terms with them, for the cubs cannot drink it, and might be
induced to sell.  Shouldn't wonder, by the way, if your friend
M'Caffrey was hanging round somewhere there; he always had a keen
scent.  You might confiscate it as an "incitement to desertion," you
know.  The girl's pretty, and ought to be growing up now."

But haply at this point the sergeant stopped further raillery by
reporting the detachment ready; and drawing his sword, Calvert, with a
confused head, a remorseful heart, but an unfaltering step, marched off
his men on his delicate mission.

It was four o'clock when he entered Jonesville.  Following a
matter-of-fact idea of his own, he had brought his men the greater
distance by a circuitous route through the woods, thus avoiding the
ostentatious exposure of his party on the open bay in a well-manned
boat to an extended view from the three leagues of shore and marsh
opposite.  Crossing the stream, which here separated him from the
Dedlow Marsh by the common ferry, he had thus been enabled to halt
unperceived below the settlement and occupy the two roads by which the
fugitives could escape inland.  He had deemed it not impossible that,
after the previous visit of the sergeant, the deserters hidden in the
vicinity might return to Jonesville in the belief that the visit would
not be repeated so soon.  Leaving a part of his small force to patrol
the road and another to deploy over the upland meadows, he entered the
village.  By the exercise of some boyish diplomacy and a certain
prepossessing grace, which he knew when and how to employ, he became
satisfied that the objects of his quest were not THERE--however, their
whereabouts might have been known to the people.  Dividing his party
again, he concluded to take a corporal and a few men and explore the
lower marshes himself.

The preoccupation of duty, exercise, and perhaps, above all, the keen
stimulus of the iodine-laden salt air seemed to clear his mind and
invigorate his body.  He had never been in the Marsh before, and
enjoyed its novelty with the zest of youth.  It was the hour when the
tide of its feathered life was at its flood.  Clouds of duck and teal
passing from the fresh water of the river to the salt pools of the
marshes perpetually swept his path with flying shadows; at times it
seemed as if even the uncertain ground around him itself arose and sped
away on dusky wings.  The vicinity of hidden pools and sloughs was
betrayed by startled splashings; a few paces from their marching feet
arose the sunlit pinions of a swan. The air was filled with
multitudinous small cries and pipings.  In this vocal confusion it was
some minutes before he recognized the voice of one of his out-flankers
calling to the other.

An important discovery had been made.  In a long tongue of bushes that
ran down to the Marsh they had found a mud-stained uniform, complete
even to the cap, bearing the initial of the deserter's company.

"Is there any hut or cabin hereabouts, Schmidt?" asked Calvert.

"Dot vos schoost it, Lefdennun," replied his corporal.  "Dot vos de
shanty from der Kingvisher--old Gulbebber.  I pet a dollar, py
shimminy, dot der men haf der gekommt."

He pointed through the brake to a long, low building that now raised
itself, white in the sunlight, above the many blackened piles.  Calvert
saw in a single reconnoitring glance that it had but one approach--the
flight of steps from the Marsh.  Instructing his men to fall in on the
outer edge of the brake and await his orders, he quickly made his way
across the space and ascended the steps.  Passing along the gallery he
knocked at the front door. There was no response.  He repeated his
knock.  Then the window beside it opened suddenly, and he was
confronted with the double-muzzle of a long ducking-gun.  Glancing
instinctively along the barrels, he saw at their other extremity the
bright eyes, brilliant color, and small set mouth of a remarkably
handsome girl.  It was the fact, and to the credit of his training,
that he paid more attention to the eyes than to the challenge of the
shining tubes before him.

"Jest stop where you are--will you!" said the girl determinedly.

Calvert's face betrayed not the slightest terror or surprise. Immovable
as on parade, he carried his white gloved hand to his cap, and said
gently, "With pleasure."

"Oh yes," said the girl quickly; "but if you move a step I'll jest blow
you and your gloves offer that railin' inter the Marsh."

"I trust not," returned Calvert, smiling.

"And why?"

"Because it would deprive me of the pleasure of a few moments'
conversation with you--and I've only one pair of gloves with me."

He was still watching her beautiful eyes--respectfully, admiringly, and
strategically.  For he was quite convinced that if he DID move she
would certainly discharge one or both barrels at him.

"Where's the rest of you?" she continued sharply.

"About three hundred yards away, in the covert, not near enough to
trouble you."

"Will they come here?"

"I trust not."

"You trust not?" she repeated scornfully.  "Why?

"Because they would be disobeying orders."

She lowered her gun slightly, but kept her black brows levelled at him.
"I reckon I'm a match for YOU," she said, with a slightly contemptuous
glance at his slight figure, and opened the door.  For a moment they
stood looking at each other.  He saw, besides the handsome face and
eyes that had charmed him, a tall slim figure, made broader across the
shoulders by an open pea-jacket that showed a man's red flannel shirt
belted at the waist over a blue skirt, with the collar knotted by a
sailor's black handkerchief, and turned back over a pretty though
sunburnt throat.  She saw a rather undersized young fellow in a jaunty
undress uniform, scant of gold braid, and bearing only the single gold
shoulder-bars of his rank, but scrupulously neat and well fitting.
Light-colored hair cropped close, the smallest of light moustaches,
clear and penetrating blue eyes, and a few freckles completed a picture
that did not prepossess her.  She was therefore the more inclined to
resent the perfect ease and self-possession with which the stranger
carried off these manifest defects before her.

She laid aside the gun, put her hands deep in the pockets of her
pea-jacket, and, slightly squaring her shoulders, said curtly, "What do
you want?"

"A very little information, which I trust it will not trouble you to
give me.  My men have just discovered the uniform belonging to a
deserter from the Fort lying in the bushes yonder.  Can you give me the
slightest idea how it came there?"

"What right have you trapseing over our property?" she said, turning
upon him sharply, with a slight paling of color.

"None whatever."

"Then what did you come for?"

"To ask that permission, in case you would give me no information."

"Why don't you ask my brother, and not a woman?  Were you afraid?"

"He could hardly have done me the honor of placing me in more peril
than you have," returned Calvert, smiling.  "Then I have the pleasure
of addressing Miss Culpepper?"

"I'm Jim Culpepper's sister."

"And, I believe, equally able to give or refuse the permission I ask."

"And what if I refuse?"

"Then I have only to ask pardon for having troubled you, go back, and
return here with the tide.  You don't resist THAT with a shotgun, do
you?" he asked pleasantly.

Maggie Culpepper was already familiar with the accepted theory of the
supreme jurisdiction of the Federal Sea.  She half turned her back upon
him, partly to show her contempt, but partly to evade the domination of
his clear, good-humored, and self-sustained little eyes.

"I don't know anythin' about your deserters, nor what rags o' theirs
happen to be floated up here," she said, angrily, "and don't care to.
You kin do what you like."

"Then I'm afraid I should remain here a little longer, Miss Culpepper;
but my duty"--

"Your wot?" she interrupted, disdainfully.

"I suppose I AM talking shop," he said smilingly.  "Then my business"--

"Your business--pickin' up half-starved runaways!"

"And, I trust, sometimes a kind friend," he suggested, with a grave bow.

"You TRUST?  Look yer, young man," she said, with her quick, fierce,
little laugh, "I reckon you TRUST a heap too much!"  She would like to
have added, "with your freckled face, red hair, and little eyes"--but
this would have obliged her to face them again, which she did not care
to do.

Calvert stepped back, lifted his hand to his cap, still pleasantly, and
then walked gravely along the gallery, down the steps, and towards the
cover.  From her window, unseen, she followed his neat little figure
moving undeviatingly on, without looking to the left or right, and
still less towards the house he had just quitted. Then she saw the
sunlight flash on cross-belt plates and steel barrels, and a light blue
line issued from out the dark green bushes, round the point, and
disappeared.  And then it suddenly occurred to her what she had been
doing!  This, then, was her first step towards that fancy she had so
lately conceived, quarrelled over with her brother, and lay awake last
night to place anew, in spite of all opposition!  This was her
brilliant idea of dazzling and subduing Logport and the Fort!  Had she
grown silly, or what had happened?  Could she have dreamed of the
coming of this whipper-snapper, with his insufferable airs, after that
beggarly deserter?  I am afraid that for a few moments the miserable
fugitive had as small a place in Maggie's sympathy as the redoubtable
whipper-snapper himself.  And now the cherished dream of triumph and
conquest was over!  What a "looney" she had been! Instead of inviting
him in, and outdoing him in "company manners," and "fooling" him about
the deserter, and then blazing upon him afterwards at Logport in the
glory of her first spent wealth and finery, she had driven him away!

And now "he'll go and tell--tell the Fort girls of his hairbreadth
escape from the claws of the Kingfisher's daughter!"

The thought brought a few bitter tears to her eyes, but she wiped them
away.  The thought brought also the terrible conviction that Jim was
right, that there could be nothing but open antagonism between them and
the traducers of their parents, as she herself had instinctively shown!
But she presently wiped that conviction away also, as she had her tears.

Half an hour later she was attracted by the appearance from the windows
of certain straggling blue spots on the upland that seemed moving
diagonally towards the Marsh.  She did not know that it was Calvert's
second "detail" joining him, but believed for a moment that he had not
yet departed, and was strangely relieved.  Still later the frequent
disturbed cries of coot, heron, and marsh-hen, recognizing the presence
of unusual invaders of their solitude, distracted her yet more, and
forced her at last with increasing color and an uneasy sense of shyness
to steal out to the gallery for a swift furtive survey of the Marsh.
But an utterly unexpected sight met her eyes, and kept her motionless.

The birds were rising everywhere and drifting away with querulous
perturbation before a small but augmented blue detachment that was
moving with monotonous regularity towards the point of bushes where she
had seen the young officer previously disappear.  In their midst,
between two soldiers with fixed bayonets, marched the man whom even at
that distance she instantly recognized as the deserter of the preceding
night, in the very clothes she had given him.  To complete her
consternation, a little to the right marched the young officer also,
but accompanied by, and apparently on the most amicable terms with,
Jim--her own brother!

To forget all else and dart down the steps, flying towards the point of
bushes, scarcely knowing why or what she was doing, was to Maggie the
impulse and work of a moment.  When she had reached it the party were
not twenty paces away.  But here a shyness and hesitation again seized
her, and she shrank back in the bushes with an instinctive cry to her
brother inarticulate upon her lips.  They came nearer, they were
opposite to her; her brother Jim keeping step with the invader, and
even conversing with him with an animation she had seldom seen upon his
face--they passed!  She had been unnoticed except by one.  The roving
eye of the deserter had detected her handsome face among the leaves,
slightly turned towards it, and poured out his whole soul in a single
swift wink of eloquent but indescribable confidence.

When they had quite gone, she crept back to the house, a little
reassured, but still tremulous.  When her brother returned at
nightfall, he found her brooding over the fire, in the same attitude as
on the previous night.

"I reckon ye might hev seen me go by with the sodgers," he said,
seating himself beside her, a little awkwardly, and with an unusual
assumption of carelessness.

Maggie, without looking up, was languidly surprised.  He had been with
the soldiers--and where?

"About two hours ago I met this yer Leftenant Calvert," he went on with
increasing awkwardness, "and--oh, I say, Mag--he said he saw you, and
hoped he hadn't troubled ye, and--and--ye saw him, didn't ye?"

Maggie, with all the red of the fire concentrated in her cheek as she
gazed at the flame, believed carelessly "that she had seen a shrimp in
uniform asking questions."

"Oh, he ain't a bit stuck up," said Jim quickly, "that's what I like
about him.  He's ez nat'ral ez you be, and tuck my arm, walkin' around,
careless-like, laffen at what he was doin', ez ef it was a game, and he
wasn't sole commander of forty men.  He's only a year or two older than
me--and--and"--he stopped and looked uneasily at Maggie.

"So ye've bin craw-fishin' agin?" said Maggie, in her deepest and most
scornful contralto.

"Who's craw-fishin'?" he retorted, angrily.

"What's this backen out o' what you said yesterday?  What's all this
trucklin' to the Fort now?"

"What?  Well now, look yer," said Jim, rising suddenly, with
reproachful indignation, "darned if I don't jest tell ye everythin'. I
promised HIM I wouldn't.  He allowed it would frighten ye."

"FRIGHTEN ME!" repeated Maggie contemptuously, nevertheless with her
cheek paling again.  "Frighten me--with what?"

"Well, since yer so cantankerous, look yer.  We've been robbed!"

"Robbed?" echoed Maggie, facing him.

"Yes, robbed by that same deserter.  Robbed of a suit of my clothes,
and my whiskey-flask, and the darned skunk had 'em on. And if it hadn't
bin for that Leftenant Calvert, and my givin' him permission to hunt
him over the Marsh, we wouldn't have caught him."

"Robbed?" repeated Maggie again, vaguely.

"Yes, robbed!  Last night, afore we came home.  He must hev got in yer
while we was comin' from the boat."

"Did, did that Leftenant say so?" stammered Maggie.

"Say it, of course he did! and so do I," continued Jim, impatiently.
"Why, there were my very clothes on his back, and he daren't deny it.
And if you'd hearkened to me jest now, instead of flyin' off in
tantrums, you'd see that THAT'S jest how we got him, and how me and the
Leftenant joined hands in it.  I didn't give him permission to hunt
deserters, but THIEVES.  I didn't help him to ketch the man that
deserted from HIM, but the skunk that took MY clothes.  For when the
Leftenant found the man's old uniform in the bush, he nat'rally
kalkilated he must hev got some other duds near by in some underhand
way.  Don't you see? eh?  Why, look, Mag. Darned if you ain't skeered
after all!  Who'd hev thought it? There now--sit down, dear.  Why,
you're white ez a gull."

He had his arm round her as she sank back in the chair again with a
forced smile.

"There now," he said with fraternal superiority, "don't mind it, Mag,
any more.  Why, it's all over now.  You bet he won't trouble us agin,
for the Leftenant sez that now he's found out to be a thief, they'll
jest turn him over to the police, and he's sure o' getten six months'
state prison fer stealin' and burglarin' in our house.  But"--he
stopped suddenly and looked at his sister's contracted face; "look yer,
Mag, you're sick, that's what's the matter.  Take suthin'"--

"I'm better now," she said with an effort; "it's only a kind o' blind
chill I must hev got on the Marsh last night.  What's that?"

She had risen, and grasping her brother's arm tightly had turned
quickly to the window.  The casement had suddenly rattled.

"It's only the wind gettin' up.  It looked like a sou'wester when I
came in.  Lot o' scud flyin'.  But YOU take some quinine, Mag. Don't
YOU go now and get down sick like Maw."

Perhaps it was this well-meant but infelicitous reference that brought
a moisture to her dark eyes, and caused her lips to momentarily quiver.
But it gave way to a quick determined setting of her whole face as she
turned it once more to the fire, and said, slowly:

"I reckon I'll sleep it off, if I go to bed now.  What time does the
tide fall."

"About three, unless this yer wind piles it up on the Marsh afore then.
Why?"

"I was only wonderin' if the boat wus safe," said Maggie, rising.

"You'd better hoist yourself outside some quinine, instead o' talken
about those things," said Jim, who preferred to discharge his fraternal
responsibility by active medication.  "You aren't fit to read tonight."

"Good night, Jim," she said suddenly, stopping before him.

"Good night, Mag."  He kissed her with protecting and amiable
toleration, generously referring her hot hands and feverish lips to
that vague mystery of feminine complaint which man admits without
indorsing.

They separated.  Jim, under the stimulus of the late supposed robbery,
ostentatiously fastening the doors and windows with assuring comments,
calculated to inspire confidence in his sister's startled heart.  Then
he went to bed.  He lay awake long enough to be pleasantly conscious
that the wind had increased to a gale, and to be lulled again to sleep
by the cosy security of the heavily timbered and tightly sealed
dwelling that seemed to ride the storm like the ship it resembled.  The
gale swept through the piles beneath him and along the gallery as
through bared spars and over wave-washed decks.  The whole structure,
attacked above, below, and on all sides by the fury of the wind, seemed
at times to be lifted in the air.  Once or twice the creaking timbers
simulated the sound of opening doors and passing footsteps, and again
dilated as if the gale had forced a passage through.  But Jim slept on
peacefully, and was at last only aroused by the brilliant sunshine
staring through his window from the clear wind-swept blue arch beyond.

Dressing himself lazily, he passed into the sitting-room and proceeded
to knock at his sister's door, as was his custom; he was amazed to find
it open and the room empty.  Entering hurriedly, he saw that her bed
was undisturbed, as if it had not been occupied, and was the more
bewildered to see a note ostentatiously pinned upon the pillow,
addressed in pencil, in a large school-hand, "To Jim."

Opening it impatiently, he was startled to read as follows:--


"Don't be angry, Jim dear--but it was all my fault--and I didn't tell
you.  I knew all about the deserter, and I gave him the clothes and
things that they say he stole.  It was while you was out that night,
and he came and begged of me, and was mournful and hidjus to behold.  I
thought I was helping him, and getting our revenge on the Fort, all at
the same time.  Don't be mad, Jim dear, and do not be frighted fer me.
I'm going over thar to make it all right--to free HIM of stealing--to
have YOU left out of it all--and take it all on myself.  Don't you be a
bit feared for me.  I ain't skeert of the wind or of going.  I'll close
reef everything, clear the creek, stretch across to Injen Island, hugg
the Point, and bear up fer Logport.  Dear Jim--don't get mad--but I
couldn't bear this fooling of you nor HIM--and that man being took for
stealing any longer!--Your loving sister,

MAGGIE."


With a confused mingling of shame, anger, and sudden fear he ran out on
the gallery.  The tide was well up, half the Marsh had already
vanished, and the little creek where he had moored his skiff was now an
empty shining river.  The water was everywhere--fringing the tussocks
of salt grass with concentric curves of spume and drift, or
tumultuously tossing its white-capped waves over the spreading expanse
of the lower bay.  The low thunder of breakers in the farther estuary
broke monotonously on the ear.  But his eye was fascinated by a dull
shifting streak on the horizon, that, even as he gazed, shuddered,
whitened along its whole line, and then grew ghastly gray again.  It
was the ocean bar.


IV.

"Well, I must say," said Cicely Preston, emphasizing the usual feminine
imperative for perfectly gratuitous statement, as she pushed back her
chair from the commandant's breakfast table, "I MUST really say that I
don't see anything particularly heroic in doing something wrong, lying
about it just to get other folks into trouble, and then rushing off to
do penance in a high wind and an open boat.  But she's pretty, and
wears a man's shirt and coat, and of course THAT settles anything.  But
why earrings and wet white stockings and slippers?  And why that Gothic
arch of front and a boy's hat?  That's what I simply ask;" and the
youngest daughter of Colonel Preston rose from the table, shook out the
skirt of her pretty morning dress, and, placing her little thumbs in
the belt of her smart waist, paused witheringly for a reply.

"You are most unfair, my child," returned Colonel Preston gravely. "Her
giving food and clothes to a deserter may have been only an ordinary
instinct of humanity towards a fellow-creature who appeared to be
suffering, to say nothing of M'Caffrey's plausible tongue.  But her
periling her life to save him from an unjust accusation, and her desire
to shield her brother's pride from ridicule, is altogether praiseworthy
and extraordinary.  And the moral influence of her kindness was strong
enough to make that scamp refuse to tell the plain truth that might
implicate her in an indiscretion, though it saved him from state
prison."

"He knew you wouldn't believe him if he had said the clothes were given
to him," retorted Miss Cicely, "so I don't see where the moral
influence comes in.  As to her periling her life, those Marsh people
are amphibious anyway, or would be in those clothes.  And as to her
motive, why, papa, I heard you say in this very room, and afterwards to
Mr. Calvert, when you gave him instructions, that you believed those
Culpeppers were capable of enticing away deserters; and you forget the
fuss you had with her savage brother's lawyer about that water front,
and how you said it was such people who kept up the irritation between
the Civil and Federal power."

The colonel coughed hurriedly.  It is the fate of all great organizers,
military as well as civil, to occasionally suffer defeat in the family
circle.

"The more reason," he said, soothingly, "why we should correct harsh
judgments that spring from mere rumors.  You should give yourself at
least the chance of overcoming your prejudices, my child.  Remember,
too, that she is now the guest of the Fort."

"And she chooses to stay with Mrs. Bromley!  I'm sure it's quite enough
for you and mamma to do duty--and Emily, who wants to know why Mr.
Calvert raves so about her--without MY going over there to stare."

Colonel Preston shook his head reproachfully, but eventually retired,
leaving the field to the enemy.  The enemy, a little pink in the
cheeks, slightly tossed the delicate rings of its blonde crest, settled
its skirts again at the piano, but after turning over the leaves of its
music book, rose, and walked pettishly to the window.

But here a spectacle presented itself that for a moment dismissed all
other thoughts from the girl's rebellious mind.

Not a dozen yards away, on the wind-swept parade, a handsome young
fellow, apparently halted by the sentry, had impetuously turned upon
him in an attitude of indignant and haughty surprise.  To the quick
fancy of the girl it seemed as if some disguised rustic god had been
startled by the challenge of a mortal.  Under an oilskin hat, like the
petasus of Hermes, pushed back from his white forehead, crisp black
curls were knotted around a head whose beardless face was perfect as a
cameo cutting.  In the close-fitting blue woolen jersey under his open
jacket the clear outlines and youthful grace of his upper figure were
revealed as clearly as in a statue.  Long fishing-boots reaching to his
thighs scarcely concealed the symmetry of his lower limbs.  Cricket and
lawn-tennis, knickerbockers and flannels had not at that period
familiarized the female eye to unfettered masculine outline, and Cicely
Preston, accustomed to the artificial smartness and regularity of
uniform, was perhaps the more impressed by the stranger's lawless grace.

The sentry had repeated his challenge; an angry flush was deepening on
the intruder's cheek.  At this critical moment Cicely threw open the
French windows and stepped upon the veranda.

The sentry saluted the familiar little figure of his colonel's daughter
with an explanatory glance at the stranger.  The young fellow looked
up--and the god became human.

"I'm looking for my sister," he said, half awkwardly, half defiantly;
"she's here, somewhere."

"Yes--and perfectly safe, Mr. Culpepper, I think," said the
arch-hypocrite with dazzling sweetness; "and we're all so delighted.
And so brave and plucky and skillful in her to come all that way--and
for such a purpose."

"Then--you know--all about it"--stammered Jim, more relieved than he
had imagined--"and that I"--

"That you were quite ignorant of your sister helping the deserter. Oh
yes, of course," said Cicely, with bewildering promptitude. "You see,
Mr. Culpepper, we girls are SO foolish.  I dare say I should have done
the same thing in her place, only I should never have had the courage
to do what she did afterwards.  You really must forgive her.  But won't
you come in--DO."  She stepped back, holding the window open with the
half-coaxing air of a spoiled child.  "This way is quickest.  DO come."
As he still hesitated, glancing from her to the house, she added, with
a demure little laugh, "Oh, I forget--this is Colonel Preston's
quarters, and I'm his daughter."

And this dainty little fairy, so natural in manner, so tasteful in
attire, was one of the artificial over-dressed creatures that his
sister had inveighed against so bitterly!  Was Maggie really to be
trusted?  This new revelation coming so soon after the episode of the
deserter staggered him.  Nevertheless he hesitated, looking up with a
certain boyish timidity into Cicely's dangerous eyes.

"Is--is--my sister there?"

"I'm expecting her with my mother every moment," responded this
youthful but ingenious diplomatist sweetly; "she might be here now;
but," she added with a sudden heart-broken flash of sympathy, "I know
HOW anxious you both must be.  I'LL take you to her now.  Only one
moment, please."  The opportunity of leading this handsome savage as it
were in chains across the parade, before everybody, her father, her
mother, her sister, and HIS--was not to be lost. She darted into the
house, and reappeared with the daintiest imaginable straw hat on the
side of her head, and demurely took her place at his side.  "It's only
over there, at Major Bromley's," she said, pointing to one of the
vine-clad cottage quarters; "but you are a stranger here, you know, and
might get lost."

Alas! he was already that.  For keeping step with those fairy-like
slippers, brushing awkwardly against that fresh and pretty skirt, and
feeling the caress of the soft folds; looking down upon the brim of
that beribboned little hat, and more often meeting the upturned blue
eyes beneath it, Jim was suddenly struck with a terrible conviction of
his own contrasting coarseness and deficiencies.  How hideous those
oiled canvas fishing-trousers and pilot jacket looked beside this
perfectly fitted and delicately gowned girl!  He loathed his collar,
his jersey, his turned-back sou'wester, even his height, which seemed
to hulk beside her--everything, in short, that the girl had recently
admired.  By the time that they had reached Major Bromley's door he had
so far succumbed to the fair enchantress and realized her ambition of a
triumphant procession, that when she ushered him into the presence of
half a dozen ladies and gentlemen he scarcely recognized his sister as
the centre of attraction, or knew that Miss Cicely's effusive greeting
of Maggie was her first one.  "I knew he was dying to see you after all
you had BOTH passed through, and I brought him straight here," said the
diminutive Machiavelli, meeting the astonished gaze of her father and
the curious eyes of her sister with perfect calmness, while Maggie,
full of gratitude and admiration of her handsome brother, forgot his
momentary obliviousness, and returned her greeting warmly.
Nevertheless, there was a slight movement of reserve among the
gentlemen at the unlooked-for irruption of this sunburnt Adonis, until
Calvert, disengaging himself from Maggie's side, came forward with his
usual frank imperturbability and quiet tact, and claimed Jim as his
friend and honored guest.

It then came out with that unostentatious simplicity which
characterized the brother and sister, and was their secure claim to
perfect equality with their entertainers, that Jim, on discovering his
sister's absence, and fearing that she might be carried by the current
towards the bar, had actually SWUM THE ESTUARY to Indian Island, and in
an ordinary Indian canoe had braved the same tempestuous passage she
had taken a few hours before.  Cicely, listening to this recital with
rapt attention, nevertheless managed to convey the impression of having
fully expected it from the first.  "Of course he'd have come here; if
she'd only waited," she said, sotto voce, to her sister Emily.

"He's certainly the handsomer of the two," responded that young lady.

"Of course," returned Cicely, with a superior air, "don't you see she
COPIES him."

Not that this private criticism prevented either from vying with the
younger officers in their attentions to Maggie, with perhaps the
addition of an open eulogy of her handsome brother, more or less
invidious in comparison to the officers.  "I suppose it's an active
out-of-door life gives him that perfect grace and freedom," said Emily,
with a slight sneer at the smartly belted Calvert. "Yes; and he don't
drink or keep late hours," responded Cicely significantly.  "His sister
says they always retire before ten o'clock, and that although his
father left him some valuable whiskey he seldom takes a drop of it."
"Therein," gravely concluded Captain Kirby, "lies OUR salvation.  If,
after such a confession, Calvert doesn't make the most of his
acquaintance with young Culpepper to remove that whiskey from his path
and bring it here, he's not the man I take him for."

Indeed, for the moment it seemed as if he was not.  During the next
three or four days, in which Colonel Preston had insisted upon
detaining his guests, Calvert touched no liquor, evaded the evening
poker parties at quarters, and even prevailed upon some of his brother
officers to give them up for the more general entertainment of the
ladies.  Colonel Preston was politician enough to avail himself of the
popularity of Maggie's adventure to invite some of the Logport people
to assist him in honoring their neighbor.  Not only was the old feud
between the Fort and the people thus bridged over, but there was no
doubt that the discipline of the Fort had been strengthened by Maggie's
extravagant reputation as a mediator among the disaffected rank and
file.  Whatever characteristic license the grateful Dennis
M'Caffrey--let off with a nominal punishment--may have taken in his
praise of the "Quane of the Marshes," it is certain that the men
worshiped her, and that the band pathetically begged permission to
serenade her the last night of her stay.

At the end of that time, with a dozen invitations, a dozen
appointments, a dozen vows of eternal friendship, much hand-shaking,
and accompanied by a number of the officers to their boat, Maggie and
Jim departed.  They talked but little on their way home; by some tacit
understanding they did not discuss those projects, only recalling
certain scenes and incidents of their visit.  By the time they had
reached the little creek the silence and nervous apathy which usually
follow excitement in the young seemed to have fallen upon them.  It was
not until after their quiet frugal supper that, seated beside the fire,
Jim looked up somewhat self-consciously in his sister's grave and
thoughtful face.

"Say, Mag, what was that idea o' yours about selling some land, and
taking a house at Logport?"

Maggie looked up, and said passively, "Oh, THAT idea?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Well," said Jim somewhat awkwardly, "it COULD be done, you know. I'm
willin'."

As she did not immediately reply, he continued uneasily, "Miss Preston
says we kin get a nice little house that is near the Fort, until we
want to build."

"Oh, then you HAVE talked about it?"

"Yes--that is--why, what are ye thinkin' of, Mag?  Wasn't it YOUR idea
all along?" he said, suddenly facing her with querulous embarrassment.
They had been sitting in their usual evening attitudes of Assyrian
frieze profile, with even more than the usual Assyrian frieze
similarity of feature.

"Yes; but, Jim dear, do you think it the best thing for--for us to do?"
said Maggie, with half-frightened gravity.

At this sudden and startling exhibition of female inconsistency and
inconsequence, Jim was for a moment speechless.  Then he recovered
himself, volubly, aggrievedly, and on his legs.  What DID she mean? Was
he to give up understanding girls--or was it their sole vocation in
life to impede masculine processes and shipwreck masculine conclusions?
Here, after all she said the other night, after they had nearly
"quo'lled" over her "set idees," after she'd "gone over all that
foolishness about Jael and Sisera--and there wasn't any use for
it--after she'd let him run on to them officers all he was goin' to
do--nay, after SHE herself, for he had heard her, had talked to Calvert
about it, she wanted to know NOW if it was best."  He looked at the
floor and the ceiling, as if expecting the tongued and grooved planks
to cry out at this crowning enormity.

The cause of it had resumed her sad gaze at the fire.  Presently,
without turning her head, she reached up her long, graceful arm, and
clasping her brother's neck, brought his face down in profile with her
own, cheek against cheek, until they looked like the double outlines of
a medallion.  Then she said--to the fire:

"Jim, do you think she's pretty?"

"Who?" said Jim, albeit his color had already answered the question.

"You know WHO.  Do you like her?"

Jim here vaguely murmured to the fire that he thought her "kinder
nice," and that she dressed mighty purty.  "Ye know, Mag," he said with
patronizing effusion, "you oughter get some gownds like hers."

"That wouldn't make me like her," said Maggie gravely.

"I don't know about that," said Jim politely, but with an appalling
hopelessness of tone.  After a pause he added slyly, "'Pears to me
SOMEBODY ELSE thought somebody else mighty purty--eh?"

To his discomfiture she did not solicit further information.  After a
pause he continued, still more archly:

"Do you like HIM, Mag?"

"I think he's a perfect gentleman," she said calmly.

He turned his eyes quickly from the glowing fire to her face.  The
cheek that had been resting against his own was as cool as the night
wind that came through the open door, and the whole face was as fixed
and tranquil as the upper stars.


V.

For a year the tide had ebbed and flowed on the Dedlow Marsh unheeded
before the sealed and sightless windows of the "Kingfisher's Nest."
Since the young birds had flown to Logport, even the Indian caretakers
had abandoned the piled dwelling for their old nomadic haunts in the
"bresh."  The high spring tide had again made its annual visit to the
little cemetery of drift-wood, and, as if recognizing another wreck in
the deserted home, had hung a few memorial offerings on the blackened
piles, softly laid a garland of grayish drift before it, and then
sobbed itself out in the salt grass.

From time to time the faint echoes of the Culpeppers' life at Logport
reached the upland, and the few neighbors who had only known them by
hearsay shook their heads over the extravagance they as yet only knew
by report.  But it was in the dead ebb of the tide and the waning
daylight that the feathered tenants of the Marsh seemed to voice dismal
prophecies of the ruin of their old master and mistress, and to give
themselves up to gloomiest lamentation and querulous foreboding.
Whether the traditional "bird of the air" had entrusted his secret to a
few ornithological friends, or whether from a natural disposition to
take gloomy views of life, it was certain that at this hour the vocal
expression of the Marsh was hopeless and despairing.  It was then that
a dejected plover, addressing a mocking crew of sandpipers on a
floating log, seemed to bewail the fortune that was being swallowed up
by the riotous living and gambling debts of Jim.  It was then that the
querulous crane rose, and testily protested against the selling of his
favorite haunt in the sandy peninsula, which only six months of Jim's
excesses had made imperative.  It was then that a mournful curlew, who,
with the preface that he had always been really expecting it,
reiterated the story that Jim had been seen more than once staggering
home with nervous hands and sodden features from a debauch with the
younger officers; it was the same desponding fowl who knew that
Maggie's eyes had more than once filled with tears at Jim's failings,
and had already grown more hollow with many watchings.  It was a flock
of wrangling teal that screamingly discussed the small scandals,
jealous heart-burnings, and curious backbitings that had attended
Maggie's advent into society.  It was the high-flying brent who,
knowing how the sensitive girl, made keenly conscious at every turn of
her defective training and ingenuous ignorance, had often watched their
evening flight with longing gaze, now "honked" dismally at the
recollection.  It was at this hour and season that the usual vague
lamentings of Dedlow Marsh seemed to find at last a preordained
expression.  And it was at such a time, when light and water were both
fading, and the blackness of the Marsh was once more reasserting
itself, that a small boat was creeping along one of the tortuous
inlets, at times half hiding behind the bank like a wounded bird.  As
it slowly penetrated inland it seemed to be impelled by its solitary
occupant in a hesitating uncertain way, as if to escape observation
rather than as if directed to any positive bourn.  Stopping beside a
bank of reeds at last, the figure rose stoopingly, and drew a gun from
between its feet and the bottom of the boat.  As the light fell upon
its face, it could be seen that it was James Culpepper!  James
Culpepper! hardly recognizable in the swollen features, bloodshot eyes,
and tremulous hands of that ruined figure!  James Culpepper, only
retaining a single trace of his former self in his look of set and
passionate purpose!  And that purpose was to kill himself--to be found
dead, as his father had been before him--in an open boat, adrift upon
the Marsh!

It was not the outcome of a sudden fancy.  The idea had first come to
him in a taunting allusion from the drunken lips of one of his ruder
companions, for which he had stricken the offender to the earth.  It
had since haunted his waking hours of remorse and hopeless fatuity; it
had seemed to be the one relief and atonement he could make his devoted
sister; and, more fatuous than all, it seemed to the miserable boy the
one revenge he would take upon the faithless coquette, who for a year
had played with his simplicity, and had helped to drive him to the
distraction of cards and drink. Only that morning Colonel Preston had
forbidden him the house; and now it seemed to him the end had come.  He
raised his distorted face above the reedy bank for a last tremulous and
half-frightened glance at the landscape he was leaving forever.  A
glint in the western sky lit up the front of his deserted dwelling in
the distance, abreast of which the windings of the inlet had
unwittingly led him.  As he looked he started, and involuntarily
dropped into a crouching attitude.  For, to his superstitious terror,
the sealed windows of his old home were open, the bright panes were
glittering with the fading light, and on the outer gallery the familiar
figure of his sister stood, as of old, awaiting his return!  Was he
really going mad, or had this last vision of his former youth been
purposely vouchsafed him?

But, even as he gazed, the appearance of another figure in the
landscape beyond the house proved the reality of his vision, and as
suddenly distracted him from all else.  For it was the apparition of a
man on horseback approaching the house from the upland; and even at
that distance he recognized its well-known outlines.  It was Calvert!
Calvert the traitor!  Calvert, the man whom he had long suspected as
being the secret lover and destined husband of Cicely Preston!
Calvert, who had deceived him with his calm equanimity and his affected
preference for Maggie, to conceal his deliberate understanding with
Cicely.  What was he doing here?  Was he a double traitor, and now
trying to deceive HER--as he had him? And Maggie here!  This sudden
return--this preconcerted meeting. It was infamy!

For a moment he remained stupefied, and then, with a mechanical
instinct, plunged his head and face in the lazy-flowing water, and then
once again rose cool and collected.  The half-mad distraction of his
previous resolve had given way to another, more deliberate, but not
less desperate determination.  He knew now WHY he came there--WHY he
had brought his gun--why his boat had stopped when it did!

Lying flat in the bottom, he tore away fragments of the crumbling bank
to fill his frail craft, until he had sunk it to the gunwale, and below
the low level of the Marsh.  Then, using his hands as noiseless
paddles, he propelled this rude imitation of a floating log slowly past
the line of vision, until the tongue of bushes had hidden him from
view.  With a rapid glance at the darkening flat, he then seized his
gun, and springing to the spongy bank, half crouching half crawling
through reeds and tussocks, he made his way to the brush.  A foot and
eye less experienced would have plunged its owner helpless in the black
quagmire.  At one edge of the thicket he heard hoofs trampling the
dried twigs.  Calvert's horse was already there, tied to a skirting
alder.

He ran to the house, but, instead of attracting attention by ascending
the creaking steps, made his way to the piles below the rear gallery
and climbed to it noiselessly.  It was the spot where the deserter had
ascended a year ago, and, like him, he could see and hear all that
passed distinctly.  Calvert stood near the open door as if departing.
Maggie stood between him and the window, her face in shadow, her hands
clasped tightly behind her.  A profound sadness, partly of the dying
day and waning light, and partly of some vague expiration of their own
sorrow, seemed to encompass them.  Without knowing why, a strange
trembling took the place of James Culpepper's fierce determination, and
a film of moisture stole across his staring eyes.

"When I tell you that I believe all this will pass, and that you will
still win your brother back to you," said Calvert's sad but clear
voice, "I will tell you why--although, perhaps, it is only a part of
that confidence you command me to withhold.  When I first saw you, I
myself had fallen into like dissolute habits; less excusable than he,
for I had some experience of the world and its follies.  When I met
YOU, and fell under the influence of your pure, simple, and healthy
life; when I saw that isolation, monotony, misunderstanding, even the
sense of superiority to one's surroundings could be lived down and
triumphed over, without vulgar distractions or pitiful ambitions; when
I learned to love you--hear me out, Miss Culpepper, I beg you--you
saved ME--I, who was nothing to you, even as I honestly believe you
will still save your brother, whom you love."

"How do you know I didn't RUIN him?" she said, turning upon him
bitterly.  "How do you know that it wasn't to get rid of OUR monotony,
OUR solitude that I drove him to this vulgar distraction, this
pitiful--yes, you were right--pitiful ambition?"

"Because it isn't your real nature," he said quietly.

"My real nature," she repeated with a half savage vehemence that seemed
to be goaded from her by his very gentleness, "my real nature!  What
did HE--what do YOU know of it?--My real nature!--I'll tell you what it
was," she went on passionately.  "It was to be revenged on you all for
your cruelty, your heartlessness, your wickedness to me and mine in the
past.  It was to pay you off for your slanders of my dead father--for
the selfishness that left me and Jim alone with his dead body on the
Marsh.  That was what sent me to Logport--to get even with you--to--to
fool and flaunt you! There, you have it now!  And now that God has
punished me for it by crushing my brother--you--you expect me to let
you crush ME too."

"But," he said eagerly, advancing toward her, "you are wronging me--you
are wronging yourself, cruelly."

"Stop," she said, stepping back, with her hands still locked behind
her.  "Stay where you are.  There!  That's enough!"  She drew herself
up and let her hands fall at her side.  "Now, let us speak of Jim," she
said coldly.

Without seeming to hear her, he regarded her for the first time with
hopeless sadness.

"Why did you let my brother believe you were his rival with Cicely
Preston?" she asked impatiently.

"Because I could not undeceive him without telling him I hopelessly
loved his sister.  You are proud, Miss Culpepper," he said, with the
first tinge of bitterness in his even voice.  "Can you not understand
that others may be proud too?"

"No," she said bluntly; "it is not pride but weakness.  You could have
told him what you knew to be true: that there could be nothing in
common between her folk and such savages as we; that there was a gulf
as wide as that Marsh and as black between our natures, our training
and theirs, and even if they came to us across it, now and then, to
suit their pleasure, light and easy as that tide--it was still there to
some day ground and swamp them!  And if he doubted it, you had only to
tell him your own story.  You had only to tell him what you have just
told me--that you yourself, an officer and a gentleman, thought you
loved me, a vulgar, uneducated, savage girl, and that I, kinder to you
than you to me or him, made you take it back across that tide, because
I couldn't let you link your life with me, and drag you in the mire."

"You need not have said that, Miss Culpepper," returned Calvert with
the same gentle smile, "to prove that I am your inferior in all but one
thing."

"And that?" she said quickly.

"Is my love."

His gentle face was as set now as her own as he moved back slowly
towards the door.  There he paused.

"You tell me to speak of Jim, and Jim only.  Then hear me.  I believe
that Miss Preston cares for him as far as lies in her young and giddy
nature.  I could not, therefore, have crushed HIS hope without
deceiving him, for there are as cruel deceits prompted by what we call
reason as by our love.  If you think that a knowledge of this plain
truth would help to save him, I beg you to be kinder to him than you
have been to me,--or even, let me dare to hope, to YOURSELF."

He slowly crossed the threshold, still holding his cap lightly in his
hand.

"When I tell you that I am going away to-morrow on a leave of absence,
and that in all probability we may not meet again, you will not
misunderstand why I add my prayer to the message your friends in
Logport charged me with.  They beg that you will give up your idea of
returning here, and come back to them.  Believe me, you have made
yourself loved and respected there, in spite--I beg pardon--perhaps I
should say BECAUSE of your pride.  Good-night and good-bye."

For a single instant she turned her set face to the window with a
sudden convulsive movement, as if she would have called him back, but
at the same moment the opposite door creaked and her brother slipped
into the room.  Whether a quick memory of the deserter's entrance at
that door a year ago had crossed her mind, whether there was some
strange suggestion in his mud-stained garments and weak deprecating
smile, or whether it was the outcome of some desperate struggle within
her, there was that in her face that changed his smile into a
frightened cry for pardon, as he ran and fell on his knees at her feet.
But even as he did so her stern look vanished, and with her arm around
him she bent over him and mingled her tears with his.

"I heard it all, Mag dearest!  All!  Forgive me!  I have been
crazy!--wild!--I will reform!--I will be better!  I will never disgrace
you again, Mag!  Never, never!  I swear it!"

She reached down and kissed him.  After a pause, a weak boyish smile
struggled into his face.

"You heard what he said of HER, Mag.  Do you think it might be true?"

She lifted the damp curls from his forehead with a sad half-maternal
smile, but did not reply.

"And Mag, dear, don't you think YOU were a little--just a little--hard
on HIM?  No!  Don't look at me that way, for God's sake! There, I
didn't mean anything.  Of course you knew best.  There, Maggie dear,
look up.  Hark there!  Listen, Mag, do!"

They lifted their eyes to the dim distance seen through the open door.
Borne on the fading light, and seeming to fall and die with it over
marsh and river, came the last notes of the bugle from the Fort.

"There!  Don't you remember what you used to say, Mag?"

The look that had frightened him had quite left her face now.

"Yes," she smiled, laying her cold cheek beside his softly.  "Oh yes!
It was something that came and went, 'Like a song'--'Like a song.'"




A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOTHILLS.

I.

As Father Felipe slowly toiled up the dusty road towards the Rancho of
the Blessed Innocents, he more than once stopped under the shadow of a
sycamore to rest his somewhat lazy mule and to compose his own
perplexed thoughts by a few snatches from his breviary. For the good
padre had some reason to be troubled.  The invasion of Gentile
Americans that followed the gold discovery of three years before had
not confined itself to the plains of the Sacramento, but stragglers had
already found their way to the Santa Cruz Valley, and the seclusion of
even the mission itself was threatened.  It was true that they had not
brought their heathen engines to disembowel the earth in search of
gold, but it was rumored that they had already speculated upon the
agricultural productiveness of the land, and had espied "the fatness
thereof."  As he reached the higher plateau he could see the afternoon
sea-fog--presently to obliterate the fair prospect--already pulling
through the gaps in the Coast Range, and on a nearer slope--no less
ominously--the smoke of a recent but more permanently destructive
Yankee saw-mill was slowly drifting towards the valley.

"Get up, beast!" said the father, digging his heels into the
comfortable flanks of his mule with some human impatience, "or art
THOU, too, a lazy renegade?  Thinkest thou, besotted one, that the
heretic will spare thee more work than the Holy Church."

The mule, thus apostrophized in ear and flesh, shook its head
obstinately as if the question was by no means clear to its mind, but
nevertheless started into a little trot, which presently brought it to
the low adobe wall of the courtyard of "The Innocents," and entered the
gate.  A few lounging peons in the shadow of an archway took off their
broad-brimmed hats and made way for the padre, and a half dozen equally
listless vaqueros helped him to alight.  Accustomed as he was to the
indolence and superfluity of his host's retainers, to-day it
nevertheless seemed to strike some note of irritation in his breast.

A stout, middle-aged woman of ungirt waist and beshawled head and
shoulders appeared at the gateway as if awaiting him.  After a formal
salutation she drew him aside into an inner passage.

"He is away again, your Reverence," she said.

"Ah--always the same?"

"Yes, your Reverence--and this time to 'a meeting' of the heretics at
their pueblo, at Jonesville--where they will ask him of his land for a
road."

"At a MEETING?" echoed the priest uneasily.

"Ah yes! a meeting--where Tiburcio says they shout and spit on the
ground, your Reverence, and only one has a chair and him they call a
'chairman' because of it, and yet he sits not but shouts and spits even
as the others and keeps up a tapping with a hammer like a very pico.
And there it is they are ever 'resolving' that which is not, and
consider it even as done."

"Then he is still the same," said the priest gloomily, as the woman
paused for breath.

"Only more so, your Reverence, for he reads nought but the newspaper of
the Americanos that is brought in the ship, the 'New York 'errald'--and
recites to himself the orations of their legislators.  Ah! it was an
evil day when the shipwrecked American sailor taught him his uncouth
tongue, which, as your Reverence knows, is only fit for beasts and
heathen incantation."

"Pray Heaven THAT were all he learned of him," said the priest hastily,
"for I have great fear that this sailor was little better than an
atheist and an emissary from Satan.  But where are these newspapers and
the fantasies of publicita that fill his mind?  I would see them, my
daughter."

"You shall, your Reverence, and more too," she replied eagerly, leading
the way along the passage to a grated door which opened upon a small
cell-like apartment, whose scant light and less air came through the
deeply embayed windows in the outer wall.  "Here is his estudio."

In spite of this open invitation, the padre entered with that air of
furtive and minute inspection common to his order.  His glance fell
upon a rude surveyor's plan of the adjacent embryo town of Jonesville
hanging on the wall, which he contemplated with a cold disfavor that
even included the highly colored vignette of the projected Jonesville
Hotel in the left-hand corner.  He then passed to a supervisor's notice
hanging near it, which he examined with a suspicion heightened by that
uneasiness common to mere worldly humanity when opposed to an unknown
and unfamiliar language.  But an exclamation broke from his lips when
he confronted an election placard immediately below it.  It was printed
in Spanish and English, and Father Felipe had no difficulty in reading
the announcement that "Don Jose Sepulvida would preside at a meeting of
the Board of Education in Jonesville as one of the trustees."

"This is madness," said the padre.

Observing that Dona Maria was at the moment preoccupied in examining
the pictorial pages of an illustrated American weekly which had
hitherto escaped his eyes, he took it gently from her hand.

"Pardon, your Reverence," she said with slightly acidulous deprecation,
"but thanks to the Blessed Virgin and your Reverence's teaching, the
text is but gibberish to me and I did but glance at the pictures."

"Much evil may come in with the eye," said the priest sententiously,
"as I will presently show thee.  We have here," he continued, pointing
to an illustration of certain college athletic sports, "a number of
youthful cavaliers posturing and capering in a partly nude condition
before a number of shameless women, who emulate the saturnalia of
heathen Rome by waving their handkerchiefs.  We have here a companion
picture," he said, indicating an illustration of gymnastic exercises by
the students of a female academy at "Commencement," "in which, as thou
seest, even the aged of both sexes unblushingly assist as spectators
with every expression of immodest satisfaction."

"Have they no bull-fights or other seemly recreation that they must
indulge in such wantonness?" asked Dona Maria indignantly, gazing,
however, somewhat curiously at the baleful representations.

"Of all that, my daughter, has their pampered civilization long since
wearied," returned the good padre, "for see, this is what they consider
a moral and even a religious ceremony."  He turned to an illustration
of a woman's rights convention; "observe with what rapt attention the
audience of that heathen temple watch the inspired ravings of that
elderly priestess on the dais.  It is even this kind of sacrilegious
performance that I am told thy nephew Don Jose expounds and defends."

"May the blessed saints preserve us; where will it lead to?" murmured
the horrified Dona Maria.

"I will show thee," said Father Felipe, briskly turning the pages with
the same lofty ignoring of the text until he came to a representation
of a labor procession.  "There is one of their periodic revolutions
unhappily not unknown even in Mexico.  Thou perceivest those complacent
artisans marching with implements of their craft, accompanied by the
military, in the presence of their own stricken masters.  Here we see
only another instance of the instability of all communities that are
not founded on the principles of the Holy Church."

"And what is to be done with my nephew?"

The good father's brow darkened with the gloomy religious zeal of two
centuries ago.  "We must have a council of the family, the alcalde, and
the archbishop, at ONCE," he said ominously.  To the mere heretical
observer the conclusion might have seemed lame and impotent, but it was
as near the Holy inquisition as the year of grace 1852 could offer.

A few days after this colloquy the unsuspecting subject of it, Don Jose
Sepulvida, was sitting alone in the same apartment.  The fading glow of
the western sky, through the deep embrasured windows, lit up his rapt
and meditative face.  He was a young man of apparently twenty-five,
with a colorless satin complexion, dark eyes alternating between
melancholy and restless energy, a narrow high forehead, long straight
hair, and a lightly penciled moustache.  He was said to resemble the
well-known portrait of the Marquis of Monterey in the mission church, a
face that was alleged to leave a deep and lasting impression upon the
observers.  It was undoubtedly owing to this quality during a brief
visit of the famous viceroy to a remote and married ancestress of Don
Jose at Leon that the singular resemblance may be attributed.

A heavy and hesitating step along the passage stopped before the
grating.  Looking up, Don Jose beheld to his astonishment the slightly
inflamed face of Roberto, a vagabond American whom he had lately taken
into his employment.

Roberto, a polite translation of "Bob the Bucker," cleaned out at a
monte-bank in Santa Cruz, penniless and profligate, had sold his
mustang to Don Jose and recklessly thrown himself in with the bargain.
Touched by the rascal's extravagance, the quality of the mare, and
observing that Bob's habits had not yet affected his seat in the
saddle, but rather lent a demoniac vigor to his chase of wild cattle,
Don Jose had retained rider and horse in his service as vaquero.

Bucking Bob, observing that his employer was alone, coolly opened the
door without ceremony, shut it softly behind him, and then closed the
wooden shutter of the grating.  Don Jose surveyed him with mild
surprise and dignified composure.  The man appeared perfectly
sober,--it was a peculiarity of his dissipated habits that, when not
actually raving with drink, he was singularly shrewd and practical.

"Look yer, Don Kosay," he began in a brusque but guarded voice, "you
and me is pards.  When ye picked me and the mare up and set us on our
legs again in this yer ranch, I allowed I'd tie to ye whenever you was
in trouble--and wanted me.  And I reckon that's what's the matter now.
For from what I see and hear on every side, although you're the boss of
this consarn, you're surrounded by a gang of spies and traitors.  Your
comings and goings, your ins and outs, is dogged and followed and blown
upon.  The folks you trust is playing it on ye.  It ain't for me to say
why or wherefore--what's their rights and what's yourn--but I've come
to tell ye that if you don't get up and get outer this ranch them d--d
priests and your own flesh and blood--your aunts and your uncles and
your cousins, will have you chucked outer your property, and run into a
lunatic asylum."

"Me--Don Jose Sepulvida--a lunatico!  You are yourself crazy of drink,
friend Roberto."

"Yes," said Roberto grimly, "but that kind ain't ILLEGAL, while your
makin' ducks and drakes of your property and going into 'Merikin ideas
and 'Merikin speculations they reckon is.  And speakin' on the square,
it ain't NAT'RAL."

Don Jose sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down his cell-like
study.  "Ah, I remember now," he muttered, "I begin to comprehend:
Father Felipe's homilies and discourses!  My aunt's too affectionate
care!  My cousin's discreet consideration!  The prompt attention of my
servants!  I see it all!  And you," he said, suddenly facing Roberto,
"why come you to tell me this?"

"Well, boss," said the American dryly, "I reckoned to stand by you."

"Ah," said Don Jose, visibly affected.  "Good Roberto, come hither,
child, you may kiss my hand."

"If! it's all the same to you, Don Kosay,--THAT kin slide."

"Ah, if--yes," said Don Jose, meditatively putting his hand to his
forehead, "miserable that I am!--I remembered not you were Americano.
Pardon, my friend--embrace me--Conpanero y Amigo."

With characteristic gravity he reclined for a moment upon Robert's
astonished breast.  Then recovering himself with equal gravity he
paused, lifted his hand with gentle warning, marched to a recess in the
corner, unhooked a rapier hanging from the wall, and turned to his
companion.

"We will defend ourselves, friend Roberto.  It is the sword of the
Comandante--my ancestor.  The blade is of Toledo."

"An ordinary six-shooter of Colt's would lay over that," said Roberto
grimly--"but that ain't your game just now, Don Kosay.  You must get up
and get, and at once.  You must vamose the ranch afore they lay hold of
you and have you up before the alcalde.  Once away from here, they
daren't follow you where there's 'Merikin law, and when you kin fight
'em in the square."

"Good," said Don Jose with melancholy preciseness.  "You are wise,
friend Roberto.  We may fight them later, as you say--on the square, or
in the open Plaza.  And you, camarado, YOU shall go with me--you and
your mare."

Sincere as the American had been in his offer of service, he was
somewhat staggered at this imperative command.  But only for a moment.
"Well," he said lazily, "I don't care if I do."

"But," said Don Jose with increased gravity, "you SHALL care, friend
Roberto.  We shall make an alliance, an union.  It is true, my brother,
you drink of whiskey, and at such times are even as a madman.  It has
been recounted to me that it was necessary to your existence that you
are a lunatic three days of the week.  Who knows?  I myself, though I
drink not of aguardiente, am accused of fantasies for all time.
Necessary it becomes therefore that we should go TOGETHER.  My
fantasies and speculations cannot injure you, my brother; your whiskey
shall not empoison me.  We shall go together in the great world of your
American ideas of which I am much inflamed.  We shall together breathe
as one the spirit of Progress and Liberty.  We shall be even as
neophytes making of ourselves Apostles of Truth.  I absolve and
renounce myself henceforth of my family.  I shall take to myself the
sister and the brother, the aunt and the uncle, as we proceed.  I
devote myself to humanity alone.  I devote YOU, my friend, and the
mare--though happily she has not a Christian soul--to this glorious
mission."

The few level last rays of light lit up a faint enthusiasm in the face
of Don Jose, but without altering his imperturbable gravity. The
vaquero eyed him curiously and half doubtfully.

"We will go to-morrow," resumed Don Jose with solemn decision, "for it
is Wednesday.  It was a Sunday that thou didst ride the mare up the
steps of the Fonda and demanded that thy liquor should be served to
thee in a pail.  I remember it, for the landlord of the Fonda claimed
twenty pesos for damage and the kissing of his wife. Therefore, by
computation, good Roberto, thou shouldst be sober until Friday, and we
shall have two clear days to fly before thy madness again seizes thee."

"They kin say what they like, Don Kosay, but YOUR head is level,"
returned the unabashed American, grasping Don Jose's hand.  "All right,
then.  Hasta manana, as your folks say."

"Hasta manana," repeated Don Jose gravely.

At daybreak next morning, while slumber still weighted the lazy eyelids
of "the Blessed Innocents," Don Jose Sepulvida and his trusty squire
Roberto, otherwise known as "Bucking Bob," rode forth unnoticed from
the corral.


II.

Three days had passed.  At the close of the third, Don Jose was seated
in a cosy private apartment of the San Mateo Hotel, where they had
halted for an arranged interview with his lawyer before reaching San
Francisco.  From his window he could see the surrounding park-like
avenues of oaks and the level white high road, now and then clouded
with the dust of passing teams.  But his eyes were persistently fixed
upon a small copy of the American Constitution before him.  Suddenly
there was a quick rap on his door, and before he could reply to it a
man brusquely entered.

Don Jose raised his head slowly, and recognized the landlord.  But the
intruder, apparently awed by the gentle, grave, and studious figure
before him, fell back for an instant in an attitude of surly apology.

"Enter freely, my good Jenkinson," said Don Jose, with a quiet courtesy
that had all the effect of irony.  "The apartment, such as it is, is at
your disposition.  It is even yours, as is the house."

"Well, I'm darned if I know as it is," said the landlord, recovering
himself roughly, "and that's jest what's the matter. Yer's that man of
yours smashing things right and left in the bar-room and chuckin' my
waiters through the window."

"Softly, softly, good Jenkinson," said Don Jose, putting a mark in the
pages of the volume before him.  "It is necessary first that I should
correct your speech.  He is not my 'MAN,' which I comprehend to mean a
slave, a hireling, a thing obnoxious to the great American nation which
I admire and to which HE belongs.  Therefore, good Jenkinson, say
'friend,' 'companion,' 'guide,' philosopher,' if you will.  As to the
rest, it is of no doubt as you relate.  I myself have heard the
breakings of glass and small dishes as I sit here; three times I have
seen your waiters projected into the road with much violence and
confusion.  To myself I have then said, even as I say to you, good
Jenkinson, 'Patience, patience, the end is not far.'  In four hours,"
continued Don Jose, holding up four fingers, "he shall make a finish.
Until then, not."

"Well, I'm d--d," ejaculated Jenkinson, gasping for breath in his
indignation.

"Nay, excellent Jenkinson, not dam-ned but of a possibility dam-AGED.
That I shall repay when he have make a finish."

"But, darn it all," broke in the landlord angrily.

"Ah," said Don Jose gravely, "you would be paid before!  Good; for how
much shall you value ALL you have in your bar?"

Don Jose's imperturbability evidently shook the landlord's faith in the
soundness of his own position.  He looked at his guest critically and
audaciously.

"It cost me two hundred dollars to fit it up," he said curtly.

Don Jose rose, and, taking a buckskin purse from his saddle-bag,
counted out four slugs[1] and handed them to the stupefied Jenkinson.
The next moment, however, his host recovered himself, and casting the
slugs back on the little table, brought his fist down with an emphasis
that made them dance.

"But, look yer--suppose I want this thing stopped--you hear
me--STOPPED--now."

"That would be interfering with the liberty of the subject, my good
Jenkinson--which God forbid!" said Don Jose calmly.  "Moreover, it is
the custom of the Americanos--a habit of my friend Roberto--a necessity
of his existence--and so recognized of his friends. Patience and
courage, Senor Jenkinson.  Stay--ah, I comprehend! you have--of a
possibility--a wife?"

"No, I'm a widower," said Jenkinson sharply.

"Then I congratulate you.  My friend Roberto would have kissed her. It
is also of his habit.  Truly you have escaped much.  I embrace you,
Jenkinson."

He threw his arms gravely around Jenkinson, in whose astounded face at
last an expression of dry humor faintly dawned.  After a moment's
survey of Don Jose's impenetrable gravity, he coolly gathered up the
gold coins, and saying that he would assess the damages and return the
difference, he left the room as abruptly as he had entered it.

But Don Jose was not destined to remain long in peaceful study of the
American Constitution.  He had barely taken up the book again and
renewed his serious contemplation of its excellences when there was
another knock at his door.  This time, in obedience to his invitation
to enter, the new visitor approached with more deliberation and a
certain formality.

He was a young man of apparently the same age as Don Jose, handsomely
dressed, and of a quiet self-possession and gravity almost equal to his
host's.

"I believe I am addressing Don Jose Sepulvida," he said with a familiar
yet courteous inclination of his handsome head.  Don Jose, who had
risen in marked contrast to his reception of his former guest,
answered,--

"You are truly making to him a great honor."

"Well, you're going it blind as far as I'M concerned certainly," said
the young man, with a slight smile, "for you don't know ME."

"Pardon, my friend," said Don Jose gently, "in this book, this great
Testament of your glorious nation, I have read that you are all equal,
one not above, one not below the other.  I salute in you the Nation!
It is enough!"

"Thank you," returned the stranger, with a face that, saving the
faintest twinkle in the corner of his dark eyes, was as immovable as
his host's, "but for the purposes of my business I had better say I am
Jack Hamlin, a gambler, and am just now dealing faro in the Florida
saloon round the corner."

He paused carelessly, as if to allow Don Jose the protest he did not
make, and then continued,--

"The matter is this.  One of your vaqueros, who is, however, an
American, was round there an hour ago bucking against faro, and put up
and LOST, not only the mare he was riding, but a horse which I have
just learned is yours.  Now we reckon, over there, that we can make
enough money playing a square game, without being obliged to take
property from a howling drunkard, to say nothing of it not belonging to
him, and I've come here, Don Jose, to say that if you'll send over and
bring away your man and your horse, you can have 'em both."

"If I have comprehended, honest Hamlin," said Don Jose slowly, "this
Roberto, who was my vaquero and is my brother, has approached this faro
game by himself unsolicited?"

"He certainly didn't seem shy of it," said Mr. Hamlin with equal
gravity.  "To the best of my knowledge he looked as if he'd been there
before."

"And if he had won, excellent Hamlin, you would have given him the
equal of his mare and horse?"

"A hundred dollars for each, yes, certainly."

"Then I see not why I should send for the property which is truly no
longer mine, nor for my brother who will amuse himself after the
fashion of his country in the company of so honorable a caballero as
yourself?  Stay! oh imbecile that I am.  I have not remembered. You
would possibly say that he has no longer of horses!  Play him; play
him, admirable yet prudent Hamlin.  I have two thousand horses!  Of a
surety he cannot exhaust them in four hours. Therefore play him, trust
to me for recompensa, and have no fear."

A quick flush covered the stranger's cheek, and his eyebrows
momentarily contracted.  He walked carelessly to the window, however,
glanced out, and then turned to Don Jose.

"May I ask, then," he said with almost sepulchral gravity, "is anybody
taking care of you?"

"Truly," returned Don Jose cautiously, "there is my brother and friend
Roberto."

"Ah! Roberto, certainly," said Mr. Hamlin profoundly.

"Why do you ask, considerate friend?"

"Oh! I only thought, with your kind of opinions, you must often feel
lonely in California.  Good-bye."  He shook Don Jose's hand heartily,
took up his hat, inclined his head with graceful seriousness, and
passed out of the room.  In the hall he met the landlord.

"Well," said Jenkinson, with a smile half anxious, half insinuating,
"you saw him?  What do you think of him?"

Mr. Hamlin paused and regarded Jenkinson with a calmly contemplative
air, as if he were trying to remember first who he was, and secondly
why he should speak to him at all.  "Think of whom?" he repeated
carelessly.

"Why him--you know--Don Jose."

"I did not see anything the matter with him," returned Hamlin with
frigid simplicity.

"What? nothing queer?"

"Well, no--except that he's a guest in YOUR house," said Hamlin with
great cheerfulness.  "But then, as you keep a hotel, you can't help
occasionally admitting a--gentleman."

Mr. Jenkinson smiled the uneasy smile of a man who knew that his
interlocutor's playfulness occasionally extended to the use of a
derringer, in which he was singularly prompt and proficient, and Mr.
Hamlin, equally conscious of that knowledge on the part of his
companion, descended the staircase composedly.

But the day had darkened gradually into night, and Don Jose was at last
compelled to put aside his volume.  The sound of a large bell rung
violently along the hall and passages admonished him that the American
dinner was ready, and although the viands and the mode of cooking were
not entirely to his fancy, he had, in his grave enthusiasm for the
national habits, attended the table d'hote regularly with Roberto.  On
reaching the lower hall he was informed that his henchman had early
succumbed to the potency of his libations, and had already been carried
by two men to bed. Receiving this information with his usual stoical
composure, he entered the dining-room, but was surprised to find that a
separate table had been prepared for him by the landlord, and that a
rude attempt had been made to serve him with his own native dishes.

"Senores y Senoritas," said Don Jose, turning from it and with grave
politeness addressing the assembled company, "if I seem to-day to
partake alone and in a reserved fashion of certain viands that have
been prepared for me, it is truly from no lack of courtesy to your
distinguished company, but rather, I protest, to avoid the appearance
of greater discourtesy to our excellent Jenkinson, who has taken some
pains and trouble to comport his establishment to what he conceives to
be my desires.  Wherefore, my friends, in God's name fall to, the same
as if I were not present, and grace be with you."

A few stared at the tall, gentle, melancholy figure with some
astonishment; a few whispered to their neighbors; but when, at the
conclusion of his repast, Don Jose arose and again saluted the company,
one or two stood up and smilingly returned the courtesy, and Polly
Jenkinson, the landlord's youngest daughter, to the great delight of
her companions, blew him a kiss.

After visiting the vaquero in his room, and with his own hand applying
some native ointment to the various contusions and scratches which
recorded the late engagements of the unconscious Roberto, Don Jose
placed a gold coin in the hands of the Irish chamber-maid, and bidding
her look after the sleeper, he threw his serape over his shoulders and
passed into the road.  The loungers on the veranda gazed at him
curiously, yet half acknowledged his usual serious salutation, and made
way for him with a certain respect.  Avoiding the few narrow streets of
the little town, he pursued his way meditatively along the highroad,
returning to the hotel after an hour's ramble, as the evening
stage-coach had deposited its passengers and departed.

"There's a lady waiting to see you upstairs," said the landlord with a
peculiar smile.  "She rather allowed it wasn't the proper thing to see
you alone, or she wasn't quite ekal to it, I reckon, for she got my
Polly to stand by her."

"Your Polly, good Jenkinson?" said Don Jose interrogatively.

"My darter, Don Jose."

"Ah, truly!  I am twice blessed," said Don Jose, gravely ascending the
staircase.

On entering the room he perceived a tall, large-featured woman with an
extraordinary quantity of blond hair parted on one side of her broad
forehead, sitting upon the sofa.  Beside her sat Polly Jenkinson, her
fresh, honest, and rather pretty face beaming with delighted
expectation and mischief.  Don Jose saluted them with a formal
courtesy, which, however, had no trace of the fact that he really did
not remember anything of them.

"I called," said the large-featured woman with a voice equally
pronounced, "in reference to a request from you, which, though perhaps
unconventional in the extreme, I have been able to meet by the
intervention of this young lady's company.  My name on this card may
not be familiar to you--but I am 'Dorothy Dewdrop.'"

A slight movement of abstraction and surprise passed over Don Jose's
face, but as quickly vanished as he advanced towards her and gracefully
raised the tips of her fingers to his lips.  "Have I then, at last, the
privilege of beholding that most distressed and deeply injured of
women!  Or is it but a dream!"

It certainly was not, as far as concerned the substantial person of the
woman before him, who, however, seemed somewhat uneasy under his words
as well as the demure scrutiny of Miss Jenkinson.  "I thought you might
have forgotten," she said with slight acerbity, "that you desired an
interview with the authoress of"--

"Pardon," interrupted Don Jose, standing before her in an attitude of
the deepest sympathizing dejection, "I had not forgotten.  It is now
three weeks since I have read in the journal 'Golden Gate' the eloquent
and touching poem of your sufferings, and your aspirations, and your
miscomprehensions by those you love.  I remember as yesterday that you
have said, that cruel fate have linked you to a soulless
state--that--but I speak not well your own beautiful language--you are
in tears at evenfall 'because that you are not understood of others,
and that your soul recoiled from iron bonds, until, as in a dream, you
sought succor and release in some true Knight of equal plight.'"

"I am told," said the large-featured woman with some satisfaction,
"that the poem to which you allude has been generally admired."

"Admired!  Senora," said Don Jose, with still darker sympathy, "it is
not the word; it is FELT.  I have felt it.  When I read those words of
distress, I am touched of compassion!  I have said, This woman, so
disconsolate, so oppressed, must be relieved, protected! I have wrote
to you, at the 'Golden Gate,' to see me here."

"And I have come, as you perceive," said the poetess, rising with a
slight smile of constraint; "and emboldened by your appreciation, I
have brought a few trifles thrown off"--

"Pardon, unhappy Senora," interrupted Don Jose, lifting his hand
deprecatingly without relaxing his melancholy precision, "but to a
cavalier further evidence is not required--and I have not yet make
finish.  I have not content myself to WRITE to you.  I have sent my
trusty friend Roberto to inquire at the 'Golden Gate' of your
condition.  I have found there, most unhappy and persecuted
friend--that with truly angelic forbearance you have not told ALL--that
you are MARRIED, and that of a necessity it is your husband that is
cold and soulless and unsympathizing--and all that you describe."

"Sir!" said the poetess, rising in angry consternation.

"I have written to him," continued Don Jose, with unheeding gravity;
"have appealed to him as a friend, I have conjured him as a caballero,
I have threatened him even as a champion of the Right, I have said to
him, in effect--that this must not be as it is.  I have informed him
that I have made an appointment with you even at this house, and I
challenged him to meet you here--in this room--even at this instant,
and, with God's help, we should make good our charges against him.  It
is yet early; I have allowed time for the lateness of the stage and the
fact that he will come by another conveyance.  Therefore, O Dona
Dewdrop, tremble not like thy namesake as it were on the leaf of
apprehension and expectancy.  I, Don Jose, am here to protect thee.  I
will take these charges"--gently withdrawing the manuscripts from her
astonished grasp--"though even, as I related to thee before, I want
them not, yet we will together confront him with them and make them
good against him."

"Are you mad?" demanded the lady in almost stentorious accents, "or is
this an unmanly hoax?"  Suddenly she stopped in undeniable
consternation.  "Good heavens," she muttered, "if Abner should believe
this.  He is SUCH a fool!  He has lately been queer and jealous.  Oh
dear!" she said, turning to Polly Jenkinson with the first indication
of feminine weakness, "Is he telling the truth? is he crazy? what shall
I do?"

Polly Jenkinson, who had witnessed the interview with the intensest
enjoyment, now rose equal to the occasion.

"You have made a mistake," she said, uplifting her demure blue eyes to
Don Jose's dark and melancholy gaze.  "This lady is a POETESS! The
sufferings she depicts, the sorrows she feels, are in the IMAGINATION,
in her fancy only."

"Ah!" said Don Jose gloomily; "then it is all false."

"No," said Polly quickly, "only they are not her OWN, you know. They
are somebody elses.  She only describes them for another, don't you
see?"

"And who, then, is this unhappy one?" asked the Don quickly.

"Well--a--friend," stammered Polly, hesitatingly.

"A friend!" repeated Don Jose.  "Ah, I see, of possibility a dear one,
even," he continued, gazing with tender melancholy into the untroubled
cerulean depths of Polly's eyes, "even, but no, child, it could not be!
THOU art too young."

"Ah," said Polly, with an extraordinary gulp and a fierce nudge of the
poetess, "but it WAS me."

"You, Senorita," repeated Don Jose, falling back in an attitude of
mingled admiration and pity.  "You, the child of Jenkinson!"

"Yes, yes," joined in the poetess hurriedly; "but that isn't going to
stop the consequences of your wretched blunder.  My husband will be
furious, and will be here at any moment.  Good gracious! what is that?"

The violent slamming of a distant door at that instant, the sounds of
quick scuffling on the staircase, and the uplifting of an irate voice
had reached her ears and thrown her back in the arms of Polly
Jenkinson.  Even the young girl herself turned an anxious gaze towards
the door.  Don Jose alone was unmoved.

"Possess yourselves in peace, Senoritas," he said calmly.  "We have
here only the characteristic convalescence of my friend and brother,
the excellent Roberto.  He will ever recover himself from drink with
violence, even as he precipitates himself into it with fury.  He has
been prematurely awakened.  I will discover the cause."

With an elaborate bow to the frightened women, he left the room.
Scarcely had the door closed when the poetess turned quickly to Polly.
"The man's a stark staring lunatic, but, thank Heaven, Abner will see
it at once.  And now let's get away while we can. To think," she said,
snatching up her scattered manuscripts, "that THAT was all the beast
wanted."

"I'm sure he's very gentle and kind," said Polly, recovering her
dimples with a demure pout; "but stop, he's coming back."

It was indeed Don Jose re-entering the room with the composure of a
relieved and self-satisfied mind.  "It is even as I said, Senora," he
began, taking the poetess's hand,--"and MORE.  You are SAVED!"

As the women only stared at each other, he gravely folded his arms and
continued: "I will explain.  For the instant I have not remember that,
in imitation of your own delicacy, I have given to your husband in my
letter, not the name of myself, but, as a mere Don Fulano, the name of
my brother Roberto--'Bucking Bob.'  Your husband have this moment
arrive!  Penetrating the bedroom of the excellent Roberto, he has
indiscreetly seize him in his bed, without explanation, without
introduction, without fear!  The excellent Roberto, ever ready for such
distractions, have respond! In a word, to use the language of the good
Jenkinson--our host, our father--who was present, he have 'wiped the
floor with your husband,' and have even carried him down the staircase
to the street.  Believe me, he will not return.  You are free!"

"Fool!  Idiot!  Crazy beast!" said the poetess, dashing past him and
out of the door.  "You shall pay for this!"

Don Jose did not change his imperturbable and melancholy calm. "And
now, little one," he said, dropping on one knee before the
half-frightened Polly, "child of Jenkinson, now that thy perhaps too
excitable sponsor has, in a poet's caprice, abandoned thee for some
newer fantasy, confide in me thy distress, to me, thy Knight, and tell
the story of thy sorrows."

"But," said Polly, rising to her feet and struggling between a laugh
and a cry.  "I haven't any sorrows.  Oh dear! don't you see, it's only
her FANCY to make me seem so.  There's nothing the matter with me."

"Nothing the matter," repeated Don Jose slowly.  "You have no distress?
You want no succor, no relief, no protector?  This, then, is but
another delusion!" he said, rising sadly.

"Yes, no--that is--oh, my gracious goodness!" said Polly, hopelessly
divided between a sense of the ridiculous and some strange attraction
in the dark, gentle eyes that were fixed upon her half reproachfully.
"You don't understand."

Don Jose replied only with a melancholy smile, and then going to the
door, opened it with a bowed head and respectful courtesy.  At the act,
Polly plucked up courage again, and with it a slight dash of her old
audacity.

"I'm sure I'm very sorry that I ain't got any love sorrows," she said
demurely.  "And I suppose it's very dreadful in me not to have been
raving and broken-hearted over somebody or other as that woman has
said.  Only," she waited till she had gained the secure vantage of the
threshold, "I never knew a gentleman to OBJECT to it before!"

With this Parthian arrow from her blue eyes she slipped into the
passage and vanished through the door of the opposite parlor.  For an
instant Don Jose remained motionless and reflecting.  Then, recovering
himself with grave precision, he deliberately picked up his narrow
black gloves from the table, drew them on, took his hat in his hand,
and solemnly striding across the passage, entered the door that had
just closed behind her.


[1] Hexagonal gold pieces valued at $50 each, issued by a private firm
as coin in the early days.


III.

It must not be supposed that in the meantime the flight of Don Jose and
his follower was unattended by any commotion at the rancho of the
Blessed Innocents.  At the end of three hours' deliberation, in which
the retainers were severally examined, the corral searched, and the
well in the courtyard sounded, scouts were dispatched in different
directions, who returned with the surprising information that the
fugitives were not in the vicinity.  A trustworthy messenger was sent
to Monterey for "custom-house paper," on which to draw up a formal
declaration of the affair.  The archbishop was summoned from San Luis,
and Don Victor and Don Vincente Sepulvida, with the Donas Carmen and
Inez Alvarado, and a former alcalde, gathered at a family council the
next day.  In this serious conclave the good Father Felipe once more
expounded the alienated condition and the dangerous reading of the
absent man.  In the midst of which the ordinary post brought a letter
from Don Jose, calmly inviting the family to dine with him and Roberto
at San Mateo on the following Wednesday.  The document was passed
gravely from hand to hand.  Was it a fresh evidence of mental
aberration--an audacity of frenzy--or a trick of the vaquero?  The
archbishop and alcalde shook their heads--it was without doubt a
lawless, even a sacrilegious and blasphemous fete.  But a certain
curiosity of the ladies and of Father Felipe carried the day.  Without
formally accepting the invitation it was decided that the family should
examine the afflicted man, with a view of taking active measures
hereafter.  On the day appointed, the traveling carriage of the
Sepulvidas, an equipage coeval with the beginning of the century, drawn
by two white mules gaudily caparisoned, halted before the hotel at San
Mateo and disgorged Father Felipe, the Donas Carmen and Inez Alvarado
and Maria Sepulvida, while Don Victor and Don Vincente Sepulvida, their
attendant cavaliers on fiery mustangs, like outriders, drew rein at the
same time.  A slight thrill of excitement, as of the advent of a
possible circus, had preceded them through the little town; a faint
blending of cigarette smoke and garlic announced their presence on the
veranda.

Ushered into the parlor of the hotel, apparently set apart for their
reception, they were embarrassed at not finding their host present.
But they were still more disconcerted when a tall full-bearded
stranger, with a shrewd amused-looking face, rose from a chair by the
window, and stepping forward, saluted them in fluent Spanish with a
slight American accent.

"I have to ask you, gentlemen and ladies," he began, with a certain
insinuating ease and frankness that alternately aroused and lulled
their suspicions, "to pardon the absence of our friend Don Jose
Sepulvida at this preliminary greeting.  For to be perfectly frank with
you, although the ultimate aim and object of our gathering is a social
one, you are doubtless aware that certain infelicities and
misunderstandings--common to most families--have occurred, and a free,
dispassionate, unprejudiced discussion and disposal of them at the
beginning will only tend to augment the goodwill of our gathering."

"The Senor without doubt is"--suggested the padre, with a polite
interrogative pause.

"Pardon me!  I forgot to introduce myself.  Colonel Parker--entirely at
your service and that of these charming ladies."

The ladies referred to allowed their eyes to rest with evident
prepossession on the insinuating stranger.  "Ah, a soldier," said Don
Vincente.

"Formerly," said the American lightly; "at present a lawyer, the
counsel of Don Jose."

A sudden rigor of suspicion stiffened the company; the ladies withdrew
their eyes; the priest and the Sepulvidas exchanged glances.

"Come," said Colonel Parker, with apparent unconsciousness of the
effect of his disclosure, "let us begin frankly.  You have, I believe,
some anxiety in regard to the mental condition of Don Jose."

"We believe him to be mad," said Padre Felipe promptly, "irresponsible,
possessed!"

"That is your opinion; good," said the lawyer quietly.

"And ours too," clamored the party, "without doubt."

"Good," returned the lawyer with perfect cheerfulness.  "As his
relations, you have no doubt had superior opportunities for observing
his condition.  I understand also that you may think it necessary to
have him legally declared non compos, a proceeding which, you are
aware, might result in the incarceration of our distinguished friend in
a mad-house."

"Pardon, Senor," interrupted Dona Maria proudly, "you do not comprehend
the family.  When a Sepulvida is visited of God we do not ask the
Government to confine him like a criminal.  We protect him in his own
house from the consequences of his frenzy."

"From the machinations of the worldly and heretical," broke in the
priest, "and from the waste and dispersion of inherited possessions."

"Very true," continued Colonel Parker, with unalterable good-humor;
"but I was only about to say that there might be conflicting evidence
of his condition.  For instance, our friend has been here three days.
In that time he has had three interviews with three individuals under
singular circumstances."  Colonel Parker then briefly recounted the
episodes of the landlord, the gambler, Miss Jenkinson and the poetess,
as they had been related to him.  "Yet," he continued, "all but one of
these individuals are willing to swear that they not only believe Don
Jose perfectly sane, but endowed with a singularly sound judgment.  In
fact, the testimony of Mr. Hamlin and Miss Jenkinson is remarkably
clear on that subject."

The company exchanged a supercilious smile.  "Do you not see, O Senor
Advocate," said Don Vincente compassionately, "that this is but a
conspiracy to avail themselves of our relative's weakness. Of a
necessity they find him sane who benefits them."

"I have thought of that, and am glad to hear you say so," returned the
lawyer still more cheerfully, "for your prompt opinion emboldens me to
be at once perfectly frank with you.  Briefly then, Don Jose has
summoned me here to make a final disposition of his property.  In the
carrying out of certain theories of his, which it is not my province to
question, he has resolved upon comparative poverty for himself as best
fitted for his purpose, and to employ his wealth solely for others.  In
fact, of all his vast possessions he retains for himself only an income
sufficient for the bare necessaries of life."

"And you have done this?" they asked in one voice.

"Not yet," said the lawyer.

"Blessed San Antonio, we have come in time!" ejaculated Dona Carmen.
"Another day and it would have been too late; it was an inspiration of
the Blessed Innocents themselves," said Dona Maria, crossing herself.
"Can you longer doubt that this is the wildest madness?" said Father
Felipe with flashing eyes.

"Yet," returned the lawyer, caressing his heavy beard with a meditative
smile, "the ingenious fellow actually instanced the vows of YOUR OWN
ORDER, reverend sir, as an example in support of his theory.  But to be
brief.  Conceiving, then, that his holding of property was a mere
accident of heritage, not admitted by him, unworthy his acceptance, and
a relic of superstitious ignorance"--

"This is the very sacrilege of Satanic prepossession," broke in the
priest indignantly.

"He therefore," continued the lawyer composedly, "makes over and
reverts the whole of his possessions, with the exceptions I have
stated, to his family and the Church."

A breathless and stupefying silence fell upon the company.  In the dead
hush the sound of Polly Jenkinson's piano, played in a distant room,
could be distinctly heard.  With their vacant eyes staring at him the
speaker continued:

"That deed of gift I have drawn up as he dictated it.  I don't mind
saying that in the opinion of some he might be declared non compos upon
the evidence of that alone.  I need not say how relieved I am to find
that your opinion coincides with my own."

"But," gasped Father Felipe hurriedly, with a quick glance at the
others, "it does not follow that it will be necessary to resort to
these legal measures.  Care, counsel, persuasion--"

"The general ministering of kinship--nursing, a woman's care--the
instincts of affection," piped Dona Maria in breathless eagerness.

"Any light social distraction--a harmless flirtation--a possible
attachment," suggested Dona Carmen shyly.

"Change of scene--active exercise--experiences--even as those you have
related," broke in Don Vincente.

"I for one have ever been opposed to LEGAL measures," said Don Victor.
"A mere consultation of friends--in fact, a fete like this is
sufficient."

"Good friends," said Father Felipe, who had by this time recovered
himself, taking out his snuff-box portentously, "it would seem truly,
from the document which this discreet caballero has spoken of, that the
errors of our dear Don Jose are rather of method than intent, and that
while we may freely accept the one"--

"Pardon," interrupted Colonel Parker with bland persistence, "but I
must point out to you that what we call in law 'a consideration' is
necessary to the legality of a conveyance, even though that
consideration be frivolous and calculated to impair the validity of the
document."

"Truly," returned the good padre insinuatingly; "but if a discreet
advocate were to suggest the substitution of some more pious and
reasonable consideration"--

"But that would be making it a perfectly sane and gratuitous document,
not only glaringly inconsistent with your charges, my good friends,
with Don Jose's attitude towards you and his flight from home, but open
to the gravest suspicion in law.  In fact, its apparent propriety in
the face of these facts would imply improper influence."

The countenances of the company fell.  The lawyer's face, however,
became still more good-humored and sympathizing.  "The case is simply
this.  If in the opinion of judge and jury Don Jose is declared insane,
the document is worthless except as a proof of that fact or a possible
indication of the undue influence of his relations, which might compel
the court to select his guardians and trustees elsewhere than among
them."

"Friend Abogado," said Father Felipe with extraordinary deliberation,
"the document thou hast just described so eloquently convinces me
beyond all doubt that Don Jose is not only perfectly sane but endowed
with a singular discretion.  I consider it as a delicate and
high-spirited intimation to us, his friends and kinsmen, of his
unalterable and logically just devotion to his family and religion,
whatever may seem to be his poetical and imaginative manner of
declaring it.  I think there is not one here," continued the padre,
looking around him impressively, "who is not entirely satisfied of Don
Jose's reason and competency to arrange his own affairs."

"Entirely," "truly," "perfectly," eagerly responded the others with
affecting spontaneity.

"Nay, more.  To prevent any misconception, we shall deem it our duty to
take every opportunity of making our belief publicly known," added
Father Felipe.

The padre and Colonel Parker gazed long and gravely into each other's
eyes.  It may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight through the
window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the pupil of the affable
lawyer at the same moment that, probably from the like cause, there was
a slight nervous contraction of the left eyelid of the pious father.
But it passed, and the next instant the door opened to admit Don Jose
Sepulvida.

He was at once seized and effusively embraced by the entire company
with every protest of affection and respect.  Not only Mr. Hamlin and
Mr. Jenkinson, who accompanied him as invited guests, but Roberto, in a
new suit of clothes and guiltless of stain or trace of dissipation,
shared in the pronounced friendliness of the kinsmen.  Padre Felipe
took snuff, Colonel Parker blew his nose gently.

Nor were they less demonstrative of their new convictions later at the
banquet.  Don Jose, with Jenkinson and the padre on his right and left,
preserved his gentle and half-melancholy dignity in the midst of the
noisy fraternization.  Even Padre Felipe, in a brief speech or
exhortation proposing the health of their host, lent himself in his own
tongue to this polite congeniality.  "We have had also, my friends and
brothers," he said in peroration, "a pleasing example of the compliment
of imitation shown by our beloved Don Jose.  No one who has known him
during his friendly sojourn in this community but will be struck with
the conviction that he has acquired that most marvelous faculty of your
great American nation, the exhibition of humor and of the practical
joke."

Every eye was turned upon the imperturbable face of Don Jose as he
slowly rose to reply.  "In bidding you to this fete, my friends and
kinsmen," he began calmly, "it was with the intention of formally
embracing the habits, customs, and spirit of American institutions by
certain methods of renunciation of the past, as became a caballero of
honor and resolution.  Those methods may possibly be known to some of
you."  He paused for a moment as if to allow the members of his family
to look unconscious.  "Since then, in the wisdom of God, it has
occurred to me that my purpose may be as honorably effected by a
discreet blending of the past and the present--in a word, by the
judicious combination of the interests of my native people and the
American nation.  In consideration of that purpose, friends and
kinsmen, I ask you to join me in drinking the good health of my host
Senor Jenkinson, my future father-in-law, from whom I have to-day had
the honor to demand the hand of the peerless Polly, his daughter, as
the future mistress of the Rancho of the Blessed Innocents."


The marriage took place shortly after.  Nor was the free will and
independence of Don Jose Sepulvida in the least opposed by his
relations.  Whether they felt they had already committed themselves, or
had hopes in the future, did not transpire.  Enough that the escapade
of a week was tacitly forgotten.  The only allusion ever made to the
bridegroom's peculiarities was drawn from the demure lips of the bride
herself on her installation at the "Blessed Innocents."

"And what, little one, didst thou find in me to admire?" Don Jose had
asked tenderly.

"Oh, you seemed to be so much like that dear old Don Quixote, you
know," she answered demurely.

"Don Quixote," repeated Don Jose with gentle gravity.  "But, my child,
that was only a mere fiction--a romance, of one Cervantes. Believe me,
of a truth there never was any such person!"




A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL

I.

As Mr. Herbert Bly glanced for the first time at the house which was to
be his future abode in San Francisco, he was somewhat startled.  In
that early period of feverish civic improvement the street before it
had been repeatedly graded and lowered until the dwelling--originally a
pioneer suburban villa perched upon a slope of Telegraph Hill--now
stood sixty feet above the sidewalk, superposed like some Swiss chalet
on successive galleries built in the sand-hill, and connected by a
half-dozen distinct zigzag flights of wooden staircase.  Stimulated,
however, by the thought that the view from the top would be a fine one,
and that existence there would have all the quaint originality of
Robinson Crusoe's tree-dwelling, Mr. Bly began cheerfully to mount the
steps.  It should be premised that, although a recently appointed clerk
in a large banking house, Mr. Bly was somewhat youthful and
imaginative, and regarded the ascent as part of that "Excelsior"
climbing pointed out by a great poet as a praiseworthy function of
ambitious youth.

Reaching at last the level of the veranda, he turned to the view. The
distant wooded shore of Contra Costa, the tossing white-caps and
dancing sails of the bay between, and the foreground at his feet of
wharves and piers, with their reed-like jungles of masts and cordage,
made up a bright, if somewhat material, picture.  To his right rose the
crest of the hill, historic and memorable as the site of the old
semaphoric telegraph, the tossing of whose gaunt arms formerly thrilled
the citizens with tidings from the sea. Turning to the house, he
recognized the prevailing style of light cottage architecture, although
incongruously confined to narrow building plots and the civic
regularity of a precise street frontage.  Thus a dozen other villas,
formerly scattered over the slope, had been laboriously displaced and
moved to the rigorous parade line drawn by the street surveyor, no
matter how irregular and independent their design and structure.
Happily, the few scrub-oaks and low bushes which formed the scant
vegetation of this vast sand dune offered no obstacle and suggested no
incongruity. Beside the house before which Mr. Bly now stood, a
prolific Madeira vine, quickened by the six months' sunshine, had alone
survived the displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed
luxuriance half hid the upper veranda from his view.

Still glowing with his exertion, the young man rang the bell and was
admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and
well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him.  An open piano, a
sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face
downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant rustle
of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion of refined
domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the homeless and
nomadic Bly.  He was still enjoying, in half embarrassment, that vague
and indescribable atmosphere of a refined woman's habitual presence,
when the door opened and the mistress of the house formally presented
herself.

She was a faded but still handsome woman.  Yet she wore that peculiar
long, limp, formless house-shawl which in certain phases of Anglo-Saxon
spinster and widowhood assumes the functions of the recluse's veil and
announces the renunciation of worldly vanities and a resigned
indifference to external feminine contour.  The most audacious
masculine arm would shrink from clasping that shapeless void in which
the flatness of asceticism or the heavings of passion might alike lie
buried.  She had also in some mysterious way imported into the fresh
and pleasant room a certain bombaziny shadow of the past, and a
suggestion of that appalling reminiscence known as "better days."
Though why it should be always represented by ashen memories, or why
better days in the past should be supposed to fix their fitting symbol
in depression in the present, Mr. Bly was too young and too preoccupied
at the moment to determine.  He only knew that he was a little
frightened of her, and fixed his gaze with a hopeless fascination on a
letter which she somewhat portentously carried under the shawl, and
which seemed already to have yellowed in its arctic shade.

"Mr. Carstone has written to me that you would call," said Mrs. Brooks
with languid formality.  "Mr. Carstone was a valued friend of my late
husband, and I suppose has told you the circumstances--the only
circumstances--which admit of my entertaining his proposition of taking
anybody, even temporarily, under my roof. The absence of my dear son
for six months at Portland, Oregon, enables me to place his room at the
disposal of Mr. Carstone's young protege, who, Mr. Carstone tells me,
and I have every reason to believe, is, if perhaps not so seriously
inclined nor yet a church communicant, still of a character and
reputation not unworthy to follow my dear Tappington in our little
family circle as he has at his desk in the bank."

The sensitive Bly, struggling painfully out of an abstraction as to how
he was ever to offer the weekly rent of his lodgings to such a remote
and respectable person, and also somewhat embarrassed at being appealed
to in the third person, here started and bowed.

"The name of Bly is not unfamiliar to me," continued Mrs. Brooks,
pointing to a chair and sinking resignedly into another, where her
baleful shawl at once assumed the appearance of a dust-cover; "some of
my dearest friends were intimate with the Blys of Philadelphia. They
were a branch of the Maryland Blys of the eastern shore, of whom my
Uncle James married.  Perhaps you are distantly related?"

Mrs. Brooks was perfectly aware that her visitor was of unknown Western
origin, and a poor but clever protege of the rich banker; but she was
one of a certain class of American women who, in the midst of a fierce
democracy, are more or less cat-like conservators of family pride and
lineage, and more or less felinely inconsistent and treacherous to
republican principles.  Bly, who had just settled in his mind to send
her the rent anonymously--as a weekly valentine--recovered himself and
his spirits in his usual boyish fashion.

"I am afraid, Mrs. Brooks," he said gayly, "I cannot lay claim to any
distinguished relationship, even to that 'Nelly Bly' who, you remember,
'winked her eye when she went to sleep.'"  He stopped in consternation.
The terrible conviction flashed upon him that this quotation from a
popular negro-minstrel song could not possibly be remembered by a lady
as refined as his hostess, or even known to her superior son.  The
conviction was intensified by Mrs. Brooks rising with a smileless face,
slightly shedding the possible vulgarity with a shake of her shawl, and
remarking that she would show him her son's room, led the way upstairs
to the apartment recently vacated by the perfect Tappington.

Preceded by the same distant flutter of unseen skirts in the passage
which he had first noticed on entering the drawing-room, and which
evidently did not proceed from his companion, whose self-composed
cerements would have repressed any such indecorous agitation, Mr. Bly
stepped timidly into the room.  It was a very pretty apartment,
suggesting the same touches of tasteful refinement in its furniture and
appointments, and withal so feminine in its neatness and regularity,
that, conscious of his frontier habits and experience, he felt at once
repulsively incongruous.  "I cannot expect, Mr. Bly," said Mrs. Brooks
resignedly, "that you can share my son's extreme sensitiveness to
disorder and irregularity; but I must beg you to avoid as much as
possible disturbing the arrangement of the book-shelves, which, you
observe, comprise his books of serious reference, the Biblical
commentaries, and the sermons which were his habitual study.  I must
beg you to exercise the same care in reference to the valuable
offerings from his Sabbath-school scholars which are upon the mantel.
The embroidered book-marker, the gift of the young ladies of his
Bible-class in Dr. Stout's church, is also, you perceive, kept for
ornament and affectionate remembrance.  The harmonium--even if you are
not yourself given to sacred song--I trust you will not find in your
way, nor object to my daughter continuing her practice during your
daily absence.  Thank you.  The door you are looking at leads by a
flight of steps to the side street."

"A very convenient arrangement," said Bly hopefully, who saw a chance
for an occasional unostentatious escape from a too protracted
contemplation of Tappington's perfections.  "I mean," he added
hurriedly, "to avoid disturbing you at night."

"I believe my son had neither the necessity nor desire to use it for
that purpose," returned Mrs. Brooks severely; "although he found it
sometimes a convenient short cut to church on Sabbath when he was late."

Bly, who in his boyish sensitiveness to external impressions had by
this time concluded that a life divided between the past perfections of
Tappington and the present renunciations of Mrs. Brooks would be
intolerable, and was again abstractedly inventing some delicate excuse
for withdrawing without committing himself further, was here suddenly
attracted by a repetition of the rustling of the unseen skirt.  This
time it was nearer, and this time it seemed to strike even Mrs.
Brooks's remote preoccupation. "My daughter, who is deeply devoted to
her brother," she said, slightly raising her voice, "will take upon
herself the care of looking after Tappington's precious mementoes, and
spare you the trouble.  Cherry, dear! this way.  This is the young
gentleman spoken of by Mr. Carstone, your papa's friend.  My daughter
Cherubina, Mr. Bly."

The fair owner of the rustling skirt, which turned out to be a pretty
French print, had appeared at the doorway.  She was a tall, slim
blonde, with a shy, startled manner, as of a penitent nun who was
suffering for some conventual transgression--a resemblance that was
heightened by her short-cut hair, that might have been cropped as if
for punishment.  A certain likeness to her mother suggested that she
was qualifying for that saint's ascetic shawl--subject, however, to
rebellious intervals, indicated in the occasional sidelong fires of her
gray eyes.  Yet the vague impression that she knew more of the world
than her mother, and that she did not look at all as if her name was
Cherubina, struck Bly in the same momentary glance.

"Mr. Bly is naturally pleased with what he has seen of our dear
Tappington's appointments; and as I gather from Mr. Carstone's letter
that he is anxious to enter at once and make the most of the dear boy's
absence, you will see, my dear Cherry, that Ellen has everything ready
for him?"

Before the unfortunate Bly could explain or protest, the young girl
lifted her gray eyes to his.  Whether she had perceived and understood
his perplexity he could not tell; but the swift shy glance was at once
appealing, assuring, and intelligent.  She was certainly unlike her
mother and brother.  Acting with his usual impulsiveness, he forgot his
previous resolution, and before he left had engaged to begin his
occupation of the room on the following day.

The next afternoon found him installed.  Yet, after he had unpacked his
modest possessions and put them away, after he had placed his few books
on the shelves, where they looked glaringly trivial and frivolous
beside the late tenant's severe studies; after he had set out his
scanty treasures in the way of photographs and some curious mementoes
of his wandering life, and then quickly put them back again with a
sudden angry pride at exposing them to the unsympathetic incongruity of
the other ornaments, he, nevertheless, felt ill at ease.  He glanced in
vain around the pretty room.  It was not the delicately flowered
wall-paper; it was not the white and blue muslin window-curtains
gracefully tied up with blue and white ribbons; it was not the spotless
bed, with its blue and white festooned mosquito-net and flounced
valances, and its medallion portrait of an unknown bishop at the back;
it was not the few tastefully framed engravings of certain cardinal
virtues, "The Rock of Ages," and "The Guardian Angel"; it was not the
casts in relief of "Night" and "Morning"; it was certainly not the cosy
dimity-covered arm-chairs and sofa, nor yet the clean-swept polished
grate with its cheerful fire sparkling against the chill afternoon
sea-fogs without; neither was it the mere feminine suggestion, for that
touched a sympathetic chord in his impulsive nature; nor the religious
and ascetic influence, for he had occupied a monastic cell in a school
of the padres at an old mission, and slept profoundly;--it was none of
those, and yet a part of all.  Most habitations retain a cast or shell
of their previous tenant that, fitting tightly or loosely, is still
able to adjust itself to the newcomer; in most occupied apartments
there is still a shadowy suggestion of the owner's individuality; there
was nothing here that fitted Bly--nor was there either, strange to say,
any evidence of the past proprietor in this inhospitality of sensation.
It did not strike him at the time that it was this very LACK of
individuality which made it weird and unreal, that it was strange only
because it was ARTIFICIAL, and that a REAL Tappington had never
inhabited it.

He walked to the window--that never-failing resource of the unquiet
mind--and looked out.  He was a little surprised to find, that, owing
to the grading of the house, the scrub-oaks and bushes of the hill were
nearly on the level of his window, as also was the adjoining side
street on which his second door actually gave. Opening this, the sudden
invasion of the sea-fog and the figure of a pedestrian casually passing
along the disused and abandoned pavement not a dozen feet from where he
had been comfortably seated, presented such a striking contrast to the
studious quiet and cosiness of his secluded apartment that he hurriedly
closed the door again with a sense of indiscreet exposure.  Returning
to the window, he glanced to the left, and found that he was overlooked
by the side veranda of another villa in the rear, evidently on its way
to take position on the line of the street.  Although in actual and
deliberate transit on rollers across the backyard and still occulting a
part of the view, it remained, after the reckless fashion of the
period, inhabited.  Certainly, with a door fronting a thoroughfare, and
a neighbor gradually approaching him, he would not feel lonely or lack
excitement.

He drew his arm-chair to the fire and tried to realize the
all-pervading yet evasive Tappington.  There was no portrait of him in
the house, and although Mrs. Brooks had said that he "favored" his
sister, Bly had, without knowing why, instinctively resented it. He had
even timidly asked his employer, and had received the vague reply that
he was "good-looking enough," and the practical but discomposing
retort, "What do you want to know for?"  As he really did not know why,
the inquiry had dropped.  He stared at the monumental crystal ink-stand
half full of ink, yet spotless and free from stains, that stood on the
table, and tried to picture Tappington daintily dipping into it to
thank the fair donors--"daughters of Rebecca."  Who were they? and what
sort of man would they naturally feel grateful to?

What was that?

He turned to the window, which had just resounded to a slight tap or
blow, as if something soft had struck it.  With an instinctive
suspicion of the propinquity of the adjoining street he rose, but a
single glance from the window satisfied him that no missile would have
reached it from thence.  He scanned the low bushes on the level before
him; certainly no one could be hiding there.  He lifted his eyes toward
the house on the left; the curtains of the nearest window appeared to
be drawn suddenly at the same moment. Could it have come from there?
Looking down upon the window-ledge, there lay the mysterious missile--a
little misshapen ball.  He opened the window and took it up.  It was a
small handkerchief tied into a soft knot, and dampened with water to
give it the necessary weight as a projectile.

Was it apparently the trick of a mischievous child? or--

But here a faint knock on the door leading into the hall checked his
inquiry.  He opened it sharply in his excitement, and was embarrassed
to find the daughter of his hostess standing there, shy, startled, and
evidently equally embarrassed by his abrupt response.

"Mother only wanted me to ask you if Ellen had put everything to
rights," she said, making a step backwards.

"Oh, thank you.  Perfectly," said Herbert with effusion.  "Nothing
could be better done.  In fact"--

"You're quite sure she hasn't forgotten anything? or that there isn't
anything you would like changed?" she continued, with her eyes leveled
on the floor.

"Nothing, I assure you," he said, looking at her downcast lashes. As
she still remained motionless, he continued cheerfully, "Would
you--would you--care to look round and see?"

"No; I thank you."

There was an awkward pause.  He still continued to hold the door open.
Suddenly she moved forward with a school-girl stride, entered the room,
and going to the harmonium, sat down upon the music-stool beside it,
slightly bending forward, with one long, slim, white hand on top of the
other, resting over her crossed knees.

Herbert was a little puzzled.  It was the awkward and brusque act of a
very young person, and yet nothing now could be more gentle and
self-composed than her figure and attitude.

"Yes," he continued, smilingly; "I am only afraid that I may not be
able to live quite up to the neatness and regularity of the example I
find here everywhere.  You know I am dreadfully careless and not at all
orderly.  I shudder to think what may happen; but you and your mother,
Miss Brooks, I trust, will make up your minds to overlook and forgive a
good deal.  I shall do my best to be worthy of Mr. Tap--of my
predecessor--but even then I am afraid you'll find me a great bother."

She raised her shy eyelids.  The faintest ghost of a long-buried dimple
came into her pale cheek as she said softly, to his utter consternation:

"Rats!"

Had she uttered an oath he could not have been more startled than he
was by this choice gem of Western saloon-slang from the pure lips of
this Evangeline-like figure before him.  He sat gazing at her with a
wild hysteric desire to laugh.  She lifted her eyes again, swept him
with a slightly terrified glance, and said:

"Tap says you all say that when any one makes-believe politeness to
you."

"Oh, your BROTHER says that, does he?" said Herbert, laughing.

"Yes, and sometimes 'Old rats.'  But," she continued hurriedly, "HE
doesn't say it; he says YOU all do.  My brother is very particular, and
very good.  Doctor Stout loves him.  He is thought very much of in all
Christian circles.  That book-mark was given to him by one of his
classes."

Every trace of her dimples had vanished.  She looked so sweetly grave,
and withal so maidenly, sitting there slightly smoothing the lengths of
her pink fingers, that Herbert was somewhat embarrassed.

"But I assure you, Miss Brooks, I was not making-believe.  I am really
very careless, and everything is so proper--I mean so neat and
pretty--here, that I"--he stopped, and, observing the same backward
wandering of her eye as of a filly about to shy, quickly changed the
subject.  "You have, or are about to have, neighbors?" he said,
glancing towards the windows as he recalled the incident of a moment
before.

"Yes; and they're not at all nice people.  They are from Pike County,
and very queer.  They came across the plains in '50.  They say
'Stranger'; the men are vulgar, and the girls very forward. Tap forbids
my ever going to the window and looking at them. They're quite what you
would call 'off color.'"

Herbert, who did not dare to say that he never would have dreamed of
using such an expression in any young girl's presence, was plunged in
silent consternation.

"Then your brother doesn't approve of them?" he said, at last,
awkwardly.

"Oh, not at all.  He even talked of having ground-glass put in all
these windows, only it would make the light bad."

Herbert felt very embarrassed.  If the mysterious missile came from
these objectionable young persons, it was evidently because they
thought they had detected a more accessible and sympathizing individual
in the stranger who now occupied the room.  He concluded he had better
not say anything about it.

Miss Brooks's golden eyelashes were bent towards the floor.  "Do you
play sacred music, Mr. Bly?" she said, without raising them.

"I am afraid not."

"Perhaps you know only negro-minstrel songs?"

"I am afraid--yes."

"I know one."  The dimples faintly came back again.  "It's called 'The
Ham-fat Man.'  Some day when mother isn't in I'll play it for you."

Then the dimples fled again, and she immediately looked so distressed
that Herbert came to her assistance.

"I suppose your brother taught you that too?"

"Oh dear, no!" she returned, with her frightened glance; "I only heard
him say some people preferred that kind of thing to sacred music, and
one day I saw a copy of it in a music-store window in Clay Street, and
bought it.  Oh no! Tappington didn't teach it to me."

In the pleasant discovery that she was at times independent of her
brother's perfections, Herbert smiled, and sympathetically drew a step
nearer to her.  She rose at once, somewhat primly holding back the
sides of her skirt, school-girl fashion, with thumb and finger, and her
eyes cast down.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Bly."

"Must you go?  Good afternoon."

She walked directly to the open door, looking very tall and stately as
she did so, but without turning towards him.  When she reached it she
lifted her eyes; there was the slightest suggestion of a return of her
dimples in the relaxation of her grave little mouth. Then she said,
"good-bye, Mr. Bly," and departed.

The skirt of her dress rustled for an instant in the passage. Herbert
looked after her.  "I wonder if she skipped then--she looks like a girl
that might skip at such a time," he said to himself. "How very odd she
is--and how simple!  But I must pull her up in that slang when I know
her better.  Fancy her brother telling her THAT!  What a pair they must
be!"  Nevertheless, when he turned back into the room again he forbore
going to the window to indulge further curiosity in regard to his
wicked neighbors.  A certain new feeling of respect to his late
companion--and possibly to himself--held him in check.  Much as he
resented Tappington's perfections, he resented quite as warmly the
presumption that he was not quite as perfect, which was implied in that
mysterious overture.  He glanced at the stool on which she had been
sitting with a half-brotherly smile, and put it reverently on one side
with a very vivid recollection of her shy maidenly figure.  In some
mysterious way too the room seemed to have lost its formal strangeness;
perhaps it was the touch of individuality--HERS--that had been wanting?
He began thoughtfully to dress himself for his regular dinner at the
Poodle Dog Restaurant, and when he left the room he turned back to look
once more at the stool where she had sat.  Even on his way to that fast
and famous cafe of the period he felt, for the first time in his
thoughtless but lonely life, the gentle security of the home he had
left behind him.


II.

It was three or four days before he became firmly adjusted to his new
quarters.  During this time he had met Cherry casually on the
staircase, in going or coming, and received her shy greetings; but she
had not repeated her visit, nor again alluded to it.  He had spent part
of a formal evening in the parlor in company with a calling deacon,
who, unappalled by the Indian shawl for which the widow had exchanged
her household cerements on such occasions, appeared to Herbert to have
remote matrimonial designs, as far at least as a sympathetic
deprecation of the vanities of the present, an echoing of her sighs
like a modest encore, a preternatural gentility of manner, a vague
allusion to the necessity of bearing "one another's burdens," and an
everlasting promise in store, would seem to imply.  To Herbert's vivid
imagination, a discussion on the doctrinal points of last Sabbath's
sermon was fraught with delicate suggestion and an acceptance by the
widow of an appointment to attend the Wednesday evening "Lectures" had
all the shy reluctant yielding of a granted rendezvous.  Oddly enough,
the more formal attitude seemed to be reserved for the young people,
who, in the suggestive atmosphere of this spiritual flirtation, alone
appeared to preserve the proprieties and, to some extent, decorously
chaperon their elders.  Herbert gravely turned the leaves of Cherry's
music while she played and sang one or two discreet but depressing
songs expressive of her unalterable but proper devotion to her mother's
clock, her father's arm-chair, and her aunt's Bible; and Herbert joined
somewhat boyishly in the soul-subduing refrain.  Only once he ventured
to suggest in a whisper that he would like to add HER music-stool to
the adorable inventory; but he was met by such a disturbed and
terrified look that he desisted. "Another night of this wild and
reckless dissipation will finish me," he said lugubriously to himself
when he reached the solitude of his room.  "I wonder how many times a
week I'd have to help the girl play the spiritual gooseberry downstairs
before we could have any fun ourselves?"

Here the sound of distant laughter, interspersed with vivacious
feminine shrieks, came through the open window.  He glanced between the
curtains.  His neighbor's house was brilliantly lit, and the shadows of
a few romping figures were chasing each other across the muslin shades
of the windows.  The objectionable young women were evidently enjoying
themselves.  In some conditions of the mind there is a certain
exasperation in the spectacle of unmeaning enjoyment, and he shut the
window sharply.  At the same moment some one knocked at his door.

It was Miss Brooks, who had just come upstairs.

"Will you please let me have my music-stool?"

He stared at her a moment in surprise, then recovering himself, said,
"Yes, certainly," and brought the stool.  For an instant he was tempted
to ask why she wanted it, but his pride forbade him.

"Thank you.  Good-night."

"Good-night!"

"I hope it wasn't in your way?"

"Not at all."

"Good-night!"

"Good-night."

She vanished.  Herbert was perplexed.  Between young ladies whose naive
exuberance impelled them to throw handkerchiefs at his window and young
ladies whose equally naive modesty demanded the withdrawal from his
bedroom of a chair on which they had once sat, his lot seemed to have
fallen in a troubled locality.  Yet a day or two later he heard Cherry
practising on the harmonium as he was ascending the stairs on his
return from business; she had departed before he entered the room, but
had left the music-stool behind her.  It was not again removed.

One Sunday, the second or third of his tenancy, when Cherry and her
mother were at church, and he had finished some work that he had
brought from the bank, his former restlessness and sense of strangeness
returned.  The regular afternoon fog had thickened early, and, driving
him back from a cheerless, chilly ramble on the hill, had left him
still more depressed and solitary.  In sheer desperation he moved some
of the furniture, and changed the disposition of several smaller
ornaments.  Growing bolder, he even attacked the sacred shelf devoted
to Tappington's serious literature and moral studies.  At first glance
the book of sermons looked suspiciously fresh and new for a volume of
habitual reference, but its leaves were carefully cut, and contained
one or two book-marks.  It was only another evidence of that perfect
youth's care and neatness.  As he was replacing it he noticed a small
object folded in white paper at the back of the shelf.  To put the book
back into its former position it was necessary to take this out.  He
did so, but its contents slid from his fingers and the paper to the
floor.  To his utter consternation, looking down he saw a pack of
playing-cards strewn at his feet!

He hurriedly picked them up.  They were worn and slippery from use, and
exhaled a faint odor of tobacco.  Had they been left there by some
temporary visitor unknown to Tappington and his family, or had they
been hastily hidden by a servant?  Yet they were of a make and texture
superior to those that a servant would possess; looking at them
carefully, he recognized them to be of a quality used by the
better-class gamblers.  Restoring them carefully to their former
position, he was tempted to take out the other volumes, and was
rewarded with the further discovery of a small box of ivory counters,
known as "poker-chips."  It was really very extraordinary!  It was
quite the cache of some habitual gambler. Herbert smiled grimly at the
irreverent incongruity of the hiding-place selected by its unknown and
mysterious owner, and amused himself by fancying the horror of his
sainted predecessor had he made the discovery.  He determined to
replace them, and to put some mark upon the volumes before them in
order to detect any future disturbance of them in his absence.

Ought he not to take Miss Brooks in his confidence?  Or should he say
nothing about it at present, and trust to chance to discover the
sacrilegious hider?  Could it possibly be Cherry herself, guilty of the
same innocent curiosity that had impelled her to buy the "Ham-fat Man"?
Preposterous!  Besides, the cards had been used, and she could not play
poker alone!

He watched the rolling fog extinguish the line of Russian Hill, the
last bit of far perspective from his window.  He glanced at his
neighbor's veranda, already dripping with moisture; the windows were
blank; he remembered to have heard the girls giggling in passing down
the side street on their way to church, and had noticed from behind his
own curtains that one was rather pretty. This led him to think of
Cherry again, and to recall the quaint yet melancholy grace of her
figure as she sat on the stool opposite. Why had she withdrawn it so
abruptly; did she consider his jesting allusion to it indecorous and
presuming?  Had he really meant it seriously; and was he beginning to
think too much about her?  Would she ever come again?  How nice it
would be if she returned from church alone early, and they could have a
comfortable chat together here!  Would she sing the "Ham-fat Man" for
him?  Would the dimples come back if she did?  Should he ever know more
of this quaint repressed side of her nature?  After all, what a dear,
graceful, tantalizing, lovable creature she was!  Ought he not at all
hazards try to know her better?  Might it not be here that he would
find a perfect realization of his boyish dreams, and in HER all
that--what nonsense he was thinking!

Suddenly Herbert was startled by the sound of a light but hurried foot
upon the wooden outer step of his second door, and the quick but
ineffective turning of the door-handle.  He started to his feet, his
mind still filled with a vision of Cherry.  Then he as suddenly
remembered that he had locked the door on going out, putting the key in
his overcoat pocket.  He had returned by the front door, and his
overcoat was now hanging in the lower hall.

The door again rattled impetuously.  Then it was supplemented by a
female voice in a hurried whisper: "Open quick, can't you? do hurry!"

He was confounded.  The voice was authoritative, not unmusical; but it
was NOT Cherry's.  Nevertheless he called out quickly, "One moment,
please, and I'll get the key!" dashed downstairs and up again,
breathlessly unlocked the door and threw it open.

Nobody was there!

He ran out into the street.  On one side it terminated abruptly on the
cliff on which his dwelling was perched; on the other, it descended
more gradually into the next thoroughfare; but up and down the street,
on either hand, no one was to be seen.  A slightly superstitious
feeling for an instant crept over him.  Then he reflected that the
mysterious visitor could in the interval of his getting the key have
easily slipped down the steps of the cliff or entered the shrubbery of
one of the adjacent houses.  But why had she not waited?  And what did
she want?  As he reentered his door he mechanically raised his eyes to
the windows of his neighbor's. This time he certainly was not mistaken.
The two amused, mischievous faces that suddenly disappeared behind the
curtain as he looked up showed that the incident had not been
unwitnessed. Yet it was impossible that it could have been either of
THEM. Their house was only accessible by a long detour.  It might have
been the trick of a confederate; but the tone of half familiarity and
half entreaty in the unseen visitor's voice dispelled the idea of any
collusion.  He entered the room and closed the door angrily. A grim
smile stole over his face as he glanced around at the dainty saint-like
appointments of the absent Tappington, and thought what that
irreproachable young man would have said to the indecorous intrusion,
even though it had been a mistake.  Would those shameless Pike County
girls have dared to laugh at HIM?

But he was again puzzled to know why he himself should have been
selected for this singular experience.  Why was HE considered fair game
for these girls?  And, for the matter of that, now that he reflected
upon it, why had even this gentle, refined, and melancholy Cherry
thought it necessary to talk slang to HIM on their first acquaintance,
and offer to sing him the "Ham-fat Man"? It was true he had been a
little gay, but never dissipated.  Of course he was not a saint, like
Tappington--oh, THAT was it!  He believed he understood it now.  He was
suffering from that extravagant conception of what worldliness consists
of, so common to very good people with no knowledge of the world.
Compared to Tappington he was in their eyes, of course, a rake and a
roue.  The explanation pleased him.  He would not keep it to himself.
He would gain Cherry's confidence and enlist her sympathies.  Her
gentle nature would revolt at this injustice to their lonely lodger.
She would see that there were degrees of goodness besides her
brother's.  She would perhaps sit on that stool again and NOT sing the
"Ham-fat Man."

A day or two afterwards the opportunity seemed offered to him.  As he
was coming home and ascending the long hilly street, his eye was taken
by a tall graceful figure just preceding him.  It was she. He had never
before seen her in the street, and was now struck with her ladylike
bearing and the grave superiority of her perfectly simple attire.  In a
thoroughfare haunted by handsome women and striking toilettes, the
refined grace of her mourning costume, and a certain stateliness that
gave her the look of a young widow, was a contrast that evidently
attracted others than himself.  It was with an odd mingling of pride
and jealousy that he watched the admiring yet respectful glances of the
passers-by, some of whom turned to look again, and one or two to
retrace their steps and follow her at a decorous distance.  This caused
him to quicken his own pace, with a new anxiety and a remorseful sense
of wasted opportunity.  What a booby he had been, not to have made more
of his contiguity to this charming girl--to have been frightened at the
naive decorum of her maidenly instincts!  He reached her side, and
raised his hat with a trepidation at her new-found graces--with a
boldness that was defiant of her other admirers.  She blushed slightly.

"I thought you'd overtake me before," she said naively.  "I saw YOU
ever so long ago."

He stammered, with an equal simplicity, that he had not dared to.

She looked a little frightened again, and then said hurriedly: "I only
thought that I would meet you on Montgomery Street, and we would walk
home together.  I don't like to go out alone, and mother cannot always
go with me.  Tappington never cared to take me out--I don't know why.
I think he didn't like the people staring and stop ping us.  But they
stare more--don't you think?--when one is alone. So I thought if you
were coming straight home we might come together--unless you have
something else to do?"

Herbert impulsively reiterated his joy at meeting her, and averred that
no other engagement, either of business or pleasure, could or would
stand in his way.  Looking up, however, it was with some consternation
that he saw they were already within a block of the house.

"Suppose we take a turn around the hill and come back by the old street
down the steps?" he suggested earnestly.

The next moment he regretted it.  The frightened look returned to her
eyes; her face became melancholy and formal again.

"No!" she said quickly.  "That would be taking a walk with you like
these young girls and their young men on Saturdays.  That's what Ellen
does with the butcher's boy on Sundays.  Tappington often used to meet
them.  Doing the 'Come, Philanders,' as he says you call it."

It struck Herbert that the didactic Tappington's method of inculcating
a horror of slang in his sister's breast was open to some objection;
but they were already on the steps of their house, and he was too much
mortified at the reception of his last unhappy suggestion to make the
confidential disclosure he had intended, even if there had still been
time.

"There's mother waiting for me," she said, after an awkward pause,
pointing to the figure of Mrs. Brooks dimly outlined on the veranda.
"I suppose she was beginning to be worried about my being out alone.
She'll be so glad I met you."  It didn't appear to Herbert, however,
that Mrs. Brooks exhibited any extravagant joy over the occurrence, and
she almost instantly retired with her daughter into the sitting-room,
linking her arm in Cherry's, and, as it were, empanoplying her with her
own invulnerable shawl. Herbert went to his room more dissatisfied with
himself than ever.

Two or three days elapsed without his seeing Cherry; even the
well-known rustle of her skirt in the passage was missing.  On the
third evening he resolved to bear the formal terrors of the
drawing-room again, and stumbled upon a decorous party consisting of
Mrs. Brooks, the deacon, and the pastor's wife--but not Cherry.  It
struck him on entering that the momentary awkwardness of the company
and the formal beginning of a new topic indicated that HE had been the
subject of their previous conversation.  In this idea he continued,
through that vague spirit of opposition which attacks impulsive people
in such circumstances, to generally disagree with them on all subjects,
and to exaggerate what he chose to believe they thought objectionable
in him.  He did not remain long; but learned in that brief interval
that Cherry had gone to visit a friend in Contra Costa, and would be
absent a fortnight; and he was conscious that the information was
conveyed to him with a peculiar significance.

The result of which was only to intensify his interest in the absent
Cherry, and for a week to plunge him in a sea of conflicting doubts and
resolutions.  At one time he thought seriously of demanding an
explanation from Mrs. Brooks, and of confiding to her--as he had
intended to do to Cherry--his fears that his character had been
misinterpreted, and his reasons for believing so.  But here he was met
by the difficulty of formulating what he wished to have explained, and
some doubts as to whether his confidences were prudent.  At another
time he contemplated a serious imitation of Tappington's perfections, a
renunciation of the world, and an entire change in his habits.  He
would go regularly to church--HER church, and take up Tappington's
desolate Bible-class.  But here the torturing doubt arose whether a
young lady who betrayed a certain secular curiosity, and who had
evidently depended upon her brother for a knowledge of the world, would
entirely like it.  At times he thought of giving up the room and
abandoning for ever this doubly dangerous proximity; but here again he
was deterred by the difficulty of giving a satisfactory reason to his
employer, who had procured it as a favor.  His passion--for such he
began to fear it to be--led him once to the extravagance of asking a
day's holiday from the bank, which he vaguely spent in the streets of
Oakland in the hope of accidentally meeting the exiled Cherry.


III.

The fortnight slowly passed.  She returned, but he did not see her. She
was always out or engaged in her room with some female friend when
Herbert was at home.  This was singular, as she had never appeared to
him as a young girl who was fond of visiting or had ever affected
female friendships.  In fact, there was little doubt now that,
wittingly or unwittingly, she was avoiding him.

He was moodily sitting by the fire one evening, having returned early
from dinner.  In reply to his habitual but affectedly careless inquiry,
Ellen had told him that Mrs. Brooks was confined to her room by a
slight headache, and that Miss Brooks was out.  He was trying to read,
and listening to the wind that occasionally rattled the casement and
caused the solitary gas-lamp that was visible in the side street to
flicker and leap wildly.  Suddenly he heard the same footfall upon his
outer step and a light tap at the door.  Determined this time to solve
the mystery, he sprang to his feet and ran to the door; but to his
anger and astonishment it was locked and the key was gone.  Yet he was
positive that HE had not taken it out.

The tap was timidly repeated.  In desperation he called out, "Please
don't go away yet.  The key is gone; but I'll find it in a moment."
Nevertheless he was at his wits' end.

There was a hesitating pause and then the sound of a key cautiously
thrust into the lock.  It turned; the door opened, and a tall figure,
whose face and form were completely hidden in a veil and long gray
shawl, quickly glided into the room and closed the door behind it.
Then it suddenly raised its arms, the shawl was parted, the veil fell
aside, and Cherry stood before him!

Her face was quite pale.  Her eyes, usually downcast, frightened, or
coldly clear, were bright and beautiful with excitement.  The dimples
were faintly there, although the smile was sad and half hysterical.
She remained standing, erect and tall, her arms dropped at her side,
holding the veil and shawl that still depended from her shoulders.

"So--I've caught you!" she said, with a strange little laugh.  "Oh yes.
'Please don't go away yet.  I'll get the key in a moment,'" she
continued, mimicking his recent utterance.

He could only stammer, "Miss Brooks--then it was YOU?"

"Yes; and you thought it was SHE, didn't you?  Well, and you're caught!
I didn't believe it; I wouldn't believe it when they said it.  I
determined to find it out myself.  And I have; and it's true."

Unable to determine whether she was serious or jesting, and conscious
only of his delight at seeing her again, he advanced impulsively.  But
her expression instantly changed: she became at once stiff and
school-girlishly formal, and stepped back towards the door.

"Don't come near me, or I'll go," she said quickly, with her hand upon
the lock.

"But not before you tell me what you mean," he said half laughingly
half earnestly.  "Who is SHE? and what wouldn't you have believed? For
upon my honor, Miss Brooks, I don't know what you are talking about."

His evident frankness and truthful manner appeared to puzzle her. "You
mean to say you were expecting no one?" she said sharply.

"I assure you I was not."

"And--and no woman was ever here--at that door?"

He hesitated.  "Not to-night--not for a long time; not since you
returned from Oakland."

"Then there WAS one?"

"I believe so."

"You BELIEVE--you don't KNOW?"

"I believed it was a woman from her voice; for the door was locked, and
the key was downstairs.  When I fetched it and opened the door, she--or
whoever it was--was gone."

"And that's why you said so imploringly, just now, 'Please don't go
away yet'?  You see I've caught you.  Ah! I don't wonder you blush!"

If he had, his cheeks had caught fire from her brilliant eyes and the
extravagantly affected sternness--as of a school-girl monitor--in her
animated face.  Certainly he had never seen such a transformation.

"Yes; but, you see, I wanted to know who the intruder was," he said,
smiling at his own embarrassment.

"You did--well, perhaps THAT will tell you?  It was found under your
door before I went away."  She suddenly produced from her pocket a
folded paper and handed it to him.  It was a misspelt scrawl, and ran
as follows:--

"Why are you so cruel?  Why do you keep me dansing on the stepps before
them gurls at the windows?  Was it that stuckup Saint, Miss Brooks,
that you were afraid of, my deer?  Oh, you faithless trater!  Wait till
I ketch you!  I'll tear your eyes out and hern!"

It did not require great penetration for Herbert to be instantly
convinced that the writer of this vulgar epistle and the owner of the
unknown voice were two very different individuals.  The note was
evidently a trick.  A suspicion of its perpetrators flashed upon him.

"Whoever the woman was, it was not she who wrote the note," he said
positively.  "Somebody must have seen her at the door.  I remember now
that those girls--your neighbors--were watching me from their window
when I came out.  Depend upon it, that letter comes from them."

Cherry's eyes opened widely with a sudden childlike perception, and
then shyly dropped.  "Yes," she said slowly; "they DID watch you. They
know it, for it was they who made it the talk of the neighborhood, and
that's how it came to mother's ears."  She stopped, and, with a
frightened look, stepped back towards the door again.

"Then THAT was why your mother"--

"Oh yes," interrupted Cherry quickly.  "That was why I went over to
Oakland, and why mother forbade my walking with you again, and why she
had a talk with friends about your conduct, and why she came near
telling Mr. Carstone all about it until I stopped her."  She checked
herself--he could hardly believe his eyes--the pale, nun-like girl was
absolutely blushing.

"I thank you, Miss Brooks," he said gravely, "for your thoughtfulness,
although I hope I could have still proven my innocence to Mr. Carstone,
even if some unknown woman tried my door by mistake, and was seen doing
it.  But I am pained to think that YOU could have believed me capable
of so wanton and absurd an impropriety--and such a gross disrespect to
your mother's house."

"But," said Cherry with childlike naivete, "you know YOU don't think
anything of such things, and that's what I told mother."

"You told your mother THAT?"

"Oh yes--I told her Tappington says it's quite common with young men.
Please don't laugh--for it's very dreadful.  Tappington didn't laugh
when he told it to me as a warning.  He was shocked."

"But, my dear Miss Brooks"--

"There--now you're angry--and that's as bad.  Are you sure you didn't
know that woman?"

"Positive!"

"Yet you seemed very anxious just now that she should wait till you
opened the door."

"That was perfectly natural."

"I don't think it was natural at all."

"But--according to Tappington"--

"Because my brother is very good you need not make fun of him."

"I assure you I have no such intention.  But what more can I say? I
give you my word that I don't know who that unlucky woman was. No doubt
she may have been some nearsighted neighbor who had mistaken the house,
and I dare say was as thoroughly astonished at my voice as I was at
hers.  Can I say more?  Is it necessary for me to swear that since I
have been here no woman has ever entered that door--but"--

"But who?"

"Yourself."

"I know what you mean," she said hurriedly, with her old frightened
look, gliding to the outer door.  "It's shameful what I've done. But I
only did it because--because I had faith in you, and didn't believe
what they said was true."  She had already turned the lock. There were
tears in her pretty eyes.

"Stop," said Herbert gently.  He walked slowly towards her, and within
reach of her frightened figure stopped with the timid respect of a
mature and genuine passion.  "You must not be seen going out of that
door," he said gravely.  "You must let me go first, and, when I am
gone, lock the door again and go through the hall to your own room.  No
one must know that I was in the house when you came in at that door.
Good-night."

Without offering his hand he lifted his eyes to her face.  The dimples
were all there--and something else.  He bowed and passed out.

Ten minutes later he ostentatiously returned to the house by the front
door, and proceeded up the stairs to his own room.  As he cast a glance
around he saw that the music-stool had been moved before the fire,
evidently with the view of attracting his attention.  Lying upon it,
carefully folded, was the veil that she had worn.  There could be no
doubt that it was left there purposely.  With a smile at this strange
girl's last characteristic act of timid but compromising recklessness,
after all his precautions, he raised it tenderly to his lips, and then
hastened to hide it from the reach of vulgar eyes.  But had Cherry
known that its temporary resting-place that night was under his pillow
she might have doubted his superior caution.

When he returned from the bank the next afternoon, Cherry rapped
ostentatiously at his door.  "Mother wishes me to ask you," she began
with a certain prim formality, which nevertheless did not preclude
dimples, "if you would give us the pleasure of your company at our
Church Festival to-night?  There will be a concert and a collation.
You could accompany us there if you cared.  Our friends and
Tappington's would be so glad to see you, and Dr. Stout would be
delighted to make your acquaintance."

"Certainly!" said Herbert, delighted and yet astounded.  "Then," he
added in a lower voice, "your mother no longer believes me so
dreadfully culpable?"

"Oh no," said Cherry in a hurried whisper, glancing up and down the
passage; "I've been talking to her about it, and she is satisfied that
it is all a jealous trick and slander of these neighbors. Why, I told
her that they had even said that I was that mysterious woman; that I
came that way to you because she had forbidden my seeing you openly."

"What!  You dared say that?"

"Yes don't you see?  Suppose they said they HAD seen me coming in last
night--THAT answers it," she said triumphantly.

"Oh, it does?" he said vacantly.

"Perfectly.  So you see she's convinced that she ought to put you on
the same footing as Tappington, before everybody; and then there won't
be any trouble.  You'll come, won't you?  It won't be so VERY good.
And then, I've told mother that as there have been so many
street-fights, and so much talk about the Vigilance Committee lately, I
ought to have somebody for an escort when I am coming home.  And if
you're known, you see, as one of US, there'll be no harm in your
meeting me."

"Thank you," he said, extending his hand gratefully.

Her fingers rested a moment in his.  "Where did you put it?" she said
demurely.

"It?  Oh! IT'S all safe," he said quickly, but somewhat vaguely.

"But I don't call the upper drawer of your bureau safe," she returned
poutingly, "where EVERYBODY can go.  So you'll find it NOW inside the
harmonium, on the keyboard."

"Oh, thank you."

"It's quite natural to have left it there ACCIDENTALLY--isn't it?" she
said imploringly, assisted by all her dimples.  Alas! she had forgotten
that he was still holding her hand.  Consequently, she had not time to
snatch it away and vanish, with a stifled little cry, before it had
been pressed two or three times to his lips.  A little ashamed of his
own boldness, Herbert remained for a few moments in the doorway
listening, and looking uneasily down the dark passage.  Presently a
slight sound came over the fanlight of Cherry's room.  Could he believe
his ears?  The saint-like Cherry--no doubt tutored, for example's sake,
by the perfect Tappington--was softly whistling.

In this simple fashion the first pages of this little idyl were quietly
turned.  The book might have been closed or laid aside even then.  But
it so chanced that Cherry was an unconscious prophet; and presently it
actually became a prudential necessity for her to have a masculine
escort when she walked out.  For a growing state of lawlessness and
crime culminated one day the deep tocsin of the Vigilance Committee,
and at its stroke fifty thousand peaceful men, reverting to the first
principles of social safety, sprang to arms, assembled at their
quarters, or patrolled the streets.  In another hour the city of San
Francisco was in the hands of a mob--the most peaceful, orderly, well
organized, and temperate the world had ever known, and yet in
conception as lawless, autocratic, and imperious as the conditions it
opposed.


IV.

Herbert, enrolled in the same section with his employer and one or two
fellow-clerks, had participated in the meetings of the committee with
the light-heartedness and irresponsibility of youth, regretting only
the loss of his usual walk with Cherry and the hours that kept him from
her house.  He was returning from a protracted meeting one night, when
the number of arrests and searching for proscribed and suspected
characters had been so large as to induce fears of organized resistance
and rescue, and on reaching the foot of the hill found it already so
late, that to avoid disturbing the family he resolved to enter his room
directly by the door in the side street.  On inserting his key in the
lock it met with some resisting obstacle, which, however, yielded and
apparently dropped on the mat inside.  Opening the door and stepping
into the perfectly dark apartment, he trod upon this object, which
proved to be another key.  The family must have procured it for their
convenience during his absence, and after locking the door had
carelessly left it in the lock.  It was lucky that it had yielded so
readily.

The fire had gone out.  He closed the door and lit the gas, and after
taking off his overcoat moved to the door leading into the passage to
listen if anybody was still stirring.  To his utter astonishment he
found it locked.  What was more remarkable--the key was also INSIDE!
An inexplicable feeling took possession of him. He glanced suddenly
around the room, and then his eye fell upon the bed.  Lying there,
stretched at full length, was the recumbent figure of a man.

He was apparently in the profound sleep of utter exhaustion.  The
attitude of his limbs and the order of his dress--of which only his
collar and cravat had been loosened--showed that sleep must have
overtaken him almost instantly.  In fact, the bed was scarcely
disturbed beyond the actual impress of his figure.  He seemed to be a
handsome, matured man of about forty; his dark straight hair was a
little thinned over the temples, although his long heavy moustache was
still youthful and virgin.  His clothes, which were elegantly cut and
of finer material than that in ordinary use, the delicacy and neatness
of his linen, the whiteness of his hands, and, more particularly, a
certain dissipated pallor of complexion and lines of recklessness on
the brow and cheek, indicated to Herbert that the man before him was
one of that desperate and suspected class--some of whose proscribed
members he had been hunting--the professional gambler!

Possibly the magnetism of Herbert's intent and astonished gaze affected
him.  He moved slightly, half opened his eyes, said "Halloo, Tap,"
rubbed them again, wholly opened them, fixed them with a lazy stare on
Herbert, and said:

"Now, who the devil are you?"

"I think I have the right to ask that question, considering that this
is my room," said Herbert sharply.

"YOUR room?"

"Yes!"

The stranger half raised himself on his elbow, glanced round the room,
settled himself slowly back on the pillows, with his hands clasped
lightly behind his head, dropped his eyelids, smiled, and said:

"Rats!"

"What?" demanded Herbert, with a resentful sense of sacrilege to
Cherry's virgin slang.

"Well, old rats then!  D'ye think I don't know this shebang?  Look
here, Johnny, what are you putting on all this side for, eh? What's
your little game?  Where's Tappington?"

"If you mean Mr. Brooks, the son of this house, who formerly lived in
this room," replied Herbert, with a formal precision intended to show a
doubt of the stranger's knowledge of Tappington, "you ought to know
that he has left town."

"Left town!" echoed the stranger, raising himself again.  "Oh, I see!
getting rather too warm for him here?  Humph! I ought to have thought
of that.  Well, you know, he DID take mighty big risks, anyway!"  He
was silent a moment, with his brows knit and a rather dangerous
expression in his handsome face.  "So some d--d hound gave him
away--eh?"

"I hadn't the pleasure of knowing Mr. Brooks except by reputation, as
the respected son of the lady upon whose house you have just intruded,"
said Herbert frigidly, yet with a creeping consciousness of some
unpleasant revelation.

The stranger stared at him for a moment, again looked carefully round
the room, and then suddenly dropped his head back on the pillow, and
with his white hands over his eyes and mouth tried to restrain a spasm
of silent laughter.  After an effort he succeeded, wiped his moist
eyes, and sat up.

"So you didn't know Tappington, eh?" he said, lazily buttoning his
collar.

"No."

"No more do I."

He retied his cravat, yawned, rose, shook himself perfectly neat again,
and going to Herbert's dressing-table quietly took up a brush and began
to lightly brush himself, occasionally turning to the window to glance
out.  Presently he turned to Herbert and said:

"Well, Johnny, what's your name?"

"I am Herbert Bly, of Carstone's Bank."

"So, and a member of this same Vigilance Committee, I reckon," he
continued.

"Yes."

"Well, Mr. Bly, I owe you an apology for coming here, and some thanks
for the only sleep I've had in forty-eight hours.  I struck this old
shebang at about ten o'clock, and it's now two, so I reckon I've put in
about four hours' square sleep.  Now, look here."  He beckoned Herbert
towards the window.  "Do you see those three men standing under that
gaslight?  Well, they're part of a gang of Vigilantes who've hunted me
to the hill, and are waiting to see me come out of the bushes, where
they reckon I'm hiding.  Go to them and say that I'm here!  Tell them
you've got Gentleman George--George Dornton, the man they've been
hunting for a week--in this room.  I promise you I won't stir, nor kick
up a row, when they've come.  Do it, and Carstone, if he's a square
man, will raise your salary for it, and promote you."  He yawned
slightly, and then slowly looking around him, drew the easy-chair
towards him and dropped comfortably in it, gazing at the astounded and
motionless Herbert with a lazy smile.

"You're wondering what my little game is, Johnny, ain't you?  Well,
I'll tell you.  What with being hunted from pillar to post, putting my
old pards to no end of trouble, and then slipping up on it whenever I
think I've got a sure thing like this,"--he cast an almost affectionate
glance at the bed,--"I've come to the conclusion that it's played out,
and I might as well hand in my checks.  It's only a question of my
being RUN OUT of 'Frisco, or hiding until I can SLIP OUT myself; and
I've reckoned I might as well give them the trouble and expense of
transportation.  And if I can put a good thing in your way in doing
it--why, it will sort of make things square with you for the fuss I've
given you."

Even in the stupefaction and helplessness of knowing that the man
before him was the notorious duellist and gambler George Dornton, one
of the first marked for deportation by the Vigilance Committee, Herbert
recognized all he had heard of his invincible coolness, courage, and
almost philosophic fatalism.  For an instant his youthful imagination
checked even his indignation.  When he recovered himself, he said, with
rising color and boyish vehemence:

"Whoever YOU may be, I am neither a police officer nor a spy.  You have
no right to insult me by supposing that I would profit by the mistake
that made you my guest, or that I would refuse you the sanctuary of the
roof that covers your insult as well as your blunder."

The stranger gazed at him with an amused expression, and then rose and
stretched out his hand.

"Shake, Mr. Bly!  You're the only man that ever kicked George Dornton
when he deserved it.  Good-night!"  He took his hat and walked to the
door.

"Stop!" said Herbert impulsively; "the night is already far gone; go
back and finish your sleep."

"You mean it?"

"I do."

The stranger turned, walked back to the bed, unfastening his coat and
collar as he did so, and laid himself down in the attitude of a moment
before.

"I will call you in the morning," continued Herbert.  "By that
time,"--he hesitated,--"by that time your pursuers may have given up
their search.  One word more.  You will be frank with me?"

"Go on."

"Tappington and you are--friends?"

"Well--yes."

"His mother and sister know nothing of this?"

"I reckon he didn't boast of it.  I didn't.  Is that all?" sleepily.

"Yes."

"Don't YOU worry about HIM.  Good-night."

"Good-night."

But even at that moment George Dornton had dropped off in a quiet,
peaceful sleep.

Bly turned down the light, and, drawing his easy-chair to the window,
dropped into it in bewildering reflection.  This then was the
secret--unknown to mother and daughter--unsuspected by all! This was
the double life of Tappington, half revealed in his flirtation with the
neighbors, in the hidden cards behind the books, in the mysterious
visitor--still unaccounted for--and now wholly exploded by this
sleeping confederate, for whom, somehow, Herbert felt the greatest
sympathy!  What was to be done?  What should he say to Cherry--to her
mother--to Mr. Carstone?  Yet he had felt he had done right.  From time
to time he turned to the motionless recumbent shadow on the bed and
listened to its slow and peaceful respiration.  Apart from that
undefinable attraction which all original natures have for each other,
the thrice-blessed mystery of protection of the helpless, for the first
time in his life, seemed to dawn upon him through that night.

Nevertheless, the actual dawn came slowly.  Twice he nodded and awoke
quickly with a start.  The third time it was day.  The street-lamps
were extinguished, and with them the moving, restless watchers seemed
also to have vanished.  Suddenly a formal deliberate rapping at the
door leading to the hall startled him to his feet.

It must be Ellen.  So much the better; he could quickly get rid of her.
He glanced at the bed; Dornton slept on undisturbed.  He unlocked the
door cautiously, and instinctively fell back before the erect, shawled,
and decorous figure of Mrs. Brooks.  But an utterly new resolution and
excitement had supplanted the habitual resignation of her handsome
features, and given them an angry sparkle of expression.

Recollecting himself, he instantly stepped forward into the passage,
drawing to the door behind him, as she, with equal celerity, opposed it
with her hand.

"Mr. Bly," she said deliberately, "Ellen has just told me that your
voice has been heard in conversation with some one in this room late
last night.  Up to this moment I have foolishly allowed my daughter to
persuade me that certain infamous scandals regarding your conduct here
were false.  I must ask you as a gentleman to let me pass now and
satisfy myself."

"But, my dear madam, one moment.  Let me first explain--I
beg"--stammered Herbert with a half-hysterical laugh.  "I assure you a
gentleman friend"--

But she had pushed him aside and entered precipitately.  With a quick
feminine glance round the room she turned to the bed, and then halted
in overwhelming confusion.

"It's a friend," said Herbert in a hasty whisper.  "A friend of mine
who returned with me late, and whom, on account of the disturbed state
of the streets, I induced to stay here all night. He was so tired that
I have not had the heart to disturb him yet."

"Oh, pray don't!--I beg"--said Mrs. Brooks with a certain youthful
vivacity, but still gazing at the stranger's handsome features as she
slowly retreated.  "Not for worlds!"

Herbert was relieved; she was actually blushing.

"You see, it was quite unpremeditated, I assure you.  We came in
together," whispered Herbert, leading her to the door, "and I"--

"Don't believe a word of it, madam," said a lazy voice from the bed, as
the stranger leisurely raised himself upright, putting the last
finishing touch to his cravat as he shook himself neat again. "I'm an
utter stranger to him, and he knows it.  He found me here, biding from
the Vigilantes, who were chasing me on the hill.  I got in at that
door, which happened to be unlocked.  He let me stay because he was a
gentleman--and--I wasn't.  I beg your pardon, madam, for having
interrupted him before you; but it was a little rough to have him lie
on MY account when he wasn't the kind of man to lie on his OWN.  You'll
forgive him--won't you, please?--and, as I'm taking myself off now,
perhaps you'll overlook MY intrusion too."

It was impossible to convey the lazy frankness of this speech, the
charming smile with which it was accompanied, or the easy yet
deferential manner with which, taking up his hat, he bowed to Mrs.
Brooks as he advanced toward the door.

"But," said Mrs. Brooks, hurriedly glancing from Herbert to the
stranger, "it must be the Vigilantes who are now hanging about the
street.  Ellen saw them from her window, and thought they were YOUR
friends, Mr. Bly.  This gentleman--your friend"--she had become a
little confused in her novel excitement--"really ought not to go out
now.  It would be madness."

"If you wouldn't mind his remaining a little longer, it certainly would
be safer," said Herbert, with wondering gratitude.

"I certainly shouldn't consent to his leaving my house now," said Mrs.
Brooks with dignity; "and if you wouldn't mind calling Cherry here, Mr.
Bly--she's in the dining-room--and then showing yourself for a moment
in the street and finding out what they wanted, it would be the best
thing to do."

Herbert flew downstairs; in a few hurried words he gave the same
explanation to the astounded Cherry that he had given to her mother,
with the mischievous addition that Mrs. Brooks's unjust suspicions had
precipitated her into becoming an amicable accomplice, and then ran out
into the street.  Here he ascertained from one of the Vigilantes, whom
he knew, that they were really seeking Dornton; but that, concluding
that the fugitive had already escaped to the wharves, they expected to
withdraw their surveillance at noon.  Somewhat relieved, he hastened
back, to find the stranger calmly seated on the sofa in the parlor with
the same air of frank indifference, lazily relating the incidents of
his flight to the two women, who were listening with every expression
of sympathy and interest.  "Poor fellow!" said Cherry, taking the
astonished Bly aside into the hall, "I don't believe he's half as bad
as THEY said he is--or as even HE makes himself out to be.  But DID you
notice mother?"

Herbert, a little dazed, and, it must be confessed, a trifle uneasy at
this ready acceptance of the stranger, abstractedly said he had not.

"Why, it's the most ridiculous thing.  She's actually going round
WITHOUT HER SHAWL, and doesn't seem to know it."


V.

When Herbert finally reached the bank that morning he was still in a
state of doubt and perplexity.  He had parted with his grateful
visitor, whose safety in a few hours seemed assured, but without the
least further revelation or actual allusion to anything antecedent to
his selecting Tappington's room as refuge.  More than that, Herbert was
convinced from his manner that he had no intention of making a
confidant of Mrs. Brooks, and this convinced him that Dornton's
previous relations with Tappington were not only utterly inconsistent
with that young man's decorous reputation, but were unsuspected by the
family.  The stranger's familiar knowledge of the room, his mysterious
allusions to the "risks" Tappington had taken, and his sudden silence
on the discovery of Bly's ignorance of the whole affair all pointed to
some secret that, innocent or not, was more or less perilous, not only
to the son but to the mother and sister.  Of the latter's ignorance he
had no doubt--but had he any right to enlighten them?  Admitting that
Tappington had deceived them with the others, would they thank him for
opening their eyes to it?  If they had already a suspicion, would they
care to know that it was shared by him?  Halting between his frankness
and his delicacy, the final thought that in his budding relations with
the daughter it might seem a cruel bid for her confidence, or a revenge
for their distrust of him, inclined him to silence.  But an unforeseen
occurrence took the matter from his hands.  At noon he was told that
Mr. Carstone wished to see him in his private room!

Satisfied that his complicity with Dornton's escape was discovered, the
unfortunate Herbert presented himself, pale but self-possessed, before
his employer.  That brief man of business bade him be seated, and
standing himself before the fireplace, looked down curiously, but not
unkindly, upon his employee.

"Mr. Bly, the bank does not usually interfere with the private affairs
of its employees, but for certain reasons which I prefer to explain to
you later, I must ask you to give me a straightforward answer to one or
two questions.  I may say that they have nothing to do with your
relations to the bank, which are to us perfectly satisfactory."

More than ever convinced that Mr. Carstone was about to speak of his
visitor, Herbert signified his willingness to reply.

"You have been seen a great deal with Miss Brooks lately--on the street
and elsewhere--acting as her escort, and evidently on terms of
intimacy.  To do you both justice, neither of you seemed to have made
it a secret or avoided observation; but I must ask you directly if it
is with her mother's permission?"

Considerably relieved, but wondering what was coming, Herbert answered,
with boyish frankness, that it was.

"Are you--engaged to the young lady?"

"No, sir."

"Are you--well, Mr. Bly--briefly, are you what is called 'in love' with
her?" asked the banker, with a certain brusque hurrying over of a
sentiment evidently incompatible with their present business
surroundings.

Herbert blushed.  It was the first time he had heard the question
voiced, even by himself.

"I am," he said resolutely.

"And you wish to marry her?"

"If I dared ask her to accept a young man with no position as yet,"
stammered Herbert.

"People don't usually consider a young man in Carstone's Bank of no
position," said the banker dryly; "and I wish for your sake THAT were
the only impediment.  For I am compelled to reveal to you a secret."
He paused, and folding his arms, looked fixedly down upon his clerk.
"Mr. Bly, Tappington Brooks, the brother of your sweetheart, was a
defaulter and embezzler from this bank!"

Herbert sat dumfounded and motionless.

"Understand two things," continued Mr. Carstone quickly.  "First, that
no purer or better women exist than Miss Brooks and her mother.
Secondly, that they know nothing of this, and that only myself and one
other man are in possession of the secret."

He slightly changed his position, and went on more deliberately. "Six
weeks ago Tappington sat in that chair where you are sitting now, a
convicted hypocrite and thief.  Luckily for him, although his guilt was
plain, and the whole secret of his double life revealed to me, a sum of
money advanced in pity by one of his gambling confederates had made his
accounts good and saved him from suspicion in the eyes of his
fellow-clerks and my partners.  At first he tried to fight me on that
point; then he blustered and said his mother could have refunded the
money; and asked me what was a paltry five thousand dollars!  I told
him, Mr. Bly, that it might be five years of his youth in state prison;
that it might be five years of sorrow and shame for his mother and
sister; that it might be an everlasting stain on the name of his dead
father--my friend.  He talked of killing himself: I told him he was a
cowardly fool.  He asked me to give him up to the authorities: I told
him I intended to take the law in my own hands and give him another
chance; and then he broke down.  I transferred him that very day,
without giving him time to communicate with anybody, to our branch
office at Portland, with a letter explaining his position to our agent,
and the injunction that for six months he should be under strict
surveillance.  I myself undertook to explain his sudden departure to
Mrs. Brooks, and obliged him to write to her from time to time."  He
paused, and then continued: "So far I believe my plan has been
successful: the secret has been kept; he has broken with the evil
associates that ruined him here--to the best of my knowledge he has had
no communication with them since; even a certain woman here who shared
his vicious hidden life has abandoned him."

"Are you sure?" asked Herbert involuntarily, as he recalled his
mysterious visitor.

"I believe the Vigilance Committee has considered it a public duty to
deport her and her confederates beyond the State," returned Carstone
dryly.

Another idea flashed upon Herbert.  "And the gambler who advanced the
money to save Tappington?" he said breathlessly.

"Wasn't such a hound as the rest of his kind, if report says true,"
answered Carstone.  "He was well known here as George
Dornton--Gentleman George--a man capable of better things.  But he was
before your time, Mr. Bly--YOU don't know him."

Herbert didn't deem it a felicitous moment to correct his employer, and
Mr. Carstone continued: "I have now told you what I thought it was my
duty to tell you.  I must leave YOU to judge how far it affects your
relations with Miss Brooks."

Herbert did not hesitate.  "I should be very sorry, sir, to seem to
undervalue your consideration or disregard your warning; but I am
afraid that even if you had been less merciful to Tappington, and he
were now a convicted felon, I should change neither my feelings nor my
intentions to his sister."

"And you would still marry her?" said Carstone sternly; "YOU, an
employee of the bank, would set the example of allying yourself with
one who had robbed it?"

"I--am afraid I would, sir," said Herbert slowly.

"Even if it were a question of your remaining here?" said Carstone
grimly.

Poor Herbert already saw himself dismissed and again taking up his
weary quest for employment; but, nevertheless, he answered stoutly:

"Yes, sir."

"And nothing will prevent you marrying Miss Brooks?"

"Nothing--save my inability to support her."

"Then," said Mr. Carstone, with a peculiar light in his eyes, "it only
remains for the bank to mark its opinion of your conduct by INCREASING
YOUR SALARY TO ENABLE YOU TO DO SO!  Shake hands, Mr. Bly," he said,
laughing.  "I think you'll do to tie to--and I believe the young lady
will be of the same opinion.  But not a word to either her or her
mother in regard to what you have heard.  And now I may tell you
something more.  I am not without hope of Tappington's future,
nor--d--n it!--without some excuse for his fault, sir.  He was
artificially brought up.  When my old friend died, Mrs. Brooks, still a
handsome woman, like all her sex wouldn't rest until she had another
devotion, and wrapped herself and her children up in the Church.
Theology may be all right for grown people, but it's apt to make
children artificial; and Tappington was pious before he was fairly
good.  He drew on a religious credit before he had a moral capital
behind it.  He was brought up with no knowledge of the world, and when
he went into it--it captured him.  I don't say there are not saints
born into the world occasionally; but for every one you'll find a lot
of promiscuous human nature.  My old friend Josh Brooks had a heap of
it, and it wouldn't be strange if some was left in his children, and
burst through their straight-lacing in a queer way.  That's all!
Good-morning, Mr. Bly.  Forget what I've told you for six months, and
then I shouldn't wonder if Tappington was on hand to give his sister
away."

       .       .       .       .       .       .       .

Mr. Carstone's prophecy was but half realized.  At the end of six
months Herbert Bly's discretion and devotion were duly rewarded by
Cherry's hand.  But Tappington did NOT give her away.  That saintly
prodigal passed his period of probation with exemplary rectitude, but,
either from a dread of old temptation, or some unexplained reason, he
preferred to remain in Portland, and his fastidious nest on Telegraph
Hill knew him no more.  The key of the little door on the side street
passed, naturally, into the keeping of Mrs. Bly.

Whether the secret of Tappington's double life was ever revealed to the
two women is not known to the chronicler.  Mrs. Bly is reported to have
said that the climate of Oregon was more suited to her brother's
delicate constitution than the damp fogs of San Francisco, and that his
tastes were always opposed to the mere frivolity of metropolitan
society.  The only possible reason for supposing that the mother may
have become cognizant of her son's youthful errors was in the
occasional visits to the house of the handsome George Dornton, who, in
the social revolution that followed the brief reign of the Vigilance
Committee, characteristically returned as a dashing stockbroker, and
the fact that Mrs. Brooks seemed to have discarded her ascetic shawl
forever.  But as all this was contemporaneous with the absurd rumor,
that owing to the loneliness induced by the marriage of her daughter
she contemplated a similar change in her own condition, it is deemed
unworthy the serious consideration of this veracious chronicle.




CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND.

I.

Hardly one of us, I think, really believed in the auriferous
probabilities of Eureka Gulch.  Following a little stream, we had one
day drifted into it, very much as we imagined the river gold might have
done in remoter ages, with the difference that WE remained there, while
the river gold to all appearances had not. At first it was tacitly
agreed to ignore this fact, and we made the most of the charming
locality, with its rare watercourse that lost itself in tangled depths
of manzanita and alder, its laurel-choked pass, its flower-strewn
hillside, and its summit crested with rocking pines.

"You see," said the optimistic Rowley, "water's the main thing after
all.  If we happen to strike river gold, thar's the stream for washing
it; if we happen to drop into quartz--and that thar rock looks mighty
likely--thar ain't a more natural-born site for a mill than that right
bank, with water enough to run fifty stamps.  That hillside is an
original dump for your tailings, and a ready found inclined road for
your trucks, fresh from the hands of Providence; and that road we're
kalkilatin' to build to the turnpike will run just easy along that
ridge."

Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was
really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained
there, excusing our youthful laziness and incertitude by brilliant and
effective sarcasms upon the unremunerative attractions of the gulch.
Nevertheless, when Captain Jim, returning one day from the nearest
settlement and post-office, twenty miles away, burst upon us with
"Well, the hull thing'll be settled now, boys; Lacy Bassett is coming
down yer to look round," we felt considerably relieved.

And yet, perhaps, we had as little reason for it as we had for
remaining there.  There was no warrant for any belief in the special
divining power of the unknown Lacy Bassett, except Captain Jim's
extravagant faith in his general superiority, and even that had always
been a source of amused skepticism to the camp.  We were already
impatiently familiar with the opinions of this unseen oracle; he was
always impending in Captain Jim's speech as a fragrant memory or an
unquestioned authority.  When Captain Jim began, "Ez Lacy was one day
tellin' me," or, "Ez Lacy Bassett allows," or more formally, when
strangers were present, "Ez a partickler friend o' mine, Lacy
Bassett--maybe ez you know him--sez," the youthful and lighter members
of the Eureka Mining Company glanced at each other in furtive
enjoyment.  Nevertheless no one looked more eagerly forward to the
arrival of this apocryphal sage than these indolent skeptics.  It was
at least an excitement; they were equally ready to accept his
condemnation of the locality or his justification of their original
selection.

He came.  He was received by the Eureka Mining Company lying on their
backs on the grassy site of the prospective quartz mill, not far from
the equally hypothetical "slide" to the gulch.  He came by the future
stage road--at present a thickset jungle of scrub-oaks and ferns.  He
was accompanied by Captain Jim, who had gone to meet him on the trail,
and for a few moments all critical inspection of himself was withheld
by the extraordinary effect he seemed to have upon the faculties of his
introducer.

Anything like the absolute prepossession of Captain Jim by this
stranger we had never imagined.  He approached us running a little
ahead of his guest, and now and then returning assuringly to his side
with the expression of a devoted Newfoundland dog, which in fluffiness
he generally resembled.  And now, even after the introduction was over,
when he made a point of standing aside in an affectation of
carelessness, with his hands in his pockets, the simulation was so
apparent, and his consciousness and absorption in his friend so
obvious, that it was a relief to us to recall him into the conversation.

As to our own first impressions of the stranger, they were probably
correct.  We all disliked him; we thought him conceited,
self-opinionated, selfish, and untrustworthy.  But later, reflecting
that this was possibly the result of Captain Jim's over-praise, and
finding none of these qualities as yet offensively opposed to our own
selfishness and conceit, we were induced, like many others, to forget
our first impressions.  We could easily correct him if he attempted to
impose upon US, as he evidently had upon Captain Jim. Believing, after
the fashion of most humanity, that there was something about US
particularly awe-inspiring and edifying to vice or weakness of any
kind, we good-humoredly yielded to the cheap fascination of this showy,
self-saturated, over-dressed, and underbred stranger.  Even the epithet
of "blower" as applied to him by Rowley had its mitigations; in that
Trajan community a bully was not necessarily a coward, nor florid
demonstration always a weakness.

His condemnation of the gulch was sweeping, original, and striking. He
laughed to scorn our half-hearted theory of a gold deposit in the bed
and bars of our favorite stream.  We were not to look for auriferous
alluvium in the bed of any present existing stream, but in the "cement"
or dried-up bed of the original prehistoric rivers that formerly ran
parallel with the present bed, and which--he demonstrated with the stem
of Pickney's pipe in the red dust--could be found by sinking shafts at
right angles with the stream.  The theory was to us, at that time,
novel and attractive.  It was true that the scientific explanation,
although full and gratuitous, sounded vague and incoherent.  It was
true that the geological terms were not always correct, and their
pronunciation defective, but we accepted such extraordinary discoveries
as "ignus fatuus rock," "splendiferous drift," "mica twist" (recalling
a popular species of tobacco), "iron pirates," and "discomposed quartz"
as part of what he not inaptly called a "tautological formation," and
were happy.  Nor was our contentment marred by the fact that the
well-known scientific authority with whom the stranger had been
intimate,--to the point of "sleeping together" during a survey,--and
whom he described as a bent old man with spectacles, must have aged
considerably since one of our party saw him three years before as a
keen young fellow of twenty-five.  Inaccuracies like those were only
the carelessness of genius.  "That's my opinion, gentlemen," he
concluded, negligently rising, and with pointed preoccupation whipping
the dust of Eureka Gulch from his clothes with his handkerchief, "but
of course it ain't nothin' to me."

Captain Jim, who had followed every word with deep and trustful
absorption, here repeated, "It ain't nothing to him, boys," with a
confidential implication of the gratuitous blessing we had received,
and then added, with loyal encouragement to him, "It ain't nothing to
you, Lacy, in course," and laid his hand on his shoulder with infinite
tenderness.

We, however, endeavored to make it something to Mr. Lacy Bassett. He
was spontaneously offered a share in the company and a part of Captain
Jim's tent.  He accepted both after a few deprecating and muttered
asides to Captain Jim, which the latter afterwards explained to us was
the giving up of several other important enterprises for our sake.
When he finally strolled away with Rowley to look over the gulch,
Captain Jim reluctantly tore himself away from him only for the
pleasure of reiterating his praise to us as if in strictest confidence
and as an entirely novel proceeding.

"You see, boys, I didn't like to say it afore HIM, we bein' old
friends; but, between us, that young feller ez worth thousands to the
camp.  Mebbee," he continued with grave naivete, "I ain't said much
about him afore, mebbee, bein' old friends and accustomed to him--you
know how it is, boys,--I haven't appreciated him as much ez I ought,
and ez you do.  In fact, I don't ezakly remember how I kem to ask him
down yer.  It came to me suddent, one day only a week ago Friday night,
thar under that buckeye; I was thinkin' o' one of his sayins, and sez
I--thar's Lacy, if he was here he'd set the hull thing right.  It was
the ghost of a chance my findin' him free, but I did.  And there HE is,
and yer WE are settled!  Ye noticed how he just knocked the bottom
outer our plans to work.  Ye noticed that quick sort o' sneerin' smile
o' his, didn't ye--that's Lacy!  I've seen him knock over a heap o'
things without sayin' anythin'--with jist that smile."

It occurred to us that we might have some difficulty in utilizing this
smile in our present affairs, and that we should have probably
preferred something more assuring, but Captain Jim's faith was
contagious.

"What is he, anyway?" asked Joe Walker lazily.

"Eh!" echoed Captain Jim in astonishment.  "What is Lacy Bassett?"

"Yes, what is he?" repeated Walker.

"Wot IS--he?"

"Yes."

"I've knowed him now goin' as four year," said Captain Jim with slow
reflective contentment.  "Let's see.  It was in the fall o' '54 I first
met him, and he's allus been the same ez you see him now."

"But what is his business or profession?  What does he do?"

Captain Jim looked reproachfully at his questioner.

"Do?" he repeated, turning to the rest of us as if disdaining a direct
reply.  "Do?--why, wot he's doin' now.  He's allus the same, allus Lacy
Bassett."

Howbeit, we went to work the next day under the superintendence of the
stranger with youthful and enthusiastic energy, and began the sinking
of a shaft at once.  To do Captain Jim's friend justice, for the first
few weeks he did not shirk a fair share of the actual labor, replacing
his objectionable and unsuitable finery with a suit of serviceable
working clothes got together by general contribution of the camp, and
assuring us of a fact we afterwards had cause to remember, that "he
brought nothing but himself into Eureka Gulch."  It may be added that
he certainly had not brought money there, as Captain Jim advanced the
small amounts necessary for his purchases in the distant settlement,
and for the still smaller sums he lost at cards, which he played with
characteristic self-sufficiency.

Meantime the work in the shaft progressed slowly but regularly. Even
when the novelty had worn off and the excitement of anticipation grew
fainter, I am afraid that we clung to this new form of occupation as an
apology for remaining there; for the fascinations of our vagabond and
unconventional life were more potent than we dreamed of.  We were
slowly fettered by our very freedom; there was a strange spell in this
very boundlessness of our license that kept us from even the desire of
change; in the wild and lawless arms of nature herself we found an
embrace as clinging, as hopeless and restraining, as the civilization
from which we had fled.  We were quite content after a few hours' work
in the shaft to lie on our backs on the hillside staring at the
unwinking sky, or to wander with a gun through the virgin forest in
search of game scarcely less vagabond than ourselves.  We indulged in
the most extravagant and dreamy speculations of the fortune we should
eventually discover in the shaft, and believed that we were practical.
We broke our "saleratus bread" with appetites unimpaired by
restlessness or anxiety; we went to sleep under the grave and sedate
stars with a serene consciousness of having fairly earned our rest; we
awoke the next morning with unabated trustfulness, and a sweet
obliviousness of even the hypothetical fortunes we had perhaps won or
lost at cards overnight.  We paid no heed to the fact that our little
capital was slowly sinking with the shaft, and that the rainy
season--wherein not only "no man could work," but even such play as
ours was impossible--was momentarily impending.

In the midst of this, one day Lacy Bassett suddenly emerged from the
shaft before his "shift" of labor was over with every sign of disgust
and rage in his face and inarticulate with apparent passion.  In vain
we gathered round him in concern; in vain Captain Jim regarded him with
almost feminine sympathy, as he flung away his pick and dashed his hat
to the ground.

"What's up, Lacy, old pard?  What's gone o' you?" said Captain Jim
tenderly.

"Look!" gasped Lacy at last, when every eye was on him, holding up a
small fragment of rock before us and the next moment grinding it under
his heel in rage.  "Look!  To think that I've been fooled agin by this
blanked fossiliferous trap--blank it!  To think that after me and
Professor Parker was once caught jist in this way up on the Stanislaus
at the bottom of a hundred-foot shaft by this rotten trap--that yer I
am--bluffed agin!"

There was a dead silence; we looked at each other blankly.

"But, Bassett," said Walker, picking up a part of the fragment, "we've
been finding this kind of stuff for the last two weeks."

"But how?" returned Lacy, turning upon him almost fiercely.  "Did ye
find it superposed on quartz, or did you find it NOT superposed on
quartz?  Did you find it in volcanic drift, or did ye find it in old
red-sandstone or coarse illuvion?  Tell me that, and then ye kin talk.
But this yer blank fossiliferous trap, instead o' being superposed on
top, is superposed on the bottom.  And that means"--

"What?" we all asked eagerly.

"Why--blank it all--that this yer convulsion of nature, this
prehistoric volcanic earthquake, instead of acting laterally and
chuckin' the stream to one side, has been revolutionary and turned the
old river-bed bottom-side up, and yer d--d cement hez got half the
globe atop of it!  Ye might strike it from China, but nowhere else."

We continued to look at one another, the older members with darkening
faces, the younger with a strong inclination to laugh. Captain Jim, who
had been concerned only in his friend's emotion, and who was hanging
with undisguised satisfaction on these final convincing proofs of his
superior geological knowledge, murmured approvingly and confidingly,
"He's right, boys!  Thar ain't another man livin' ez could give you the
law and gospil like that!  Ye can tie to what he says.  That's Lacy all
over."

Two weeks passed.  We had gathered, damp and disconsolate, in the only
available shelter of the camp.  For the long summer had ended
unexpectedly to us; we had one day found ourselves caught like the
improvident insect of the child's fable with gauzy and unseasonable
wings wet and bedraggled in the first rains, homeless and hopeless. The
scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle
in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see
Captain Jim returning from a visit to him, slowly plodding along the
trail towards us.

"It's no use, boys," said Rowley, summarizing the result of our
conference, "we must speak out to him, and if nobody else cares to do
it I will.  I don't know why we should be more mealy-mouthed than they
are at the settlement.  They don't hesitate to call Bassett a
dead-beat, whatever Captain Jim says to the contrary."

The unfortunate Captain Jim had halted irresolutely before the gloomy
faces in the shelter.  Whether he felt instinctively some forewarning
of what was coming I cannot say.  There was a certain dog-like
consciousness in his eye and a half-backward glance over his shoulder
as if he were not quite certain that Lacy was not following.  The rain
had somewhat subdued his characteristic fluffiness, and he cowered with
a kind of sleek storm-beaten despondency over the smoking fire of green
wood before our tent.

Nevertheless, Rowley opened upon him with a directness and decision
that astonished us.  He pointed out briefly that Lacy Bassett had been
known to us only through Captain Jim's introduction.  That he had been
originally invited there on Captain Jim's own account, and that his
later connection with the company had been wholly the result of Captain
Jim's statements.  That, far from being any aid or assistance to them,
Bassett had beguiled them by apocryphal knowledge and sham scientific
theories into an expensive and gigantic piece of folly.  That, in
addition to this, they had just discovered that he had also been using
the credit of the company for his own individual expenses at the
settlement while they were working on his d--d fool shaft--all of which
had brought them to the verge of bankruptcy.  That, as a result, they
were forced now to demand his resignation--not only on their general
account, but for Captain Jim's sake--believing firmly, as they did,
that he had been as grossly deceived in his friendship for Lacy Bassett
as THEY were in their business relations with him.

Instead of being mollified by this, Captain Jim, to our greater
astonishment, suddenly turned upon the speaker, bristling with his old
canine suggestion.

"There!  I said so!  Go on!  I'd have sworn to it afore you opened your
lips.  I knowed it the day you sneaked around and wanted to know wot
his business was!  I said to myself, Cap, look out for that sneakin'
hound Rowley, he's no friend o' Lacy's.  And the day Lacy so far
demeaned himself as to give ye that splendid explanation o' things, I
watched ye; ye didn't think it, but I watched ye.  Ye can't fool me!  I
saw ye lookin' at Walker there, and I said to myself, Wot's the use,
Lacy, wot's the use o' your slingin' them words to such as THEM?  Wot
do THEY know?  It's just their pure jealousy and ignorance.  Ef you'd
come down yer, and lazed around with us and fallen into our common
ways, you'd ha' been ez good a man ez the next.  But no, it ain't your
style, Lacy, you're accustomed to high-toned men like Professor Parker,
and you can't help showing it.  No wonder you took to avoidin' us; no
wonder I've had to foller you over the Burnt Wood Crossin' time and
again, to get to see ye.  I see it all now: ye can't stand the kempany
I brought ye to!  Ye had to wipe the slum gullion of Eureka Gulch off
your hands, Lacy"--  He stopped, gasped for breath, and then lifted his
voice more savagely, "And now, what's this?  Wot's this hogwash? this
yer lyin' slander about his gettin' things on the kempany's credit?
Eh, speak up, some of ye!"

We were so utterly shocked and stupefied at the degradation of this
sudden and unexpected outburst from a man usually so honorable, gentle,
self-sacrificing, and forgiving, that we forgot the cause of it and
could only stare at each other.  What was this cheap stranger, with his
shallow swindling tricks, to the ignoble change he had worked upon the
man before us.  Rowley and Walker, both fearless fighters and quick to
resent an insult, only averted their saddened faces and turned aside
without a word.

"Ye dussen't say it!  Well, hark to me then," he continued with white
and feverish lips.  "I put him up to helpin' himself.  I told him to
use the kempany's name for credit.  Ye kin put that down to ME.  And
when ye talk of HIS resigning, I want ye to understand that I resign
outer this rotten kempany and TAKE HIM WITH ME!  Ef all the gold yer
lookin' for was piled up in that shaft from its bottom in hell to its
top in the gulch, it ain't enough to keep me here away from him!  Ye
kin take all my share--all MY rights yer above ground and below it--all
I carry,"--he threw his buckskin purse and revolver on the
ground,--"and pay yourselves what you reckon you've lost through HIM.
But you and me is quits from to-day."

He strode away before a restraining voice or hand could reach him. His
dripping figure seemed to melt into the rain beneath the thickening
shadows of the pines, and the next moment he was gone. From that day
forward Eureka Gulch knew him no more.  And the camp itself somehow
melted away during the rainy season, even as he had done.


II.

Three years had passed.  The pioneer stage-coach was sweeping down the
long descent to the pastoral valley of Gilead, and I was looking
towards the village with some pardonable interest and anxiety.  For I
carried in my pocket my letters of promotion from the box seat of the
coach--where I had performed the functions of treasure messenger for
the Excelsior Express Company--to the resident agency of that company
in the bucolic hamlet before me. The few dusty right-angled streets,
with their rigid and staringly new shops and dwellings, the stern
formality of one or two obelisk-like meeting-house spires, the
illimitable outlying plains of wheat and wild oats beyond, with their
monotony scarcely broken by skeleton stockades, corrals, and
barrack-looking farm buildings, were all certainly unlike the unkempt
freedom of the mountain fastnesses in which I had lately lived and
moved.  Yuba Bill, the driver, whose usual expression of humorous
discontent deepened into scorn as he gathered up his reins as if to
charge the village and recklessly sweep it from his path, indicated a
huge, rambling, obtrusively glazed, and capital-lettered building with
a contemptuous flick of his whip as we passed.  "Ef you're kalkilatin'
we'll get our partin' drink there you're mistaken. That's wot they call
a TEMPERANCE HOUSE--wot means a place where the licker ye get underhand
is only a trifle worse than the hash ye get above-board.  I suppose
it's part o' one o' the mysteries o' Providence that wharever you find
a dusty hole like this--that's naturally THIRSTY--ye run agin a
'temperance' house.  But never YOU mind!  I shouldn't wonder if thar
was a demijohn o' whiskey in the closet of your back office, kept thar
by the feller you're relievin'--who was a white man and knew the ropes."

A few minutes later, when my brief installation was over, we DID find
the demijohn in the place indicated.  As Yuba Bill wiped his mouth with
the back of his heavy buckskin glove, he turned to me not unkindly.  "I
don't like to set ye agin Gile-ad, which is a scrip-too-rural place,
and a God-fearin' place, and a nice dry place, and a place ez I've
heard tell whar they grow beans and pertatoes and garden sass; but
afore three weeks is over, old pard, you'll be howlin' to get back on
that box seat with me, whar you uster sit, and be ready to take your
chances agin, like a little man, to get drilled through with buckshot
from road agents.  You hear me!  I'll give you three weeks, sonny, just
three weeks, to get your butes full o' hayseed and straws in yer har;
and I'll find ye wadin' the North Fork at high water to get out o'
this."  He shook my hand with grim tenderness, removing his glove--a
rare favor--to give me the pressure of his large, soft, protecting
palm, and strode away.  The next moment he was shaking the white dust
of Gilead from his scornful chariot-wheels.

In the hope of familiarizing myself with the local interests of the
community, I took up a copy of the "Gilead Guardian" which lay on my
desk, forgetting for the moment the usual custom of the country press
to displace local news for long editorials on foreign subjects and
national politics.  I found, to my disappointment, that the "Guardian"
exhibited more than the usual dearth of domestic intelligence, although
it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian
Democracy."  A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a
colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of
inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my
memory.  I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally
familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened
and a man entered.  I was surprised to recognize Captain Jim.

I had not seen him since he had indignantly left us, three years
before, in Eureka Gulch.  The circumstances of his defection were
certainly not conducive to any voluntary renewal of friendship on
either side; and although, even as a former member of the Eureka Mining
Company, I was not conscious of retaining any sense of injury, yet the
whole occurrence flashed back upon me with awkward distinctness.  To my
relief, however, he greeted me with his old cordiality; to my amusement
he added to it a suggestion of the large forgiveness of conscious
rectitude and amiable toleration.  I thought, however, I detected, as
he glanced at the paper which was still in my hand and then back again
at my face, the same uneasy canine resemblance I remembered of old.  He
had changed but little in appearance; perhaps he was a trifle stouter,
more mature, and slower in his movements.  If I may return to my canine
illustration, his grayer, dustier, and more wiry ensemble gave me the
impression that certain pastoral and agricultural conditions had varied
his type, and he looked more like a shepherd's dog in whose brown eyes
there was an abiding consciousness of the care of straying sheep, and
possibly of one black one in particular.

He had, he told me, abandoned mining and taken up farming on a rather
large scale.  He had prospered.  He had other interests at stake, "A
flour-mill with some improvements--and--and"--here his eyes wandered to
the "Guardian" again, and he asked me somewhat abruptly what I thought
of the paper.  Something impelled me to restrain my previous fuller
criticism, and I contented myself by saying briefly that I thought it
rather ambitious for the locality. "That's the word," he said with a
look of gratified relief, "'ambitious'--you've just hit it.  And what's
the matter with thet? Ye kan't expect a high-toned man to write down to
the level of every karpin' hound, ken ye now?  That's what he says to
me"--  He stopped half confused, and then added abruptly: "That's one
o' my investments."

"Why, Captain Jim, I never suspected that you"--

"Oh, I don't WRITE it," he interrupted hastily.  "I only furnish the
money and the advertising, and run it gin'rally, you know; and I'm
responsible for it.  And I select the eddyter--and"--he continued, with
a return of the same uneasy wistful look--"thar's suthin' in thet, you
know, eh?"

I was beginning to be perplexed.  The memory evoked by the style of the
editorial writing and the presence of Captain Jim was assuming a
suspicious relationship to each other.  "And who's your editor?" I
asked.

"Oh, he's--he's--er--Lacy Bassett," he replied, blinking his eyes with
a hopeless assumption of carelessness.  "Let's see!  Oh yes! You knowed
Lacy down there at Eureka.  I disremembered it till now. Yes, sir!" he
repeated suddenly and almost rudely, as if to preclude any adverse
criticism, "he's the eddyter!"

To my surprise he was quite white and tremulous with nervousness. I was
very sorry for him, and as I really cared very little for the
half-forgotten escapade of his friend except so far as it seemed to
render HIM sensitive, I shook his hand again heartily and began to talk
of our old life in the gulch--avoiding as far as possible any allusion
to Lacy Bassett.  His face brightened; his old simple cordiality and
trustfulness returned, but unfortunately with it his old disposition to
refer to Bassett.  "Yes, they waz high old times, and ez I waz sayin'
to Lacy on'y yesterday, there is a kind o' freedom 'bout that sort o'
life that runs civilization and noospapers mighty hard, however
high-toned they is.  Not but what Lacy ain't right," he added quickly,
"when he sez that the opposition the 'Guardian' gets here comes from
ignorant low-down fellers ez wos brought up in played-out camps, and
can't tell a gentleman and a scholar and a scientific man when they
sees him. No!  So I sez to Lacy, 'Never you mind, it's high time they
did, and they've got to do it and to swaller the "Guardian," if I sink
double the money I've already put into the paper.'"

I was not long in discovering from other sources that the "Guardian"
was not popular with the more intelligent readers of Gilead, and that
Captain Jim's extravagant estimate of his friend was by no means
indorsed by the community.  But criticism took a humorous turn even in
that practical settlement, and it appeared that Lacy Bassett's vanity,
assumption, and ignorance were an unfailing and weekly joy to the
critical, in spite of the vague distrust they induced in the more
homely-witted, and the dull acquiescence of that minority who accepted
the paper for its respectable exterior and advertisements.  I was
somewhat grieved, however, to find that Captain Jim shared equally with
his friend in this general verdict of incompetency, and that some of
the most outrageous blunders were put down to HIM.  But I was not
prepared to believe that Lacy had directly or by innuendo helped the
public to this opinion.

Whether through accident or design on his part, Lacy Bassett did not
personally obtrude himself upon my remembrance until a month later.
One dazzling afternoon, when the dust and heat had driven the pride of
Gilead's manhood into the surreptitious shadows of the temperance
hotel's back room, and had even cleared the express office of its
loungers, and left me alone with darkened windows in the private
office, the outer door opened and Captain Jim's friend entered as part
of that garish glitter I had shut out.  To do the scamp strict justice,
however, he was somewhat subdued in his dress and manner, and, possibly
through some gentle chastening of epigram and revolver since I had seen
him last, was less aggressive and exaggerated.  I had the impression,
from certain odors wafted through the apartment and a peculiar physical
exaltation that was inconsistent with his evident moral hesitancy, that
he had prepared himself for the interview by a previous visit to the
hidden fountains of the temperance hotel.

"We don't seem to have run agin each other since you've been here," he
said with an assurance that was nevertheless a trifle forced "but I
reckon we're both busy men, and there's a heap too much loafing goin'
on in Gilead.  Captain Jim told me he met you the day you arrived; said
you just cottoned to the 'Guardian' at once and thought it a deal too
good for Gilead; eh?  Oh, well, jest ez likely he DIDN'T say it--it was
only his gassin'.  He's a queer man--is Captain Jim."

I replied somewhat sharply that I considered him a very honest man, a
very simple man, and a very loyal man.

"That's all very well," said Bassett, twirling his cane with a
patronizing smile, "but, as his friend, don't you find him considerable
of a darned fool?"

I could not help retorting that I thought HE had found that hardly an
objection.

"YOU think so," he said querulously, apparently ignoring everything but
the practical fact,--"and maybe others do; but that's where you're
mistaken.  It don't pay.  It may pay HIM to be runnin' me as his
particular friend, to be quotin' me here and there, to be gettin'
credit of knowin' me and my friends and ownin' me--by Gosh! but I don't
see where the benefit to ME comes in.  Eh?  Take your own case down
there at Eureka Gulch; didn't he send for me just to show me up to you
fellers?  Did I want to have anything to do with the Eureka Company?
Didn't he set me up to give my opinion about that shaft just to show
off what I knew about science and all that? And what did he get me to
join the company for?  Was it for you? No!  Was it for me?  No!  It was
just to keep me there for HIMSELF, and kinder pit me agin you fellers
and crow over you!  Now that ain't my style!  It may be HIS--it may be
honest and simple and loyal, as you say, and it may be all right for
him to get me to run up accounts at the settlement and then throw off
on me--but it ain't my style.  I suppose he let on that I did that.
No?  He didn't?  Well then, why did he want to run me off with him, and
out the whole concern in an underhand way and make me leave with nary a
character behind me, eh?  Now, I never said anything about this
before--did I?  It ain't like me.  I wouldn't have said anything about
it now, only you talked about MY being benefited by his darned
foolishness.  Much I've made outer HIM."

Despicable, false, and disloyal as this was, perhaps it was the
crowning meanness of such confidences that his very weakness seemed
only a reflection of Captain Jim's own, and appeared in some strange
way to degrade his friend as much as himself.  The simplicity of his
vanity and selfishness was only equalled by the simplicity of Captain
Jim's admiration of it.  It was a part of my youthful inexperience of
humanity that I was not above the common fallacy of believing that a
man is "known by the company he keeps," and that he is in a manner
responsible for its weakness; it was a part of that humanity that I
felt no surprise in being more amused than shocked by this revelation.
It seemed a good joke on Captain Jim!

"Of course YOU kin laugh at his darned foolishness; but, by Gosh, it
ain't a laughing matter to me!"

"But surely he's given you a good position on the 'Guardian,'" I urged.
"That was disinterested, certainly."

"Was it?  I call that the cheekiest thing yet.  When he found he
couldn't make enough of me in private life, he totes me out in public
as HIS editor--the man who runs HIS paper!  And has his name in print
as the proprietor, the only chance he'd ever get of being before the
public.  And don't know the whole town is laughing at him!"

"That may be because they think HE writes some of the articles," I
suggested.

Again the insinuation glanced harmlessly from his vanity.  "That
couldn't be, because I do all the work, and it ain't his style," he
said with naive discontent.  "And it's always the highest style, done
to please him, though between you and me it's sorter castin' pearls
before swine--this 'Frisco editing--and the public would be just as
satisfied with anything I could rattle off that was peart and
sassy,--something spicy or personal.  I'm willing to climb down and do
it, for there's nothin' stuck-up about me, you know; but that darned
fool Captain Jim has got the big head about the style of the paper, and
darned if I don't think he's afraid if there's a lettin' down, people
may think it's him!  Ez if!  Why, you know as well as me that there's a
sort of snap I could give these things that would show it was me and no
slouch did them, in a minute."

I had my doubts about the elegance or playfulness of Mr. Bassett's
trifling, but from some paragraphs that appeared in the next issue of
the "Guardian" I judged that he had won over Captain Jim--if indeed
that gentleman's alleged objections were not entirely the outcome of
Bassett's fancy.  The social paragraphs themselves were clumsy and
vulgar.  A dull-witted account of a select party at Parson Baxter's,
with a point-blank compliment to Polly Baxter his daughter, might have
made her pretty cheek burn but for her evident prepossession for the
meretricious scamp, its writer.  But even this horse-play seemed more
natural than the utterly artificial editorials with their pinchbeck
glitter and cheap erudition; and thus far it appeared harmless.

I grieve to say that these appearances were deceptive.  One afternoon,
as I was returning from a business visit to the outskirts of the
village, I was amazed on reentering the main street to find a crowd
collected around the "Guardian" office, gazing at the broken glass of
its windows and a quantity of type scattered on the ground.  But my
attention was at that moment more urgently attracted by a similar group
around my own office, who, however, seemed more cautious, and were
holding timorously aloof from the entrance.  As I ran rapidly towards
them, a few called out, "Look out--he's in there!" while others made
way to let me pass.  With the impression of fire or robbery in my mind,
I entered precipitately, only to find Yuba Bill calmly leaning back in
an arm-chair with his feet on the back of another, a glass of whiskey
from my demijohn in one hand and a huge cigar in his mouth.  Across his
lap lay a stumpy shotgun which I at once recognized as "the Left
Bower," whose usual place was at his feet on the box during his
journeys.  He looked cool and collected, although there were one or two
splashes of printer's ink on his shirt and trousers, and from the
appearance of my lavatory and towel he had evidently been removing
similar stains from his hands.  Putting his gun aside and grasping my
hand warmly without rising, he began with even more than his usual lazy
imperturbability:

"Well, how's Gilead lookin' to-day?"

It struck me as looking rather disturbed, but, as I was still too
bewildered to reply, he continued lazily:

"Ez you didn't hunt me up, I allowed you might hev got kinder petrified
and dried up down yer, and I reckoned to run down and rattle round a
bit and make things lively for ye.  I've jist cleared out a newspaper
office over thar.  They call it the 'Guardi-an,' though it didn't seem
to offer much pertection to them fellers ez was in it.  In fact, it
wasn't ez much a fight ez it orter hev been.  It was rather monotonous
for me."

"But what's the row, Bill?  What has happened?" I asked excitedly.

"Nothin' to speak of, I tell ye," replied Yuba Bill reflectively. "I
jest meandered into that shop over there, and I sez, 'I want ter see
the man ez runs this yer mill o' literatoor an' progress.' Thar waz two
infants sittin' on high chairs havin' some innocent little game o'
pickin' pieces o' lead outer pill-boxes like, and as soon ez they seed
me one of 'em crawled under his desk and the other scooted outer the
back door.  Bimeby the door opens again, and a fluffy coyote-lookin'
feller comes in and allows that HE is responsible for that yer paper.
When I saw the kind of animal he was, and that he hadn't any weppings,
I jist laid the Left Bower down on the floor.  Then I sez, 'You allowed
in your paper that I oughter hev a little sevility knocked inter me,
and I'm here to hev it done.  You ken begin it now.'  With that I
reached for him, and we waltzed oncet or twicet around the room, and
then I put him up on the mantelpiece and on them desks and little
boxes, and took him down again, and kinder wiped the floor with him
gin'rally, until the first thing I knowed he was outside the winder on
the sidewalk. On'y blamed if I didn't forget to open the winder.  Ef it
hadn't been for that, it would hev been all quiet and peaceful-like,
and nobody hev knowed it.  But the sash being in the way, it sorter
created a disturbance and unpleasantness OUTSIDE."

"But what was it all about?" I repeated.  "What had he done to you?"

"Ye'll find it in that paper," he said, indicating a copy of the
"Guardian" that lay on my table with a lazy nod of his head. "P'r'aps
you don't read it?  No more do I.  But Joe Bilson sez to me yesterday:
'Bill,' sez he, 'they're goin' for ye in the "Guardian."'  'Wot's
that?' sez I.  'Hark to this,' sez he, and reads out that bit that
you'll find there."

I had opened the paper, and he pointed to a paragraph.  "There it is.
Pooty, ain't it?"  I read with amazement as follows:--


"If the Pioneer Stage Company want to keep up with the times, and not
degenerate into the old style 'one hoss' road-wagon business, they'd
better make some reform on the line.  They might begin by shipping off
some of the old-time whiskey-guzzling drivers who are too high and
mighty to do anything but handle the ribbons, and are above speaking to
a passenger unless he's a favorite or one of their set.  Over-praise
for an occasional scrimmage with road agents, and flattery from Eastern
greenhorns, have given them the big head.  If the fool-killer were let
loose on the line with a big club, and knocked a little civility into
their heads, it wouldn't be a bad thing, and would be a particular
relief to the passengers for Gilead who have to take the stage from
Simpson's Bar."


"That's my stage," said Yuba Bill quietly, when I had ended; "and
that's ME."

"But it's impossible," I said eagerly.  "That insult was never written
by Captain Jim."

"Captain Jim," repeated Yuba Bill reflectively.  "Captain Jim,--yes,
that was the name o' the man I was playin' with.  Shortish hairy
feller, suthin' between a big coyote and the old-style hair-trunk.
Fought pretty well for a hay-footed man from Gil-e-ad."

"But you've whipped the wrong man, Bill," I said.  "Think again! Have
you had any quarrel lately?--run against any newspaper man?" The
recollection had flashed upon me that Lacy Bassett had lately returned
from a visit to Stockton.

Yuba Bill regarded his boots on the other arm-chair for a few moments
in profound meditation.  "There was a sort o' gaudy insect," he began
presently, "suthin' halfway betwixt a boss-fly and a devil's
darnin'-needle, ez crawled up onter the box seat with me last week, and
buzzed!  Now I think on it, he talked high-faluten' o' the inflooence
of the press and sech.  I may hev said 'shoo' to him when he was
hummin' the loudest.  I mout hev flicked him off oncet or twicet with
my whip.  It must be him.  Gosh!" he said suddenly, rising and lifting
his heavy hand to his forehead, "now I think agin he was the feller ez
crawled under the desk when the fight was goin' on, and stayed there.
Yes, sir, that was HIM. His face looked sorter familiar, but I didn't
know him moultin' with his feathers off."  He turned upon me with the
first expression of trouble and anxiety I had ever seen him wear.
"Yes, sir, that's him.  And I've kem--me, Yuba Bill!--kem MYSELF, a
matter of twenty miles, totin' a GUN--a gun, by Gosh!--to fight
that--that--that potatar-bug!"  He walked to the window, turned, walked
back again, finished his whiskey with a single gulp, and laid his hand
almost despondingly on my shoulder.  "Look ye, old--old fell, you and
me's ole friends.  Don't give me away.  Don't let on a word o' this to
any one!  Say I kem down yer howlin' drunk on a gen'ral tear!  Say I
mistook that newspaper office for a cigar-shop, and--got licked by the
boss!  Say anythin' you like, 'cept that I took a gun down yer to chase
a fly that had settled onter me.  Keep the Left Bower in yer back
office till I send for it.  Ef you've got a back door somewhere handy
where I can slip outer this without bein' seen I'd be thankful."

As this desponding suggestion appeared to me as the wisest thing for
him to do in the then threatening state of affairs outside,--which, had
he suspected it, he would have stayed to face,--I quickly opened a door
into a courtyard that communicated through an alley with a side street.
Here we shook hands and parted; his last dejected ejaculation being,
"That potatobug!"  Later I ascertained that Captain Jim had retired to
his ranch some four miles distant. He was not seriously hurt, but
looked, to use the words of my informant, "ez ef he'd been hugged by a
playful b'ar."  As the "Guardian" made its appearance the next week
without the slightest allusion to the fracas, I did not deem it
necessary to divulge the real facts.  When I called to inquire about
Captain Jim's condition, he himself, however, volunteered an
explanation.

"I don't mind tellin' you, ez an old friend o' mine and Lacy's, that
the secret of that there attack on me and the 'Guardian' was
perlitikal.  Yes, sir!  There was a powerful orginization in the
interest o' Halkins for assemblyman ez didn't like our high-toned
editorials on caucus corruption, and hired a bully to kem down here and
suppress us.  Why, this yer Lacy spotted the idea to oncet; yer know
how keen be is."

"Was Lacy present?" I asked as carelessly as I could.

Captain Jim glanced his eyes over his shoulder quite in his old furtive
canine fashion, and then blinked them at me rapidly.  "He war!  And if
it warn't for HIS pluck and HIS science and HIS strength, I don't know
whar I'D hev been now!  Howsomever, it's all right.  I've had a fair
offer to sell the 'Guardian' over at Simpson's Bar, and it's time I
quit throwin' away the work of a man like Lacy Bassett upon it.  And
between you and me, I've got an idea and suthin' better to put his
talens into."


III.

It was not long before it became evident that the "talens" of Mr. Lacy
Bassett, as indicated by Captain Jim, were to grasp at a seat in the
state legislature.  An editorial in the "Simpson's Bar Clarion" boldly
advocated his pretensions.  At first it was believed that the article
emanated from the gifted pen of Lacy himself, but the style was so
unmistakably that of Colonel Starbottle, an eminent political
"war-horse" of the district, that a graver truth was at once suggested,
namely, that the "Guardian" had simply been transferred to Simpson's
Bar, and merged into the "Clarion" solely on this condition.  At least
it was recognized that it was the hand of Captain Jim which guided the
editorial fingers of the colonel, and Captain Jim's money that
distended the pockets of that gallant political leader.

Howbeit Lacy Bassett was never elected; in fact he was only for one
brief moment a candidate.  It was related that upon his first ascending
the platform at Simpson's Bar a voice in the audience said lazily,
"Come down!"  That voice was Yuba Bill's.  A slight confusion ensued,
in which Yuba Bill whispered a few words in the colonel's ear.  After a
moment's hesitation the "war-horse" came forward, and in his loftiest
manner regretted that the candidate had withdrawn.  The next issue of
the "Clarion" proclaimed with no uncertain sound that a base conspiracy
gotten up by the former proprietor of the "Guardian" to undermine the
prestige of the Great Express Company had been ruthlessly exposed, and
the candidate on learning it HIMSELF for the first time, withdrew his
name from the canvass, as became a high-toned gentleman.  Public
opinion, ignoring Lacy Bassett completely, unhesitatingly denounced
Captain Jim.

During this period I had paid but little heed to Lacy Bassett's social
movements, or the successes which would naturally attend such a
character with the susceptible sex.  I had heard that he was engaged to
Polly Baxter, but that they had quarrelled in consequence of his
flirtations with others, especially a Mrs. Sweeny, a profusely
ornamented but reputationless widow.  Captain Jim had often alluded
with a certain respectful pride and delicacy to Polly's ardent
appreciation of his friend, and had more than half hinted with the same
reverential mystery to their matrimonial union later, and his intention
of "doing the square thing" for the young couple.  But it was presently
noticed that these allusions became less frequent during Lacy's amorous
aberrations, and an occasional depression and unusual reticence marked
Captain Jim's manner when the subject was discussed in his presence.
He seemed to endeavor to make up for his friend's defection by a kind
of personal homage to Polly, and not unfrequently accompanied her to
church or to singing-class.  I have a vivid recollection of meeting him
one afternoon crossing the fields with her, and looking into her face
with that same wistful, absorbed, and uneasy canine expression that I
had hitherto supposed he had reserved for Lacy alone.  I do not know
whether Polly was averse to the speechless devotion of these yearning
brown eyes; her manner was animated and the pretty cheek that was
nearest me mantled as I passed; but I was struck for the first time
with the idea that Captain Jim loved her! I was surprised to have that
fancy corroborated in the remark of another wayfarer whom I met, to the
effect, "That now that Bassett was out o' the running it looked ez if
Captain Jim was makin' up for time!"  Was it possible that Captain Jim
had always loved her? I did not at first know whether to be pained or
pleased for his sake.  But I concluded that whether the unworthy
Bassett had at last found a RIVAL in Captain Jim or in the girl
herself, it was a displacement that was for Captain Jim's welfare.  But
as I was about leaving Gilead for a month's transfer to the San
Francisco office, I had no opportunity to learn more from the
confidences of Captain Jim.

I was ascending the principal staircase of my San Francisco hotel one
rainy afternoon, when I was pointedly recalled to Gilead by the passing
glitter of Mrs. Sweeny's jewelry and the sudden vanishing behind her of
a gentleman who seemed to be accompanying her.  A few moments after I
had entered my room I heard a tap at my door, and opened it upon Lacy
Bassett.  I thought he looked a little confused and agitated.
Nevertheless, with an assumption of cordiality and ease he said, "It
appears we're neighbors.  That's my room next to yours."  He pointed to
the next room, which I then remembered was a sitting-room en suite with
my own, and communicating with it by a second door, which was always
locked.  It had not been occupied since my tenancy.  As I suppose my
face did not show any extravagant delight at the news of his
contiguity, he added, hastily, "There's a transom over the door, and I
thought I'd tell you you kin hear everything from the one room to the
other."

I thanked him, and told him dryly that, as I had no secrets to divulge
and none that I cared to hear, it made no difference to me. As this
seemed to increase his confusion and he still hesitated before the
door, I asked him if Captain Jim was with him.

"No," he said quickly.  "I haven't seen him for a month, and don't want
to.  Look here, I want to talk to you a bit about him."  He walked into
the room, and closed the door behind him.  "I want to tell you that me
and Captain Jim is played!  All this runnin' o' me and interferin' with
me is played!  I'm tired of it.  You kin tell him so from me."

"Then you have quarrelled?"

"Yes.  As much as any man can quarrel with a darned fool who can't take
a hint."

"One moment.  Have you quarrelled about Polly Baxter?"

"Yes," he answered querulously.  "Of course I have.  What does he mean
by interfering?

"Now listen to me, Mr. Bassett," I interrupted.  "I have no desire to
concern myself in your association with Captain Jim, but since you
persist in dragging me into it, you must allow me to speak plainly.
From all that I can ascertain you have no serious intentions of
marrying Polly Baxter.  You have come here from Gilead to follow Mrs.
Sweeny, whom I saw you with a moment ago. Now, why do you not frankly
give up Miss Baxter to Captain Jim, who will make her a good husband,
and go your own way with Mrs. Sweeny? If you really wish to break off
your connection with Captain Jim, that's the only way to do it."

His face, which had exhibited the weakest and most pitiable
consciousness at the mention of Mrs. Sweeny, changed to an expression
of absolute stupefaction as I concluded.

"Wot stuff are you tryin' to fool me with?" he said at last roughly.

"I mean," I replied sharply, "that this double game of yours is
disgraceful.  Your association with Mrs. Sweeny demands the withdrawal
of any claim you have upon Miss Baxter at once.  If you have no respect
for Captain Jim's friendship, you must at least show common decency to
her."

He burst into a half-relieved, half-hysteric laugh.  "Are you crazy?"
gasped he.  "Why, Captain Jim's just huntin' ME down to make ME marry
Polly.  That's just what the row's about.  That's just what he's
interferin' for--just to carry out his darned fool ideas o' gettin' a
wife for me; just his vanity to say HE'S made the match.  It's ME that
he wants to marry to that Baxter girl--not himself.  He's too cursed
selfish for that."

I suppose I was not different from ordinary humanity, for in my
unexpected discomfiture I despised Captain Jim quite as much as I did
the man before me.  Reiterating my remark that I had no desire to mix
myself further in their quarrels, I got rid of him with as little
ceremony as possible.  But a few minutes later, when the farcical side
of the situation struck me, my irritation was somewhat mollified,
without however increasing my respect for either of the actors.  The
whole affair had assumed a triviality that was simply amusing, nothing
more, and I even looked forward to a meeting with Captain Jim and HIS
exposition of the matter--which I knew would follow--with pleasurable
anticipation.  But I was mistaken.

One afternoon, when I was watching the slanting volleys of rain driven
by a strong southwester against the windows of the hotel reading-room,
I was struck by the erratic movements of a dripping figure outside that
seemed to be hesitating over the entrance to the hotel.  At times
furtively penetrating the porch as far as the vestibule, and again
shyly recoiling from it, its manner was so strongly suggestive of some
timid animal that I found myself suddenly reminded of Captain Jim and
the memorable evening of his exodus from Eureka Gulch.  As the figure
chanced to glance up to the window where I stood I saw to my
astonishment that it WAS Captain Jim himself, but so changed and
haggard that I scarcely knew him.  I instantly ran out into the hall
and vestibule, but when I reached the porch he had disappeared.  Either
he had seen me and wished to avoid me, or he had encountered the object
of his quest, which I at once concluded must be Lacy Bassett.  I was so
much impressed and worried by his appearance and manner, that, in this
belief, I overcame my aversion to meeting Bassett, and even sought him
through the public rooms and lobbies in the hope of finding Captain Jim
with him.  But in vain; possibly he had succeeded in escaping his
relentless friend.

As the wind and rain increased at nightfall and grew into a tempestuous
night, with deserted streets and swollen waterways, I did not go out
again, but retired early, inexplicably haunted by the changed and
brooding face of Captain Jim.  Even in my dreams he pursued me in his
favorite likeness of a wistful, anxious, and uneasy hound, who, on my
turning to caress him familiarly, snapped at me viciously, and appeared
to have suddenly developed a snarling rabid fury.  I seemed to be
awakened at last by the sound of his voice.  For an instant I believed
the delusion a part of my dream. But I was mistaken; I was lying broad
awake, and the voice clearly had come from the next room, and was
distinctly audible over the transom.

"I've had enough of it," he said, "and I'm givin' ye now--this
night--yer last chance.  Quit this hotel and that woman, and go back to
Gilead and marry Polly.  Don't do it and I'll kill ye, ez sure ez you
sit there gapin' in that chair.  If I can't get ye to fight me like a
man,--and I'll spit in yer face or put some insult onto you afore that
woman, afore everybody, ez would make a bigger skunk nor you
turn,--I'll hunt ye down and kill ye in your tracks."

There was a querulous murmur of interruption in Lacy's voice, but
whether of defiance or appeal I could not distinguish.  Captain Jim's
voice again rose, dogged and distinct.

"Ef YOU kill me it's all the same, and I don't say that I won't thank
ye.  This yer world is too crowded for yer and me, Lacy Bassett.  I've
believed in ye, trusted in ye, lied for ye, and fought for ye.  From
the time I took ye up--a feller-passenger to 'Fresco--believin' there
wor the makin's of a man in ye, to now, you fooled me,--fooled me afore
the Eureka boys; fooled me afore Gilead; fooled me afore HER; fooled me
afore God!  It's got to end here.  Ye've got to take the curse of that
foolishness off o' me! You've got to do one single thing that's like
the man I took ye for, or you've got to die.  Times waz when I'd have
wished it for your account--that's gone, Lacy Bassett!  You've got to
do it for ME.  You've got to do it so I don't see 'd--d fool' writ in
the eyes of every man ez looks at me."

He had apparently risen and walked towards the door.  His voice sounded
from another part of the room.

"I'll give ye till to-morrow mornin' to do suthin' to lift this curse
off o' me.  Ef you refoose, then, by the living God, I'll slap yer face
in the dinin'-room, or in the office afore them all! You hear me!"

There was a pause, and then a quick sharp explosion that seemed to fill
and expand both rooms until the windows were almost lifted from their
casements, a hysterical inarticulate cry from Lacy, the violent opening
of a door, hurried voices, and the tramping of many feet in the
passage.  I sprang out of bed, partly dressed myself, and ran into the
hall.  But by that time I found a crowd of guests and servants around
the next door, some grasping Bassett, who was white and trembling, and
others kneeling by Captain Jim, who was half lying in the doorway
against the wall.

"He heard it all," Bassett gasped hysterically, pointing to me. "HE
knows that this man wanted to kill me."

Before I could reply, Captain Jim partly raised himself with a
convulsive effort.  Wiping away the blood that, oozing from his lips,
already showed the desperate character of his internal wound, he said
in a husky and hurried voice: "It's all right, boys!  It's my fault.
It was ME who done it.  I went for him in a mean underhanded way jest
now, when he hadn't a weppin nor any show to defend himself.  We
gripped.  He got a holt o' my derringer--you see that's MY pistol
there, I swear it--and turned it agin me in self-defense, and sarved me
right.  I swear to God, gentlemen, it's so!"  Catching sight of my
face, he looked at me, I fancied half imploringly and half
triumphantly, and added, "I might hev knowed it!  I allers allowed Lacy
Bassett was game!--game, gentlemen--and he was.  If it's my last word,
I say it--he was game!"

And with this devoted falsehood upon his lips and something of the old
canine instinct in his failing heart, as his head sank back he seemed
to turn it towards Bassett, as if to stretch himself out at his feet.
Then the light failed from his yearning upward glance, and the curse of
foolishness was lifted from him forever.

So conclusive were the facts, that the coroner's jury did not deem it
necessary to detain Mr. Bassett for a single moment after the inquest.
But he returned to Gilead, married Polly Baxter, and probably on the
strength of having "killed his man," was unopposed on the platform next
year, and triumphantly elected to the legislature!