THE LOOM OF THE DESERT




To the courtesy of the editors of the “Argonaut,” “Out West,”
“Criterion,” “Arena” and “Munsey’s”--in which publications many of
these sketches have already seen print--is due their reappearance in
more permanent form.




[Illustration: “The boy swayed backward--backward.”--Page 10]




  The Loom of the Desert

  by
  Idah Meacham Strobridge

  LOS ANGELES
  MCMVII




  Copyright, 1907, by
  Idah Meacham Strobridge


  Printed by the
  Baumgardt Publishing Company
  Los Angeles, California




  Of this autographed edition of
  “The Loom of the Desert,” one
  thousand copies were made; this
  one being number 351

  Idah M. Strobridge




  MARRIED: In Newark, New Jersey, Thursday, evening, June the Second,
  1852, Phebe Amelia Craiger of Newark, to George Washington Meacham of
  California.


  To these--my dearest;
  the FATHER and MOTHER who are my comrades still,
  I dedicate
  these stories of a land where we were pioneers.




[Illustration]

FOREWORD


There, in that land set apart for Silence, and Space, and the Great
Winds, Fate--a grim, still figure--sat at her loom weaving the
destinies of desert men and women. The shuttles shot to and fro
without ceasing, and into the strange web were woven the threads of
Light, and Joy, and Love; but more often were they those of Sorrow, or
Death, or Sin. From the wide Gray Waste the Weaver had drawn the color
and design; and so the fabric’s warp and woof were of the desert’s
tone. Keeping this always well in mind will help you the better to
understand those people of the plains, whose lives must needs be often
sombre-hued.




[Illustration]

MESQUITE


Miss Glendower sat on the ranch-house piazza, shading her eyes from the
white glare of the sun by holding above them--in beautiful, beringed
fingers--the last number of a Boston magazine. It was all very new
and delightful to her--this strange, unfinished country, and each
day developed fresh charm. As a spectacle it was perfect--the very
desolation and silence of the desert stirred something within her that
the Back Bay had never remotely roused. Viewed from the front row of
the dress circle, as it were, nothing could be more fascinating to her
art-loving sense than this simple, wholesome life lived out as Nature
teaches, and to feel that, for the time, the big, conventional world
of wise insincerities was completely shut away behind those far purple
mountains out of which rose the desert sun.

As for becoming an integral part of all this one’s self--Ah, that was a
different matter! The very thought of her cousin, Blanche Madison, and
Roy--her husband--deliberately turning their backs on the refinements
of civilization, and accepting the daily drudgery and routine of life
on a cattle ranch, filled her with wondering amazement. When she
fell to speculating on what their future years here would be, she
shuddered. From the crown of her sleek and perfectly poised little
head, to the hollowed sole of her modishly booted foot, Miss Audrey
Glendower was Bostonian.

Still, for the short space of time that she waited Lawrence Irving’s
coming, life here was full of charm for her--its ways were alluring,
and not the least among its fascinations was Mesquite.

She smiled amusedly as she thought of the tall cowboy’s utter
unconsciousness of any social difference between them--at his simple
acceptance of her notice. Miss Glendower was finding vast entertainment
in his honest-hearted, undisguised adoration. She had come West for
experiences, and one of the first (as decidedly the most exciting and
interesting) had been found in Mesquite. Besides, it gave her something
to write of when she sent her weekly letter to Lawrence Irving.
Sometimes she found writing to him a bit of a bore--when topics were
few.

But Mesquite---- The boy was a revelation of fresh surprises every
day. There was no boredom where he was. Amusing; yes, that was the
word. There he was now!--crossing the bare and hard beaten square of
gray earth that lay between the ranch house and the corrals. Though he
was looking beyond the piazza to where the other boys were driving a
“bunch” of bellowing, dust-stirring cattle into an enclosure, yet she
felt it was she whom his eyes saw. He was coming straight toward the
house--and her. She knew it. Miss Glendower knew many things, learned
in the varied experience of her eight-and-twenty years. Her worldly
wisdom was more--much more--than his would be at double his present
age. Mesquite was twenty.

He looked up with unconcealed pleasure in her presence as he seated
himself on the piazza--swinging his spurred heels against each other,
while he leaned his head back against one of the pillars. Miss
Glendower’s eyes rested on the burned, boyish face with delight. There
was something so näive, so sweetly childish about him. It was simply
delicious to hear his “Yes, ma’am,” or his “Which?” Just now his
yellow hair lay in little damp rings on his forehead, like a baby’s
just awakened from sleep. He sat with his big, dust-covered sombrero
shoved back from a forehead guiltless of tan or freckles as the
petals of a white rose. But the lower part of his face was roughened
by wind and burned by the sun to an Indian red, making the blue eyes
the bluer--those great, babyish eyes that looked out with a belying
innocence from under their marvelous fringe of upcurling lashes. The
blue eyes were well used to looking upon sights that would have shocked
Miss Glendower’s New England training, could she have known; and the
babyish lips were quite familiar with language that would have made
her pale with horror and disgust to hear. But then, she didn’t know.
Neither could he have understood her standpoint.

He was only the product of his environment, and one of the best things
that it had taught him was to have no disguises. So he sat today
looking up at his lady with all his love showing in his face.

Then, in the late afternoon warmth, as the day’s red ball of burning
wrath dropped down behind the western desert rim of their little world,
he rode beside her, across sand hills where sweet flowers began to open
their snow-white petals to the night wind’s touch, and over barren
alkali flats to the postoffice half a dozen miles away.

There was only one letter waiting for Miss Glendower that night. It
began:

“I will be with you, my darling, twenty-four hours after you get this.
Just one more day, Love, and I may hold you in my arms again! Just one
more week, and you will be my wife, Audrey. Think of it!”

She had thought; she was thinking now. She was also wondering how
Mesquite would take it. She glanced at the boy as she put the letter
away and turned her horse’s head toward home. Such a short time and she
would return to the old life that, for the hour, seemed so strangely
far away! Now--alone in the desert with Mesquite--it would not be hard
to persuade herself that this was all there was of the world or of life.

As they loped across the wide stretch of desert flats that reached to
the sand hills, shutting the ranch from sight, the twilight fell, and
with it came sharp gusts of wind that now and then brought a whirl of
desert dust. Harder and harder it blew. Nearer and nearer--then it
fell upon them in its malevolence, to catch them--to hold them in its
uncanny clasp an instant--and then, releasing them, go madly racing off
to the farther twilight, moaning in undertone as it went. Then heat
lightning struck vividly at the horizon, and the air everywhere became
surcharged with the electric current of a desert sand storm. They
heard its roar coming up the valley. Audrey Glendower felt her nerves
a-tingle. This, too, was an experience! In sheer delight she laughed
aloud at the excitement showing in the quivering horses--their ears
nervously pointing forward, and their nostrils distended, as with long,
eager strides they pounded away over the wind-beaten levels.

Then the storm caught them at its wildest. Suddenly a tumble-weed, dry
and uprooted from its slight moorings somewhere away on the far side
of the flats, came whirling toward them broadside in the vortex of a
mad rush of wind in which--without warning--they were in an instant
enveloped. As the great, rolling, ball-like weed struck her horse, Miss
Glendower took a tighter grip on the reins and steadied herself for the
runaway rush into the dust storm and the darkness. The wild wind caught
her, shrieked in her ears, tore at her habit as though to wrest it from
her body, dragged at the braids of heavy hair until--loosened--the
strands whipped about her head, a tangled mass of stinging lashes.

She was alone--drawn into the maelstrom of the mad element; alone--with
the fury of the desert storm; alone--in the awful darkness it wrapped
about her, the darkness of the strange storm and the darkness of the
coming night. The frightened, furious horse beneath her terrified her
less than the weird, rainless storm that had so swiftly slipped in
between her and Mesquite, carrying her away into its unknown depths.
Where was he? In spite of the mastering fear that was gaining upon
her, in spite of her struggle for courage, was a consciousness which
told her that more than all else--that more than everyone else in the
world--it was Mesquite she wanted. Had others, to the number of a great
army, ridden down to her rescue she would have turned away from them
all to reach out her arms to the boy vaquero. Perhaps it was because
she had seen his marvelous feats of daring in the saddle (for Mesquite
was the star rider of the range), and she felt instinctively that he
could help her as none other; perhaps it was because of the past days
that had so drawn him toward her; perhaps (and most likely) it was
because he had but just been at her side. However it might be, she was
praying with all her soul for his help--for him to come to her--while
mile after mile she rode on, unable to either guide or slacken the
stride of her horse. His pace had been terrific; and not until it had
carried him out of the line of the storm, and up from the plain into
the sand hills, did he lessen his speed. Then the hoofs were dragged
down by the heavy sand, and the storm’s strength--all but spent--was
left away back on the desert.

She felt about her only the softest of West winds; the dust that had
strangled her was gone, and in its place was the syringa-like fragrance
of the wild, white primroses, star-strewing the earth, as the heavens
were strewn with their own night blossoms.

Just above the purple-black bar of the horizon burned a great blood-red
star in the sky. It danced and wavered before her--rising and falling
unsteadily--and she realized that her strength was spent--that she was
falling. Then, just as the loosened girth let the saddle turn with her
swaying body, a hand caught at her bridle-rein, and----

Ah, she was lying sobbing and utterly weak, but unutterably happy, on
Mesquite’s breast--Mesquite’s arms about her! She made no resistance to
the passionate kisses the boyish lips laid half fearfully on her face.
She was only glad of the sweetness of it all; just as the sweetness of
the evening primroses (so like the fragrance of jasmine, or tuberose,
or syringa) sunk into her senses. So she rested against his breast,
seeing still--through closed eyelids--the glowing, red star. She was
unstrung by the wild ride and the winds that had wrought on her nerves.
It made yielding so easy.

At last she drew back from him; and instantly his arms were unlocked.
She was free! Not a second of time would he clasp her unwillingly.
Neither had spoken. Nor, after resetting the saddle, when he took her
again in his arms and lifted her, as he would a little child, upon her
horse, did they speak. Only when the ranch buildings--outlined against
the darkness--showed dimly before them, and they knew that the ride was
at an end, did he voice what was uppermost in his mind.

“Yo’ don’t---- Yo’ ain’t---- Oh, my pretty, yo’ ain’t mad at me, are
yo’?”

“No, Mesquite,” came the softly whispered answer.

“I’m glad o’ that. Shore, I didn’t mean fur to go an’ do sech a thing;
but---- Gawd! I couldn’t help it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

But when lifting her down at the ranch-house gate he would have again
held her sweetness a moment within his clasp, Miss Glendower (she was
once again Miss Glendower of the great world) let her cool, steady
voice slip between:

“The letter I got tonight is from the man I am to marry in a week. He
will be here tomorrow. But, I want to tell you---- Mesquite---- I want
you to know that I--I shall always remember this ride of ours. Always.”

Mesquite did not answer.

“Good-night, Mesquite.” She waited. Still there was no reply.

Mesquite led the horses away and Miss Glendower turned and went into
the house. Being an uneducated cowboy he was remiss in many matters of
courtesy.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Lawrence Irving arrived at the Madison ranch, his host, in the
list of entertainment he was offering the Bostonian, promised an
exhibition of bronco riding that would stir even the beat of that
serene gentleman’s well regulated pulse.

“This morning,” said Madison, “I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to
get my star bronco buster out for your edification, Lawrence, for the
boys have been telling me that he has been ‘hitting the jug’ pretty
lively down at the store for the past twenty-four hours (he’s never
been much of a drinker, either), but when I told him Miss Glendower
wanted to show you the convolutions of a bucking horse, it seemed to
sober him up a bit, and he not only promised to furnish the thrills,
but to do the business up with all the trimmings on--for he’s going
to ride ‘Sobrepaso,’ a big, blaze-face sorrel that they call ‘the
man killer,’ and that every vaquero in the country has given up
unconquered. Mesquite himself refused to mount him again, some time
ago; but today he is in a humor that I can’t quite understand--even
allowing for all the bad whiskey that he’s been getting away with--and
seems not only ready but eager to tackle anything.”

“I’m grateful to you, Rob,” began Irving, “for----”

“Oh, you’ll have to thank Audrey for the show! Mesquite is doing it
solely for her sake. He has been her abject slave ever since she came.”

Both men laughed and looked at Miss Glendower, who did not even smile.
It might have been that she did not hear them. They rose and went out
to the shaded piazza where it was cooler. The heat was making Miss
Glendower look pale.

       *       *       *       *       *

They, and the ranch hands who saw “Sobrepaso” (“the beautiful red
devil,” Mrs. Madison called him) brought out into the gray, hard beaten
square that formed the arena, felt a thrill of nervous expectancy--a
chilling thrill--as Mesquite made ready to mount. The horse was
blindfolded ere the saddle was thrown on; but with all the fury of a
fiend he fought--in turn--blanket, and saddle, and cincha. The jaquima
was slipped on, the stirrups tied together under the horse’s belly,
and all the while his squeals of rage and maddened snorts were those
of an untamed beast that would battle to the death. The blind then was
pulled up from his eyes, and--at the end of a sixty-foot riata--he was
freed to go bucking and plunging in a fury of uncontrolled wrath around
the enclosure. At last sweating and with every nerve twitching in his
mad hatred of the meddling of Man he was brought to a standstill, and
the blind was slipped down once more. He stood with all four feet
braced stiffly, awkwardly apart, and his head down, while Mesquite
hitched the cartridge belt (from which hung his pistol’s holster) in
place; tightened the wide-brimmed, battered hat on his head; slipped
the strap of a quirt on his wrist; looked at the fastenings of his
big-rowelled, jingling spurs; and then (with a quick, upward glance at
Miss Glendower--the first he had given her) he touched caressingly a
little bunch of white primroses he had plucked that morning from their
bed in the sand hills and pinned to the lapel of his unbuttoned vest.

Mesquite had gathered the reins into his left hand, and was ready for
his cat-like spring into place. His left foot was thrust into the
stirrup--there was the sweep of a long leg thrown across the saddle--a
sinuous swing into place, and Mesquite--“the star rider of the range”
had mounted the man killer. Quickly the blind was whipped up from the
blood-shot eyes, the spurred heels gripped onto the cincha, there was a
shout from his rider and a devilish sound from the mustang as he made
his first upward leap, and then went madly fighting his way around and
around the enclosure.

Mesquite sat the infuriated animal as though he himself were but a
part of the sorrel whirlwind. His seat was superb. Miss Glendower felt
a tremor of pride stir her as she watched him--pride that her lover
should witness this matchless horsemanship. She was panting between
fear and delight while she watched the boy’s face (wearing the sweet,
boyish smile--like, yet so unlike--the smile she had come to know in
the past weeks), and the yellow curls blowing back from the bared
forehead.

“Sobrepaso” rose in his leaps to great heights--almost falling
backward--to plunge forward, with squeals of rage that he could not
unseat his rider. The boy sat there, a king--king of his own little
world, while he slapped at the sorrel’s head and withers with the
sombrero that swung in his hand. Plunging and leaping, round and
round--now here and now there--about the enclosure they went, the horse
a mad hurricane and his rider a centaur. Mesquite was swayed back and
forth, to and fro, but no surge could unseat him. Miss Glendower grew
warm in her joy of him as she looked.

Then, somehow (as the “man killer” made another great upward leap)
the pistol swinging from Mesquite’s belt was thrown from its holster,
and--striking the cantle of the saddle as it fell--there was a sharp
report, and a cloud-like puff (not from the dust raised by beating
hoofs), and a sound (not the terrible sounds made by a maddened horse),
and the boy swayed backward--backward--with the boyish smile chilled
on his lips, and the wet, yellow curls blowing back from his white
forehead that soon would grow yet whiter.

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Glendower did not faint, neither did she scream; she was one with
her emotions held always well in hand, and she expressed the proper
amount of regret the occasion required--shuddering a little over its
horror. But to this day (and she is Mrs. Lawrence Irving now) she
cannot look quite steadily at a big, red star that sometimes burns
in the West at early eve; and the scent of tuberoses, or jasmine, or
syringa makes her deathly sick.




[Illustration]

THE REVOLT OF MARTHA SCOTT


There was nothing pleasing in the scene. It was in that part of the
vast West where a gray sky looked down upon the grayer soil beneath;
where neither brilliant birds nor bright blossoms, nor glittering
rivulets made lovely the place in which human beings went up and down
the earth daily performing those labors that made the sum of what they
called life. Neither tree nor shrub, nor spear of grass showed green
with the healthy color of plant-life. As far as the eye could reach
was the monotonous gray of sagebrush, and greasewood, and sand. The
muddy river, with its myriad curves, ran between abrupt banks of soft
alkali ground, where now and then as it ate into the confining walls,
portions would fall with a loud splash into the water. A hurrying,
treacherous river--with its many silent eddies--it turned and twisted
and doubled on itself a thousand times as it wound its way down the
valley. Here, where it circled in a great curve called “Scott’s Bend,”
the waters were always being churned by the ponderous wheel of a little
quartz-mill, painted by storm and sunshine in the leaden tones of its
sad-colored surroundings.

On the bluff above, near the ore platform, were grouped a dozen houses.
Fenceless, they faced the mill, which day after day pounded away at
the ore with a maddening monotony. All day, all night, the stamps kept
up their ceaseless monotone. The weather-worn mill and drab adobe
houses had stood there, year after year, through the heat of summer
days, when the sun blistered and burned the whole valley, and in
winter, when the winds of the desert moaned and wailed at the windows.

Today the air is quiet, save for the tiny whirlwinds that, running over
the tailings below the mill, have caught up the fine powder and carried
bits of it away with them, a white cloud, as they went. The sun, too,
is shining painfully bright and burning. By the well a woman stands,
her eyes intently following a chance wayfarer who has turned into the
Sherman road--in all the waste, the only moving thing.

How surely human beings take on themselves the reflection of their
surroundings! Living in the dull solitude of this valley that woman’s
life has become but a gray reflection of its never-ending sameness. As
we look, we fall a-wondering. Has she never known what it is to live
in the way we understand it? Has nothing ever set her pulses tingling
with the exultation of Life? Does she know only an existence which is
but the compulsory working of a piece of human machinery? Has she never
known what it is to feel hope, or joy, or love, in the way we feel
it--never experienced one single stirring emotion in the whole round of
her pitifully barren life? Is it possible that she has never realized
the poverty of her existence?

Yet, she was a creature meant for Life. What a beautiful woman she
is, too, with all that brilliance of coloring--that copper-hued hair,
and those great, velvety eyes, lovely in spite of their apathetic
stare. What a model for some painter’s brush! Such beauty and such
apathy combined; such expressionless perfection of feature; “faultily
faultless, icily regular, splendidly null--dead perfection.”

Martha Scott is one of those women whose commanding figure and
magnificent coloring are always sufficient to attract the admiration of
even the most indifferent. No doubt now in her maturity she is far more
beautiful than when, nearly twenty years ago, she became Old Scott’s
wife. A tall, unformed girl then, she gave no promise of her later
beauty, except in the velvety softness of the great eyes that never
seemed to take heed of anything in the world about her, and the great
mass of shining hair that had the red-gold of a Western sunset in it.

There had been a courtship so brief that they were still strangers when
he took her to the small, untidy house where he had come to realize
that the presence of a woman was needed. He wanted a wife to cook for
him; to wash--to sew. And so they were married.

The sheep which numbered thousands, the little mill--always grinding
in its jaws the ores brought down the mountain by the snail-paced
teams to fill its hungry maw, these added daily to the hoard Old Scott
clutched with gripping, penurious fingers. Early and late, unceasingly,
he worked, and chose that Martha should labor as he labored, live as
he lived. But, as she mechanically took up her burden of life, there
came to the sweet, uncomplaining mouth a droop at the corners that grew
with the years, telling to those who had the eyes to see, that while
accepting with mute lips the unhappy conditions of her lot, she longed
with all her starved soul for something different from her yearly round
of never-ending toil.

Once--only once--in a whirlwind of revolt, she felt that she could
endure it no longer--that she must break away from the dull routine
which made the measure of her days; felt that she must go out among
happy human beings--to be in the rush and whirl of life under
Pleasure’s sunshine--to bask in its warmth as others did. She longed to
enjoy life as Youth enjoys; herself to be young once more. Yes, even to
dance as she had danced when a girl! In the upheaval of her passionate
revolt, flushed and trembling, she begged her husband to take her to
one of the country balls of the neighborhood.

“Take me wunst!” she pleaded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears;
“only this wunst; I won’t never ask you no more. But I do want to have
one right good time. You never take me nowheres. Please take me, Fred,
won’t you?”

Old Scott straightened himself from the task over which he was bending
and looked at her in incredulous wonder. For more than a minute he
stared at her; then, breaking into a loud laugh, he mocked:

“You’d look pretty, now, wouldn’t you, a-goin’ and a-toein’ it like you
was a young gal!”

She shrank from him as though he had raised a lash over her, and the
light died out of her face. Without a word she turned and went back to
her work.

       *       *       *       *       *

Martha Scott never again alluded to the meagre pleasures of her life.
She went back to her work of cooking the coarse food which was their
only fare; of mending the heavy, uncouth clothing which week-day and
Sunday alike, was her husband’s only apparel; of washing and ironing
the cheap calicoes, and coarse, unbleached muslins of her own poor,
and scanty wardrobe, fulfilling her part as a bread-winner. The man
never saw that he failed in performing the part of a good and loving
husband; and if anyone had pointed out to him that her existence was
impoverished by his indifference and neglect, he still would have been
unable to see wherein he had erred. He would have argued that she
had enough to eat, enough to wear; that they owned their home--their
neighbors having no better, nor any larger; he was laying aside money
all the time; he did not drink; he never struck her. What more could
any woman ask?

That the home which suited him, and the life to which he was used,
could be other than all she desired, had never once occurred to him.
As a boy, “back East” in the old days, he had never cared for the
sports and pleasures enjoyed by other young people. How much less, now
that the natural pleasure-time of life was past, could he tolerate
pleasure-seeking in others!

“Folks show better sense to work an’ save their money,” he would say,
“than to go gaddin’ about havin’ a good time an’ comin’ home broke.”

Together they lived in the house which through all their married life
they had called “home;” together they worked side by side through all
their years of youth and middle age. But not farther are we from the
farthest star than were these two apart in their real lives. Yet she
was his wife; this woman for whom he had no dearer name than “Marth’,”
and to whom--for years--he had given no caress. She looked the
incarnation of indifference and apathy. Ah! but was she?

       *       *       *       *       *

A few years ago there came a mining expert from San Francisco to
examine the Yellow Bird mine; and with him came a younger man, who
appeared to have no particular business but to look around at the
country, and to fish and hunt. There is the finest kind of sport for
the hunter over in the Smoky Range; and this fellow, Baird--Alfred
Baird was his name--spent much of his time there shooting antelope and
deer.

He was courteous and gentle mannered; he was finely educated--polished
in address; he spoke three or four languages, and was good to look
at. He stayed with the Scotts for a time--and a long time it proved
to be; a self-invited guest, whether or no. Yet all the while he did
not fail to reiterate his intentions to “handsomely remunerate them
for their generous hospitality in a country where there were so few
or no hotels.” He assured them he was “daily expecting a remittance
from home. The delay was inexcusable--unless the mail had miscarried.
Very annoying! So embarrassing!” And so on. It was the old stereotyped
story which that sort of a fellow always carries on the tip of his
tongue. And the wonder of it all was that Scott--surly and gruff to all
others--was so completely under the scamp’s will, and ready to humor
his slightest wish. Baird used without question his saddle and best
horse; and it was Scott who fitted him out whenever he went hunting
deer over in the Smokies.

By and by there came a time when Scott himself had to go away on a
trip into the Smoky Range, and which would keep him from home a week.
He left his wife behind, as was his custom. He also left Alfred Baird
there--for Baird was still “boarding” at Scott’s.

When old Fred Scott came back, it was to find the house in as perfect
order as ever, with every little detail of house work faithfully
performed up to the last moment of her staying, but the wife was gone.
Neither wife, nor the money--hidden away in an old powder-can behind
the corner cupboard--were there.

Both were gone--the woman and the gold pieces; and it was
characteristic of Old Scott that his first feelings of grief and rage
were not for the loss of his wife, but for the coins she had taken from
the powder-can. He was like a maniac--breaking everything he had ever
seen his wife use; tearing to pieces with his strong, sinewy hands
every article of her clothing his eyes fell upon. He raved like a
madman, and cursed like a fiend. Then he found her letter.

“Dear Fred:--

Now I’m a going away, and I’m a going to stay a year. The money will
last us two just about that long. I asked Mr. Baird to go with me,
so you needn’t blame him. I ain’t got nothing against you, only you
wouldn’t never take me nowheres; and I just couldn’t stand it no
longer. I’ve been a good wife, and worked hard, and earned money for
you; but I ain’t never had none of it myself to spend. So I’m a going
to have it now; for some of it is mine anyway. It has been work--work
all the time, and you wouldn’t take me nowheres. So I’m a going now
myself. I don’t like Mr. Baird better than I do you--that ain’t it--and
if you want me to come back to you in a year I will. And I’ll be a good
wife to you again, like I was before. Only you needn’t expect for me to
say that I’ll be sorry because I done it, for I won’t be. I won’t never
be sorry I done it; never, never! So, good-by.

                                             Your loving wife,

                                                       Martha J. Scott.”

If, through the long years, he had not been blind, he could have
saved her from it. Not a vicious woman--not a wantonly sinning woman;
only one who--weak and ignorant--was dazed and bewildered by the
possibilities she saw in just one year of unrestricted freedom to enjoy
all the pleasures that might come within her reach.

To be sure, it did seem preposterous that a young and handsome man,
with refined tastes and education, should go away with a woman years
older than himself, and one, too, who was uncouth in manner and in
speech. However strange it looked to the world, the fact remained that
they eloped. But both were well away before it was suspected that they
had gone together. Old Scott volunteered no information to the curious;
and his grim silence forbade the questions they would have asked. It
was long before the truth was known, for people were slow to credit so
strange a story.

The two were seen in San Francisco one day as they were buying their
tickets on the eve of sailing for Honolulu. She looked very lovely, and
was as tastefully and becomingly gowned as any woman one might see.
Baird, no doubt, had seen to that; for he had exquisite taste, and he
was too wise to challenge adverse criticism by letting her dress in
the glaring colors and startling styles she would have chosen, had she
been allowed to follow her own tastes. In her pretty, new clothes, with
her really handsome face all aglow from sheer joy in the new life she
was beginning, she looked twenty years younger, and attracted general
attention because of her unusual eyes and her magnificently-colored
hair.

She was radiant with happiness; and there was no apparent consciousness
of wrong-doing. Baird always showed a gracious deference to all
women, and to her he was devotion itself. The little attentions that
will charm and captivate any woman--attentions to which she was so
unused--fed her starved nature, and for the time satisfied without
sating her. They sailed for the Islands, and were there a year.
They kept to themselves, seeking no acquaintance with those around
them--living but for one another. And those who saw them, told they
seemed thoroughly fond of each other. He was too much in love with
himself and the surroundings which catered to his extravagant tastes,
to have a great love for any woman; and she was scarcely the person, in
spite of her beauty--the beauty of some magnificent animal--to inspire
lasting affection in a man like Baird. He was shrewd enough to keep
people at a distance, for unless one entered into conversation with her
she might easily be taken for the really cultivated woman she looked.
Yet the refined and aesthetic side of Alfred Baird’s nature--and
there was such--much have met with some pretty severe shocks during
a twelvemonth’s close companionship. Too indolent to work to support
himself, he bore (he felt, heroically) any mortification he was
subjected to, and was content in his degradation. But the woman herself
was intensely happy; happier than, in all her dreary life, she had ever
dreamed that mortals could be. She was in love with the beautiful new
world, which was like a dream of fairy-land after her sordid life in
the desolate valley. That Hawaiian year must have been a revelation of
hitherto unimagined things to her. Baird’s moral sense was blunted by
his past dissipations, but her moral sense was simply undeveloped. In
her ignorance she had no definition of morality. The man was nothing
to her except as an accessory to the fascinating life which she had
allowed herself “while the money lasted.”

When the twelve months were run she philosophically admitted the end
of it all, and parted with him--apparently--without a pang. If, at
the moment of parting, any regrets were felt by either because of the
separation, it was he, not she, who would have chosen to drift longer
down the stream. The year had run its course; she would again take up
the old life. This could not last. Perhaps--who knows?--in time he
might have palled on her. No doubt, in time, his weak nature would have
wearied her; her own was too eager for strong emotions, to find in him
a fitting mate.

Whether, at the last, she wrote to her husband, or if he came to her
when the year came to its end, no one knows. But one day the people of
the desert saw her back at the adobes on the bluff. She returned as
suddenly as she had disappeared.

       *       *       *       *       *

She seems to have settled into the old groove again. She moves in the
same apathetic way as before the stirring events of her life. In her
letter she said she would not be sorry. It is not probable that she
ever was, or ever will be; but neither is it likely that she has ever
seen the affair from the point of view a moralist would take. Her
limited intelligence only allowed her to perceive the dreariness of
her own poor life, and when her longings touched no responsive chord
in the man whom she had married, she deliberately took one year of her
existence and hung its walls with all the gorgeous tapestries and rich
paintings that could be wrought by the witchery of those magic days in
the Pacific.

Fires have burned as fiercely within that woman’s breast as ever burned
the fires of Kilauea; and when they were ready to burst their bounds,
she fled in her impulse to the coral isles of the peaceful Western sea,
and there her ears heard the sound, and her heart learned the meaning
of words that have left no visible sign upon her--the wondrous, sweet
words of a dream, whispered to her unceasingly, while she gave herself
up to an enchantment as mad and bewildering as that of the rhythmic
hula-hula.

If she sinned, she does not seem to know it. Going about at her work,
as before, the expressionless face is a mask; yet it may be she is
moving in a dream-world, wherein she lives over once again the months
that were hers--once--in the far Hawaiian Isles.




[Illustration]

AN OLD SQUAW


She had been lying by the stone wall all day. And the sun was so
hot that the blood beating in her ears sounded like the White Man’s
fire-horse that had just pulled a freight train into the station, and
was grunting and drinking down at the water tank a hundred yards away.
It was getting all the water it wanted; why couldn’t she have all the
water she wanted, too?

Today they had brought her the tomato can only half full. Such a little
drink! And her mouth was so hot and dry! They were starving her to
death--had been starving her for days and days. Oh, yes! she knew what
they were doing. She knew why they were doing it, too. It was because
she was in the way.

She was an old squaw. For weeks she had been half dead; she had lain
for weeks whimpering and moaning in a corner of the camp on a heap of
refuse and rotting rags, where they had first shoved her aside when she
could no longer gather herself up on her withered limbs and go about to
wait upon herself.

They had cursed her for her uselessness; and had let the children throw
dirt at her, and take her scant share of food away and give it to the
dogs. Then they had laughed at her when one of the older grandchildren
had spat at her; and when she had striven to strike at the mocking,
devilish face, and in her feebleness had failed, they had but laughed
the louder while she shrieked out in her hatred of them all.

Her children, and her children’s children--her flesh and bone! They
were young, and well, and strong; and she was old, feeble and dying.
Old--old--old! Too old to work. Too old to do for herself any longer,
they were tired of her; and now they had put her out of the wick-i-up
to die alone there by the stone wall. She knew it--knew the truth; but
what could she do?

She was only an old Paiute squaw.

At first they had given her half the amount of food which they allowed
her before she had grown so feeble. Then it was but a quarter; and then
again it was divided in half. Now--at the last--they were bringing her
only water.

One day when she was faint and almost crazed from hunger, one of the
boys (her own son’s son) had come with a meat bone and thrown it down
before her; but when she reached out with trembling, fleshless hands
to grasp it, he had jerked at the string to which it was tied, and
snatched it away. Again and again he threw it toward her; again and
again she tried to be quick enough to close her fingers upon it before
he could jerk it from her. Then (when, at last, he was tired of the
play) he had flung it only an arm’s length beyond her reach, and had
run laughing down to the railroad to beg nickels from the passengers
on the train. When he had gone a dog came and dropped down beside
her, and gnawed the bone where it lay. She had crawled out into the
sunshine that day, and lay huddled in a heap close to the door-flap at
the wick-i-up entrance. The warm sunlight at first felt good to her
chilled blood, and she had lain there long; but finally when she would
have dragged her feeble body within again, a young squaw (the one who
had mated with the firstborn son, and was now ruler of the camp) had
thrust her back with her foot, and said that her whining and crying
were making the Great Spirit angry; and that henceforth she must stay
outside the camp, for a punishment.

Ah, she knew! She knew! They could not deceive her. It was not the
Great Spirit that had put her out, but her own flesh and blood. How
she hated them all! If she could only be young again she would have
them put to death, as she herself had had others put to death when
there were many to do her bidding. But she was old; and she must lie
outside, away from those who had put her there to starve, while in the
gray dusk they gathered around the campfire and ate, and laughed, and
forgot her. She wished the cool, dark night might last longer, with
the sage-scented winds from the plain blowing over her. But morning
would come with a blood-red sun shining through the summer haze, and
she would have to lie there under the furnace heat through all the long
daylight hours, with only a few swallows of water brought to her in the
tomato can to quench her intolerable thirst.

They were slowly starving her to death just because she was old. They
hated squaws when they got old. They did not tell her so; but she knew.
She, too, had hated them once. That was long ago. Long, long ago; when
she was young, and strong, and swift.

She was straight then and good to look at. All of the young men of
her tribe had striven for her; and two had fought long--had fought
wildly and wickedly. That was when the White Man had first come into
the country of her people, and they had fought with knives they had
taken from the Whites. Knives long, and shining, and sharp. They had
fought and slashed, and cut each other till the hard ground was red and
slippery where they stood. Then--still fighting--they had fallen down,
down; and where they fell, they died. Died for her--a squaw! Well, what
of it, now? Tomorrow she, too, would die. She whom they, and others,
had loved.

Once, long ago--long before the time when she had become Wi-o-chee’s
wife--at the Fort on the other side of the mountain, where the morning
sun comes first, there had been a White Man whose eyes were the blue of
the soldier-blue he wore; and whose mustache was yellow like the gold
he wore on his shoulders.

He, too, was young, and straight, and strong; and one day he had caught
her in his arms and held her while he kissed her on mouth and eyes,
and under her little round chin. And when she had broken away from
him and had run--run fast as the deer runs--he had called after her:
“Josie! Josie! Come back!” But she had run the faster till, by and
by, when he had ceased calling, she had stolen back and had thrown a
handful of grass at him as he sat, with bowed head, on the doorstep
of the officers’ quarters; his white fingers pressed tight over his
eyelids. Then when he had looked up she had gone shyly to him, and put
her hand in his. And when he stood up, looking eagerly in her eyes, she
had thrown her head back, where she let it lay against his arm, and
laughed, showing the snow-white line of her teeth, till he was dazzled
by what he saw and hid the whiteness that gleamed between her lips by
the gold that swept across his own.

That was long ago. Not yesterday, nor last week, nor last month;
but so long ago that it did not even awaken in her an interest in
remembering how he had taught her English words to say to him, and
laughed with her when she said them so badly.

She did not care about it, at all, now. She only wanted a drink of
water; and her children would not give her what she craved.

Always, she had been brave. She had feared nothing--nothing. She could
ride faster, run farther, dare more than other young squaws of the
tribe. She had been stronger and suppler. Yet today she was dying here
by the stone wall--put out of the camp by her children’s children to
die.

She would die tomorrow; or next day, at latest. Perhaps tonight. She
had thought she was to die last night when the lean coyote came and
stood off from her, and watched with hungry eyes. All night he watched.
Going away, and coming back. Coming and going all night. All night his
little bright eyes shone like stars. And the stars, too, watched her
there dying for water and meat, but they handed nothing down to her
from the cool sky.

Oh, for strength again! For life, and to be young! But she was old and
weak. She would die; and when she was dead they would take her in her
rags, and--winding the shred of a gray blanket about her (the blanket
on which she lay)--they would tie it tightly at her head and at her
feet; and so she would be made ready for her last journey.

Dragging her to a waiting pony she would be laid across the saddle,
face down. To the stirrups, which would be tied together beneath
the horse that they might not swing, her head and feet would be
fastened--her head at one stirrup, her feet at the other.

Then they would lead the pony off through the greasewood. Along the
stony trail across the upland to the foothills the little buckskin pony
would pick his way, stumbling on the rocks while his burden would slip
and shake about, lying across the saddle. Then they would lay her in a
shallow place, and heaping earth and gravel over her, would come away.
That was the way they had done with her mother, with Wi-o-chee, and the
son who had died.

Tomorrow--yes, tomorrow--they would take her to the foothills. Perhaps
the coyote would go there tomorrow night; would go there, and dig.

He had come now, and stood watching her from the shelter of the
sagebrush. He was afraid to come nearer--now. She was too weak to move
even a finger today, yet he was afraid. He would not come close till
she was dead. He knew.

Once he walked a few steps toward her, watching her all the while
with his little cruel eyes. Then he turned and trotted back into the
sagebrush. He knew. Not yet.

       *       *       *       *       *

All day the sun had lain in heavy heat on the tangle of vile rags by
the stone wall. All day the magpie, hopping along the wall, watched
with head bent sidewise at the rags that only moved with the faint
breathing of the body beneath. All day long two buzzards far up in the
still air swung slowly in great circling sweeps. All day, from early
dawn till dusk, a brown hand--skinny and foully dirty--clutched the
tomato can; but the can today had been left empty. Forgotten.

When it grew dark and a big, bright star glowed in the West, the coyote
came out of the shadows of the sagebrush and stood looking at the
tangled rags by the stone wall.

Only a moment he stood there. He threw up his head, and his voice went
out in a chilling call to his mate. Then with lifted lip he walked
quickly forward. He was no longer afraid.




[Illustration]

GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN


“Yes, you’re right, Sid; in these days of multi-millionaires, nothing
that is written with less than eight figures is considered ‘wealth.’
Yet, even so, I count this something more than a ‘tidy little sum’
you’ve cleaned up--even if you do not. And now tell me, what are you
going to do with it?”

The man sitting at the uncovered pine table in the center of the room
opened his lips to answer, checked himself as if doubtful of the
reception of what he might say, and then went on nervously sorting and
rearranging the handful of papers and letters which he held. However,
the light that came into his eyes at Keith’s question, and the smile
that played around his weak lips, showed without a doubt that the “tidy
little sum” promised to him at least the fulfillment of unspoken dreams.

He was a handsome man of thirty--a man of feminine beauty rather than
that which is masculine. And though dressed in rough corduroys and
flannels, like his companion, they added to, rather than detracted
from his picturesque charm. Slightly--almost delicately proportioned,
he seemed to be taller than he really was. In spite of his great
beauty, however, his face was not a satisfying one under the scrutiny
of a close observer, for it lacked character. There was refinement
and a certain sweetness of temperament there, but the ensemble was
essentially weak--it was the face of a man of whom one felt it would
not be well for any believing, loving woman to pin her faith to.

Keith, sitting with his long legs crossed and his big, strong hands
thrust deep into his trousers’ pockets, watched the younger man
curiously, wondering what manner of woman she could have been who had
chosen Sidney Williston for her lord and master.

“Poor little neglected woman,” thought Keith, with that tender and
compassionate feeling he had for every feminine and helpless thing;
“poor little patiently waiting wife! Will he ever go back to her, I
wonder? I doubt it. And now to think of all this money!”

Williston had said but little to Keith about his wife. In fact, all
reference to her very existence had been avoided when possible. Keith
even doubted if his friend would ever again recognize the marriage
tie between them unless the deserted one should unexpectedly present
herself in person and claim her rights. Williston--vacillating,
unstable--was the kind of a man in whom loyalty depends on the presence
of its object as a continual reminder of obligations. Keith was sure,
however, that the woman, whoever she might be, was more than deserving
of pity.

“Sidney means well,” thought Keith trying to find excuse for him, “but
he is weak--lamentably so--and sadly lacking in moral balance.” And
never had Williston been so easily lead, so subservient to the will of
another as now, since “that cursed Howard woman” (as Keith called her
under his breath) had got him into her toils.

Lovesick as any boy he was befooled to his heart’s content, wilfully
blind to the fact that it was the old pitiful story of a woman’s greed,
and that her white hands had caresses and her lips kisses for his
gold--not for himself. Her arms were eager to hold in their clasp--not
him, but--the great wealth which was his, the gold which had come
from the fabulously rich strike he had cleaned up on the bedrock of
the claim, where a cross reef had held it hidden a thousand years and
more. Her red lips were athirst to lay kisses---- On his mouth? Nay!
on the piles of minted gold that had lain in the bank vault since he
had sold his mine. The Twentieth Century Aspasia has a hundred arts
her sister of old knew naught of; and Williston was not the first man
who has unwittingly played the part of proxy to another, or blissfully
believed in the lying lips whose kisses sting like the sting of wild
bees--those honey-sweet kisses that stab one’s soul with needles of
passionate pain. All these were for the gold-god, not him; he was but
the unconscious proxy.

Keith mused on the situation as he sat in the flickering candle-light
blown by the night wind that--coming in through the open
window--brought with it the pungent odor of sagebrush-covered hills.

“Strange,” he thought, “how a woman of that particular stamp gets a
hold on some fellows! And with a whole world full of other women,
too--sweet, good women who are ready to give a man the right sort
of love and allegiance, if he’s a half-way decent sort of a fellow
with anything at all worthy to give in exchange; God bless ’em!--and
confound him! He makes me angry; why can’t he pull himself together
and be a man!”

Bayard Keith was no saint. Far from it. Yet, for all his drifting about
the world, he had kept a pretty clean and wholesome moral tone. Women
of the Gloria Howard class did not appeal to his taste; that was all
there was about it. But he knew men a-plenty who, for her sake, would
have committed almost any crime in the calendar if she set it for them
to do. There were men who would have faced the decree of judge and jury
without a tremor, if the deed was done for her sake. He himself could
not understand such things. Not that he felt himself better or stronger
than his fellows; it was simply that he was made of a different sort of
stuff.

Yet, in spite of his manifest indifference to the charm of her large,
splendid beauty--dazzling as the sun at noon-day--and that marked
personality which all others who ever came within the circle of her
presence seemed to feel, Keith knew he could have this woman’s love
for the asking--the love of a woman who, ’twas said, won love from
all, yet giving love to none. Nay, but he knew it was already his. His
very indifference had fanned a flame in her breast; a flame which had
been lit as her eyes were first lifted to his own and she beheld her
master, and burning steadily it had become the consuming passion of
this strange creature’s existence. Hopeless, she knew it was; yet it
was stronger than her love of life. Even stronger than her inordinate
love of money was this passion for the man whose heart she had utterly
failed to touch.

That he must know it to be so, was but an added pain for her fierce
nature to bear. Keith wondered if Williston had ever suspected, as she
played her part, the woman’s passionate and genuine attachment to
himself. He hoped not, for the two men had been good comrades, though
without the closer bond of a fine sympathy; and Keith’s wish was that
their comradeship should continue, while he hoped the woman’s love, in
time, would wear itself out. To Williston he had once tried to give a
word of advice.

“Drop it, Keith,” came the quick answer to his warning, “I love her.”

“Granted that you do, why should you so completely enslave yourself to
a woman of that type?”

“What do you mean by ‘that type?’ Take care! take care, Keith! I tell
you I love her! Were I not already a married man I would make Mrs.
Howard my wife.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” Keith answered quietly. “Howard refuses to get
a divorce, and you know very well she cannot. Besides, Sid, it would be
sheer madness for you to do such a thing, even were she free.”

“It makes no difference; I love her,” was again the reply, and said
with the childish persistence of those with whom reiteration takes the
place of argument.

Keith said no more, though he felt the shame of it that Sidney
Williston’s fortune should be squandered on another woman,
while--somewhere off there in the East--his wife waited for him to send
for her. Keith’s shoulders shrugged with impatience over the whole
pitiful affair. He was disgusted at Williston’s lack of principle and
angered by his disregard of public censure. However, he reflected,
trying to banish all thoughts of it, it was none of his business; he
was not elected to be his brother’s keeper in this affair surely.

As for himself, he believed the only love worth having was that upon
which the foundation of the hearthstone was laid. He believed, too,
that to no man do the gods bring this priceless treasure more than
once. When a man like Keith believes this, it becomes his religion.

Through the gateway to his big, honest heart, one summer in the years
gone by, love had entered, and--finding it the dwelling of honor and
truth--it abided there still.

Thinking of Williston’s infatuation for Gloria Howard, he could but
compare it to his own entire, endless love for Kathryn Verrill. He
recalled a day that would always stand out in bold relief from all
others in memory’s gallery.

In fancy now he could see the wide veranda built around one of
the loveliest summer homes of the beautiful Thousand Islands.
Cushions--soft and silken--lay tossed about on easy chairs and divans
that were scattered about here and there among tubs of palms and potted
plants. On little tables up and down the veranda’s length were summer
novels open and face downward as their readers had left them, or dainty
and neglected bits of fancy-work. Cooling drinks and dishes of luscious
fruits had been placed there within their reach. Keith closed his eyes
with a sigh, as the memory of it all came back to him. Here, amid the
sage and desert sands, it was like a dream of lost Paradise.

It had been a day of opalescent lights, and through its translucence
they (he and--she) could see the rest of the party on the sparkling
waters, among the pleasure craft from other wooded islands, full of
charm, near by. Only these two--he and she--were here on the broad
veranda. The echo of distant laughter came to them, but here was a
languorous silence. Even the yellow-feathered warblers in the gilded
cages above them had, for the time, hushed their songs.

Kathryn Verrill was swinging slowly back and forth in one of the
hammocks swung along the veranda, the sunlight filtering through the
slats of the lowered blinds streaking with gold her filmy draperies
as they swept backward and forward on the polished floor. Her fingers
had ceased their play on the mandolin strings, and there was now no
sound about them louder than the hum of the big and gorgeous bumble-bee
buzzing above their heads. Summer sweetness anywhere, and she the
sweetest of it all! Then----

Ah, well! He had asked her to marry him, and the pained look that came
into her face was his answer even before he heard her say that for two
years she had been another’s--a secretly-wedded wife. Why she should
now tell her carefully guarded secret to him she herself could hardly
have told. No one else knew. Her husband had asked that it should
be their dear secret until he could send for her to come to him out
in the land of the setting sun, where he had gone alone in the hope
that he would find enough of the yellow metal grains so that he could
provide her with a fitting home. Her guardian had not liked the man
of her choice--had made objections to his attentions. Then there was
the clandestine marriage. And then he had gone away to make a home
for her. But she loved him; oh, yes! he was her choice of all the
world, her hero always--her husband now. She was glad to have done as
she did--there was nothing to regret, except the enforced separation.
So she was keeping their secret while feeding her soul with the hope
of reunion that his rare letters brought. But she had faith. Some
day--some day he would win the fortune that would pave the way to him;
then he would send for her. Some day. And she was waiting. And she
loved him; loved him. That was all.

All, except that she was sorry for Keith, as all good women are
sorry to hurt any human creature. No loyal, earnest, loving man ever
offers his whole heart to any true and womanly woman (it matters not
how little her own affections are moved by his appeal, or if they be
stirred at all) that she does not feel touched and honored by the
proffered gift. Womanly sympathy looked out of her gentle eyes, but she
had for him no slightest feeling of other attraction. Keith gravely
accepted his fate; but he knew that Love (that beautiful child born of
Friendship--begot by Passion) would live forever in the inner chamber
of his heart. To him, Kathryn Verrill would always be the one woman in
all the world.

He went out of her life and back to the business routine of his own. In
work he would try to forget his wounds. Later there were investments
that turned out badly, and he lost heavily--lost all.

Then he came West. Here, in the Nevada mountains, he had found
companionship in Sidney Williston who, like himself, was a seeker for
gold. A general similarity of tastes brought about by their former ways
of living (for Williston, too, was an eastern man) had been the one
reason for each choosing the companionship of the other. So, here in
the paintless pine cabin in Porcupine Gulch, each working his separate
claim, they had been living under the same roof for nearly two years;
but Fate, that sees fit to play us strange tricks sometimes, had laid a
fortune in Williston’s hands, while Keith’s were yet empty.

Sidney Williston’s silence, when asked what he would do with his
wealth, was answer enough. It would be for Gloria Howard. There he sat
now, thinking of her--planning for her.

Millers, red-winged moths and flying ants fluttered around the candle,
blindly batting at the burning wick and falling with singed wings on
the table. The wind was rising again, and the blaze at times was nearly
snuffed out, moth-beaten and blown by the strong breeze.

All the morning the sun had laid its hot hand heavily on the earth
between the places where dense white clouds hung without a motion in
the breathless sky. The clouds had spread great dark shadows on the
cliffs below, where they clung to the rocks like time-blackened and
century-old lichens. But in the shadowless spots the sun’s rays were
intensely hot, as they so often are before a coming storm; while the
fierce heat for the time prostrated plant-life, and sent the many tiny
animals of the hills to those places where the darkest shadows lay.
Flowers were wilting where they grew. White primroses growing in the
sandy soil near the cabin had but the night before lifted their pale,
sweet faces to the moon’s soft light--lovely evening primroses growing
straight and strong. Noonday saw them drooping weakly on their stalks,
blushing a rosy, shamed pink; kissed into color by the amorous caresses
of that rough lover, the Sun. Night would find them faded and unlovely,
their purity and sweetness ruthlessly wrested from them forever.

As the sun climbed to the zenith, there was not the slightest wind
stirring; the terrible heat lay, fold on fold, upon the palpitating
earth. But noon came and brought a breeze from out of the south.
Stronger and stronger it swept toward the blue mountains lying away to
the northward. It gathered up sand particles and dust, and shook them
out into the air till the sunlight was dulled, and the great valley
below showed through a mist of gold. All the afternoon the atmosphere
was oppressively hot, while the wind hurried over valley and upland and
mountain. All the afternoon the dust storm in billowy clouds hurried
on, blowing--blowing--blowing. A whistling wind it was, keeping up its
mournful song in the cracks of the unpainted cabin, and whipping the
burlap awning over the door into ragged shreds at the edges. The dark
green window shades flapped and rattled their length, carried out level
from their fastenings by the force of the hot in-blowing wind.

Then with the down-going of the sun the wind died down also. When
twilight came, the heavens were overcast with rain-clouds that told of
a hastening storm which would leave the world fresh and cool when it
had passed. The horizon line was brightened now and again by zigzags of
lightning. Inside the cabin the close air was full of dust particles.

Sidney Williston tossed a photograph across the table, as he gathered
his papers together preparatory to putting them away.

“There’s my wife’s picture, Keith,” he said; “I don’t think I ever
showed it to you, did I?”

Keith got up--six feet, and more, of magnificent manhood; tall, he was,
and straight as a pine, and holding his head in kingly wise. Leisurely
he walked across the bare floor, which echoed loudly to his tread;
leisurely he picked it up.

It was the pictured face of Kathryn Verrill!

       *       *       *       *       *

He did not say anything; neither did he move.... If you come to think
of it, those who sustain great shocks seldom do anything unusual
except in novels. In real life people cry out and exclaim over trifles;
but let a really stupendous thing happen, and you may be very sure that
they will be proportionately silent. The mind, incapable of instantly
grasping the magnitude of what has happened, makes one to stand
immovable and in silence.

Keith said nothing. His breathing was quite as regular as usual, and
his grasp on the picture was firm--untrembling. Yet in that instant
of time he had received the greatest shock of his life, and myriad
thoughts were running through his brain with the swiftness of the
waters in the mining sluice. He held the bit of pasteboard so long that
Williston at last looked up at him inquiringly.

When he handed it back his mind was made up. He knew what must be done.
He knew what he must do--at once--for her sake.

When two or three hours later he heard Williston’s regular breathing
coming from the bed across the room, he stole out in the darkness to
the shed where the horses and buckboard were. It was their one vehicle
of any sort, and the only means they had of reaching the valley. With
the team gone, Williston would practically be a prisoner for several
days. Keith had no hesitation in deciding which way his duty lay. It
was thirty miles to the nearest town; to the telegraph; to Gloria
Howard; to the railroad!

As he pulled the buckboard out of the shed and put the horses before
it, the first raindrops began to fall. Big splashing drops they were,
puncturing the parched dust as they beat down upon it. Flashes of
lightning split the heavens, and each flash made the earth--for the
instant--noon-bright. When he had buckled the last strap his hands
tightened on the reins, and he swung himself up to the seat as the
thunder’s batteries were turned loose on the earth in a tremendous
volley that set the very ground trembling. The frightened horses,
crouching, swerved aside an instant, and then leaped forward into the
darkness. Along the winding road they swept, like part of the wild
storm, toward the town that lay off in the darkness of the valley below.

It was past midnight, and thirty miles lay between him and the
railroad. There was no time to spare. He drove the horses at a pace
which kept time with his whirlwind thoughts and his pulses.

He had been cool and his thoughts had been collected when under
another’s possible scrutiny. Now, alone, with the midnight storm about
him, his brain was whirling, and a like storm was coursing through his
veins.

The crashing thunder that had seemed like an avalanche of boulders
shattered and flung earthward by the fury of the storm, began to
spend itself, and close following on the peals and flashes came the
earth-scent of rain-wetted dust as the big drops came down. By and by
the thunder died away in distant grumbling, and the fiery zigzags went
out. There was the sound of splashing hoofs pounding along the road;
and the warm, wet smell of horses’ steaming hides, blown back by the
night wind.

Fifteen miles--ten--five miles yet to go. Not once had Keith slackened
speed.

When at length he found himself on the low levels bordering the river,
the storm had passed over, and ere he reached the town the rain had
ceased falling. A dim light was breaking through the darkness in
places, and scudding clouds left rifts between which brilliant stars
were beginning to shine.

As he drove across the bridge and into the lower town, he woke the
echoes of a watch-dog’s barking; otherwise, the town was still. At
the livery stable he roused the sleeping boy, who took his team; and
flinging aside the water-soaked great-coat he wore, he walked rapidly
toward the railroad station at the upper end of the town. The message
he wrote was given to the telegraph operator with orders to “rush.” It
read:

“I have found the fortune. Now I want my wife. Come.”

He signed it with Sidney Williston’s name.

“Is Number Two on time?” he asked.

“An hour late. It’ll be here about 4:10,” was the reply.

Leaving the office, he went back to the lower town. Down the hill and
past the pleasant cottages half hidden under their thick poplar shade,
and surrounded by neat, close-trimmed lawns. Leaf and grass-blade
had been freshened by the summer storm; and the odor of sweet garden
flowers--verbenas, mignonette and pinks--was wafted strongly to his
nostrils on the night air. They were homes. He turned away from all
the fragrance and sighed--the sigh of renunciation. Crickets were
beginning to trill their night songs. Past the court-house he went,
where it stood ghostly and still in the darkness; past the business
buildings farther down, glistening with wet. He turned into a side
street to the house where he had been told Gloria Howard lived. At the
gate he hesitated a moment, then opening it, went inside. Stepping off
the graveled walk, his feet pressed noiselessly into the rain-soaked
turf as he turned a corner of the cottage, and--going to a side
window--rapped on the casing.

There was silence, absolute and deep. Again he rapped. Sharply this
time; and he softly called her name twice. He heard a startled movement
in the room, then a pause, as though she were listening. A moment later
her white gown gleamed against the darkness of the bedchamber, and she
stood at the open window under its thick awning of green hop vines. Her
face was on a level with his own. Her hair exhaled the odor of violets.
He could hear her breathing.

“Gloria,”----he began, softly.

“Who are you----what is it?” Then, “Keith! You!” she exclaimed; and in
a moment more flung wide the wire screen that had divided them.

“Sh!”----he whispered. “I want to speak to you. But----hark! listen!”
He laid his hand lightly on her lips.

She caught it quickly between both her own, and laid a hot cheek
against it for an instant; then she pressed it tightly against her
heart.

The night watchman patrolling the streets was passing; and they
stood--he and she together--without movement, in the moist, dusky
warmth of the rain-washed summer night, until the footsteps echoed
faintly on the wet boards half a block away; the sound mingling with
the croaking of the river frogs. Keith could feel the fast beating of
her heart. The wet hop leaves shook down a shower of drops as they were
touched by a passing breeze.

“Gloria,”----he spoke rapidly, but scarcely above his breath----“I am
going away tonight----(he felt her start) away from this part of the
country forever; and I have come to ask you to go with me. Will you?
Tell me, Gloria, will you go?”

She did not reply, but laying a hand on his still damp coat-sleeve,
tried to draw him closer, leaning her face towards his, and striving to
read in his own face the truth of his words.

Had there been light enough for him to see, he would have marvelled
at the varying expressions that followed in quick succession across
her face. Surprise, incredulity, wonderment, a dawning of the real
meaning of his words, triumph as she heard, and then--finally--a look
of fierce, absorbing, tigerish love. For whatever else there might be
to her discredit, her love for him was no lie in her life. She had for
this man a passion as strong as her nature was intense.

“Gloria, Gloria, tell me! Will you leave all--everything and
everybody--and go away with me?” he demanded impatiently. “Number Two
is late--an hour late tonight, and you will have time to make yourself
ready if you hasten. Come, Gloria, come!”

“Do----you----mean----it, Bayard Keith?” she breathed.

“I mean it. Yes.”

She knew his yea was yea; still she missed a certain quality in what he
said--a certain something (she could not say what) in his tone.

She inhaled a long breath as she drew away from him.

“You are a strange man--a very, very strange man. Do you know it? All
these many months you have shunned me; yet now you ask me to cast my
lot with yours. Why?”

“Because I find I want you--at last.”

His answer seemed to satisfy her.

“For how long?” she asked.

Just for the imperceptible part of a second he hesitated. His answer
would be another unbreakable link in the chain he was forging for
himself. Only the fraction of a second, though, he paused. Then his
reply came, firm and decided:

“Forever, Gloria, if you will have it so.”

For answer she dropped her head on her folded arms while a dry, hard
sob forced its way through her lips. It struck upon the chord within
him that always thrilled to the sight or sound of anything, even
remotely, touching grief. This sudden, unexpected joy of hers was so
near akin to sorrow--ay, and she had had much sorrow, God knows! in her
misspent life--it was cause enough for calling forth the gentle touch
he laid upon her bowed head.

“Don’t, Gloria, girl! Don’t! It isn’t worth this, believe me. Yet, if
you come, you shall never have cause for regret, if there’s anything
left in a man’s honor.”

He stroked her hair silently a moment before he said:

“There are some things yet to be done before train time; so I must go
now. Will you be there--at the station?”

“Yes.”

So it was that the thing was settled; and Keith accepted his fate in
silence.

An evil thing done? Perhaps. Evil, that good might come of it. And he
himself to be the sole sufferer. He was removing this woman beyond
Sidney Williston’s reach forever. When the weak, erring husband should
find himself free once more from the toils which had held him, his love
(if love it was) would return to the neglected wife; and she, dear,
faithful, loving woman that she was, would never, thank heaven! guess
his unfaithfulness.

Bayard Keith did not feel himself to be a hero. Such men as he are
never vainglorious; and Keith had no thought of questioning Life’s way
of spelling “duty” as he saw it written. He was being loyal for the
sake of loyalty, a sacrifice for love’s own sake than which no man can
make greater, for he knew that his martyrdom would be in forever being
misjudged by the woman for whose dear sake it was done. He would be
misjudged, of course, by Sidney Williston, and by all the world, for
that matter; but for them he did not care. He was simply doing what
he thought was right that he himself should do--for Kathryn Verrill’s
sake. Her love had been denied him. Now he must even forfeit her
respect. All for love’s sake. None must ever know why he had done this
hideous thing. They must be made to think that he--like others--had
yielded to a mad love for the bad, beautiful woman. In his very silence
under condemnation lay security for Kathryn Verrill’s happiness. Only
he himself would ever know how great would be his agony in bearing the
load he had undertaken. Oh, if there might be some other way than this!
If there could be but some still unthought-of means of escape whereby
he could serve his dear lady, and yet be freed from yoking his life
with a woman from whom his whole being would revolt. How would he be
able through all the years to come--years upon years--to bear his life,
with her?

As he walked past the darkened buildings he breathed heavily, each
breath indrawn with a sibilant sound, like a badger at bay. Yet he had
no thought of turning aside from his self-imposed immolation.

No one was astir in the lower town, save himself and the night
watchman. Now and then he passed a dim light burning--here a low-turned
burner in store or bank building; there the brighter glow of lamps
behind the ground glass of some saloon door. Halfway up the long street
leading to the upper town he heard the rumble of an incoming train. Was
Number Two on time, after all? Was a pitying Fate taking matters away
from him, and into its own hands? Was escape being offered him?

If he hurried--if he ran--he could reach the station in time,
but--alone! There would be no time to go back for Gloria Howard. He
almost yielded for a moment to the coward’s impulse to shrink from
responsibility, but the thought of Kathryn Verrill, waiting by the
eastern sea for a message to come from the man she loved, roused him to
his better self. He resolutely slackened his pace till the minutes had
gone by wherein he could have become a deserter; then he went on up to
the station.

“No, that was a freight train that just pulled out,” said the telegraph
operator. “Number Two will be here pretty soon, though. Less’n half an
hour. She’s made up a little time now.”

Keith went to the office counter and began to write. It was not a long
letter, but it told all there was to say:

“Sid: I have wired to your wife to come to you, and I have signed your
name. By the time this reaches you she will be on her way here. It will
be wiser, of course, for you to assume the sending of the message, and
to give her the welcome she will expect. It will be wiser, too--if I
may offer suggestions--to travel about with her for a while; to go away
from this place, where she certainly would hear of your unfaithfulness
should she remain. Then go back with her to your friends, and live out
the balance of your life, in the old home, as you ought. I know you
will feel I am not a fit one to preach, for I myself am going away
tonight, taking Gloria Howard with me. I know, too, how you will look
at what I am doing; but I have neither excuses nor explanations to
offer.

                                                          Bayard Keith.”

That was all.

When he had sealed and directed it, he went to the livery stable and
waked up Pete Dudley.

“See here, Pete,” he said, “I want you to do something for me.”

“Sure, Mr. Keith!” said Pete, rubbing his eyes.

“Here’s a letter for Mr. Williston out at our camp in Porcupine Gulch.
I want you to take it to him, and take the buckboard, too.”

“All right, I’ll go in the morning.”

“No, no! Listen! Not till day after tomorrow. Wait, let me think----
You’d better wait a day longer----go the next day. Do you understand?”

“I guess I savvy. Not till Friday. Take the letter and the buckboard.
Is that the racket?”

“Yes, that’s what I want, Pete. Here! Take them to him without fail on
Friday. Good-night, Pete. Good bye!”

Keith walked back to the station and went in the waiting-room, where
he sat down. His heart felt as heavy as lead. He had burned all his
bridges behind him, and it made his soul sick to contemplate the long
vista of the coming years.

As he sat there, the coward hope that she--Gloria--might not come, shot
up in his heart, trying to make of him a traitor. He said to himself:
“If----if----” Presently he heard the train whistle. He got up and went
to the door. He felt he was choking. Daylight was coming fast; day-dawn
in the eastern sky. The town, rain-cleansed and freshened, would soon
awake and lift its face to the greeting of another morn.

The ticket-office window was shoved up. It was nearing train time.

“Hello, Mr. Keith, going away?”

“Yes, I want a----” he hesitated.

“Where to?”

But Keith did not answer. A ticket? One, or two? If she should not
come---- Was Fate----? What was he to do? But, no! Yet he hesitated,
while the man at the window waited his reply. Two tickets, or only one?
Or not any? Nay, but he must go; and there must be two.

Then the train thundered into the station, and almost at the same
moment he heard, through the sound made by the clanging bell, the
rustle of a woman’s rich garments. He turned. Gloria Howard stood
there, beautiful and eager, panting from her hurried walk.

“Where to?” repeated the man at the window.

“San Francisco--two tickets,” said Keith.

“‘Two,’ did you say?” asked the man, looking up quickly at him and then
glancing sideways at the radiant, laughing woman who had taken her
place so confidently at Keith’s side.

Keith’s voice did not falter, nor did his eyes fall:

“Two.”

But the telegraph operator smiled to himself as he shoved the tickets
across the window sill. To him, Keith was simply “Another one!” So,
too, would the world judge him after he was gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bayard Keith was no saint; but as he crossed to the cars in the
waxing light of day-dawn, his countenance was transfigured by an
indescribable look we do not expect to see--ever--on the face of mortal
man.

“For her dear sake!” he whispered softly to himself, as he looked away
to the reddening East--to the eastward where “she” was. “For the sake
of the woman I love.”

And “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends.”




[Illustration]

IN NANNA’S PALM


It all happened years ago. Before there was any railroad; even before
there were any overland stages crossing the plains. Only the emigrant
teams winding slowly down the valley on the road stretching westward.

Some there were, though, that had worked their way back from the
Western sea, to stop at those Nevada cañons where there was silver to
be had for the delving.

The cañons were beautiful with dashing, dancing streams, and blossoming
shrubbery, and thick-leafed trees; and there grew up in the midst of
these, tiny towns that called themselves “cities,” where the miners
lived who came in with the return tide from the West.

There in one of the busiest, prettiest mining camps on a great
mountain’s side, in one of the stone cabins set at the left of the
single long street, dwelt Tony and his cousin Bruno--Italians, both.
Bruno worked in the mines; but Tony, owning an ox team, hauled loads
for the miners to and from the other settlements. A dangerous calling
it was in those days, because an Indian in ambush had ever to be
watched for when a White Man came down from the cañons to travel alone
through the valley.

Tony was willing, however, to take risks. Teaming brought him more
money than anything else he could do; and the more he earned, the
sooner he could go back to Nanna--to Nanna waiting for him away on the
other side of the world.

He and Bruno both loved her--had loved her ever since the days when,
long ago, in their childhood, they had played at being lovers down
among the fishing boats drawn up on the beach of their beloved Italian
home. Black-browed Bruno had then quarreled with him in jealous hatred
time and again; but the little Nanna (who loved peace, and to whom both
playfellows were dear) would kiss each and say:

“Come! Let us play that you are my twin brothers, and I your only
sister!” And so harmony would be restored.

Thus it went on, and at last they were no longer little children, but
men who love a woman as men may love. And Bruno’s parents came to the
father and mother of Nanna and settled that their children should be
man and wife; so in that way Bruno was made glad, and no longer jealous
of Tony--poor Tony, who had not a single small coin that he could call
his own. Yet it was Tony whom Nanna loved--Tony whose wife she wanted
to be. But what can a young girl do when the one she loves is poor, and
there is another whom her parents have chosen for her who has a little
farm promised him by his father the day he shall bring home the wife
they would have him marry? Nanna neither resisted nor rebelled; but
only went to Tony who was as helpless as herself, and there against his
breast wept her heart out.

It was only when Bruno declared that he was going to America to make a
great deal of money (saying that the farm was not enough--that when
he and Nanna were married he wanted they should be rich) that a ray of
hope shone for Tony.

“I, too, will go to America,” Tony whispered to Nanna, “and perhaps
there I also may find a fortune. Then--when I come back--I may marry
thee; may I not, little dear one?”

And for answer, the little Nanna lifted her arms to his neck and her
lips to his own.

       *       *       *       *       *

The night before the two men sailed away to the strange, far-off land,
Nanna and Tony walked together under the oaks and ilexes.

“Thou wilt miss me, little one, but thou wilt be true, I know. I shall
think of thee all the time--every hour. Thou wilt long for me, as I for
thee. Thou wilt miss my kisses; is it not so? But I----! Ah, Nanna!
Nanna! Here----” And bowing over her hand he pressed kiss after kiss in
the upturned little brown palm, closing her fingers tightly upon them
as he raised his head and smiled in her eyes.

“There! These I give thee, sweet one, so that when I am gone it shall
be that thy Tony’s kisses are with thee, and are thine whenever thou
wilt.”

All the morrow, when the ship had sailed away, Nanna lay on her cot
up in the little whitewashed bedroom under the eaves, and with lips
pressed close upon the palm that Tony’s lips had touched, sobbed her
grief out, till she sank into exhausted slumber.

One year; two years; three, came and went. Tony off in America was
making money, and soon he could go home and they would be married in
spite of her parents or Bruno. The fourth year he wrote her how the
sum had grown--it was almost enough. Then she began checking off the
months ere he would return to her. Eighteen--sixteen--fourteen--now
only twelve months more! A year, and Tony would be with her! Then half
that year was gone. Six months, only, to wait! Happy little Nanna!
And Tony was not less happy, away off there in his little stone cabin
in the mountains, or hauling goods for the miners across the valley.
His heart was so full of her that--almost--he forgot to think of the
Indians when he was traveling along the road.

“Thou art a fool,” said Bruno to him over and over again. “Thou
art a fool, indeed. It is more money--this hauling--yes! But some
day--ping!--and it is the arrow of an Indian. Then what good is it, the
money? Thou art a fool, I say. As for me, I will work here with the
many in the mines.”

Bruno had just said this to him for the hundredth time, as Tony was
yoking his oxen for the long journey up the wide valley to the North.
And his answer had been as always, that the saints would protect him.
Yet, should he not return the thirteenth day, then indeed might Bruno
think all was not well with him, and could send some of the men from
the mines to go to him. He was not afraid, though. Had not the saints
protected him for nearly five years? He was soon to go back to Italy,
and (he whispered to himself) to Nanna! So with a light heart, and a
laugh on his lip, he went down the cañon beside the oxen, cracking his
whip as he warbled a song he and Nanna had sung together when they had
played by the boats and among the fishing nets in the long, long ago.

The wagon jolted and rattled on its way down the rocky road to the
plain; and Tony’s big, beautiful St. Bernard dog, Bono, followed in
the dust sent skyward by the heavy wheels as they came upon the softer
earth of the lowlands.

       *       *       *       *       *

Everyone was Tony’s friend in the little mining town. Therefore
everyone was anxious when the thirteenth day came, yet not Tony. With
few words (at such times such men do not say much) they selected a
dozen from among the town’s bravest and best, and with heavy hearts set
out on their journey that was to follow Tony’s trail till they should
find him.

Down into the hot valley--a-quiver under the summer heat, over a road
of powdered alkali, along the Humboldt’s banks--through mile after mile
of sagebrush and greasewood--under the glaring, white sun, they rode
two and two. And so riding they spoke seldom.

When they were nearing the place they knew Tony must have reached the
third day out (now more than ten days gone) they saw outlined against
the blue--high, high in the air--circling spots of black. Dark things
that swept with a majesty of motion that was appalling. Round and
round, in great curves half a mile wide, they swam through the ether,
and dipped and tilted without so much as the quiver of a wing or other
motion than that given by their marvelous self-poise; sailing through
mid-air as only a vulture can.

They swept and circled over a spot that was awful in its silence under
the metallic brightness of the hot August sun. The men looked at each
other; looked without speaking--for they understood. So without speech
they rode on to the place where the warped irons from the burned
wagon lay, and where a gaunt, nearly starved St. Bernard howled over
something that had once been his master. He had guarded the dead man
through ten hot days--through ten long nights. Bono’s wail sounded long
and mournful through the narrow pass where the whistling arrows had
found them. Tony had never been neglectful before, and the dog could
not understand it.

Alas, poor Tony!

When Bruno went back to Italy that fall he told Nanna that Tony was
dead. And Nanna who came of a race more or less stoical in time of
stress did not cry out, but simply shut her sorrow up close in her
heart where the others could not see. It had been their secret--hers
and Tony’s--and they had guarded it well. Henceforth it would be
hers alone. So she gave no sign except such as she might for an old
playmate’s death.

By and by she married Bruno. What would you? Her father and mother
wished it; Bruno loved her; he had money now to provide well for a
wife; and there was the little farm that his parents would give him the
day when he should bring home his bride. So, after the manner of her
kind, she finally yielded to his wooing; and one day they were wed in
the little church on the hill where they had both been christened when
babies.

She bore him children, and was a good mother--a good wife. She lived to
be an old woman, and her hair grew streaked with gray; yet to the last
day of her life she had a way of falling asleep with the fingers of her
left hand slipped under her cheek, and her lips touching the upturned
palm.

It was her one disloyalty to Bruno.

And so it was they found her lying on that morning that she did not
waken.




[Illustration]

THE VENGEANCE OF LUCAS


The little adobe house stood flush with the street, halfway between
the business houses and the residence portion of the town which turned
its back on the sand and sage-covered hills that--breaking into gray
waves--far off cast themselves on the beach of blue skyland in great
breakers of snow-crested mountains.

At the side of the house was a dooryard--so small!--beaten hard and
smooth as a floor, and without a tree or a bush. There was no grass
even at the edge of the sturdy little stream that ran across the square
enclosure, talking all day to the old-faced baby in its high chair
under the shake-covered kitchen porch. All day the stream laughed and
chattered noisily to the owl-eyed baby, and chuckled and gurgled as it
hurried across the yard and burrowed under the weather-bleached boards
of the high fence, to find its way along the edge of the street, and
so on to the river a quarter of a mile below. But the wee woman-child,
owl-eyed and never complaining, sat through the long sunshine hours
without one smile on its little old face, and never heeding the stream.

As the days grew hotter, its little thin hands became thinner, and
it ate less and less of the boiled arroz and papas the young mother
sometimes brought when she came to dip water.

“Of a truth, there is no niña so good as my ’Stacia; she never, never
cries! She is no trouble to me at all,” Carmelita would exclaim, and
clap her hands at the baby. But the baby only grew rounder eyed as it
stared unsmilingly at its mother’s pretty plumpness, and laughing red
lips, and big black eyes, whenever she stopped to talk to the little
one.

Carmelita--pretty, shallow-pated Carmelita--never stayed long with the
tiny ’Stacia, for the baby was so good left alone; and there was always
Anton or Luciano and Monico to drop in for a laugh with the young
wife of stupid old Lucas; or Josefa coming in for a game of “coyote y
gallos.”

It was Lucas who went out to the porch whenever he could spare the time
from earning money that he might buy the needed arroz and papas, or the
rose-colored dresses he liked to see her wear.

It was for Lucas she said her first word--the only word she had learned
yet--“papa!” And she said it, he thought, as if she knew it was a
love in no wise different from a father’s love that he gave her, poor
little Anastacia, whose father--well, Lucas had never asked Carmelita
to tell him. How could he? Poor child, let her keep her secret. Pobre
Carmelita! Only sixteen and no mother. And could he--Lucas--see her
beaten and abused by that old woman who took the labor of her hands
and gave her nothing in return?--could he stand by when he saw the big
welts and bruises, and not beg her to let him care for her and the
niña?--such a little niña it was, too! Of a verity, he was no longer
young; and there was his ugly pock-marked face, to say nothing of the
scars the oso had given him that day when he, a youth, had sent his
knife to the hilt in the bear that so nearly cost him his life. The
scars were horrible to see--horrible! But Carmelita (so young--so
pretty!) did not seem to mind; and when the priest came again they were
married, so that Carmelita had a husband and the pobrecita a father.

And such a father! How Lucas loved his little ’Stacia! How tender he
was with her; how his heart warmed to the touch of her lips and hands!
Why, he grew almost jealous of the red-breasted robin that came daily
to sit by the edge of her plate and eat arroz with her! He begrudged
the bird its touch of the little sticky hand covered with grains of
rice which the robin pecked at so fearlessly. And when the sharp bill
hurt the tender flesh, how she would scold! She was not his ’Stacia
then at all--no, some other baby very different from the solemn little
one he knew. There seemed something unearthly in it, and Lucas would
feel a sinking of his heart and wish the bird would stay away. It never
came when others were there. Only from the shelter of window or doorway
did he and the others see the little bright bird-eyes watch--with head
aslant--the big black ones; or hear the baby bird-talk between the two.
Every day throughout the long, hot summer the robin came to eat from
the niña’s plate of rice as she sat in her high chair under the curling
shake awning; and all the while she grew more owl-eyed and thin. A good
niña, she was, and so little trouble!

One day the robin did not come. That night, through the open windows
of the front room, passers-by could see a table covered with a folded
sheet. A very small table--it did not need to be large; but the bed
had been taken out of the small, mean room to give space to those who
came to look at the poor, little, pinched face under a square of pink
mosquito bar. There were lighted candles at the head and feet. Moths,
flying in and out of the wide open window, fluttered about the flames.
The rose-colored dress had been exchanged for one that was white and
stiffly starched. Above the wee gray face was a wreath of artificial
orange blossoms, but the wasted baby-fingers had been closed upon some
natural sprays of lovely white hyacinths. The cloying sweetness of
the blossoms mingled with the odor of cigarette smoke coming from the
farther corners of the room, and the smell of a flaring kerosene lamp
which stood near the window. It flickered uncertainly in the breeze,
and alternately lighted or threw into shadow the dark faces clustered
about the doorway of the second room. Those who in curiosity lingered
for a moment outside the little adobe house could hear voices speaking
in the soft language of Spain.

To them who peered within with idle interest, it was “only some Mexican
woman’s baby dead.” Tomorrow, in a little white-painted coffin, it
would be born down the long street, past the saloons and shops where
the idle and the curious would stare at the procession. Over the bridge
across the now muddy river they would go to the unfenced graveyard on
the bluff, and there the little dead mite of illegitimacy would be
lowered into the dust from whence it came. Then each mourner in turn
would cast a handful of earth into the open grave, and the clods would
rattle dully on the coffin lid. (Ah, pobre, pobre Lucas!) Then they
would come away, leaving Carmelita’s baby there underground.

Carmelita herself was now sitting apathetically by the coffin. She
dully realized what tomorrow was to be; but she could not understand
what this meant. She had cried a little at first, but now her eyes
were dry. Still, she was sorry--it had been such a good little baby,
and no trouble at all!

“A good niña, and never sick; such a good little ’Stacia!” she
murmured. Carmelita felt very sorry for herself.

Outside, in the darkness of the summer night, Lucas sat on the kitchen
porch leaning his head against the empty high chair of the pobrecita,
and sobbed as if his heart would break.

       *       *       *       *       *

That had happened in August. Through September, pretty Carmelita cried
whenever she remembered what a good baby the little Anastacia had been.
Then Josefa began coming to the house again to play “coyote y gallos”
with her, so that she forgot to cry so often.

As for Lucas, he worked harder than ever. Though, to be sure, there
were only two now to work for where there had been three. With Anton,
and Luciano, and Monico, he had been running in wild horses from the
mountains; and among others which had fallen to his share was an old
blaze-face roan stallion, unmanageable and full of vicious temper. They
had been put--these wild ones--in a little pasture on the other side of
the river; a pasture in the rancho of Señor Metcalf, the Americano. And
the señor, who laughed much and liked fun, had said he wanted to see
the sport when Lucas should come to ride the old roan.

Today, Lucas--on his sleek little cow-horse, Topo--was riding along the
river road leading to the rancho; but not today would he rope the old
blaze-face. There were others to be broken. Halfway from the bridge
he met little Nicolás, who worked for the señor, and passed him with
a pleasant “Buenos dias!” without stopping. The boy had been his good
amigo since the time he got him away from the maddened steer that would
have gored him to death. There was nothing ’Colás would not do for his
loved Lucas. But the older man cared not to stop and talk to him today,
as was his custom; for he was gravely thinking of the little dead
’Stacia, and rode on. A hundred yards farther, and he heard the clatter
of a horse’s hoofs behind him, and Nicolás calling:

“Lucas! Lucas!”

He turned the rein on Topo’s neck, and waited till the boy came. In
the pleasant, warm October sunlight he waited, while Nicolás told him
that which would always make him shiver and feel cold when afterward
he should remember that half-hour in the stillness and sunshine of the
river road. He waited, even after Nicolás (frightened at having dared
to tell his friend) had gone.

The señor and Carmelita! It was the truth--Nicolás would not lie. The
truth; for the boy had listened behind the high fence of weather-beaten
boards, and had heard them talk together. He, and the little stream
that gurgled and laughed all day, had heard how they--the señor and
Carmelita--would go away to the north when the month should end. For
many months they two had loved--the Señor Metcalf and the wife of
Lucas; had loved before Lucas had made her his wife--ay! even before
the little ’Stacia had come. And the little ’Stacia was the señor’s----
Ah, Lucas would not say it of the dead pobrecita! For she was
his--Lucas’s--by right of his love for her. Poor little Anastacia! And
but that the little one would have been a trouble to the Americano,
they--the woman and the man--would have gone away together before;
but he would not have it so. Now that the little one was no longer to
trouble them, he would take the mother and go away to the new rancho he
had just bought far over on the other side of the mountains.

[Illustration: “Their eyes met.”--Page 65]

“Go!”--said Lucas, when the boy had finished telling all he had
overheard--“Go and tell the señor that I go now to the corral to ride
the roan stallion. And--’Colás, give to me thy riata for today.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lucas had driven the horses into one of the corrals. Alone there he
had lassoed the old blaze-face; and then had driven the others out.
Unaided, he had tied the old stallion down. As he lay there viciously
biting and trying to strike out with his hind feet, Lucas had fastened
a halter on his head and had drawn a riata (sixty feet long, and strong
as the thews of a lion) tight about him just back of the forelegs.
Twice he had passed it about the heaving girth of the old roan, whose
reeking body was muddy with sweat and the grime and dust of the corral.
The knots were tied securely and well. The rope would not break. Had
he not made it himself from the hide of an old toro? From jaw-piece
to jaw-piece of the halter he drew his crimson silk handkerchief,
bandaging the eyes that gleamed red under swollen and skinned lids.
Then, cautiously, Lucas unbound the four hoofs that had been tied
together. The horse did not attempt to move, though he was consumed by
a rage against his captor that was fiendish--the fury of a wild beast
that has never yet been conquered.

Lucas struck him across the ribs with the end of the rope he was
holding. The big roan head was lifted from the ground a second and
then let fall, as he squealed savagely. Again the rope made a hollow
sound against the heaving sides. Again the maddened horse squealed.
When the rope struck the third time, he gathered himself together
uncertainly--hesitated--struggled an instant--staggered to his feet,
and stood quivering in every muscle of his great body. His legs shook
under him; and his head--with the bandaged eyes--moved from side to
side unsteadily.

Then Lucas wound the halter-rope--which was heavy and a long
one--around the center-post of the corral where they were standing.

As he finished, he heard someone singing; the voice coming nearer and
nearer. A man’s voice it was, full and rich, caroling a love song, the
sound mingling with that of clattering hoofs.

Lucas, stooping, picked up the riata belonging to Nicolás. He was
carefully re-coiling it when Guy Metcalf, riding up to the enclosure,
looked down into the corral.

“Hello, Lucas! ‘Going to have some fun with the old roan,’ are you?
Well, you’re the boy to ride him. ‘Haven’t got the saddle on yet, hey?’
Hold on a minute---- Soon as I tie, I’ll be with you!”

Lucas had not spoken, neither had he raised his head. He went to where
little Topo was standing. Shaking the noose into place by a turn or
two of the wrist, while the long loop dragged at his heels through the
dust, he put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself into the saddle.
He glanced at the gate--he ran the noose out yet a little more. Then he
began to swing it slowly in easy, long sweeps above his head while he
waited.

The gate opened and Metcalf came in. He turned and carefully fastened
the gate behind him. He was a third of the way across the corral when
their eyes met.

Then--with its serpent hiss of warning--the circling riata, snake-like,
shot out, fastening its coils about him. And Topo, the little cow-horse
trained to such work, wheeled at the touch of the spur as the turns
of the rope fastened themselves about the horn of the saddle, and the
man--furrowing the hoof-powdered dust of the corral--was dragged to
the heels of the wild stallion. Lucas, glancing hastily at the face,
earth-scraped and smeared and the full lips that were bleeding under
their fringe of gold, saw that--though insensible for a moment from
the quick jerk given the rope--the blue eyes of the man were opening.
Lucas swung himself out of the saddle--leaving Topo to hold taut the
riata. Then he began the work of binding the doomed Americano. When
he had done, to the doubled rope of braided rawhide that was about
the roan stallion, he made Carmelita’s lover fast with the riata he
had taken from Nicolás. He removed it slowly from the man’s neck (the
señor should not have his eyes closed too quickly to the valley through
which he would pass!) and he put it about the body, under the arms.
Lucas was lingering now over his work like one engaged in some pleasant
occupation.

The halter-rope was then unknotted, and the turns unwound from the
center-post. Next, he pulled the crimson handkerchief from the horse’s
eyes--shouted--and shook his hat at him!

Maddened, terrified, and with the dragging thing at his heels, the
four-footed fury fought man, and earth, and air about him like the very
demon that he was till he came to the gate that Lucas had set wide for
him, and he saw again the waves of sage and sand hills (little waves
of sweet-scented sage) that rippled away to the mountains he knew. Out
there was liberty; out there was the free life of old; and there he
could get rid of the thing at his heels that--with all his kicking, and
rearing, and plunging--still dragged at the end of the rope.

Out through the wide set gate he passed, mad with an awful rage, and
as with the wings of the wind. On, and on he swept; marking a trail
through the sand with his burden. Faster and faster, and growing dim to
the sight of the man who stood grim and motionless at the gate of the
corral. Away! away to those far-lying mountains that are breakers on
the beach of blue skyland!




[Illustration]

A SHEPHERD OF THE SILENT WASTES


“To be hung. To be hung by the neck until dead.”

Over and over I say it to myself as I sit here in my room in the
hotel, trying to think connectedly of the events which have led to the
culmination of this awful thing that, in so short a time, is to deprive
me of life.

At eleven o’clock I am to die; to go out of the world of sunshine and
azure seas, of hills and vales of living green, of the sweet breath of
wild flowers and fruit bloom, of light and laughter and the music of
Life, to----what? Where? How far does the Soul go? What follows that
awful moment of final dissolution?

At eleven o’clock I shall know; for I must die. There is no hope,
no help; though my hand has never been raised against mortal man or
woman--never have I taken a human life.

At the stroke of the hour a great crowd will stand in the prison yard,
and gape at the scaffold, and see the drop fall, and--fascinated and
frowning--gaze with straining eyes at the Thing dangling at the end of
a hempen rope. A Soul will go out into immeasurable space. A purple
mark on my throat will tell the story of death by strangulation. Two
bodies will lie stark and dead tonight--his and mine. His will be laid
in the pine box that belongs to the dishonored dead; while mine will be
housed in rosewood, and satin, and silver.

You do not understand?

Listen, let me tell you! Let me go back to the first time we ever
met--he and I.

After college days were over, I left the Atlantic coast and all that
Life there meant to me, and came out to the West of the sagebrush,
and the whirlwinds, and the little horned toads. And there in the
wide wastes where there is nothing but the immensity of space and the
everlasting quiet of the desert, I went into business for myself.
Business there? Oh, yes! for out there where men go mad or die, cattle
and sheep may thrive. I, who loved Life and the association of bright
minds, and everything that such companionship gives, invested all I
had (and little enough it was!) in a business of which I knew nothing,
except that those men who went there with a determination to stick
to the work till success should find them, brought away bags full of
gold--all they could carry--as they came back into the world they had
known before their self-banishment.

So I, too, went there, and bought hundreds of
sheep--bleating--blear-eyed, stupid creatures that they are! I,
essentially a man of cities and of people, began a strange, new life
there, becoming care-taker of the flocks myself.

A lonely life? Yes; but remember there was money to be made in
sheep-raising in the gray wastes; and I was willing to forego, for a
time, all that civilization could give. So I dulled my recollections
of the old life and the things that were dear to me, and went to work
with a will in caring for the dusty, bleating, aimlessly-moving sheep.
I wanted to be rich. Not for the sake of riches, but to be independent
of the toil of bread-winning. I longed with all my soul to have money,
that I might gratify my old desires for travel away to the far ends of
the earth. All my life I had dreamed of the day I was to turn my face
to those old lands far away, which would be new lands to me. So I was
glad to sacrifice myself for a few years in the monstrous stillness of
the gray plains so that I might the sooner be free to go where I would.

Friends tried to dissuade me from the isolated life. They declared I
was of a temperament that could not stand the strain of the awful quiet
there--the eternal silence broken only by some lone coyote’s yelp, or
the always “Baa! Baa!” of the sheep. They told me that men before my
time had gone stark mad--that I, too, would lose my mind. I laughed
at them, and went my way; yet, in truth, there was many a day through
the long years I lived there, when I felt myself near to madness as I
watched the slow-moving, dust-powdered woolly backs go drifting across
the landscape as a gray fog drifts in from the sea. It seemed the
desert was the emptier by reason of the sheep being there, for nothing
else moved. Never a sign of life but the sheep; never a sound but the
everlasting “Baa! Baa! Baa!” Oh! I tell you I was very near to madness
then, and many another man in my place would have broken under the
tension. But not I. I was strong because I was growing rich. I made
money. I took it eastward to the sea, and watched the ships go out. It
was a fine thing to see the great waste of waters move, as the desert
waste never had. There was the sea, and beyond lay far lands! Still, I
said to myself:

“No; not yet will I go. I will wait yet a little longer. I will wait
until I hold so much gold in my hands that I need never return--need
never again look upon the desert and its ways.”

So--though I watched the ships sail away to waiting lands beyond--the
time was not yet ripe for me to go. Back to the money-making a little
longer--back for a while to the stupid, staring-eyed sheep--then a
final good-bye to the desert’s awful emptiness, and that never-ceasing
sound that is worse than silence--the bleating of the flocks!

       *       *       *       *       *

It was on one of these trips to the Atlantic coast that I saw, for the
first time, him of the Half-a-Soul.

The hour was late afternoon of a hot mid-summer day. The sun was red
as blood and seemed quadrupled in size where it hung on the horizon
with its silent warning of another terrible day on the morrow.
Block-pavements and cobbles radiated heat, and the sidewalks burned my
feet painfully as I stepped on their scorching surfaces coming out of
my friend Burnham’s office. The hot air stifled me, and I flinched at
the dazzling light. Then I stepped in with the throng, and in a moment
more was part of the great surging mass of heat-burdened humanity.
Drifting with the pulsating stream, I was for the time listlessly
indifferent to what might be coming except that I longed for the night,
and for darkness. It might not, probably would not, bring any welcome
cool breeze, but at least in the shadows of the night there would
be a respite from the torturing white glare that was now reflected
from every sun-absorbing brick, or square of granite or stone. I was
drifting along the great current of Broadway life when----

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a sudden clutching at my heart--a tension on the muscles that
was an acute pain--a reeling of the brain--and I found myself gazing
eagerly into two eyes that as eagerly gazed back into mine. Dark eyes
they were, smoldering with evil passions and the light of all things
that are bad. The eyes of a man I had never known--had never seen; yet
between whom and myself I felt existed a kinship stronger than any tie
that my life had hitherto admitted. For one instant I saw those strange
black eyes, blazing and baleful, the densely black hair worn rather
long, the silky mustache brushed up from the corners of the mouth, the
gleam of the sharp white teeth under a lifted lip, the smooth heavy
eyebrows slightly curving upward at the outer edges, giving the face
the expression we give to the pictures we make of Satan. These I saw.
Then he was lost in the crowd.

Where had I seen him before that these details should all seem so
familiar? I knew (and my blood chilled as I confessed it to myself)
that in all my life I had never seen or known him in the way I had
seen and known others. And, more, I knew that we were linked by some
strange, unknown, unnamed, unnatural tie. It was as though a hand
gloved in steel had clutched my heart in a strangling grip as he moved
past. I gasped for breath, staggered, caught myself, and--staggering
again--fell forward on the pavement.

“Sunstroke,” they said. “Overcome by the heat.”

       *       *       *       *       *

And then----

Long afterward I saw him again.

I was traveling in far lands. Going over from Stamboul to Pera I stood
on the Galata bridge watching the great flood of living, pulsing human
life--those people of many races.

There was a fresh breeze from the North that day, and it set dancing
the caiques and barcas where they threaded their way among the big
ferry-boats and ships of many strange sails, and all the craft of
summer seas. There was a sparkle on the Bosphorus under the golden
sunshine and a gleam on the Golden Horn. A violet-hued haze hung over
the wide expanse, and through it one could see the repeated graces of
mosque and minaret, the Seven Towers and the rounded whiteness of Santa
Sophia. Higher, there was the green of laurel and lime, of rose-tree
and shrubbery in profusion--terrace upon terrace--and now and again
darker shadows made by the foliage of cypress or pine. All the morning
I had reveled in Nature’s great color scheme; had feasted eye and sense
on the amethyst, and emerald, and sapphire of water, and sky and shore.
And then I went to the Galata bridge.

There I stood and watched that medley of races moving by. Arab and
Ethiopian, Moslem and Jew; the garb of modern European civilization,
and the flowing robes of the East; Kurds, Cossacks and Armenians;
the gaudy red fez and the white turban of the Turk; dogs lean and
sneaking-eyed; other eyes that looked out from under the folds of a
yashmak. And always the babel of voices speaking many tongues. Greeks
and Albanians; the flowing mantle of Bedouins and the Tartar in
sheepskins. Ebbing and flowing--ebbing and flowing, the restless human
tide at the great Gateway of the East.

As I stood looking and listening, there came again without warning that
clutching at my heartstrings--that sharp pain in my left side--that
same dizzying whirl of thoughts--that sickening fear of something (I
knew not what) which I could not control; and out of the flowing tide
of faces I saw one not a stranger--he whom I did not know. His eyes
held mine again; and in that moment something seemed to tell me that he
was my everlasting curse. Through him would come things dread and evil;
from him there was no escape. I looked long--my eyes starting in their
sockets. I gasped--caught at the air--and lost consciousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I recovered myself I was sitting in a little café whither a young
lad had assisted me. I gave him a few piasters and told him to leave
me. He took them, said:

“Pek eyi!” and went away.

Left alone at the café table, after motioning the attendant also
away, I sat and pondered. Where would this haunting dread end? The
basilisk eyes I so loathed had borne me a message which I could not yet
translate. Not yet. But he would pass me again some day, and once more
his eyes would speak a message. What was it? Something evil, I knew.
But what?

So I went away; went away from the Galata bridge; away from Pera and
Stamboul.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then----

Then from the deck of a dahabeeyeh on the Nile!

I was with the Burnhams. We were eight in the party. Lucille Burnham
(Joe’s sister) and I were betrothed. Betrothed after months and months
of playing at love, and the making and unmaking of lovers’ quarrels.
Each had thought the other meant nothing more than what makes for an
idler’s pastime, until drifting on the current of old Nilus we read
the true love in each other’s heart, and the story (old as Egypt is
old) was told over again there where it was told centuries before by
men and women who loved in the land of the lotus.

Joe and his wife, and the Merrills (brother and sister), Colonel
Lamar and his pretty daughter, and my dear girl and I. What a happy,
care-free party we were! My most precious dreams were coming true; and
now I went up and down the earth’s highways as I willed.

Under the awning that day I was lying at Lucille’s feet, half-asleep,
half-awake and wholly happy. I remember how, just there above Luxor,
I noticed two women on the river bank, the dull-blue dress of the
one, and the other carrying a water-skin to be filled. A boy, naked
and brown-skinned, sprawled in the sand. Moving--slow moving with the
current--we came drifting out of that vast land that is old as Time
itself reckons age.

Then between my vision and the banks beginning the level which reached
far and away to the hills beyond, came the shadow of a lateen sail not
our own. A dahabeeyeh was slipping by, going against the current. I
raised myself on my elbow, and there--unfathomable, dark as Erebus, and
gazing out of deep sockets--were the eyes of a man who drew me to him
with a power I was unable to resist; a power fearful as----

The thin, sneering lips seemed to whisper the word “Brother!” and
“Brother----” I whispered back.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sight of that face under the shadow of the lateen sail--like
a shadow cast by a carrion bird where it slowly moves above you
in the desert--coming as it did, in the midst of my days of love
and new-found joy, left me unnerved and wrecked both mentally and
physically.

“Come, come! this won’t do,” said Joe; “I am afraid you are going to
have the fever!”

“It is nothing,” I declared, shrinking from his scrutiny, “I----I have
these attacks sometimes.”

“Who is he? What is he?” I asked myself the question hourly. And there
in the silence of those nights under the stars of the East, while we
breathed the soft winds blowing across the sands the Pharaohs had trod,
the answer came to me:

He was my other Half-Self--the twin half of my own Soul. This brother
of mine--this being for whom I had a loathing deep and intense--was one
in whom there lived an incomplete Soul (a half that was evil through
and through) and mine was the other half. I was beginning now to
understand. We had been sent into this world with but one Soul between
us; and to me had been apportioned the good. But evil or good--good and
evil--we were henceforth to be inseparable in our fate.

But always I cried out in my helpless, hopeless agony, “Yet
why--why--why?” It is the cry of the Soul from the first day of
creation.

I turned my back on the far East, and set my face towards America.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then----

Then I started on a trip through California and old Mexico. My health
was broken. My marriage with Lucille was postponed.

On the Nevada desert our train was side-tracked early one morning to
allow the passing of the eastbound express which was late. A vast
level plain stretched its weary way in every direction. Only the twin
lines of steel and the dark-red section house showed that the White
Man’s footsteps had ever found their way into the stillness of the
dreary plains.

We had fifteen minutes to wait. I got out with others and walked up and
down the wind-blown track, smoking my cigar and spinning pebbles, which
I picked up from the road-bed, at a jack-rabbit in the sagebrush across
the way. The wind made a mournful sound through the telegraph wires,
but a wild canary sang sweetly from the top of a tall greasewood--sang
as if to drown the wind’s dirge. Dull grays were about us; and we were
hemmed in by mountains rugged, and rough, and dull gray, with here
and there touches of dull reds and browns. On their very tops patches
of snow lay, far--far up on the heights. Miles down the valley we
could see the coming train. A few minutes later the conductor called
to us “All aboard!” and I swung myself up on the steps of the last
sleeping-car as we began to move slowly down toward the western end of
the switch.

There was a roar and a clatter--a flash of faces at the windows--a rush
of wind and dust whirled up by the whirling wheels--and, as the Eastern
Express shot by, I saw (on the rear platform of the last car) him,
between whom and myself a Soul was shared.

The conductor stepped up on the platform where I stood, and caught me
by the arm as I reeled.

“The high altitude,” he said, “makes a good many folks get dizzy. You’d
better go inside and sit down.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Then again.

On a ferry-boat crossing the bay from the Oakland pier to San
Francisco. I had just returned that morning from a four-months’ tour
of Mexico. It was raining dismally, and everything about the shipping
on the bay was dripping and dreary. Gray-white sea gulls circled and
screamed; darting and dipping, they followed our wake, or dropped down
into the foam churned up by the wheels. Winds--wet and salty, and fresh
from the sea--tugged at our mackintoshes; and flapped the gowns and
wraps of the women where--huddled together away from the rail--we stood
under shelter. Sheets of flying fog--dense, dark and forbidding--went
by; gray ghosts of the ocean’s uneasy dead. And back of the curtain of
falling waters and fog, whistles shrieked shrilly, and the fog horns
uttered their hideous sounds. Bellowing--moaning; moaning--bellowing;
suddenly still.

The city seemed but an endless succession of terraced, water-washed
houses under an endless rain. The storm lashed the waves in the
harbor into running ridges of foam, and on the billows the ferry-boat
(falling and rising, rising and falling) pushed her way through gray
skeleton-ships at anchor, and into her slip at the wharf. The drivers
of wagons and trucks on the lower deck, wrapped in oilskins yellow or
black and all dripping with wet, drove down the echoing planks. Then
the people began to descend the stairways. With my right hand steadying
me, I had taken three downward steps when the gripping at my heart told
me who was passing at my left (always at the left, it had been; at the
left, always) and he of the smoldering eyes that burned into mine like
live embers passed me quickly, and went on down the stairway and into
the rain-wetted crowd.

       *       *       *       *       *

And again----

It happened when, with a guide and some Club friends, we went through
the Chinatown slums of the city.

It was Saturday night; the night of all others for hovels and evil
haunts to disgorge their hives of human bees to swarm through passage
and alley, or up and down the dark and wretched stairways.

We had begun at the Joss Houses--gaudy with tinsel, and close and
choking from the incense of burning tapers. We had gone to restaurant
and theater. At the one, going in through the back way and on through
their cooking rooms where they were preparing strange and repulsive
looking food; at the other, using the stage entrance and going on
the stage with the players. Into opium joints our guide led the way,
where the smokers in their utter degradation lay like the dead, as the
drug carried the dreamers into a land of untranslatable dreams. We
had looked at the pelf in the pawn-shops, and at the painted faces of
Chinese courtesans looking out through their lattices.

Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen
places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond
description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The
Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”--through “Ross Alley,”
where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had
been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of
secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged.
Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved;
and once I passed a little child--a half-caste--toddling through the
alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he
stumbled and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and
laughed.

[Illustration: “Again the sirocco passed.”--Page 79]

Then, somewhere between high walls that reached to the open air, I
found myself alone--left behind by the others. I could see the guide’s
light burning--a tiny red spark--far ahead in the darkness, but my own
candle had gone out. Away up in the narrow slit showing the sky, shone
the cold, still stars. Under my feet crunched clinkers and cinders wet
with a little stream from some sewer running over the ground.

Then in the dark wall a door opened, and as the light from within
lit up the inky blackness without I saw him again. Again the sirocco
passed, burning--scorching the life-blood in my veins.

They came back and found me lying in the wet of the noisome alley. For
weeks, in the hotel, I lay ill; then, as soon as I was able to walk
unassisted, I took passage for Japan, intending to extend my trip to
Suez, and through Europe, on home. I said to myself that I would never
again set foot in San Francisco. I feared that horrible something, the
power of which seemed stronger over me there than elsewhere. Six times
we had met and passed. I shrank from the seventh. Each time that we had
come face to face--met--passed--drifted apart, I heard a voice saying
that my life was being daily drawn closer and closer into his, to be a
part of the warp and woof of his own. And the end? It would be----when?
Where? In what way? What would be that final meeting of ours? How far
off was it? What would that fatal seventh meeting mean for us both?

I fled from the city as one does from the touch of a leper. I dared not
stay.

But the third day out on the ocean there suddenly came over me a
knowledge that a greater force than my own will would compel me to
return. Something bade me go back. I fought with it; I battled with
the dread influence the rest of the voyage. It was useless. I was
a passenger on the ship when it returned to San Francisco. There I
found the whole city talking and horrified, over a murder hideous,
foul, revolting. Carmen de la Guerra, a young Spanish woman, had been
brutally murdered--butchered by her lover. I was sick--chilled, when I
heard. A foreboding of the truth came to me as I listened. I feverishly
read the papers; they told of the tragedy in all its frightful details.
I went to the public libraries for the back files. Then I went to the
jail to look at the face of the fiend who had killed her. I knew whom I
should see behind the bars. It was he. And it was the seventh meeting.

His eyes bade me go and get him release.

“Go!” they said, “Call to your aid all the angels of your heaven, and
the help of the demons who are one with me in hell, that you may save
me from the gallows. My Soul is your Soul; if I die, you also must die
with me. Keep the rope from me; for you are fighting for your own life.
Go!”

       *       *       *       *       *

I went out of the chill jail corridors a madman. I raved against the
hellish destiny. What use? I must save him, or I must die with him.
No one understood. I told no one my secret. Early and late; day and
night I worked unceasingly to get him pardoned. God! how I worked to
save him. I tried every conceivable means to secure him his life. I
exhausted all methods known to the law. I spent money as a mill-wheel
runs water.

“You believe him innocent?--this fiend!” my friends cried
aghast--amazed at my mad eagerness to get him acquittal.

“No! not that!” I answered in my agony, “but he must not die--shall not
hang! Shall not! Do you hear? Innocent or guilty--what do I care? Only
he must live, that I shall not die.”

But no one understood.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has been in vain. At eleven o’clock he is to be hung. The
death-watch is with him. And the death-watch is here, too, with me. Two
are here; and the name of one is Horror, and the other’s name is Fear.
Down below I hear the rattle of traffic on the streets, and in the
hotel corridors I hear the voices of people talking--just now I heard
one laugh. They do not know. And Lucille---- Ah, my poor Lucille!

The tide of life is running out, and the end is drawing nigh. I have
come to find at last that evil is always stronger than good; and in
that way he draws me after him. I cannot hold the half of his Soul
back. Closer and closer together we come. A Divided Soul--his and mine.
His body has housed the evil half--mine the good. His is all that is
vile, and bestial, and bloodthirsty; mine has always striven after the
best. Yet because of his sin I, too, must die.

At the hour of eleven he will hang for the murder of Carmen de la
Guerra. At eleven I, too, must die. As the sheriff cuts the rope,
and the evil Divided Soul swings out eternity-ward from the body
which has housed it evilly, so will I die at that instant--death by
strangulation. For a Divided Soul may not live when its twin is gone.
Death. And then one body in the rosewood casket, and one in its box of
pine.

At eleven----

“Baa! Baa!” I hear the sheep---- No; it is---- What is it? I cannot
see---- Something is being pressed down over my eyes, shutting out the
light. My arms--my feet are being tied--I cannot move. Help! Something
is closing on my neck--I cannot breathe. It is tightening--choking----
I hear the bleating of the sheep---- God! God! I am strangling! The
rope---- It is the rope--and Death.

May God have mercy on my Soul!




[Illustration]

BY THE OIL SEEP UNDER THE BLUFF


Jon Landis turned the bit of black rock over and over in his hand as
he held it under the searching Nevada sunlight. The lids of his light
blue eyes narrowed as he looked, and he chewed nervously at the corner
of his long upper lip under its cropped reddish mustache. Finally, as
though wholly satisfied with the close scrutiny he had given it, he
nodded his head slowly.

“You think he good? All same like that other kin’ you show um me?”

The young Paiute was peering into his palm, too.

“I guess so, Nick,” answered Landis; “Anyway, you no tell um ’nother
man ’bout this. Savvy?”

The Paiute nodded. It was evident that he “savvied.” He had shown
Landis a copper ledge off in the mountains, two years before, and
Landis had given him a hundred dollars. It was Indian Nick’s opinion
that Landis was “heap pretty good man;” and he now recognized the value
of silence until such a time as Landis would let him speak. Other white
men had, before this, got him to show them prospects upon promises,
and--without an exception--had cheated him out of his due. But Jon
Landis was different. This big, quiet man who talked but little, and
never laughed at all--him he would be “partner” with, and show him the
place down by the river where the black rock sample came from, and the
bluffs where--underneath--a queer little spring (that wasn’t water)
oozed forth, and lost itself a dozen feet away in the muddy current of
the greater stream.

Indian Nick didn’t know what that stream--a very, very little
stream--was; and he didn’t care to know. Indians as a rule are not
inquisitive. He only knew it looked “heap greasy;” and if the black
rock on the sandy mesa above was like the piece that Landis showed him,
saying it was from California--then Nick was to have another hundred
dollars.

Now that Landis had “guessed” that the rock sample was the same sort,
Nick (seeing a hundred dollars easily earned) looked furtively about
him as they stood on the railroad track--where the section house and
the freight house were sole evidence of a station--to discover if
they had been observed talking together. For even a Paiute knows that
precaution may prevent a secret from being suspected. No, no one had
seen them together. The section foreman was out on the road with his
men, and the telegraph operator had not come out of his office in the
freight house since he had reported the train that had just brought
Landis back to Nevada. No one from the town (as the mining camp up
in the foothills was called) had come down to the station that day.
The Indian was satisfied; no one would guess that he and Landis were
“partners.”

“You come now; I show you that place. He not far--can walk.”

“How far?”

“Maybe two mile, I think. You see. You come now?”

Landis deliberated. Presently he asked:

“You got a shovel, Nick? Got a pick at your wick-i-up?”

“I got um ol’ one--not much good.”

“Well, never mind; they’ll do for today. You go get ’em, and trot on
ahead. Where is it?”

Nick pointed in the direction of the river bluffs; and when Landis had
reached the mesa the Paiute--with pick and shovel--was already there.

“The ol’ man--my father--asked um me where I go. I no tell um. He ask
what for I take pick--take um shovel--what I do. I no say nothin’.”

“That’s right, Nick! Don’t tell anybody. By an’ by, when I get the
business all fixed, then we’ll talk. Savvy?”

And again Nick “savvied.”

All about them was the black rock from which Nick had got the sample.
Not much of it, but enough to demonstrate the value of what it
indicated. It was undoubtedly asphaltum; the indication for oil was
good--more than good. Landis was interested. The Paiute was moving off
through the stunted greasewood to the bluffs near the river edge, and
Landis followed.

The face of the bluffs--eroded and uneven--rose high above the river
level; leaving but a narrow footway between their base and the
stream, here at this point. Across by the other bank, was a growth of
rabbit-wood and sage. A twisted, leafless buck-bush stood lonely and
alone at the rim of a dry slough. The carcass of a dead horse--victim
of some horse-hide hunter--furnished a gruesome feast for a half dozen
magpies that fluttered chattering away as the two figures appeared
on the top of the bluffs; and a coyote that had been the magpies’
companion, slipped away into the thicket of rabbit-wood. The river
was deep here, and dirty with the debris brought down by its rising
waters. Froth, and broken twigs, and sticks swirled around in the
eddies. To Landis, there was something unspeakably depressing about the
place, though he was well used to the country in all its phases. Its
very stillness seemed today to weigh on him.

The two men began the descent; the Indian slipping quickly down the
face of the bluffs, and Landis clambering after.

There--at the foot--in a gully so narrow it would escape any but the
keenest eye, a tiny, slow-moving, dark thread of a stream oozed from
beneath the bluffs of clay, and following the bottom of the narrow
cut that ran at right angles to the river--slipped down into the
roily waters that bore it away. Landis squatted down by it for closer
inspection. He rubbed it between his fingers. He smelt of it. Yes, it
was oil!

“All right, Nick! You’ll get your hundred dollars!”

Nick grinned delightedly; but the face of Landis--from the high cheek
bones down to the square set jaws that were burned as red as the skin
of an Indian is supposed to be--was a mask of immobility. This find
meant many thousands of dollars to him, but he only said:

“Here, boy! Pitch in now, and dig out under that bank!” as he
pointed out a part of the bluff at the very edge of the gully. And
Nick--strong, and young, and keen as himself to know how much of the
“greasy” stream was dammed up behind the bluffs that the pick could
disclose, swung it with strong strokes that ate into the clay in a way
that did Landis good to see.

He had been working but a short time when the pick point caught into
something other than lumps of clay; caught at it--clawed at it--and
then dragged out (one--two--half a dozen) bones stripped of all flesh.

Nick stopped.

“What are you stopping for?” Landis asked sharply. “Go on! It’s only
some horse or a cow that’s died here.” But already he himself had seen
the thigh bone of a human being. Nick hesitated; still staring at what
lay there.

“Damn you, go on! What’s the matter with you?”

The steady strokes recommenced. Little by little there was uncovered
and dragged out the skeleton of someone Who Once Was. Nick looked
sullen and strange, but he did not falter. He worked steadily on until
they lay--an indistinguishable heap--beside the narrow gully. Landis
said nothing, and the pick strokes ate farther and farther into the
bank.

Suddenly there was a terrible sound--half a shriek and half a gurgle
that died away in the throat--which startled them; and swinging around,
Landis saw an old Indian tottering along the narrow ledge that bordered
the river there. He was stumbling and blindly staggering toward them,
waving his arms above his head as he came. A bareheaded, vilely dirty
and ragged old man--how old no one might be able to say. As his bleared
eyes found the skeleton heap, he shrieked forth in the Indian tongue
something (though Landis knew no word of what he might say) that sent
a chill over him of prescient knowledge of what was to come. He turned
his back on the old man, and addressed himself to Nick.

“What does he say?”

The younger Paiute looked old and gray with a horror that Landis
refused to translate.

“My father----”

“Yes, I know. Your father. What does he say?”

“My father----” Nick’s words came slowly, “He say----them----bones----”

“For God’s sake, what? Why don’t you say what? Can’t you talk?”

“Them,” Nick’s teeth were chattering now, “my----my----mother.”

Landis caught his breath. Then a stinging pain shot through his left
arm, and something fell to the ground. He swung around in time to
see the old Paiute, with another stone in his raised hand, his face
distorted with hate and fury.

“Quit that!” Landis yelled, and strode toward him. But the old man’s
fury was now turned to fear as he saw this white giant bearing down on
him, and the stone fell short of its mark. He started to flee before
the strength he feared, but the narrow ledge that lay between the river
and the bluff would have been but insecure foothold for steadier steps
than his. He tripped--reeled--and then with a cry that Landis will
remember so long as he lives--he went backward; and down into the muddy
river the eddies sucked him--down and down--and so out of sight.

Then Jon Landis fought with the one who, with raised pick, stood ready
to avenge the death of his father, and the desecration of his other
dead. The struggle was not long, but they fought as men do who know
that but one man shall live when the combat be done. Twice the pick
descending almost struck the bared head of the white man; thrice his
adversary forced him to the very water’s edge. Landis knew he was
fighting for his life, and he watched his opportunity. It came. Eluding
that rain of death-meant blows, he caught the Indian close to him, and
with a quick movement flung the pick far out into the river. Then they
clinched in the final struggle for life that to the white man or the
brown man is equally dear. Back and forth, swaying and bending, the hot
breath of each in the other’s face, they moved over the narrow confine.
It was not for long; for--with one mighty final effort--Landis wrenched
himself loose, caught at the other, shoved--flung him off, and it was
over. Jon Landis stood there alone.

The fleshless skull grinned out at him from the heap of bones. Landis
shivered; he felt cold. Overhead, clouds like swansdown were beautiful
against the sapphire blue of the afternoon sky. A soft wind blowing
down the valley brought him the sound of a locomotive’s whistle; and
the breeze was sweet with the breath of spring flowers growing upon the
banks, away from the bluffs. A little brown bird began to warble from
the buck-brush across the river.

It must have been five minutes that Landis stood there without moving.
Then he picked up the shovel and walked over to the Indian woman’s
bones. It did not take him long to dump them into the little gully
where the oil ran, and to cover them over with loose earth from the
place she had lain for thirty years. Afterward, he scraped the earth
about with the broken shovel, to destroy all footprints. Then he
dropped it into the stream. He would never come here again; and now
there was no evidence that he had ever been there.

Then he climbed the bluffs. Nor did he look back as he walked rapidly
away.




[Illustration]

THE BLUE-EYED CHIEF


It sounds a bit melodramatic, in these days of “Carlisle” education
for the Indian, and with “Lo” himself on the lecture platform, to tell
of a band of one time hostile red men having a white chief--once a
captive--who so learned to love his captivity that when freedom was
to be had for the taking, he refused it, and still lives among them,
voluntarily. Contentedly--happily? Who knows? He says so; and with no
proof to the contrary we must needs believe him.

Once in every three years he leaves his home among the mountains of
eastern Oregon, and goes for a week to San Francisco by the sea. Once
in every three years he may be seen there on the streets, in the
parks, at the theaters, on the beach, at the Cliff or the Heights, as
strangers are seen daily, and with nothing about him to mark him in
any wise different from a thousand others. You might pass him dozens
of times without particularly observing him, save that he is always
accompanied by a woman so evidently of a different world than that
which he has known, that your attention is at once arrested, and your
curiosity is whetted to know the story--for story there is, you are
sure. And what a story! One does not have to go to fiction for tales
of the marvelous; and these two--he, roughened, bearded and browned,
clothed as the average American laborer taking a holiday; she, with
the bearing of a gentlewoman, and dressed as they do who have found the
treasure-trove that lies at the end of the rainbow--these two have a
tragic story, all their own, that few know. It is this:

Back in those far days when the Pacific Railroad was undreamed
of--before we had so much as ever guessed there might in reality be a
stage line between the Missouri and the Sacramento--one noon the wheels
of an emigrant wagon were moving down a wide Nevada valley, where the
sage gray of the short greasewood was the only thing remotely green;
moving so slowly that they seemed not to move at all. It was a family
from one of the States of our Middle West, going to California. The man
walked beside the slow-moving wagon. Sometimes some of the children
walked, too. The woman rode and held in her arms a wee boy whose own
arms fought and sturdy legs struggled often to walk with the others--a
blue-eyed boy, bonny and beautiful.

Days and days of unblinking sunshine; and always the awful stillness
of the plains. There had been weeks of it; and this day when they came
down the broad wash that was the drain from the bordering mountain
range, a thick heat lay on the land, making welcome the promised noon
rest where the greasewood grew tall. All down the length of the now dry
wash the brush was more than shoulder high--annually wetted as it was
by the full spring creek.

When the greasewood grows so high it may easily hide a foe.

The wagon bumped and ground its wheels over the stones of the road here
in the wash toward the row of tall greasewood, a dozen yards away. Over
there they would halt for a noon rest. Over there they would eat their
noon meal--drink from their scanty water supply--and then resume the
dreary journey.

This day was just such an one as all their other desert days had been;
the place seemed to them not different in any way from the other
miles of endless monotony. As they neared the high brush, one of the
children--a fair-haired girl of eight--picking up a bright pebble from
the road, held it up that her father might see. The other children
walking beside the wagon picked up pebbles, too--pebbles red, and
purple, and green, that had come down the bed of the creek when the
flood came. In the wagon the woman sat holding the blue-eyed boy in her
arms.

Then----

There was a swift, singing sound in the air, and one of the oxen
staggered--bellowed--fell!

The sound of an arrow boring the air isn’t quite like anything else one
may ever hear; and the man knew--before he heard the big steer’s roar
of pain--that the thing he had feared (but had at last come to believe
he had no cause to fear, when weeks passed and it had not happened) had
finally come to them.

Dashing out from the greasewood cover, the Indians--half naked and
wholly devilish--made quick work of their victims. They did not dally
in what they had to do. Back on the plains another wagon--two, three,
four, a train!--was coming; they did not dare to stay to meet such
numbers. They struck only when sure of their strength. Now they were
two to one--nay, ten men to one man! And he, that man, went down with a
wife’s shrieks and the screaming of children’s voices in his ears.

It was the old story of early times and emigrants on the plains. You
have heard it time and again.

After the arrow, the knife; and bloody corpses left by a burning
wagon. Things done to turn sick with horror the next lone wayfarers who
should reach this gruesome spot. Human flesh and bone for the vultures
of the air and the wolves of the desert to feed upon, till--taken from
their preying talon and tooth--they might be laid in the shallow graves
hollowed by the roadside.

Yet one was spared. The wee bonny laddie wrested from the clinging arms
of a dying mother, was held apart to witness a butchery that strained
the childish eyes with terror. He lived, but never was he to forget the
awful scene of that hour in the desert. And when the brutal work was
over, savage arms bore him away to their homes on the heights of near
mountains gashed by many a cañon.

There, for years upon years--growing from babyhood to boyhood--from
boyhood to youth--he lived among them; and so became as one of their
tribe. They were a small tribe--these--of renegade Bannocks; shifting
their camps further and further into the North, and away from the White
Man’s approach as civilization began to force them back. Northward; and
at last into Oregon.

The sturdy little frame remained sturdy. Some children there are who
persist in thriving under the most adverse conditions. And he was
one of these. Yet, it must be admitted, his captors were kind; for
the Indian--savage though he may be--deals gently, always, with his
children; and this boy had become to them as their own.

The baby words of the White Man’s tongue were soon forgotten, and
Indian gutterals took their place. The little feet were moccasined with
deerskin, and the round cheeks daubed with paint. The little body was
kept warm in a rabbitskin robe. Their food was his food--grass seeds
ground into paste, and game; and his friends were themselves. To all
intents and purposes he had become an Indian.

When, at length, he reached early manhood he took to himself an Indian
bride. Then the tribe made him their chief.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mines in the mountains had brought an army of prospectors into
the once wild country. The mines prospered, and camps--permanent
ones--multiplied. The Red Men saw their enemy growing in numbers beyond
their strength to battle, so the depredations became fewer and fewer,
and finally ceased altogether. “Lo” is something of a philosopher, and
he generally accepts defeat with a better grace than his white brother.
These knew they were beaten, so they were willing to accept peace;
and began to mix, by degrees, with the Whites. They adopted the White
Man’s dress--some learned his speech. The blue-eyed chief, too, whose
position among them was never quite clear to the miners, again learned
the language that seemed as one he had never known.

It was a long time before he came to realize that his chains of
captivity had dropped away--rusted apart by time and circumstances--and
that he might now, if he so chose, go back to the people of his own
blood. He thought of it dully, indifferently, at first--then deeply.
The way was open for him! He could go! But he came to know that down in
the depths of his heart an affection had grown up for these people who
had made him their own, that no other people could lay claim to, ever.
That for all the days of his life his lot was here.

The awful events of that long gone day in the desert were too deeply
branded into his recollection ever to be forgotten (young child though
he was at the time); but the years had dimmed its horrors, and the
associations of a lifetime had dulled his sensibilities.

No! he would remain among them. As he had been, he would still be--one
of them. He had lost all desire to go. How many years had come and gone
since the longing for liberty left him? He could not remember. This was
his home--these were his people--he would stay.

And there he is today. There, a dozen years ago, a San Franciscan,
drawn by the mines, found him; and during a summer’s companionship,
gaining his confidence, learned from his lips his story.

Months later, this thrice strange tale served to entertain half a score
of people who met together in his parlors on his return. They gathered
around the story teller--close listeners--intent on every syllable; but
one there was who went white as she heard. And when she could see him
apart and unnoted, she said:

“He is my brother! I saw them take him away. I was hid behind a
greasewood bush--I do not know how they overlooked me. I saw it
all--everything! Then, those in an emigrant train behind ours, came and
took me with them. I was a little child then--only eight; and he--my
brother--was younger. I thought they had taken him away and killed
him--I never guessed he lived. I know--I am sure this is he. Tell me
all you can; for I must go and find him.”

       *       *       *       *       *

What that meeting was, no one can say. She found him there surrounded
by those who were his nearest and dearest--a brown-skinned wife and
little bronze bairns--his! She stood face to face with him--she clasped
hands with him; yet a lifetime and all the world lay between. Children
of the loins of one father--born of the same mother--these two had
nothing in common between them--nothing--save the yearning for a
something that was always to lie just beyond.

He yielded to her persuasions and went home with her to see the city by
the sea of which he had heard much, but knew nothing. It was a visit of
but a few days; yet in that time no hour struck for each alike. Try as
each would for a feeling of kinship, the other was ever a stranger.

She showed him the sights of the city, but he was more and more
bewildered by what he saw. At the beach it was better; he seemed to
understand the ocean best, though seeing it for the first time. She
sought to awaken in him an interest in the things of her world. And
to his credit be it said, he honestly tried to respond in the way she
would have him.

But up and away to the Northeast was all he had interest in or heart
for; and so at the end of a week he went back. Going, he pledged
himself to come to her every third year for a week’s stay; for “blood
is thicker than water,” and though they might never strike the same
chord, yet, after all, she was his sister.

The years wax and wane. Every third one brings in fulfillment of the
promise, the very commonplace-looking brother who is something of a
mystery to her metropolitan friends. Time has brought brother and
sister a little more closely together, but it will never bridge the
chasm. Always there is a restraint, a reserve, which comes from a
common knowledge that there are things in his past life he may not
tell--yet, which she guesses with an unspoken, unnamed fear.

Once (when the bronze-brown woman was dead), he tried to accept
civilized life as a finality. The month had not rounded out to
fullness when each saw the futility of the attempt.

Back on the rough Oregon mountains were sons and daughters, “flesh of
his flesh, bone of his bone,” brown-skinned though they were; and he
turned his back on the White Man and his unfamiliar ways, and set his
face toward those whom he knew best and loved.

Somehow, you like and respect the man for going, as you couldn’t had he
stayed.

The story reads like fiction, doesn’t it? But the pity of it is that it
is true.




[Illustration]

ACCORDING TO ONE’S STANDPOINT


There were three people in the group on the station platform at
Humboldt. The two who were standing were a white man and a white woman.

The man was tall, with breadth in his shoulders, five-and-thirty, and
rather good looking. His dress evidenced prosperity, and his manner
betokened long residence in a city--one of the cities east of the
Mississippi.

The woman also was tall; and graceful, and very pretty, and not over
twenty-five years of age. She was, without doubt, a bride, and--equally
without doubt--a fit mate for the man. She carried her chin high (a
trick common to those wearing eye-glasses) and moved with an air of
being quite sure of her social position. She was inconspicuously
dressed, but her gown, when she walked, rustled in the way that speaks
of silken linings. She looked like a woman whose boots were always made
to order, and who, each night, had an hour spent upon brushing her hair.

The third person in the group was an Indian. A Paiute fifty years old,
but who looked twenty years older. Old George. His little withered
brown face was puckered into a whimsical smile as with head aslant
he looked up from where he sat on the bench that was built round a
tree-box. This was his frequent seat when the trains came in, and here
he came daily to answer the inquisitive questions of people who deem
themselves well bred.

He was old, and much dirtier than even the others of his race. But he
afforded entertainment for the travelers whose pleasure it was to put
questions.

“Yep, me old. ‘Forty?’ I guess so. ‘One hundred?’ Maybe so; I no know.”
He chuckled. It was the same thing over and over again that they--on
the trains--asked him every day. Not a whit cared he what they asked,
nor was it worth while telling the truth. When they asked he answered;
saying the things they wanted to hear. And sometimes they gave him
nickels. That was all there was about it.

“Where did he live?” “What did he eat?” “Did he work?” his inquisitors
queried. “Was he married?” and “Had he any children?” “Had he ever
killed any white men?” Then they would note his maimed, misshapen
limbs. “How long ago had his leg been broken?” “In what way had he
crippled his hands?” But to all there were the same replies:

“I no know. Maybe so. I guess so.”

What did it matter? They were satisfied. And meddlers they were.
Yet----generally he got the waited-for nickel.

So today he answered even as they questioned. Then the woman
(pretty, and with an unmistakable air of good breeding) nodded
and said: “Good-by!” and the man (well-mannered, well-groomed and
self-complacent) gave him a silver quarter as he went back to the
“Pullman.”

“Henry, dear,” she asked, after they had settled themselves comfortably
again in their compartment of the sleeping-car, “how do such creatures
exist? Do they work, or only sit idly in the sun waiting for someone
to give them one or two nickels?”

“Oh, he is a confirmed beggar, one can see! They never work--these
Paiutes. Mere animals are they, eating, drinking and sleeping as
animals,” her husband replied. “So degenerate have they become since
the days when they were a wild tribe and warriors that they go through
life now in docile stupidity, without anything rousing them to what we
would call a live interest in their surroundings. I doubt very much if,
in the life of any one of them, there ever occurs any stirring event.
Perhaps it is just as well, for at least it gives them a peaceful old
age, and they can have no harassing recollections.”

“And no happy ones, either,” the woman said. “Think what it must be
to live out one’s allotted time of physical existence without ever
experiencing the faintest romance--without even a gleam of what love
means! I presume that the sense of attachment is unknown to them; such
affection as----”

“As ours?” he interrupted laughingly. “Well, rather unknown I should
say.”

The man looked with fond eyes into the eyes of the woman; then, as the
train pulled out of the station, they saw the old Indian limping away
toward his camp.

       *       *       *       *       *

Are the individual histories of Indians--even Paiutes--even the
“degenerate tribes”--uneventful or wholly devoid of human interest? Let
us see.

Old George can tell you a different story, it may be. From his point of
view there is perhaps love; perhaps even romance. Much depends upon the
standpoint one takes. The hills that look high from the valley, seem
low looking down from the mountain.

When I first knew George (he was “Young George” then), he was married
and had children. Four; two boys and two girls. More than other
Indians, he aped the Whites in their ways, and was reckoned (for a
Paiute) a decent fellow. His camp was the best, his food the most
plentiful, and his children the best kept and cleanest. The mother
sewed well, and neither she nor the children ever went ragged. Among
Indians they were as the hard-working, temperate laborer’s family is
among the white men who work--work with their hands for a living.

George had money laid by--joint earnings of his own and of Susan, his
wife. He worked at the settlers’ wood-piles in winter, chopping wood;
and in summer he worked in the hay fields. She washed and ironed for
the white families. Wage was high in those days, and George and Susan
prospered. That was a contented little camp built there in the tall
sagebrush, and they were happy as needs be.

And then----

There happened that which is not always confined to the camp of the
red man. It was the old story-- another woman. Well, has not the world
seen such things before? There are women--even those without the dower
of beauty--of whose strange power no explanation can be given save
that they can, and do, “charm men.” And in no less measure was this
brown-skinned woman a charmer. She had already parted more than one
husband and wife--had destroyed the peace and quiet of more than one
home, when she and George stood where the ways met.

If this had happened some three thousand years ago, and she had lived
on the banks of the Nile, and if you were a poet, or a recorder of
history, no doubt you would have written her down a siren--a dark-eyed
charmer of men--a sorceress of Egypt; but she lived on the Humboldt
river instead, and all this happened within the last four decades, and
she was only a squaw of one of our North American tribes. Neither was
she a pretty squaw judged by our cañons of beauty. Yet are not such
things matters of geography governed by traditions? And when a man
is bewitched by a man, brown-skinned or white, he is very apt to see
charms where another cannot discover them.

Sophy, the siren, came into the camp, and with her coming fled peace.
Poor Susan, unloved and deserted, sat apart and cried her heart out--as
many a white woman has done before her, and since--when powerless
to prevent, or right the wrong that was done her. So, bewitched and
befooled, George gave himself up to the madness that was his undoing.
The money which had been laid by went like water held in the hand. The
camp was neglected; the stores were wasted. The children, from whom the
mother had been banished, went ragged and oftentimes hungry.

It took George a long time to awake from his delirium, but he did
awaken finally--after many months. All things come--some day--to the
writing of “finis.” And no joy falls so soon and so completely as the
joy built on an unsound foundation. One day George came to his senses.
Then he cast the woman out; cast her out, and forever. He brought back
to his home the mother of his children, and she foregave him. Well,
what would you?--she was his wife, and a woman forgives much for the
sake of the children she has held to her breast. So the camp was made
tidy again and the children cared for as of old, and there were new
stores gathered, and money was again saved.

Now George--being an Indian, being a Paiute--had never heard of Colley
Cibber, else he might have been reminded that “we shall find no fiend
in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman--scorned! slighted!
dismissed without a parting pang.” Neither did George--being a Paiute
Indian--know the meaning of the word “Nemesis.”

That was more than twenty years ago; and for more than twenty years the
woman, Sophy, made his life a series of persecutions. If he builded
aught at the camp, it was torn down; what he raised in his garden was
destroyed; what he bought, was quickly broken. Horses were driven
far astray; and his favorite dogs were poisoned. Then, when she had
exhausted all her ingenuity in these and a hundred other ways of making
his life a torment, she turned her wiles on Doctor Jim, one of the
great medicine men of the tribe, married to Susan’s mother, and an
inmate of George’s camp. Doctor Jim’s long residence in the house had
given to George a certain enviable status among the Indians, and this
prestige the woman now meant to destroy. On Doctor Jim were bestowed
her blandishments, and--like George before him--he was fain to follow
whither she led. With the medicine man’s going, departed the glory of
the house. And it left, in the person of the deserted wife, another
mouth for George to feed; while at the same time the assisting support
which Doctor Jim had given the household was taken away.

Troubles came thick and fast to Old George. He had begun to be called
“Old” George now. One day while he was handling a cartridge it
accidentally exploded and tore away part of his hand. This hampered him
in what work he got to do; and sometimes because of it he was refused
employment. Then the evil fate that had chosen him for a plaything,
threw him from a train running at full speed, and left him lying on
the track with broken legs, and pitifully crippled. He got well after
many weary months while Susan nursed him, and between whiles of nursing
earned the living for the dwellers within the camp. When Spring came,
Susan died.

On George fell the care of the four children. It was harder for him to
work now, and there was less to be earned; yet he worked the harder
for his four. Another year; and there were but two for him to shelter
and to feed. The great White Plague stops not at the camps of the
White man, but has hunted out the Red man in his wick-i-up, and is
fast decreasing the number of the tribe; so two--the older two--of the
children had gone to answer its call, and George was alone with the two
that were hardly more than babies. Mourning for his dead, he must yet
work for the living.

We give our sympathy to the woman left widowed who has little children
looking to her for support. But she seldom fails in her trust, for the
world is usually kind to a woman and ready to lend her aid. Rather give
of your pity to the father who has babes to provide for when there is
no woman to take up the burden with him. He must care for the home, and
must go out in the world, as well, to work. Remember the burden is no
less hard for him to bear even so be he is an Indian. It may not seem
so to you, a white man, but you must recollect that the Indian takes a
different point of view.

Long, long after his children were grown, and the old grandmother
was dead, and George was living in his camp with grandchildren about
him, the woman came again--she, Sophy, came to him--trying to win him
back now that the woman he cared most for was dead. Sophy at last had
tired of her revenge, had tired of jealousy and strife; had tired of
everything in life but the one man who had once cast her off. Doctor
Jim was dead--had died many years before. And so she came to the one
she cared for still--as even she had cared most for. For George she
cared always; so she came and stood at his door. Many snows had come
and gone since his blood had moved at her will; and now it was too late
for her influence to weigh with him. He was old; and when he sat before
the campfire and saw a woman’s face move to and fro in the the smoke
wreaths, it was the face of the woman who best loved him, always--not
the face of the one he had loved for a time--that he saw.

So she went away, and at last there was peace between them. She died
the other day. But George--Old George--lives still, and alone. He goes
to the station day after day, as is his habit, and watches the trains
as they come in, and answers the questions of the inquisitive travelers.

       *       *       *       *       *

If my characters were white you might call this a love story with a bit
of romance threaded in. Perhaps you will, anyway. For it all depends
upon how you look at it. It is just a little story of what is happening
all the while everywhere in the world. Love and jealousy; hatred and
revenge. It does not very much matter whether they live on the water
side of Beacon street (as they do who stood talking to Old George
yesterday); or whether it is in the wick-i-ups of the sagebrush out on
the great Nevada plains. These things come into the lives of all races
alike.

George paid for the folly of his youth, as the transgressor usually
does have to pay. If you live by the sea in the East, you will perhaps
call this a punishment for George laid upon him as a rebuke by the
“hand of divine Providence.” But if your home is by the Western sea,
and you have knocked about a bit on the rough trails in the West, you
will mayhap see in it only the workings of “natural law.”

That is all. It is a little story, but quite true. It might very easily
have been made a White man’s story; but it isn’t, it is only the true
story of a Paiute.

George is an Indian; but one in a whole tribe--each having his own
story. And the tribe is but one of the race. And the race----

Are we not brothers?

For, the world over, under white skin or skin of bronze-brown, the
human heart throbs the same; for we are brothers--ay! brothers all.

Yet, even so, there is still the point of view.




[Illustration]

WHERE THE BURROS BROWSED


“Hello, Dick!”

“Hello, Reddy!”

Seven little gray burros--browsing upon the dust-covered
chamiso--lifted their heads at the words; and turned seven mealy noses
and seven pairs of inquisitive ears toward the speakers in indolent
curiosity.

The two men who met upon the mesa had been drawing slowly together on
the long white road winding up toward the mountain a dozen miles away.
The dust, raised by the shuffling feet of their horses, floated--a
long streamer of white--down toward the muddy, crooked river in the
valley far below. The dust had whitened, too, the slouch hats and worn
blue overalls they wore; and their faces were marked with furrows,
burned deep by the harsh, relentless sun of the plains. It was pouring
its rays down now with the fierce malignance of some demon bent on
destroying every vestige of plant-life that had the temerity to put
forth its young shoots; and save for the scant bunch-grass, and the
sage, and the greasewood, and a few distant and scattering junipers
that grew dark upon the mountains beyond, no growth of vegetation
was to be seen. It was within an hour of noon, and the scorching
rays descended upon the blistered earth through a silver-gray haze
that--reaching across the valley--quivered over the scene like the heat
that comes through an open furnace-door.

Little gray lizards with black, shining eyes; little horned toads
with prickly backs, lay with palpitating bodies in the scant shade.
The saucy Paiute squirrels which earlier in the day darted in and out
of their burrows, had now disappeared into subterranean darkness.
Jack-rabbits, with limp ears lying back, crouched under the edges of
the greasewood. The three horses stood with listless, drooping heads;
the two men sat with listless, drooping bodies--one leaning forward to
rest his crossed arms on the horn of the Mexican saddle he bestrode;
the other, with loosely held reins between his fingers, leaned with his
elbows on his knees.

After the brief Western greeting, the one on the buckskin horse asked
carelessly:

“Been in with some hides, Reddy?”

“Yep.”

“What luck you been havin’?”

“Poor. Tell you what ’tis, Dick, I ain’t seen more’n fifty head o’
horses sence we been a-campin’ at Big Deer Spring; an’ the’re so wild
you can’t git to within a mile of ’em. Tommy an’ me are goin’ to move.
They’re waterin’ over to them deep springs north.”

“Yaas,” drawled the other, “they’ve been shot among so much they’re
gittin’ scarry. Me an’ my pardner are campin’ over at the mine with
them Dagos there; but we don’t see many bunches of horses around,
nohow. Guess we’ll skin out next week, an’ go over to The Cedars. I
don’t s’pose----” he moved his horse nearer to the wagon, and bent a
contemplative gaze upon one of the front wheels--“I don’t s’pose Austin
an’ the Kid’ll kick if we do crowd over on their lay-out a little; for
there must be near a thousand head o’ mustangs over ’round them Cedars
that ain’t never heard a gun yit. So’t there’d be good shootin’ for all
of us, an’ plenty o’ horses to go ’round. Hey?”

The other nodded his head affirmatively.

“But that Austin’s a queer sort of a feller! Wanted him to come in
with my pardner an’ me (he’s an all-fired good shot--good as I am
myself; an’ I c’n shoot all I c’n skin in a day), an’ I thought him
an’ me could do the shootin’, an’ my pardner an’ the Kid could do
the skinnin.’ But, no sir-ee; he wouldn’t have it! Just said the Kid
couldn’t come; an’ ’t two was enough in a camp, anyway. He’s about as
stand-offish as anybody I ever see. I ain’t sorry now’t he didn’t take
up with my offer; for the boys say that the Kid wouldn’t be no ’count
along anyway. He can’t shoot; and he just nat’rally won’t skin ’em--too
squeamish an’ ladylike. Aw!”

“I know. He just tags ’round after Austin all day; an’ don’t never seem
to want to git more’n a hunderd yards from him. An’ Austin’s just about
as bad stuck on the Kid,” said Reddy.

“Yaas, I know it; an’ that’s what beats me. I don’t see what they’re
stuck so on each other for,” said Dick, as he leaned back in the saddle
and rammed a hand into the depths of a pocket of his overalls. As he
drew forth a section of “star plug” he tapped the buckskin’s flanks
with his heels to urge the sorry specimen of horseflesh closer to the
wagon.

“Chaw?”

The smaller man accepted. Turning the square over and giving each side
a cursory glance, he picked off the tin tag--a tiny star--and set
his jaws into an inviting corner, bending it back and forth in his
endeavor to wrench off a generous mouthful. Passing it in silence back
to the owner (who regaled himself also with a like quantity before
returning it to his pocket), and having--with the aid of thumbnail and
forefinger--snapped the shining little star at a big horse-fly that was
industriously sucking blood from the roan’s back, he remarked:

“Hides is gone up.”

“That so?” exclaimed Dick, with animation; “what they worth now?”

“Dollar an’ a quarter, to a dollar an’ six bits; and three dollars for
extra big ones. Manes is worth two bits a pound. What you comin’ in
for?”

“Ca’tridges. Shot mine all away.”

“I c’n let you have some till you git your’n, if you want. What’s your
gun--forty-five eighty-five Marlin?” asked Reddy.

“Nope--won’t do,” answered Dick; “mine’s Remington forty-ninety. Much
’bliged, though.”

“Say, Dick!” exclaimed Reddy, “them Mexicans down on the river are
comin’ out to run mustangs. I saw that Black Joaquin an’ his brother
yist’day, an’ told ’em if they wanted to run ’em anywheres out on our
lay-out, that we wouldn’t make no kick if they’d let us in for a share.
See? They think they c’n run in about a hunderd an’ fifty head, anyway.
An’ they’ll furnish the manada, an’ the saddle horses, an’ all, for the
whole crowd. So, I told ’em. ‘All right! go ahead, as far as me an’
my pardner are concerned.’ He says Austin’s agreed. How are you an’
Johnny? Willin’?”

“Oh, yes; I’m willin’,” answered Dick, as he jerked at the bridle-rein,
disturbing the buckskin’s doze. “Well, good luck to you! See you again!”

“Same to yourself. So long!” answered Reddy.

The saddle-horse fell into a jog trot again to the pricking of the
spur; and the sorry span started the wagon groaning and rattling on
its way up the road whose furrows were cut deep by the great teams
that hauled sulphur and borax from the furthest mountains down to the
railroad in the valley.

The creaking and rattling of the wagon had only just recommenced, when
Reddy stopped his team to call back.

“Oh, Dick!”

“Hello!”

The little burros that had returned to nibbling on the brush, again
lifted their heads at this second interruption.

“Say! Austin ast me to git him a San Fr’ncisco paper so as he could see
what hides is quoted at; an’ I plum clean forgot it. Wisht you’d bring
out one to him when you come!”

“All right! So long!”

“So long!”

The men moved on again. And the two streamers of white dust grew
farther and farther apart, till they had faded out of sight in the hazy
distance.

The burros were left in undisturbed possession of the mesa the rest
of the stifling hot day, while they browsed along on the greasewood.
Late in the afternoon their little hoofs turned into a wild horse trail
which led them, single-file, down to the river where the mealy muzzles
were plunged into the swift, muddy current for a drink.

But while they had been munching the uninviting brush and sage, and
flicking the flies away with their absurd paint-brush tails, Harvey
Austin, over on the foothills near the Cedars, sat in the tent which
was now the only home he knew; and with his hat fanned the face of the
one whom the horse-hunters had named “The Kid.”

The boy, who had been ailing, was asleep now; but the flushed cheeks,
and parched lips that were always calling for water, were cause enough
for the fear that came over Austin as he sat there. What if this were
but the beginning of a long fever? Suppose there should be a serious
illness for him?

Again Austin asked himself the same questions that he was putting to
himself daily. What had the future in store for them? From here, where
were they to go? To stay through the long winter, with the mercury
below zero, and the wild blasts of wind about their tent--perhaps to be
buried in deep snow--all these things were not to be considered for a
moment. Before the coming of winter they must go. But where? Only away
from civilization were they safe.

He had come to see, at last, that they had both made a horrible mistake
of life. In the beginning of this, it had not seemed so; things looked
differently--at first. But, at times, of late there had come a feeling
of repulsion over him for which he could not account. Was it the
aftermath of wrong-doing? Well, he must make the best of it; it was
too late to undo all that had been done. He must bear it--the larger
share--as best he could. He said to himself that, thank God! at least
he was enough of a man to hide from the “little one” what he himself
was beginning to feel.

It is the great immutable law that the fruits of pleasure, plucked by
the hands of sin, shall turn to bitterness between the lips. For sin,
there is suffering; and for wrong-doing, regret. None escape the great
law of compensation. Justice must have payment for the defiance of her
laws.

Austin drew his breath in sharply. Oh, merciful God! how long was this
way of living to last? Why, he might live on thirty--forty--fifty
years yet! Penniless, what was their future to be? To return to that
world which, through their past years, had surrounded them with all
those things that make life worth living, would be to tempt a worse
fate than awaited them here. The desolation which spread around them
in the foothills of the bare, lonely mountains was as naught to the
humiliation of returning to the peopled places where most would know
them, yet few would choose to recognize.

It had not seemed that the price they would have to pay would be so
dear when first he had faced the possible results of their rash act.
Was it only a twelve-month ago? Why, it might have been twelve times
twelve, so long ago did it seem since he was walking among men holding
his head up, and looking fearlessly into the eyes of honest fellows who
greeted him with warm hand-clasps.

His face had a strained look as he let his eyes fall on the
unconscious figure beside him; and a strange expression--almost one of
aversion--swept across his features. But he drew himself up quickly,
tossing his head back with a movement as though--by the act--he could
cast off something which might, perhaps, master him. For some time he
sat there, his sensitive, refined face rigid and set, fixing his eyes
on vacancy. Then he sank back, sighing wearily.

Before him was memory’s moving panorama of a splendid past. Out of the
many pictures--plainer than all the rest--rose the face of the man who
had befriended him; the one to whom he owed all he had ever been, or
enjoyed. The one but for whom he would have been left, when a boy, to
the chill charity of strangers. From that generous hand he had received
an education befitting the heir to great wealth, and that noble heart
had given such love and care as few sons receive from a parent. He
could now, in recollection, see the austere face of his guardian
softening into affectionate smiles as his tender gaze fell on his two
wards--himself, and the pretty, willful Mildred. Only they whom he so
fondly loved knew the great depths of tenderness and gentleness in his
nature. It stung Austin now to think of it; it shamed him as well.

       *       *       *       *       *

And was he--this coward hiding in the mountains of the West, leading
a hateful existence hunting wild horses for the few dollars that the
hides would bring, that he might be able to buy the necessaries of
life, since he had failed to get work in any other calling--was he the
one whom John Morton had once loved and trusted? He shuddered with
disgust; no man could feel a greater contempt for him, than he felt for
himself.

He rose abruptly and walked to the opening of the tent, looking out
on the sweep of sagebrush-covered foothills about him. It was useless
to think of the past, or to give way to remorse or idle regrets. What
was done could not be undone. He must arrange, as best he could, for
the future years, and provide for the needs of the present. He must do
his best in caring for and protecting the one for whom this life was
harder--far harder--than for himself.

He turned his back on the dreary landscape before him, and came back
into the tent, busying himself about camp duties till the other awoke.
And the young eyes--wistful and sad--that kept seeking Austin’s, saw no
trace of the heartache and remorse he was bravely trying to bury.

When the sun had gone down behind their mountain, and a welcome
coolness had settled itself over the burning ground, they went to
sit by the spring that bubbled out of the hillside. All through the
twilight they sat without speaking, their thoughts far away. Then
darkness came and hid the barren hills, mercifully shutting from their
sight the pitiful poverty of the life that was now theirs. A soft west
wind sprung up; and the balmy night air, cool and dry, seemed to have
driven away much of the illness the boy had felt through the day. They
sat in a silence unbroken only by the crickets’ perpetual shrilling,
the hoot of a ground owl, and a coyote yelping to its mate across the
cañon. When the first prolonged cry pierced the air, the slight form
had nestled instinctively closer to Austin. Then the mournful wail
of the little gray ghost of the plains grew fainter and fainter, and
finally ceased altogether, as he trotted away over the ridge, in quest
of a freshly-skinned carcass where some unfortunate horse had fallen a
victim to the sure aim of some horse hunter.

They sat for nearly an hour in the silence of night in the mountains,
Austin wondering if the time would ever come when the “little one”
would guess how miserably tired of it he had become in less than a
year. He hoped--prayed, the other would never know. And (worse still)
would a sickening disgust ever find its way into that other heart, as
it had into his own? With all his soul he silently prayed it might
never be so.

“Come, little one,” he said, gently, “we must go in. It is late.”

The other made no response.

“Don’t you want to go yet? Are you not sleepy--and a little bit tired,
poor child?”

Still no answer, though Austin knew he was heard. He waited. Then----

“Harvey,”--the voice was almost a whisper--“we have seen some happy
days--sometimes--and you have always been good to me; but, do you----
I mean, when you remember what we have lost, and what we are and must
always remain, do you find in this life we are living, compensation
enough for all that we suffer? Do you? Tell me!”

So! it had come to the other one, too.

       *       *       *       *       *

A day of fast, hard riding had drawn to its close. Reddy and Dick, and
their “pardners,” and Black Joaquin and his brother, together with two
or three others had made their first day’s run of wild mustangs. Three
or four “bunches” of native wild horses had been surrounded and driven
with a rush, in a whirl of alkali dust, into a juniper corral far
down in the cañon. Then the circling riatas had brought them--bucking
and kicking--down to the earth; and biting and striking at their
captors, they fought for their liberty till exhausted and dripping with
sweat--their heads and knees skinned and mouths bleeding--they found
themselves conquered, necked to gentler horses, or else hoppled.

At early morning Dick had come to Austin’s camp, bringing the
newspaper; and the two had ridden away together. And now that each man
had made his selection in the division of the day’s spoils, Austin
turned his pony’s head toward the far-off tent--a little white speck in
the light of the sunset on one of the distant foothills.

“Well, good-night, boys! I’ll join you again in the morning.” He loped
away to the place where the “little one” was awaiting him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The morrow’s sun shone blood-red--an enormous ruby disc, in the east
through the smoky haze that hung over the valley still. By eight
o’clock the air was stifling, and the men standing about camp ready
for the second day’s run were impatient to be off. It was easier to
endure the heat when in the saddle and in action, than to be idling
here at the corral. They were wondering at Austin’s delay. And most of
them had been swearing. Finally, Black Joaquin was told to go across to
the white speck on the foothills, and “hustle him up;” for they were
short of men to do the work, if he did not come. So the Mexican threw
himself across the saddle, and digging his spurs into the flanks of the
ugly-looking sorrel, loped over the hill to Austin’s camp.

Half an hour later he came back at racing speed to tell a story which
made the men look at each other with startled glances, and even with
suspicion at himself (so surely are evil deeds laid at the door of one
with an evil reputation); but when they rode over to where the stilled
forms lay beside the rifle whose aim had been true, they saw it had not
been Black Joaquin.

Who, then? Too plainly, they saw. But why?

The newspaper Dick had brought lay folded open at an article that told
the pitiful story of their love, and their sin, and their shame. It was
Johnny, Dick’s partner, who saw it, and read:

“Living among Horse Hunters--An Erring Couple Traced to Nevada--Harvey
Ashton and Mrs. John Q. Morton Seen--The Woman in Male Attire.

“The public no doubt remembers press dispatches of a year ago from
Boston, regarding the sensational elopement of Harvey Ashton and the
young and beautiful wife of John Q. Morton, a prominent and wealthy
commission merchant of that city. All parties concerned moved in the
most exclusive circles of society.

“Young Ashton had returned home from a prolonged tour of Europe to
find that Morton (who, though not related to him, has always assumed
the part of an indulgent father) had just wedded his ward, Miss Mildred
Walters, a handsome young woman many years his junior; and whose
play-fellow he--Ashton--had been when a boy, but whom she had not seen
for a number of years. She had matured into a beautiful, attractive
woman, and Ashton soon fell a willing victim to her charms. Soon after,
society of the Hub was startled and shocked to hear of the elopement of
Harvey Ashton with his benefactor’s wife.

“Subsequently they were discovered to have been in San Francisco, where
all traces of them, for the time, were lost. Nothing was heard of them
again till, some two months ago, when they were seen in Reno, Nevada,
by an old acquaintance who cannot be mistaken in their identity.

“He states he had come down from Virginia City, and was waiting to take
the train for the East, when he saw Ashton pass by the station once
or twice, in company with what was apparently a small, slightly-built
young man, but who, he is positive, is none other than Mrs. Morton in
male attire. He purposely avoided the couple, but inquiries elicited
the facts that Ashton was passing under the name of Austin, and had
stated that his companion was a young brother. It was also learned
that they were practically without means, and were leaving Reno for
the interior part of the State. Later reports locate them in a range
of mountains a short distance from the railroad, where they are with a
number of cowboys and sheep-herders who are out of work, and who are at
present engaged in shooting wild horses, furnishing hides for the San
Francisco market.

“The friend who recognized the couple at once communicated with the
deserted husband, who, it is reported, is on his way West in quest of
the erring pair.”

       *       *       *       *       *

This was their story, then! The story waiting in the newspaper for
Austin when he got back to the “little one” the evening before.

       *       *       *       *       *

The afternoon’s shadows were slanting down the valley when the seven
little burros saw Reddy’s wagon come down the long, dusty road leading
toward the river. From where they browsed they could see it go over the
bridge and the alkali flats, on its way to the railroad station in the
hazy valley. The big sheet of canvas, taken from Dick’s bed, covered
something that lay in the bottom of the wagon. Two somethings there
were--side by side, rigid and cold--sharply outlined under the folds of
white canvas.

The wagon creaked, and rattled, and groaned on its way. The afternoon
sun parched and burned the earth, as it had done for weeks. Rabbits
hid under the edges of the greasewood on the side where the greater
shadows fell. The burros still flicked with their absurd tails at the
sand-flies. Buzzing above the canvas were some big green flies that
followed the wagon till after the sun went down. A buzzard circled
overhead; and a lean coyote trotted behind the wagon on the mesa for a
mile or more.

The burros, too, crossed the bridge that night, and morning found them
browsing along the foothills nestling against the mountains across
the valley, where feed was better. Near the base of the mountain, and
not far from the little railroad station, was a graveyard. Treeless,
flowerless, unfenced. There were no headstones, ’tis true; but the
graves were well banked with broken rock, to keep the hungry coyotes
and badgers from digging up the dead.

At the station Black Joaquin had helped lift the new pine boxes into
the wagon. As he watched them start on their ride to the place of
rock-covered mounds near the foothills, he said to the men gathered
about:

“Por Dios! Not so muchos hombres to shoot mostang now!”

And his brother Domingo, who had been drinking, answered with more
freedom:

“’Sta ’ueno! Not so muchos hombres; more mostang por me. ’Sta ’ueno;
si, ’sta muy ’ueno!”

He laughed slyly. Then he went over to the saloon, followed by the
other men.

       *       *       *       *       *

The little gray burros watched the wagon for a long time, as it went
rattle--rattle--rattle over the stony road. By and by it stopped. Then
they began nibbling again on the scant bunch-grass and white sage.




[Illustration]

AT THE WILL OF THE WATERS


“Blockhead! idiot! ass! ‘Tenderfoot’ isn’t adequate for such a fool as
I have been!” he exclaimed bitterly.

He tried not to care; even he tried to forget that the good-looking,
successful mining engineer had given him a title which had made him
wince: “the deckle-edged tenderfoot!” But it stung, nevertheless.
Perhaps the reason that it hurt, was because of its fitness. And what
hurt more, was the fact Cadwallader had taken pains that Evaleen
Blaine should hear it said--Cadwallader, who seemed so well fitted to
take his place in the rough Western way of battling with life, where
he himself did but blunder and stumble, and earn the name of “the
deckle-edged tenderfoot!” That Teamster Bill had christened him “this
yer gentlemanly burro frum Bost’n,” cut far less keenly. But then, Bill
wasn’t trying to move heaven and earth to get Miss Blaine. Whereas
Elwyn Cadwallader was.

However, on all sides opinion was the same, if differently expressed.
The fact of his being a gentleman had not prevented him from becoming a
fool--chiefest of fools--else he never would have trusted so implicitly
in old Zeke Runkle’s misrepresentations of the group of mining claims
in those foothills that lay just below the Monarch group. The Monarch
was the talk of the camp for its richness. If there was a fortune in
the one group (he argued to himself), then why not also in those so
nearly adjoining. At any rate, it seemed to him it was his one chance
to find a fortune by a short cut; so, paying for them with all he had,
save a few hundreds that afterwards went for useless development work,
the mines became his. The camp welcomed him into its midst, and winked,
and grinned when he wasn’t looking; and (to a man) voted him “an easy
thing!”

His eyes not having been focused for fraud, he never doubted but that
the rich samples shown him had come from the mines represented; nor
ever suspected that, under his very eyes, the tests he himself made had
been tampered with.

Old Zeke Runkle’s annual swindles had been a camp joke for a score of
years; but Sherwood--being an in-experienced stranger--saw only in
him an honest (if usually drunken) prospector. A kindly, if simple,
old man, too; for Zeke had generously made him a gift of an entire
mining claim which had not been included in the original number--one
quite distinct from the original group. True, it seemed to be but an
undeveloped claim--its one tunnel only running in ten or fifteen feet.
And the gift had been tendered him at the suggestion of Cadwallader,
from whom Sherwood was surprised to receive evidence of a kindly
feeling which had not been previously displayed. That this unusual
interest in him had surprised old Zeke, too, was plain; for he seemed
puzzled at first, as though it were not possible for him to comprehend
Cadwallader’s meaning. After a few whispered words from the younger
man, however, Zeke’s face had brightened with understanding, and he
turned to Sherwood insisting he must accept it. The unexpected part
Cadwallader had taken, and the old man’s unselfish attitude, showed to
Sherwood such a fine glimpse of Western good-fellowship that he warmed
to the place and the people as he had done at no time before. It turned
the scale and the bargain was closed.

So he became sole owner of the seven mines on the sagebrush-covered
hills, that comprised the Golden Eagle group; and of the one isolated
claim in the foot of the bluffs that rose abruptly at the edge of an
old-time ruined mining camp which had been deserted for more than
thirty years.

It lay there in a cañon where once men came in search of precious
metals; and in that cleft of the mountains they built their homes.
Along the cañon sides, from end to end, there trailed a double line of
houses, now all in ruins--fallen walls of adobe or stone. Roofless and
floorless, with empty casements and doorways, the houses stood mute
witnesses of the false hopes which once led men to squander money, and
youth, and strength of purpose there in the long-ago, when the State
was new.

Almost a double score of years had gone since the place knew human
voice or human movement, save when some lone prospector passed along
the brush-grown street that crept upward with the cañon’s slope. The
dead town’s very stillness and desolation were full of charm, albeit
tempered with that sadness a ruin always has for the beholder. For
through the empty doorways came the whisperings of those who were
gone; and looking through the sashless windows as you rode by, you saw
wraithlike figures pass and repass within. It might have been only the
wind’s breath as it rustled the dark leaves of branches overhanging the
crumbling walls, and the ghosts, mayhap, were but the waving boughs
which tremulously moved over the gray adobes; but when you were
there--in that stillness and amid all that mystery--you felt it was
true. You hushed your quickening breath to listen for the breath of
some other. You moved through the silence with wide-lidded eyes looking
for--you knew not what. You felt yourself out of place there--an alien.
Only the lizards on the decaying walls, and the little brown birds
that pecked at berries growing on the bushes along the creek, and the
cottontails that scurried away to hide in the brush, seemed to have
honest claim there.

On a level with the dead camp’s one street, the short tunnel of the
Spencer mine ran into the cliff which pushed itself forward from the
cañon’s general contour--the mouth itself being all but hidden by the
falling walls of what had once been an adobe dwelling, its rear wall
but a few feet from the limestone bluffs. To it, old Zeke brought
Sherwood and showed him the tunnel below and the croppings of white
quartz on the cliff top. It looked barren and worthless; but an assay
certificate, in which the values were marked in four figures, held
before Sherwood’s astonished eyes, sent his hopes up to fever mark, and
left him eager to begin the work whereby he might reach the precious
stuff hidden well away within the dull-colored bluffs. If the croppings
promised such wealth, what might not the mine itself yield when he
extended the tunnel, and had tapped the ledge at a greater depth? He
felt his heart beating the faster for his dreams. A fortune! His,
and--hers! All that was needed to bring it about were pick strokes,
powder and patience. It all seemed very simple to Hume Sherwood.
Without doubt he was a “tenderfoot.”

So the Summer found him putting every pulse-throb into his labor. Was
it not for her that he wanted it? For what other end was he working,
than to win the maid who had come into this land of enchantment? To
him, it was as Paradise--these great broad levels of alkali, and
sand (blotches of white on a blur of gray) and the sagebrush and
greasewood-covered foothills that lay, fold upon fold, against the base
of grim mountains--prickly with splintered and uncovered rocks.

Each day he blessed the fate which had called her from her home by the
Western sea and placed her under the same roof that sheltered him in
the rough little Nevada camp that called itself a town since a railroad
had found it, and given it a name.

Here Judge Blaine and his daughter settled themselves for the Summer.
That is, an array of suit-cases and handbags, great and small, and
a trunk or two, proclaimed the hotel their headquarters. That was
all. Every day saw the Judge up near the top of the mountain, getting
the Monarch’s new machinery into running order; while trails, and
roads--old and new--and even the jack-rabbit paths that lay like a
network over the land, saw more of the young woman in khaki than ever
the hotel did, so long as daylight lasted--the light which she grudged
to have go.

It was Evaleen herself who had suggested coming to Nevada with her
father, instead of spending the season in the usual way with Mrs.
Blaine and the other girls at whatsoever place fashion might dictate as
the Summer’s especial (and expensive) favorite for the time.

“Daddy, dear,” she had said, standing behind his chair, with both
arms tight clasped around his neck, “I’ve made up my mind to do
something that is going to surprise you. Listen; I’m not going with
Mamma and the girls when she shuts up the house for the Summer. But,
I--am--going--with--you! Oh, yes, I am! No, no! Not a word! I’ve
always wanted to know what a mining camp was like; and this is my
golden opportunity. You know you do want me there. Say so! While you
are putting up the new works, I can go roaming over the country in old
clothes. Listen to that, Daddy--old clothes! A lovely Summer; and not a
cent spent on gowns!”

Ways and means at just that time being matters of difficult solution
with the Judge, her argument had force and bore fruit. Midsummer found
them where the alkali plains stretched away to distant ranges, and the
duns and drabs of valleys reached across to the blended purples and
blues. Such distances! And such silence! She had never dreamed of their
like before.

On the levels or on the heights, she was day by day finding life a
new and a beautiful thing. It was all so good; so fresh, and sweet,
and strong! How easily she had fitted into her new surroundings
and the new order of things--crude though they were, beyond any of
her preconceived ideas. And now how far away seemed all the other
Summers she had ever known. She felt that, after all, this was the
real life. The other (that which Jean and Lili had their part in) was
to her, now, as something known only in a dream. She was learning a
grander, fuller sense of living since all that other world was shut
away. So (companioned by her would-be lovers, Hume Sherwood and Elwyn
Cadwallader, through a Summer of glad, free, full indrawn breaths) she
rode the days away, while under the campaign hat she wore her face was
being browned by the desert winds. Hot winds. But, oh, how she had
learned to love their ardent touch! No sun was ever too hot, nor road
too rough or long, to keep her back from this life in the open; and in
the saddle she had come to know the valleys and mountains as one born
to them.

The cañon which held the ruined walls had for her an especial charm,
and toward it she often turned her horse’s head. It lay but a short
distance from the road leading to her father’s mines. So, turning
aside, she often took this short cut through the deserted town. There,
one day she heard from Cadwallader the story of Crazy Dan, whose home
had once been within the walls that hid the entrance to the tunnel of
the Spencer--the mine which had been a gift to Sherwood.

Daniel Spencer--Crazy Dan (for whom old Zeke named the claim he had
given away, because on the very ground there Dan had made his home)
had worked in the creek for placer gold during all the long gone years
when others worked the higher ground for silver lodes. An ill-featured,
ill-natured old man, having no friends, and seeking none; he had
burrowed the cañon’s length for gold as persistently as a gopher does
the ground for roots, and--as all had prophesied--with as little
showing of the yellow metal. Only a crazy man, they said, would ever
have prospected that cañon for gold. It was a cañon for ledges, not
placers; for silver, not gold. So the miserly, morose old man followed
a phantom to the last; working alone from day-dawn till dusk with
rocker and pan, in ground that pitying neighbors vainly tried to lead
him away from. Admitting he had never found gold, yet working day
after day, Crazy Dan could be seen there for twelve long years. Twelve
years of toil that showed no reward for his labor. Then he died. One
morning they saw there was no smoke issuing from the cabin chimney; and
guessing what they would find, they pushed the door open.

Death had come when he was alone; there had been none to close the
staring eyes. He had been near to starvation; there was scarcely any
food within the cabin; there were no comforts. Years of toiling for
something that was always just beyond; and a lonely death at the
end--that was the story.

As she heard, Miss Blaine was stirred with a profound pity. When
Cadwallader ceased speaking, her thoughts went straying to those far
days, in wonder of the man who made up the sum of the town’s life.
Dead, or scattered to the four corners of the earth. Crazy Dan’s death
was no more pathetic, perhaps, than that of many another of their
number. She rode on in silence, saddened by the recital.

Suddenly Cadwallader’s ringing laugh startled her. But as quickly he
checked himself, saying:

“I beg of you, Miss Blaine, don’t misjudge me. I wasn’t thinking then
of poor old Dan’s tragic death, or more than tragic life. I happened to
remember the sequel to this story; and which, I’m sure, you’ve never
heard. Let me tell you----” He hesitated. “Or, no; you’ve heard enough
for today, and its humor would jar now on what you’ve just heard. I’ll
tell you some other time.”

Nothing more was said about it by either; but she felt confident it
related in some way to Hume Sherwood and the Spencer mine.

The latter had kept men continuously at work on his newly acquired
property since coming into possession of them; but the faith that was
his in the beginning, grew fainter with the waning of Summer. Autumn
brought decided doubt. With the coming of Winter came a certainty of
their worthlessness, he knew he had been befooled by a sharp trickster,
but how far his ignorance had been played upon he did not yet know.
Nevertheless, he felt he had well earned the titles the camp had
bestowed on him, for the claims, he found, were but relocations that
had been abandoned years before as utterly worthless. He had simply
thrown his dollars into the deep sea.

If only that had been all!

       *       *       *       *       *

Evaleen Blaine and her father, contrary to all their earlier plans
for a return to San Francisco at the beginning of Autumn, were still
in Nevada, and there Winter found them, though the machinery was all
placed and the big reservoir and dam completed. But an offer to buy
the Monarch property--mines, mill, and all that went with them--had
come from a New York syndicate, and the Judge was now detained by their
agents. He must stay yet a few days more--then home to “mother and the
girls.” Nor would Evaleen leave without him; so for the first time in
all his married life he was to be away from home on Christmas. Thus
matters stood when the greater half of December had gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

A storm was brewing. There had been scarcely any rain or snow thus far,
but a damp wind from the south had shut away the mountain behind dark
and threatening clouds. The Judge found he was needed at the mine that
morning, but had promised Evaleen he would be back the next night, to
make Christmas eve as merry as possible for them both--separated from
the others. By staying one night at the mine he could, without doubt,
return on the morrow. He had kissed her good-bye and left her looking
out of the window in the gloom of the early day. Fifteen minutes later
she heard his heavy tread again on the stairs, and he stormed into the
room.

“See here, daughter!” he panted in indignation, “I’ve just heard of the
---- ---- (I beg your pardon, child); I mean the shameful trick that
that cur of a Zeke Runkle played on young Sherwood. Sherwood has just
told me--just heard of it himself. Have you heard anything about it?
No? Well, I thought not--I thought not! It seems everybody around the
place, though, has known of it all along--but us. Why didn’t anybody
tell me? Hey? What? Yes; but why didn’t anybody tell me, I want to
know! Ah, they knew better. I’d have told Sherwood that he’d been
played for a sucker! Yes, sir!” (forgetting his audience again) “and a
---- shame it is, too! There I go again--but I don’t know when anything
has so worked me up!”

“But, Daddy, what is it?” faltered Evaleen. “What has happened? I don’t
understand.”

“What has happened?” shouted the Judge. “Everything has
happened--everything. Of course, you don’t understand. I don’t,
myself--all of it. Somebody (I haven’t found out yet who, but I
will!) put up that miserable old rascal--that drunken thief of a Zeke
Runkle--to palming off on Sherwood as a bona fide mine, the worst
fake I ever heard of. Hey? What? Why! a dug-out, I tell you--a hole
in the cliff--a tunnel-like cellar-above-ground, if you want, that
Crazy Dan, it seems, used to store away bacon, and flour, and potatoes
in, more than thirty years ago. Just an old store-room, nothing else.
That’s what! Made him a present of it (the foxy old rascal) so the
law couldn’t touch him. Oh, he’s a clever swindler! I’m sorry for
Sherwood--mighty sorry for him. I like the fellow; there’s good stuff
in him. It’s a ---- A--hum! But, for the life of me I can’t see old
Zeke’s object; for he made nothing by it. Somebody must have put him up
to it--mark my words. And I’d like to know who.”

Who had done it? Evaleen was again hearing Cadwallader’s laugh, and the
words, “An amusing sequel to the story.” And “I’ll tell you some day.”
He need not tell her now. She knew; and she knew why.

All that day she stayed within her room. She felt she couldn’t see
Sherwood in his humiliation; and Cadwallader she wouldn’t see.

That evening when she went down to dinner she was purposely late that
she might avoid both men. Elwyn Cadwallader was out of town, she
learned, called away unexpectedly on business. Hume Sherwood, after
having been with her father all day, up on the mountain, had just
returned--going directly to his room. He had declined dinner.

Almost any man can bear censure, but it takes a giant to brave ridicule.

When Miss Blaine went back to her room she found two letters awaiting
her. She read the first with the angry blood mounting to her forehead,
and lips tightened into a straight, hard line. It was from Cadwallader.
He closed by saying:

“Give me the one thing I most want in all the world! I will go to you
Christmas morning for it--for your ‘yes!’”

Miss Blaine’s face was very stern as with quick, firm steps she walked
across the floor to the stove in which a fire was burning cheerily. She
opened the door and flung the letter into the flames.

The letter from her father was hurriedly scrawled, “so that Sherwood
can take it down to you,” it said. There were but a dozen brief
sentences: He couldn’t be with her, after all, on Christmas eve--he
had about closed the deal with Akerman, and there was much business
to settle up. She was to pack their suit-cases and trunks at once;
to be ready to start home any day. He hoped (didn’t know--but hoped)
to leave the evening of Christmas day, etc. There was a postscript:
“Akerman (acting on my advice) bought Sherwood’s little group today
for seven hundred and fifty dollars; which is just seven hundred and
fifty dollars more than they are worth--as mining claims. But Akerman
wants the ground for other purposes, and will use it in connection with
his other property. I’m glad for the boy’s sake he got it, for I guess
Sherwood needed the money. Of course he hasn’t said so (he’s too much
of a thoroughbred to whimper) but I don’t believe he has a nickel left.”

Evaleen Blaine laid the letter down with a tender smile on her face.
“Dear old Daddy!” she murmured. She understood the sympathetic heart
which had been the factor in bringing about the sale of Sherwood’s
claims. “Oh, Daddy, you’re good--good! I love you!”

Four or five hours after, she had finished packing and got up from
where she had been kneeling, and looked about the room. Everything was
folded away in place and awaiting the turning of the key, except the
khaki suit and the wide-brimmed hat. She would soon be miles and miles
away from Nevada and its joys. A very sober face looked out at her from
the mirror, making her force her thoughts into other channels.

“Not spend Christmas eve with you, Daddy? ’Deed, an’ I will! I’ll just
astonish you tomorrow morning!”

She laughed to herself in anticipation of his surprise. Then her face
sobered, remembering that--for the first time--she would make the trip
alone. She knew every inch of the way. She wasn’t afraid; there was
nothing to harm her. And by taking her coffee and toast by lamplight,
she would be with him by nine o’clock. As she fell asleep that night
she was wishing some good fortune might come to Hume Sherwood, making
his Christmas eve less lonely.

When day broke, though as yet no rain was falling, a storm was already
gathering itself for the onslaught. Fine dust filled the air, and the
wind was racing up the valley with the swiftness of a prairie fire,
where, on the alkali flats, great breakers of white dust rose from
the sea of dry storm that ran ahead of the rain. Dead branches of
greasewood, tumble-weeds light as sea-spume on the waves of the wind,
rabbit-brush wrenched from the roots--these (the drift-wood of desert
seas), were swept on and away!

In the gray early dawn Miss Blaine’s horse had been saddled under
protest.

“We’re a-goin’ to hev a Nevady zephyr, I’m a-thinkin’, an’ th’ house
is a mighty good place f’r wimmin-folks ’bout now!” were the words she
heard through the whistling wind as she mounted.

There was something electric in the strange storm that drew her into
its midst--some kinship that called her away! She was sure she could
reach shelter before the rain reached her. “Then, hurrah for the ring
of the bridle-rein--away, brave steed, away!”

Mountain Boy snuffed at the dust-laden air and broke into the long
stride that soon carried them into the foothills. At times the wind
nearly swept her from the saddle, but she loped on and on. Then she
gained the high ground; and the dust that had smarted her eyes and
nostrils lay far below. It was misty, and the wind came in strong
buffetings. Up, and still up they climbed. The rain-clouds were surely
keeping their burden back for her! But, nay! she had almost reached
the mill--was almost under shelter, when the storm swept down upon her
and the waters fell in a flood. Drenched and disheveled she reached
the mill. Disappointment and consternation awaited her--her father was
not there! Nearly two hours before--just the time she was leaving the
valley--the Judge, with Mr. Akerman, had driven away by the north road
to take the morning express from the station above, and were now at the
county seat thirty miles away, if they had met with no mishap.

Evaleen was aghast! What to do? Her father believed her to be at the
hotel, to which place she must return at once--there was nothing
else for her to do. Back through the wind and the wet! She heard the
foreman’s voice in warning and entreaty swept away by the gale as she
turned; but--shaking her head--she plunged down the road and back into
the storm. Away and away! The road ran with many a curve and turn--easy
grades, made for wagon use--; so, though steep it was for such riding,
she loped down the mountain, while the wind, and the rain, and the roar
of the storm shut the world away.

A feeling of numbness came over her, a something that was neither
terror nor awe, yet which held something of each. As time went on she
seemed to have been riding hours innumerable--it seemed days since she
had seen a human face. Down, farther down must she go. She was becoming
exhausted, and the sleet was chilling her to the very center of her
being. It was terrible--terrible! To reach the valley and shelter!
There on the mountain the wind shrieked and howled about her; the air
was filled with voices that were deafening, dizzying, frightful. The
horse himself was half mad with fright. Twice he had almost thrown
her as thunder claps and flashes of lightning had seemed to surround
them on all sides. Three miles yet to shelter! Could she stand it? But
where--where was there nearer relief? Ah! the Spencer tunnel---- There
would be safety there till the worst of the storm was over. A turn of
the rein, and Mountain Boy was running straight for the old tunnel
under the cliffs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hark! What was that? There came to her ears a great roaring that was
neither the howling of the wind, nor the rush of the rain, nor the
mingled awful sounds of the storm as she tore along the cañon. She
could see nothing of the thing she heard, for the wet slap of the rain
blinded her. Closer and closer it came! As she slipped from the saddle
at the tunnel’s mouth, the horse--terrified at the roaring which rose
above the voice of the storm, and which was coming nearer--broke from
her, and was off and away, with a ten-foot wall of water racing at his
heels. The overtaxed dam had bursted its bounds, and the flood was
cutting a waterway down the center of the cañon, but below the level of
the old tunnel! She was safe! But----alone, and her horse was gone!

When, more than two hours afterward, Hume Sherwood found her, it seemed
the most natural thing in the world that he should take her in his
arms, and her head should lie on his breast, while she told him how it
had happened. Without question he claimed her as his own; without a
word she gave him her troth.

“I knew you would come, Hume--I knew you would find me,” she said,
softly.

“Dear!”

       *       *       *       *       *

So simply were they plighted to one another; so easily does a great
danger sweep away all disguises.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the riderless bay had come into camp, Sherwood (half mad with an
awful fear) had hurried away to the hills, lashing his span without
mercy over the storm-washed road--or out through the open country
where the road was gullied out. When in the up-piled drift where the
flood had left it--he found the gray campaign hat he knew so well, a
sickening fear fell upon him as though he had already looked upon the
face of the dead. At length he thought of the tunnel, after fruitless
search elsewhere; and there--in the dug-out that had been palmed off on
him as a joke on his credulity, he found his heart’s desire. After all,
Spencer’s old store-room--his cellar-above-ground--was worth a king’s
ransom--when valued by this man and this maid.

The waters had gone down, but left the tunnel entrance flooded; for
the fallen walls of the old adobe created a small dam which the flood
overflowed. To get past this--without wading knee-deep in the mud--was
a problem. The whirling waters had eaten away the earth which formed
the front part of the tunnel--wider now by two feet--and in the place
where the earth had melted away stood a small box. Sherwood put his
foot against it, to pry it out of the mud.

“I’ll get this out for you to stand on, dear; then you can jump across
I think, with my help.”

But, deep settled into the mud and debris, it resisted him. He went
back in the tunnel and got a pick from among the tools he had used in
extending the “cellar” to strike the ledge that wasn’t there; for the
“croppings” that had been shown him had been hauled there--salted, to
deceive the “tenderfoot.”

The box refused to move, even when Sherwood’s pick--used as a
lever--was applied; so, swinging it over his head, he brought the pick
down into the box, shattering the lid into pieces. It was more than
half filled with small rusty tin cans, bearing soiled and torn labels,
on which were the printed words in colors still bright: “Preston &
Merrill’s Yeast Powder.” A case of baking powder of a sort popular
five-and-thirty years before. Strange!

Sherwood laughed. “We’ve found some of Crazy Dan’s stores!” and
attempted to take one of the little cans. It lifted like lead. He
stopped--afraid to put it to the test--and looked at Evaleen queerly;
and she (remembering the story she had heard of Dan’s persistence in
working the cañon for placer gold) gave a little cry as he started to
open it. It seemed too much to dare to believe--to hope for---- Yet----.

He lifted the lid. Gold! The gold dust that Crazy Dan (ay! Miser Dan)
had, back in the dead years, hoarded away in the safest place he knew;
adding to it month after month, as he delved, and died with his secret
still his own.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Judge was at the County Seat--at the station buying his ticket to
go back to his “little girl”--when the train from the West came in.
In the dusk he caught a glimpse of a tailor-made suit which seemed
familiar to his eye, and that made him look twice at the wearer.

“Why! Bless my soul, child--and Sherwood, too! Well! Well! What are you
doing here? I wrote to you about it. Didn’t you get my message, Evy?”

“Yes, Daddy, dear; you said: ‘Be at the station tonight ready to go
home--I start from here.’ But as everything was packed I thought I’d
come up and join you, and we could both start from here.”

“And,” added Sherwood, after they had gone into the now empty
waiting-room, “I wanted to see you, sir, before you left.”

“Why, of course! Glad you came to see me off, Sherwood. You must come
down to see us, you know; and meet mother and the girls. We’ll---- Eh!
What’s that? * * * What! * * * Evy--my little girl?”

The Judge stuttered and stammered, bewildered at the suddenness of the
attack.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sherwood talked long and earnestly; and the Judge’s eyes wandered to
the daughter who had, until now, never seemed other than his “little
girl.” But she had “grown up” under his unseeing eyes; and now somebody
wanted to take her from him. Sherwood---- Well, Sherwood was a fine
fellow; he would make his way in the world in spite of the luck that
was against him now.

“My boy,” (and the Judge laid his hands affectionately on the young
man’s shoulders as they stood facing each other) “I know you to be a
gentleman, and I believe you to be every inch a manly man. I want my
child to marry not what a man has made, but what he is made of. You
will win in the world’s rough and tumble of money-making, if you’re
only given a chance; and I’ve been going to tell you that there’s a
place waiting for you in our San Francisco office when you are ready
for it. And now I’ll add, there’s a place in my family, whenever Evy
says so.

“As to your not having much more than the proverbial shilling just now,
that cuts no figure with me. Why not? Let me tell you.”

He put his arm around Evaleen, drawing her to him.

“This child’s mother took me ‘for better or worse’ twenty-five years
ago this very night, when I hadn’t a dollar in the world that I could
call my own--married me on an hour’s notice, and without any wedding
guests or wedding gowns. She trusted me and loved me well enough to
take me as I was, and to trust to the future (God bless her!) and
neither of us have ever had cause to regret it.”

To have this assurance from the Judge before he knew of the wonderful
story Sherwood had to tell of the secret of Crazy Dan’s tunnel, added
to the joy of the young people who now felt they were beloved of the
gods.

The Judge’s joy over the finding of the treasure box was even greater
than Sherwood’s; for the older man had lived long enough to realize
(as a younger generation could not) that this wealth would put many
possibilities for happiness within their reach that otherwise might not
be theirs. To them--the lovers in the rose-dawn of youth, with love so
new--love itself seemed enough; save perhaps that the money would make
marriage a nearer possibility.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Darling”--and a new thought, a new hope rang through Sherwood’s
earnest tones--“do you believe you love me as well as she--your
mother--loved him?”

“Oh, Hume!” was all she said, but the reproach in her eyes answered him.

“Then marry me now, as she did your father, at an hour’s notice.
Here--this evening, before the train comes. Judge, why can not this be
so? What is there to prevent our being married at once, without all the
fussing and nonsense that will be necessary if we wait till she gets
home? Let us be married here, and now, and all go away together.”

“Why, bless my soul! This takes my breath away. You young people--what
whirlwinds you are! You--Yes, yes, but---- Hey? What’s that? I did?
I know; but---- What? I should rather think it would be a surprise
to mother and the girls to bring a son home to Christmas dinner. Oh,
yes, I know; but---- What’s that you say? Her mother did----! Yes,
yes, I know.... Well, well, my lad, I don’t know but you’re right. Her
mother---- Love is the one thing--the rest doesn’t matter. Evy, child,
it is for you to say.”

And remembering that girl of the long-ago who twenty-five years before
had gone to a penniless lover with such a beautiful love and trust
Evaleen Blaine, putting her hand with a like trust into her lover’s,
walked with him across to the little parsonage, and there became Hume
Sherwood’s wife.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Cadwallader got back to the camp the next morning, he heard much
he was unprepared for; for news travels fast where happenings are few.
What he heard did not tend to make his Christmas a merry one.

Evaleen Blaine and Hume Sherwood were now man and wife! He did not want
to believe it, yet he felt it was true. And Sherwood had sent to the
mint (from the “Spencer” mine, too,) the largest shipment of bullion
that had ever gone out of the county! Neither did he want to believe
this--and did not. There must be some mistake.

He went over to the express office through the snow and the cold; for
the rain had turned to snow and the Nevada winter had begun. It would
be a cheerless yule-tide for him. It was true as he had heard--true in
all particulars, except that the consignment to the mint had been in
gold dust, not in bullion.

Elwyn Cadwallader knew mines. Therefore he knew ledges do not produce
gold dust; and Sherwood had owned no placers. Whatever suspicion he had
of the truth he kept to himself. It was enough for him to know that
all he had done to make Hume Sherwood the butt of the camp, that he
might all the more surely part him from Evaleen Blaine, had been but
the means of aiding him in winning her; and that the richest joke of
the camp had proved to be rich indeed, in that it had placed a great
fortune in the hands of “the deckel-edged tenderfoot.”

  And here ends “The Loom of the Desert,” as written by Idah Meacham
  Strobridge, with cover design and illustrations made by L. Maynard
  Dixon, and published by the Artemisia Bindery, which is in Los
  Angeles, California, at the Sign of the Sagebrush; and completed on
  the Twelfth day of December, One thousand nine hundred and seven.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.