Title: The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other Stories
Author: Harte, Bret
Language: English
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THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN AND OTHER STORIES


By Bret Harte



CONTENTS


I.   THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN

II.  AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG

III. THE GREAT DEADWOOD MYSTERY

IV.  A LEGEND OF SAMMTSTADT

V.   VIEWS FROM A GERMAN SPION



THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN.



CHAPTER I.


A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.


They lived on the verge of a vast stony level, upheaved so far above
the surrounding country that its vague outlines, viewed from the nearest
valley, seemed a mere cloud-streak resting upon the lesser hills. The
rush and roar of the turbulent river that washed its eastern base were
lost at that height; the winds that strove with the giant pines that
half way climbed its flanks spent their fury below the summit; for, at
variance with most meteorological speculation, an eternal calm seemed
to invest this serene altitude. The few Alpine flowers seldom
thrilled their petals to a passing breeze; rain and snow fell alike
perpendicularly, heavily, and monotonously over the granite bowlders
scattered along its brown expanse. Although by actual measurement an
inconsiderable elevation of the Sierran range, and a mere shoulder of
the nearest white-faced peak that glimmered in the west, it seemed
to lie so near the quiet, passionless stars, that at night it caught
something of their calm remoteness.

The articulate utterance of such a locality should have been a whisper;
a laugh or exclamation was discordant; and the ordinary tones of the
human voice on the night of the 15th of May, 1868, had a grotesque
incongruity.

In the thick darkness that clothed the mountain that night, the human
figure would have been lost, or confounded with the outlines of outlying
bowlders, which at such times took upon themselves the vague semblance
of men and animals. Hence the voices in the following colloquy seemed
the more grotesque and incongruous from being the apparent expression
of an upright monolith, ten feet high, on the right, and another mass of
granite, that, reclining, peeped over the verge.

“Hello!”

“Hello yourself!”

“You’re late.”

“I lost the trail, and climbed up the slide.”

Here followed a stumble, the clatter of stones down the mountain-side,
and an oath so very human and undignified that it at once relieved the
bowlders of any complicity of expression. The voices, too, were close
together now, and unexpectedly in quite another locality.

“Anything up?”

“Looey Napoleon’s declared war agin Germany.”

“Sho-o-o!”

Notwithstanding this exclamation, the interest of the latter speaker was
evidently only polite and perfunctory. What, indeed, were the political
convulsions of the Old World to the dwellers on this serene, isolated
eminence of the New?

“I reckon it’s so,” continued the first voice. “French Pete and that
thar feller that keeps the Dutch grocery hev hed a row over it; emptied
their six-shooters into each other. The Dutchman’s got two balls in
his leg, and the Frenchman’s got an onnessary buttonhole in his
shirt-buzzum, and hez caved in.”

This concise, local corroboration of the conflict of remote nations,
however confirmatory, did not appear to excite any further interest.
Even the last speaker, now that he was in this calm, dispassionate
atmosphere, seemed to lose his own concern in his tidings, and to have
abandoned every thing of a sensational and lower-worldly character in
the pines below. There were a few moments of absolute silence, and then
another stumble. But now the voices of both speakers were quite patient
and philosophical.

“Hold on, and I’ll strike a light,” said the second speaker. “I brought
a lantern along, but I didn’t light up. I kem out afore sundown, and you
know how it allers is up yer. I didn’t want it, and didn’t keer to light
up. I forgot you’re always a little dazed and strange-like when you
first come up.”

There was a crackle, a flash, and presently a steady glow, which the
surrounding darkness seemed to resent. The faces of the two men thus
revealed were singularly alike. The same thin, narrow outline of jaw and
temple; the same dark, grave eyes; the same brown growth of curly beard
and mustache, which concealed the mouth, and hid what might have been
any individual idiosyncrasy of thought or expression,--showed them to
be brothers, or better known as the “Twins of Table Mountain.” A certain
animation in the face of the second speaker,--the first-comer,--a
certain light in his eye, might have at first distinguished him; but
even this faded out in the steady glow of the lantern, and had no
value as a permanent distinction, for, by the time they had reached
the western verge of the mountain, the two faces had settled into a
homogeneous calmness and melancholy.

The vague horizon of darkness, that a few feet from the lantern still
encompassed them, gave no indication of their progress, until their feet
actually trod the rude planks and thatch that formed the roof of their
habitation; for their cabin half burrowed in the mountain, and half
clung, like a swallow’s nest, to the side of the deep declivity that
terminated the northern limit of the summit. Had it not been for the
windlass of a shaft, a coil of rope, and a few heaps of stone and
gravel, which were the only indications of human labor in that stony
field, there was nothing to interrupt its monotonous dead level. And,
when they descended a dozen well-worn steps to the door of their cabin,
they left the summit, as before, lonely, silent, motionless, its long
level uninterrupted, basking in the cold light of the stars.

The simile of a “nest” as applied to the cabin of the brothers was no
mere figure of speech as the light of the lantern first flashed upon it.
The narrow ledge before the door was strewn with feathers. A suggestion
that it might be the home and haunt of predatory birds was promptly
checked by the spectacle of the nailed-up carcasses of a dozen hawks
against the walls, and the outspread wings of an extended eagle
emblazoning the gable above the door, like an armorial bearing. Within
the cabin the walls and chimney-piece were dazzlingly bedecked with the
party-colored wings of jays, yellow-birds, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and
the poly-tinted wood-duck. Yet in that dry, highly-rarefied atmosphere,
there was not the slightest suggestion of odor or decay.

The first speaker hung the lantern upon a hook that dangled from the
rafters, and, going to the broad chimney, kicked the half-dead embers
into a sudden resentful blaze. He then opened a rude cupboard, and,
without looking around, called, “Ruth!”

The second speaker turned his head from the open doorway where he was
leaning, as if listening to something in the darkness, and answered
abstractedly,--

“Rand!”

“I don’t believe you have touched grub to-day!”

Ruth grunted out some indifferent reply.

“Thar hezen’t been a slice cut off that bacon since I left,” continued
Rand, bringing a side of bacon and some biscuits from the cupboard, and
applying himself to the discussion of them at the table. “You’re gettin’
off yer feet, Ruth. What’s up?”

Ruth replied by taking an uninvited seat beside him, and resting his
chin on the palms of his hands. He did not eat, but simply transferred
his inattention from the door to the table.

“You’re workin’ too many hours in the shaft,” continued Rand. “You’re
always up to some such d--n fool business when I’m not yer.”

“I dipped a little west to-day,” Ruth went on, without heeding the
brotherly remonstrance, “and struck quartz and pyrites.”

“Thet’s you!--allers dippin’ west or east for quartz and the color,
instead of keeping on plumb down to the ‘cement’!”*


     * The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,--the bed
     of a prehistoric river.


“We’ve been three years digging for cement,” said Ruth, more in
abstraction than in reproach,--“three years!”

“And we may be three years more,--may be only three days. Why, you
couldn’t be more impatient if--if--if you lived in a valley.”

Delivering this tremendous comparison as an unanswerable climax, Rand
applied himself once more to his repast. Ruth, after a moment’s pause,
without speaking or looking up, disengaged his hand from under his chin,
and slid it along, palm uppermost, on the table beside his brother.
Thereupon Rand slowly reached forward his left hand, the right being
engaged in conveying victual to his mouth, and laid it on his brother’s
palm. The act was evidently an habitual, half mechanical one; for in
a few moments the hands were as gently disengaged, without comment or
expression. At last Rand leaned back in his chair, laid down his knife
and fork, and, complacently loosening the belt that held his revolver,
threw it and the weapon on his bed. Taking out his pipe, and chipping
some tobacco on the table, he said carelessly, “I came a piece through
the woods with Mornie just now.”

The face that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its
expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that
the twins could not be told apart. “Thet gal,” continued Rand, without
looking up, “is either flighty, or--or suthin’,” he added in vague
disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in question.
“Don’t tell me!”

Ruth’s eyes quickly sought his brother’s, and were as quickly averted,
as he asked hurriedly, “How?”

“What gets me,” continued Rand in a petulant non sequitur, “is that YOU,
my own twin-brother, never lets on about her comin’ yer, permiskus like,
when I ain’t yer, and you and her gallivantin’ and promanadin’, and
swoppin’ sentiments and mottoes.”

Ruth tried to contradict his blushing face with a laugh of worldly
indifference.

“She came up yer on a sort of pasear.”

“Oh, yes!--a short cut to the creek,” interpolated Rand satirically.

“Last Tuesday or Wednesday,” continued Ruth, with affected
forgetfulness.

“Oh, in course, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday! You’ve so many folks
climbing up this yer mountain to call on ye,” continued the ironical
Rand, “that you disremember; only you remembered enough not to tell me.
SHE did. She took me for you, or pretended to.”

The color dropped from Ruth’s cheek.

“Took you for me?” he asked, with an awkward laugh.

“Yes,” sneered Rand; “chirped and chattered away about OUR picnic, OUR
nose-gays, and lord knows what! Said she’d keep them blue-jay’s wings,
and wear ‘em in her hat. Spouted poetry, too,--the same sort o’ rot you
get off now and then.”

Ruth laughed again, but rather ostentatiously and nervously.

“Ruth, look yer!”

Ruth faced his brother.

“What’s your little game? Do you mean to say you don’t know what thet
gal is? Do you mean to say you don’t know thet she’s the laughing-stock
of the Ferry; thet her father’s a d----d old fool, and her mother’s a
drunkard and worse; thet she’s got any right to be hanging round yer?
You can’t mean to marry her, even if you kalkilate to turn me out to do
it, for she wouldn’t live alone with ye up here. ‘Tain’t her kind. And
if I thought you was thinking of--”

“What?” said Ruth, turning upon his brother quickly.

“Oh, thet’s right! holler; swear and yell, and break things, do! Tear
round!” continued Rand, kicking his boots off in a corner, “just because
I ask you a civil question. That’s brotherly,” he added, jerking his
chair away against the side of the cabin, “ain’t it?”

“She’s not to blame because her mother drinks, and her father’s a
shyster,” said Ruth earnestly and strongly. “The men who make her the
laughing-stock of the Ferry tried to make her something worse, and
failed, and take this sneak’s revenge on her. ‘Laughing-stock!’ Yes,
they knew she could turn the tables on them.”

“Of course; go on! She’s better than me. I know I’m a fratricide, that’s
what I am,” said Rand, throwing himself on the upper of the two berths
that formed the bedstead of the cabin.

“I’ve seen her three times,” continued Ruth.

“And you’ve known me twenty years,” interrupted his brother.

Ruth turned on his heel, and walked towards the door.

“That’s right; go on! Why don’t you get the chalk?”

Ruth made no reply. Rand descended from the bed, and, taking a piece of
chalk from the shelf, drew a line on the floor, dividing the cabin in
two equal parts.

“You can have the east half,” he said, as he climbed slowly back into
bed.

This mysterious rite was the usual termination of a quarrel between the
twins. Each man kept his half of the cabin until the feud was forgotten.
It was the mark of silence and separation, over which no words of
recrimination, argument, or even explanation, were delivered, until
it was effaced by one or the other. This was considered equivalent to
apology or reconciliation, which each were equally bound in honor to
accept.

It may be remarked that the floor was much whiter at this line of
demarcation, and under the fresh chalk-line appeared the faint evidences
of one recently effaced.

Without apparently heeding this potential ceremony, Ruth remained
leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose
profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault
above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the
abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon the
ledge, he leaned far over the shelf that sustained their cabin,
and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long
undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told
him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling
with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect
a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices,
swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again
swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. He was roused from a
consideration of this phenomenon by a faint glow towards the east, which
at last brightened, until the dark outline of the distant walls of the
valley stood out against the sky. Were his other senses participating in
the delusion of his ears? for with the brightening light came the faint
odor of burning timber.

His face grew anxious as he gazed. At last he rose, and re-entered the
cabin. His eyes fell upon the faint chalk-mark, and, taking his soft
felt hat from his head, with a few practical sweeps of the brim he
brushed away the ominous record of their late estrangement. Going to the
bed whereon Rand lay stretched, open-eyed, he would have laid his hand
upon his arm lightly; but the brother’s fingers sought and clasped his
own. “Get up,” he said quietly; “there’s a strange fire in the Canyon
head that I can’t make out.”

Rand slowly clambered from his shelf, and hand in hand the brothers
stood upon the ledge. “It’s a right smart chance beyond the Ferry, and a
piece beyond the Mill, too,” said Rand, shading his eyes with his hand,
from force of habit. “It’s in the woods where--” He would have added
where he met Mornie; but it was a point of honor with the twins, after
reconciliation, not to allude to any topic of their recent disagreement.

Ruth dropped his brother’s hand. “It doesn’t smell like the woods,” he
said slowly.

“Smell!” repeated Rand incredulously. “Why, it’s twenty miles in a
bee-line yonder. Smell, indeed!”

Ruth was silent, but presently fell to listening again with his former
abstraction. “You don’t hear anything, do you?” he asked after a pause.

“It’s blowin’ in the pines on the river,” said Rand shortly.

“You don’t hear anything else?”

“No.”

“Nothing like--like--like--”

Rand, who had been listening with an intensity that distorted the left
side of his face, interrupted him impatiently.

“Like what?”

“Like a woman sobbin’?”

“Ruth,” said Rand, suddenly looking up in his brother’s face, “what’s
gone of you?”

Ruth laughed. “The fire’s out,” he said, abruptly re-entering the cabin.
“I’m goin’ to turn in.”

Rand, following his brother half reproachfully, saw him divest himself
of his clothing, and roll himself in the blankets of his bed.

“Good-night, Randy!”

Rand hesitated. He would have liked to ask his brother another question;
but there was clearly nothing to be done but follow his example.

“Good-night, Ruthy!” he said, and put out the light. As he did so, the
glow in the eastern horizon faded, too, and darkness seemed to well up
from the depths below, and, flowing in the open door, wrapped them in
deeper slumber.


CHAPTER II.


THE CLOUDS GATHER.


Twelve months had elapsed since the quarrel and reconciliation, during
which interval no reference was made by either of the brothers to the
cause which had provoked it. Rand was at work in the shaft, Ruth having
that morning undertaken the replenishment of the larder with game
from the wooded skirt of the mountain. Rand had taken advantage of his
brother’s absence to “prospect” in the “drift,”--a proceeding utterly at
variance with his previous condemnation of all such speculative essay;
but Rand, despite his assumption of a superior practical nature, was not
above certain local superstitions. Having that morning put on his gray
flannel shirt wrong side out,--an abstraction recognized among the
miners as the sure forerunner of divination and treasure-discovery,--he
could not forego that opportunity of trying his luck, without
hazarding a dangerous example. He was also conscious of feeling
“chipper,”--another local expression for buoyancy of spirit, not common
to men who work fifty feet below the surface, without the stimulus of
air and sunshine, and not to be overlooked as an important factor in
fortunate adventure. Nevertheless, noon came without the discovery of
any treasure. He had attacked the walls on either side of the lateral
“drift” skilfully, so as to expose their quality without destroying
their cohesive integrity, but had found nothing. Once or twice,
returning to the shaft for rest and air, its grim silence had seemed to
him pervaded with some vague echo of cheerful holiday voices above. This
set him to thinking of his brother’s equally extravagant fancy of
the wailing voices in the air on the night of the fire, and of his
attributing it to a lover’s abstraction.

“I laid it to his being struck after that gal; and yet,” Rand continued
to himself, “here’s me, who haven’t been foolin’ round no gal, and dog
my skin if I didn’t think I heard one singin’ up thar!” He put his foot
on the lower round of the ladder, paused, and slowly ascended a dozen
steps. Here he paused again. All at once the whole shaft was filled with
the musical vibrations of a woman’s song. Seizing the rope that hung
idly from the windlass, he half climbed, half swung himself, to the
surface.

The voice was there; but the sudden transition to the dazzling level
before him at first blinded his eyes, so that he took in only by degrees
the unwonted spectacle of the singer,--a pretty girl, standing on tiptoe
on a bowlder not a dozen yards from him, utterly absorbed in tying a
gayly-striped neckerchief, evidently taken from her own plump throat, to
the halliards of a freshly-cut hickory-pole newly reared as a flag-staff
beside her. The hickory-pole, the halliards, the fluttering scarf,
the young lady herself, were all glaring innovations on the familiar
landscape; but Rand, with his hand still on the rope, silently and
demurely enjoyed it.

For the better understanding of the general reader, who does not live on
an isolated mountain, it may be observed that the young lady’s position
on the rock exhibited some study of POSE, and a certain exaggeration of
attitude, that betrayed the habit of an audience; also that her voice
had an artificial accent that was not wholly unconscious, even in this
lofty solitude. Yet the very next moment, when she turned, and caught
Rand’s eye fixed upon her, she started naturally, colored slightly,
uttered that feminine adjuration, “Good Lord! gracious! goodness me!”
 which is seldom used in reference to its effect upon the hearer, and
skipped instantly from the bowlder to the ground. Here, however, she
alighted in a POSE, brought the right heel of her neatly-fitting left
boot closely into the hollowed side of her right instep, at the same
moment deftly caught her flying skirt, whipped it around her ankles,
and, slightly raising it behind, permitted the chaste display of an inch
or two of frilled white petticoat. The most irreverent critic of the sex
will, I think, admit that it has some movements that are automatic.

“Hope I didn’t disturb ye,” said Rand, pointing to the flag-staff.

The young lady slightly turned her head. “No,” she said; “but I didn’t
know anybody was here, of course. Our PARTY”--she emphasized the word,
and accompanied it with a look toward the further extremity of the
plateau, to show she was not alone--“our party climbed this ridge,
and put up this pole as a sign to show they did it.” The ridiculous
self-complacency of this record in the face of a man who was evidently
a dweller on the mountain apparently struck her for the first time. “We
didn’t know,” she stammered, looking at the shaft from which Rand had
emerged, “that--that--” She stopped, and, glancing again towards the
distant range where her friends had disappeared, began to edge away.

“They can’t be far off,” interposed Rand quietly, as if it were the most
natural thing in the world for the lady to be there. “Table Mountain
ain’t as big as all that. Don’t you be scared! So you thought nobody
lived up here?”

She turned upon him a pair of honest hazel eyes, which not only
contradicted the somewhat meretricious smartness of her dress, but was
utterly inconsistent with the palpable artificial color of her hair,--an
obvious imitation of a certain popular fashion then known in artistic
circles as the “British Blonde,”--and began to ostentatiously resume a
pair of lemon-colored kid gloves. Having, as it were, thus indicated her
standing and respectability, and put an immeasurable distance between
herself and her bold interlocutor, she said impressively, “We
evidently made a mistake: I will rejoin our party, who will, of course,
apologize.”

“What’s your hurry?” said the imperturbable Rand, disengaging himself
from the rope, and walking towards her. “As long as you’re up here, you
might stop a spell.”

“I have no wish to intrude; that is, our party certainly has not,”
 continued the young lady, pulling the tight gloves, and smoothing the
plump, almost bursting fingers, with an affectation of fashionable ease.

“Oh! I haven’t any thing to do just now,” said Rand, “and it’s about
grub time, I reckon. Yes, I live here, Ruth and me,--right here.”

The young woman glanced at the shaft.

“No, not down there,” said Rand, following her eye, with a laugh. “Come
here, and I’ll show you.”

A strong desire to keep up an appearance of genteel reserve, and an
equally strong inclination to enjoy the adventurous company of this
good-looking, hearty young fellow, made her hesitate. Perhaps she
regretted having undertaken a role of such dignity at the beginning: she
could have been so perfectly natural with this perfectly natural man,
whereas any relaxation now might increase his familiarity. And yet she
was not without a vague suspicion that her dignity and her gloves
were alike thrown away on him,--a fact made the more evident when
Rand stepped to her side, and, without any apparent consciousness of
disrespect or gallantry, laid his large hand, half persuasively, half
fraternally, upon her shoulder, and said, “Oh, come along, do!”

The simple act either exceeded the limits of her forbearance, or decided
the course of her subsequent behavior. She instantly stepped back a
single pace, and drew her left foot slowly and deliberately after her;
then she fixed her eyes and uplifted eyebrows upon the daring hand,
and, taking it by the ends of her thumb and forefinger, lifted it, and
dropped it in mid-air. She then folded her arms. It was the indignant
gesture with which “Alice,” the Pride of Dumballin Village, received the
loathsome advances of the bloated aristocrat, Sir Parkyns Parkyn, and
had at Marysville, a few nights before, brought down the house.

This effect was, I think, however, lost upon Rand. The slight color that
rose to his cheek as he looked down upon his clay-soiled hands was due
to the belief that he had really contaminated her outward superfine
person. But his color quickly passed: his frank, boyish smile returned,
as he said, “It’ll rub off. Lord, don’t mind that! Thar, now--come on!”

The young woman bit her lip. Then nature triumphed; and she laughed,
although a little scornfully. And then Providence assisted her with the
sudden presentation of two figures, a man and woman, slowly climbing up
over the mountain verge, not far from them. With a cry of “There’s Sol,
now!” she forgot her dignity and her confusion, and ran towards them.

Rand stood looking after her neat figure, less concerned in the advent
of the strangers than in her sudden caprice. He was not so young and
inexperienced but that he noted certain ambiguities in her dress and
manner: he was by no means impressed by her dignity. But he could not
help watching her as she appeared to be volubly recounting her late
interview to her companions; and, still unconscious of any impropriety
or obtrusiveness, he lounged down lazily towards her. Her humor had
evidently changed; for she turned an honest, pleased face upon him, as
she girlishly attempted to drag the strangers forward.

The man was plump and short; unlike the natives of the locality, he was
closely cropped and shaven, as if to keep down the strong blue-blackness
of his beard and hair, which nevertheless asserted itself over his round
cheeks and upper lip like a tattooing of Indian ink. The woman at his
side was reserved and indistinctive, with that appearance of being an
unenthusiastic family servant peculiar to some men’s wives. When Rand
was within a few feet of him, he started, struck a theatrical attitude,
and, shading his eyes with his hand, cried, “What, do me eyes deceive
me!” burst into a hearty laugh, darted forward, seized Rand’s hand, and
shook it briskly.

“Pinkney, Pinkney, my boy! how are you? And this is your little ‘prop’?
your quarter-section, your country-seat, that we’ve been trespassing on,
eh? A nice little spot, cool, sequestered, remote,--a trifle unimproved;
carriage-road as yet unfinished. Ha, ha! But to think of our making
a discovery of this inaccessible mountain, climbing it, sir, for two
mortal hours, christening it ‘Sol’s Peak,’ getting up a flag-pole,
unfurling our standard to the breeze, sir, and then, by Gad, winding up
by finding Pinkney, the festive Pinkney, living on it at home!”

Completely surprised, but still perfectly good-humored, Rand shook the
stranger’s right hand warmly, and received on his broad shoulders a
welcoming thwack from the left, without question. “She don’t mind her
friends making free with ME evidently,” said Rand to himself, as he
tried to suggest that fact to the young lady in a meaning glance.

The stranger noted his glance, and suddenly passed his hand thoughtfully
over his shaven cheeks. “No,” he said--“yes, surely, I forget--yes, I
see; of course you don’t! Rosy,” turning to his wife, “of course Pinkney
doesn’t know Phemie, eh?”

“No, nor ME either, Sol,” said that lady warningly.

“Certainly!” continued Sol. “It’s his misfortune. You weren’t with me
at Gold Hill.--Allow me,” he said, turning to Rand, “to present Mrs. Sol
Saunders, wife of the undersigned, and Miss Euphemia Neville, otherwise
known as the ‘Marysville Pet,’ the best variety actress known on the
provincial boards. Played Ophelia at Marysville, Friday; domestic drama
at Gold Hill, Saturday; Sunday night, four songs in character, different
dress each time, and a clog-dance. The best clog-dance on the Pacific
Slope,” he added in a stage aside. “The minstrels are crazy to get her
in ‘Frisco. But money can’t buy her--prefers the legitimate drama to
this sort of thing.” Here he took a few steps of a jig, to which the
“Marysville Pet” beat time with her feet, and concluded with a laugh
and a wink--the combined expression of an artist’s admiration for her
ability, and a man of the world’s scepticism of feminine ambition.

Miss Euphemia responded to the formal introduction by extending her hand
frankly with a re-assuring smile to Rand, and an utter obliviousness of
her former hauteur. Rand shook it warmly, and then dropped carelessly on
a rock beside them.

“And you never told me you lived up here in the attic, you rascal!”
 continued Sol with a laugh.

“No,” replied Rand simply. “How could I? I never saw you before, that I
remember.”

Miss Euphemia stared at Sol. Mrs. Sol looked up in her lord’s face, and
folded her arms in a resigned expression. Sol rose to his feet again,
and shaded his eyes with his hand, but this time quite seriously, and
gazed at Rand’s smiling face.

“Good Lord! Do you mean to say your name isn’t Pinkney?” he asked, with
a half embarrassed laugh.

“It IS Pinkney,” said Rand; “but I never met you before.”

“Didn’t you come to see a young lady that joined my troupe at Gold Hill
last month, and say you’d meet me at Keeler’s Ferry in a day or two?”

“No-o-o,” said Rand, with a good-humored laugh. “I haven’t left this
mountain for two months.”

He might have added more; but his attention was directed to Miss
Euphemia, who during this short dialogue, having stuffed alternately her
handkerchief, the corner of her mantle, and her gloves, into her mouth,
restrained herself no longer, but gave way to an uncontrollable fit
of laughter. “O Sol!” she gasped explanatorily, as she threw herself
alternately against him, Mrs. Sol, and a bowlder, “you’ll kill me yet!
O Lord! first we take possession of this man’s property, then we claim
HIM.” The contemplation of this humorous climax affected her so that
she was fain at last to walk away, and confide the rest of her speech to
space.

Sol joined in the laugh until his wife plucked his sleeve, and whispered
something in his ear. In an instant his face became at once mysterious
and demure. “I owe you an apology,” he said, turning to Rand, but in a
voice ostentatiously pitched high enough for Miss Euphemia to overhear:
“I see I have made a mistake. A resemblance--only a mere resemblance,
as I look at you now--led me astray. Of course you don’t know any young
lady in the profession?”

“Of course he doesn’t, Sol,” said Miss Euphemia. “I could have told you
that. He didn’t even know ME!”

The voice and mock-heroic attitude of the speaker was enough to relieve
the general embarrassment with a laugh. Rand, now pleasantly conscious
of only Miss Euphemia’s presence, again offered the hospitality of his
cabin, with the polite recognition of her friends in the sentence, “and
you might as well come along too.”

“But won’t we incommode the lady of the house?” said Mrs. Sol politely.

“What lady of the house”? said Rand almost angrily.

“Why, Ruth, you know!”

It was Rand’s turn to become hilarious. “Ruth,” he said, “is short
for Rutherford, my brother.” His laugh, however, was echoed only by
Euphemia.

“Then you have a brother?” said Mrs. Sol benignly.

“Yes,” said Rand: “he will be here soon.” A sudden thought dropped the
color from his cheek. “Look here,” he said, turning impulsively upon
Sol. “I have a brother, a twin-brother. It couldn’t be HIM--”

Sol was conscious of a significant feminine pressure on his right arm.
He was equal to the emergency. “I think not,” he said dubiously, “unless
your brother’s hair is much darker than yours. Yes! now I look at you,
yours is brown. He has a mole on his right cheek hasn’t he?”

The red came quickly back to Rand’s boyish face. He laughed. “No, sir:
my brother’s hair is, if any thing, a shade lighter than mine, and nary
mole. Come along!”

And leading the way, Rand disclosed the narrow steps winding down to the
shelf on which the cabin hung. “Be careful,” said Rand, taking the now
unresisting hand of the “Marysville Pet” as they descended: “a step that
way, and down you go two thousand feet on the top of a pine-tree.”

But the girl’s slight cry of alarm was presently changed to one of
unaffected pleasure as they stood on the rocky platform. “It isn’t a
house: it’s a NEST, and the loveliest!” said Euphemia breathlessly.

“It’s a scene, a perfect scene, sir!” said Sol, enraptured. “I shall
take the liberty of bringing my scene-painter to sketch it some day.
It would do for ‘The Mountaineer’s Bride’ superbly, or,” continued
the little man, warming through the blue-black border of his face with
professional enthusiasm, “it’s enough to make a play itself. ‘The Cot on
the Crags.’ Last scene--moonlight--the struggle on the ledge! The Lady
of the Crags throws herself from the beetling heights!--A shriek from
the depths--a woman’s wail!”

“Dry up!” sharply interrupted Rand, to whom this speech recalled his
brother’s half-forgotten strangeness. “Look at the prospect.”

In the full noon of a cloudless day, beneath them a tumultuous sea of
pines surged, heaved, rode in giant crests, stretched and lost itself
in the ghostly, snow-peaked horizon. The thronging woods choked every
defile, swept every crest, filled every valley with its dark-green
tilting spears, and left only Table Mountain sunlit and bare. Here and
there were profound olive depths, over which the gray hawk hung lazily,
and into which blue jays dipped. A faint, dull yellowish streak marked
an occasional watercourse; a deeper reddish ribbon, the mountain road
and its overhanging murky cloud of dust.

“Is it quite safe here?” asked Mrs. Sol, eying the little cabin. “I mean
from storms?”

“It never blows up here,” replied Rand, “and nothing happens.”

“It must be lovely,” said Euphemia, clasping her hands.

“It IS that,” said Rand proudly. “It’s four years since Ruth and I took
up this yer claim, and raised this shanty. In that four years we haven’t
left it alone a night, or cared to. It’s only big enough for two, and
them two must be brothers. It wouldn’t do for mere pardners to live here
alone,--they couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be exactly the thing for man
and wife to shut themselves up here alone. But Ruth and me know
each other’s ways, and here we’ll stay until we’ve made a pile. We
sometimes--one of us--takes a pasear to the Ferry to buy provisions; but
we’re glad to crawl up to the back of old ‘Table’ at night.”

“You’re quite out of the world here, then?” suggested Mrs. Sol.

“That’s it, just it! We’re out of the world,--out of rows, out of
liquor, out of cards, out of bad company, out of temptation. Cussedness
and foolishness hez got to follow us up here to find us, and there’s too
many ready to climb down to them things to tempt ‘em to come up to us.”

There was a little boyish conceit in his tone, as he stood there, not
altogether unbecoming his fresh color and simplicity. Yet, when his
eyes met those of Miss Euphemia, he colored, he hardly knew why, and the
young lady herself blushed rosily.

When the neat cabin, with its decorated walls, and squirrel and wild-cat
skins, was duly admired, the luncheon-basket of the Saunders party was
re-enforced by provisions from Rand’s larder, and spread upon the
ledge; the dimensions of the cabin not admitting four. Under the potent
influence of a bottle, Sol became hilarious and professional. The “Pet”
 was induced to favor the company with a recitation, and, under the plea
of teaching Rand, to perform the clog-dance with both gentlemen. Then
there was an interval, in which Rand and Euphemia wandered a little way
down the mountain-side to gather laurel, leaving Mr. Sol to his siesta
on a rock, and Mrs. Sol to take some knitting from the basket, and sit
beside him.

When Rand and his companion had disappeared, Mrs. Sol nudged her
sleeping partner. “Do you think that WAS the brother?”

Sol yawned. “Sure of it. They’re as like as two peas, in looks.”

“Why didn’t you tell him so, then?”

“Will you tell me, my dear, why you stopped me when I began?”

“Because something was said about Ruth being here; and I supposed Ruth
was a woman, and perhaps Pinkney’s wife, and knew you’d be putting your
foot in it by talking of that other woman. I supposed it was for fear of
that he denied knowing you.”

“Well, when HE--this Rand--told me he had a twin-brother, he looked so
frightened that I knew he knew nothing of his brother’s doings with that
woman, and I threw him off the scent. He’s a good fellow, but awfully
green, and I didn’t want to worry him with tales. I like him, and I
think Phemie does too.”

“Nonsense! He’s a conceited prig! Did you hear his sermon on the world
and its temptations? I wonder if he thought temptation had come up to
him in the person of us professionals out on a picnic. I think it was
positively rude.”

“My dear woman, you’re always seeing slights and insults. I tell you
he’s taken a shine to Phemie; and he’s as good as four seats and a
bouquet to that child next Wednesday evening, to say nothing of the
eclat of getting this St. Simeon--what do you call him?--Stalactites?”

“Stylites,” suggested Mrs. Sol.

“Stylites, off from his pillar here. I’ll have a paragraph in the paper,
that the hermit crabs of Table Mountain--”

“Don’t be a fool, Sol!”

“The hermit twins of Table Mountain bespoke the chaste performance.”

“One of them being the protector of the well-known Mornie
Nixon,” responded Mrs. Sol, viciously accenting the name with her
knitting-needles.

“Rosy, you’re unjust. You’re prejudiced by the reports of the town.
Mr. Pinkney’s interest in her may be a purely artistic one, although
mistaken. She’ll never make a good variety-actress: she’s too heavy.
And the boys don’t give her a fair show. No woman can make a debut in my
version of ‘Somnambula,’ and have the front row in the pit say to her in
the sleepwalking scene, ‘You’re out rather late, Mornie. Kinder forgot
to put on your things, didn’t you? Mother sick, I suppose, and you’re
goin’ for more gin? Hurry along, or you’ll ketch it when ye get home.’
Why, you couldn’t do it yourself, Rosy!”

To which Mrs. Sol’s illogical climax was, that, “bad as Rutherford might
be, this Sunday-school superintendent, Rand, was worse.”

Rand and his companion returned late, but in high spirits. There was
an unnecessary effusiveness in the way in which Euphemia kissed
Mrs. Sol,--the one woman present, who UNDERSTOOD, and was to be
propitiated,--which did not tend to increase Mrs. Sol’s good humor.
She had her basket packed all ready for departure; and even the earnest
solicitation of Rand, that they would defer their going until sunset,
produced no effect.

“Mr. Rand--Mr. Pinkney, I mean--says the sunsets here are so lovely,”
 pleaded Euphemia.

“There is a rehearsal at seven o’clock, and we have no time to lose,”
 said Mrs. Sol significantly.

“I forgot to say,” said the “Marysville Pet” timidly, glancing at Mrs.
Sol, “that Mr. Rand says he will bring his brother on Wednesday night,
and wants four seats in front, so as not to be crowded.”

Sol shook the young man’s hand warmly. “You’ll not regret it, sir: it’s
a surprising, a remarkable performance.”

“I’d like to go a piece down the mountain with you,” said Rand, with
evident sincerity, looking at Miss Euphemia; “but Ruth isn’t here yet,
and we make a rule never to leave the place alone. I’ll show you the
slide: it’s the quickest way to go down. If you meet any one who looks
like me, and talks like me, call him ‘Ruth,’ and tell him I’m waitin’
for him yer.”

Miss Phemia, the last to go, standing on the verge of the declivity,
here remarked, with a dangerous smile, that, if she met any one who
bore that resemblance, she might be tempted to keep him with her,--a
playfulness that brought the ready color to Rand’s cheek. When she
added to this the greater audacity of kissing her hand to him, the
young hermit actually turned away in sheer embarrassment. When he looked
around again, she was gone, and for the first time in his experience the
mountain seemed barren and lonely.

The too sympathetic reader who would rashly deduce from this any newly
awakened sentiment in the virgin heart of Rand would quite misapprehend
that peculiar young man. That singular mixture of boyish inexperience
and mature doubt and disbelief, which was partly the result of his
temperament, and partly of his cloistered life on the mountain, made him
regard his late companions, now that they were gone, and his intimacy
with them, with remorseful distrust. The mountain was barren and lonely,
because it was no longer HIS. It had become a part of the great world,
which four years ago he and his brother had put aside, and in which, as
two self-devoted men, they walked alone. More than that, he believed
he had acquired some understanding of the temptations that assailed
his brother, and the poor little vanities of the “Marysville Pet” were
transformed into the blandishments of a Circe. Rand, who would have
succumbed to a wicked, superior woman, believed he was a saint in
withstanding the foolish weakness of a simple one.


He did not resume his work that day. He paced the mountain, anxiously
awaiting his brother’s return, and eager to relate his experiences. He
would go with him to the dramatic entertainment; from his example and
wisdom, Ruth should learn how easily temptation might be overcome. But,
first of all, there should be the fullest exchange of confidences
and explanations. The old rule should be rescinded for once, the old
discussion in regard to Mornie re-opened, and Rand, having convinced his
brother of error, would generously extend his forgiveness.

The sun sank redly. Lingering long upon the ledge before their cabin, it
at last slipped away almost imperceptibly, leaving Rand still wrapped in
revery. Darkness, the smoke of distant fires in the woods, and the faint
evening incense of the pines, crept slowly up; but Ruth came not. The
moon rose, a silver gleam on the farther ridge; and Rand, becoming
uneasy at his brother’s prolonged absence, resolved to break another
custom, and leave the summit, to seek him on the trail. He buckled on
his revolvers, seized his gun, when a cry from the depths arrested him.
He leaned over the ledge, and listened. Again the cry arose, and this
time more distinctly. He held his breath: the blood settled around his
heart in superstitious terror. It was the wailing voice of a woman.

“Ruth, Ruth! for God’s sake come and help me!”

The blood flew back hotly to Rand’s cheek. It was Mornie’s voice. By
leaning over the ledge, he could distinguish something moving along the
almost precipitous face of the cliff, where an abandoned trail, long
since broken off and disrupted by the fall of a portion of the ledge,
stopped abruptly a hundred feet below him. Rand knew the trail, a
dangerous one always: in its present condition a single mis-step
would be fatal. Would she make that mis-step? He shook off a horrible
temptation that seemed to be sealing his lips, and paralyzing his
limbs, and almost screamed to her, “Drop on your face, hang on to the
chaparral, and don’t move!”

In another instant, with a coil of rope around his arm, he was dashing
down the almost perpendicular “slide.” When he had nearly reached the
level of the abandoned trail, he fastened one end of the rope to a
jutting splinter of granite, and began to “lay out,” and work his
way laterally along the face of the mountain. Presently he struck the
regular trail at the point from which the woman must have diverged.

“It is Rand,” she said, without lifting her head.

“It is,” replied Rand coldly. “Pass the rope under your arms, and I’ll
get you back to the trail.”

“Where is Ruth?” she demanded again, without moving. She was trembling,
but with excitement rather than fear.

“I don’t know,” returned Rand impatiently. “Come! the ledge is already
crumbling beneath our feet.”

“Let it crumble!” said the woman passionately.

Rand surveyed her with profound disgust, then passed the rope around her
waist, and half lifted, half swung her from her feet. In a few moments
she began to mechanically help herself, and permitted him to guide her
to a place of safety. That reached, she sank down again.

The rising moon shone full upon her face and figure. Through his growing
indignation Rand was still impressed and even startled with the change
the few last months had wrought upon her. In place of the silly,
fanciful, half-hysterical hoyden whom he had known, a matured woman,
strong in passionate self-will, fascinating in a kind of wild, savage
beauty, looked up at him as if to read his very soul.

“What are you staring at?” she said finally. “Why don’t you help me on?”

“Where do you want to go?” said Rand quietly.

“Where! Up there!”--she pointed savagely to the top of the
mountain,--“to HIM! Where else should I go?” she said, with a bitter
laugh.

“I’ve told you he wasn’t there,” said Rand roughly. “He hasn’t
returned.”

“I’ll wait for him--do you hear?--wait for him; stay there till he
comes. If you won’t help me, I’ll go alone.”

She made a step forward but faltered, staggered, and was obliged to lean
against the mountain for support. Stains of travel were on her dress;
lines of fatigue and pain, and traces of burning passionate tears, were
on her face; her black hair flowed from beneath her gaudy bonnet; and,
shamed out of his brutality, Rand placed his strong arm round her waist,
and half carrying, half supporting her, began the ascent. Her head
dropped wearily on his shoulder; her arm encircled his neck; her hair,
as if caressingly, lay across his breast and hands; her grateful eyes
were close to his; her breath was upon his cheek: and yet his only
consciousness was of the possibly ludicrous figure he might present to
his brother, should he meet him with Mornie Nixon in his arms. Not a
word was spoken by either till they reached the summit. Relieved at
finding his brother still absent, he turned not unkindly toward the
helpless figure on his arm. “I don’t see what makes Ruth so late,” he
said. “He’s always here by sundown. Perhaps--”

“Perhaps he knows I’m here,” said Mornie, with a bitter laugh.

“I didn’t say that,” said Rand, “and I don’t think it. What I meant
was, he might have met a party that was picnicking here to-day,--Sol.
Saunders and wife, and Miss Euphemia--”

Mornie flung his arm away from her with a passionate gesture. “THEY
here!--picnicking HERE!--those people HERE!”

“Yes,” said Rand, unconsciously a little ashamed. “They came here
accidentally.”

Mornie’s quick passion had subsided: she had sunk again wearily and
helplessly on a rock beside him. “I suppose,” she said, with a weak
laugh--“I suppose, they talked of ME. I suppose they told you how, with
their lies and fair promises, they tricked me out, and set me before an
audience of brutes and laughing hyenas to make merry over. Did they tell
you of the insults that I received?--how the sins of my parents were
flung at me instead of bouquets? Did they tell you they could have
spared me this, but they wanted the few extra dollars taken in at the
door? No!”

“They said nothing of the kind,” replied Rand surlily.

“Then you must have stopped them. You were horrified enough to know that
I had dared to take the only honest way left me to make a living. I know
you, Randolph Pinkney! You’d rather see Joaquin Muriatta, the Mexican
bandit, standing before you to-night with a revolver, than the helpless,
shamed, miserable Mornie Nixon. And you can’t help yourself, unless you
throw me over the cliff. Perhaps you’d better,” she said, with a bitter
laugh that faded from her lips as she leaned, pale and breathless,
against the bowlder.

“Ruth will tell you--” began Rand.

“D--n Ruth!”

Rand turned away.

“Stop!” she said suddenly, staggering to her feet. “I’m sick--for all
I know, dying. God grant that it may be so! But, if you are a man, you
will help me to your cabin--to some place where I can lie down NOW, and
be at rest. I’m very, very tired.”

She paused. She would have fallen again; but Rand, seeing more in her
face than her voice interpreted to his sullen ears, took her sullenly
in his arms, and carried her to the cabin. Her eyes glanced around the
bright party-colored walls, and a faint smile came to her lips as she
put aside her bonnet, adorned with a companion pinion of the bright
wings that covered it.

“Which is Ruth’s bed?” she asked.

Rand pointed to it.

“Lay me there!”

Rand would have hesitated, but, with another look at her face, complied.

She lay quite still a moment. Presently she said, “Give me some brandy
or whiskey!”

Rand was silent and confused.

“I forgot,” she added half bitterly. “I know you have not that commonest
and cheapest of vices.”

She lay quite still again. Suddenly she raised herself partly on her
elbow, and in a strong, firm voice, said, “Rand!”

“Yes, Mornie.”

“If you are wise and practical, as you assume to be, you will do what I
ask you without a question. If you do it AT ONCE, you may save yourself
and Ruth some trouble, some mortification, and perhaps some remorse and
sorrow. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the nearest doctor, and bring him here with you.”

“But YOU!”

Her voice was strong, confident, steady, and patient. “You can safely
leave me until then.”

In another moment Rand was plunging down the “slide.” But it was past
midnight when he struggled over the last bowlder up the ascent, dragging
the half-exhausted medical wisdom of Brown’s Ferry on his arm.

“I’ve been gone long, doctor,” said Rand feverishly, “and she looked SO
death-like when I left. If we should be too late!”

The doctor stopped suddenly, lifted his head, and pricked his ears like
a hound on a peculiar scent. “We ARE too late,” he said, with a slight
professional laugh.

Indignant and horrified, Rand turned upon him.

“Listen,” said the doctor, lifting his hand.

Rand listened, so intently that he heard the familiar moan of the river
below; but the great stony field lay silent before him. And then, borne
across its bare barren bosom, like its own articulation, came faintly
the feeble wail of a new-born babe.


III.


STORM.


The doctor hurried ahead in the darkness. Rand, who had stopped
paralyzed at the ominous sound, started forward again mechanically; but
as the cry arose again more distinctly, and the full significance of
the doctor’s words came to him, he faltered, stopped, and, with cheeks
burning with shame and helpless indignation, sank upon a stone beside
the shaft, and, burying his face in his hands, fairly gave way to a
burst of boyish tears. Yet even then the recollection that he had not
cried since, years ago, his mother’s dying hands had joined his and
Ruth’s childish fingers together, stung him fiercely, and dried his
tears in angry heat upon his cheeks.

How long he sat there, he remembered not; what he thought, he recalled
not. But the wildest and most extravagant plans and resolves availed him
nothing in the face of this forever desecrated home, and this shameful
culmination of his ambitious life on the mountain. Once he thought of
flight; but the reflection that he would still abandon his brother to
shame, perhaps a self-contented shame, checked him hopelessly. Could he
avert the future? He MUST; but how? Yet he could only sit and stare into
the darkness in dumb abstraction.

Sitting there, his eyes fell upon a peculiar object in a crevice of
the ledge beside the shaft. It was the tin pail containing his dinner,
which, according to their custom, it was the duty of the brother who
staid above ground to prepare and place for the brother who worked
below. Ruth must, consequently, have put it there before he left that
morning, and Rand had overlooked it while sharing the repast of the
strangers at noon. At the sight of this dumb witness of their mutual
cares and labors, Rand sighed, half in brotherly sorrow, half in a
selfish sense of injury done him.

He took up the pail mechanically, removed its cover, and--started; for
on top of the carefully bestowed provisions lay a little note, addressed
to him in Ruth’s peculiar scrawl.

He opened it with feverish hands, held it in the light of the peaceful
moon, and read as follows:


DEAR, DEAR BROTHER,--When you read this, I shall be far away. I go
because I shall not stay to disgrace you, and because the girl that I
brought trouble upon has gone away too, to hide her disgrace and mine;
and where she goes, Rand, I ought to follow her, and, please God, I
will! I am not as wise or as good as you are, but it seems the best I
can do; and God bless you, dear old Randy, boy! Times and times again
I’ve wanted to tell you all, and reckoned to do so; but whether you was
sitting before me in the cabin, or working beside me in the drift, I
couldn’t get to look upon your honest face, dear brother, and say what
things I’d been keeping from you so long. I’ll stay away until I’ve done
what I ought to do, and if you can say, “Come, Ruth,” I will come; but,
until you can say it, the mountain is yours, Randy, boy, the mine is
yours, the cabin is yours, ALL is yours. Rub out the old chalk-marks,
Rand, as I rub them out here in my--[A few words here were blurred and
indistinct, as if the moon had suddenly become dim-eyed too]. God bless
you, brother!

P.S.--You know I mean Mornie all the time. It’s she I’m going to seek;
but don’t you think so bad of her as you do, I am so much worse than
she. I wanted to tell you that all along, but I didn’t dare. She’s run
away from the Ferry half crazy; said she was going to Sacramento, and
I am going there to find her alive or dead. Forgive me, brother! Don’t
throw this down right away; hold it in your hand a moment, Randy, boy,
and try hard to think it’s my hand in yours. And so good-by, and God
bless you, old Randy!

From your loving brother,

RUTH.


A deep sense of relief overpowered every other feeling in Rand’s breast.
It was clear that Ruth had not yet discovered the truth of Mornie’s
flight: he was on his way to Sacramento, and before he could return,
Mornie could be removed. Once despatched in some other direction, with
Ruth once more returned and under his brother’s guidance, the separation
could be made easy and final. There was evidently no marriage as yet;
and now, the fear of an immediate meeting over, there should be none.
For Rand had already feared this; had recalled the few infelicitous
relations, legal and illegal, which were common to the adjoining
camp,--the flagrantly miserable life of the husband of a San Francisco
anonyma who lived in style at the Ferry, the shameful carousals and more
shameful quarrels of the Frenchman and Mexican woman who “kept house”
 at “the Crossing,” the awful spectacle of the three half-bred Indian
children who played before the cabin of a fellow miner and townsman.
Thank Heaven, the Eagle’s Nest on Table Mountain should never be pointed
at from the valley as another--

A heavy hand upon his arm brought him trembling to his feet. He turned,
and met the half-anxious, half-contemptuous glance of the doctor.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said dryly; “but it’s about time you or
somebody else put in an appearance at that cabin. Luckily for HER, she’s
one woman in a thousand; has had her wits about her better than some
folks I know, and has left me little to do but make her comfortable. But
she’s gone through too much,--fought her little fight too gallantly,--is
altogether too much of a trump to be played off upon now. So rise up
out of that, young man, pick up your scattered faculties, and fetch a
woman--some sensible creature of her own sex--to look after her; for,
without wishing to be personal, I’m d----d if I trust her to the likes
of you.”

There was no mistaking Dr. Duchesne’ s voice and manner; and Rand
was affected by it, as most people were throughout the valley of the
Stanislaus. But he turned upon him his frank and boyish face, and said
simply, “But I don’t know any woman, or where to get one.”

The doctor looked at him again. “Well, I’ll find you some one,” he said,
softening.

“Thank you!” said Rand.

The doctor was disappearing. With an effort Rand recalled him. “One
moment, doctor.” He hesitated, and his cheeks were glowing. “You’ll
please say nothing about this down there”--he pointed to the
valley--“for a time. And you’ll say to the woman you send--”

Dr. Duchesne, whose resolute lips were sealed upon the secrets of half
Tuolumne County, interrupted him scornfully. “I cannot answer for the
woman--you must talk to her yourself. As for me, generally I keep
my professional visits to myself; but--” he laid his hand on Rand’s
arm--“if I find out you’re putting on any airs to that poor creature,
if, on my next visit, her lips or her pulse tell me you haven’t been
acting on the square to her, I’ll drop a hint to drunken old Nixon where
his daughter is hidden. I reckon she could stand his brutality better
than yours. Good-night!”

In another moment he was gone. Rand, who had held back his quick tongue,
feeling himself in the power of this man, once more alone, sank on a
rock, and buried his face in his hands. Recalling himself in a moment,
he rose, wiped his hot eyelids, and staggered toward the cabin. It was
quite still now. He paused on the topmost step, and listened: there
was no sound from the ledge, or the Eagle’s Nest that clung to it. Half
timidly he descended the winding steps, and paused before the door
of the cabin. “Mornie,” he said, in a dry, metallic voice, whose
only indication of the presence of sickness was in the lowness of its
pitch,--“Mornie!” There was no reply. “Mornie,” he repeated impatiently,
“it’s me,--Rand. If you want anything, you’re to call me. I am just
outside.” Still no answer came from the silent cabin. He pushed open the
door gently, hesitated, and stepped over the threshold.

A change in the interior of the cabin within the last few hours showed
a new presence. The guns, shovels, picks, and blankets had disappeared;
the two chairs were drawn against the wall, the table placed by the
bedside. The swinging-lantern was shaded towards the bed,--the object of
Rand’s attention. On that bed, his brother’s bed, lay a helpless woman,
pale from the long black hair that matted her damp forehead, and clung
to her hollow cheeks. Her face was turned to the wall, so that the
softened light fell upon her profile, which to Rand at that moment
seemed even noble and strong. But the next moment his eye fell upon the
shoulder and arm that lay nearest to him, and the little bundle, swathed
in flannel, that it clasped to her breast. His brow grew dark as
he gazed. The sleeping woman moved. Perhaps it was an instinctive
consciousness of his presence; perhaps it was only the current of
cold air from the opened door: but she shuddered slightly, and, still
unconscious, drew the child as if away from HIM, and nearer to her
breast. The shamed blood rushed to Rand’s face; and saying half aloud,
“I’m not going to take your precious babe away from you,” he turned in
half-boyish pettishness away. Nevertheless he came back again shortly to
the bedside, and gazed upon them both. She certainly did look altogether
more ladylike, and less aggressive, lying there so still: sickness, that
cheap refining process of some natures, was not unbecoming to her. But
this bundle! A boyish curiosity, stronger than even his strong objection
to the whole episode, was steadily impelling him to lift the blanket
from it. “I suppose she’d waken if I did,” said Rand; “but I’d like to
know what right the doctor had to wrap it up in my best flannel shirt.”
 This fresh grievance, the fruit of his curiosity, sent him away again to
meditate on the ledge. After a few moments he returned again, opened the
cupboard at the foot of the bed softly, took thence a piece of chalk,
and scrawled in large letters upon the door of the cupboard, “If you
want anything, sing out: I’m just outside.--RAND.” This done, he took a
blanket and bear-skin from the corner, and walked to the door. But here
he paused, looked back at the inscription (evidently not satisfied with
it), returned, took up the chalk, added a line, but rubbed it out
again, repeated this operation a few times until he produced the polite
postscript,--“Hope you’ll be better soon.” Then he retreated to the
ledge, spread the bear-skin beside the door, and, rolling himself in
a blanket, lit his pipe for his night-long vigil. But Rand, although
a martyr, a philosopher, and a moralist, was young. In less than ten
minutes the pipe dropped from his lips, and he was asleep.


He awoke with a strange sense of heat and suffocation, and with
difficulty shook off his covering. Rubbing his eyes, he discovered that
an extra blanket had in some mysterious way been added in the night; and
beneath his head was a pillow he had no recollection of placing there
when he went to sleep. By degrees the events of the past night forced
themselves upon his benumbed faculties, and he sat up. The sun was
riding high; the door of the cabin was open. Stretching himself, he
staggered to his feet, and looked in through the yawning crack at the
hinges. He rubbed his eyes again. Was he still asleep, and followed by
a dream of yesterday? For there, even in the very attitude he remembered
to have seen her sitting at her luncheon on the previous day, with her
knitting on her lap, sat Mrs. Sol Saunders! What did it mean? or had she
really been sitting there ever since, and all the events that followed
only a dream?

A hand was laid upon his arm; and, turning, he saw the murky black eyes
and Indian-inked beard of Sol beside him. That gentleman put his finger
on his lips with a theatrical gesture, and then, slowly retreating in
the well-known manner of the buried Majesty of Denmark, waved him, like
another Hamlet, to a remoter part of the ledge. This reached, he grasped
Rand warmly by the hand, shook it heartily, and said, “It’s all right,
my boy; all right!”

“But--” began Rand. The hot blood flowed to his cheeks: he stammered,
and stopped short.

“It’s all right, I say! Don’t you mind! We’ll pull you through.”

“But, Mrs. Sol! what does she--”

“Rosey has taken the matter in hand, sir; and when that woman takes a
matter in hand, whether it’s a baby or a rehearsal, sir, she makes it
buzz.”

“But how did she know?” stammered Rand.

“How? Well, sir, the scene opened something like this,” said Sol
professionally. “Curtain rises on me and Mrs. Sol. Domestic
interior: practicable chairs, table, books, newspapers. Enter Dr.
Duchesne,--eccentric character part, very popular with the
boys,--tells off-hand affecting story of strange woman--one ‘more
unfortunate’--having baby in Eagle’s Nest, lonely place on ‘peaks
of Snowdon,’ midnight; eagles screaming, you know, and far down
unfathomable depths; only attendant, cold-blooded ruffian, evidently
father of child, with sinister designs on child and mother.”

“He didn’t say THAT!” said Rand, with an agonized smile.

“Order! Sit down in front!” continued Sol easily. “Mrs. Sol--highly
interested, a mother herself--demands name of place. ‘Table Mountain.’
No; it cannot be--it is! Excitement. Mystery! Rosey rises to
occasion--comes to front: ‘Some one must go; I--I--will go myself!’
Myself, coming to center: ‘Not alone, dearest; I--I will accompany you!’
A shriek at right upper center. Enter the ‘Marysville Pet.’ ‘I
have heard all. ‘Tis a base calumny. It cannot be HE--Randolph!
Never!’--‘Dare you accompany us will!’ Tableau.

“Is Miss Euphemia--here?” gasped Rand, practical even in his
embarrassment.

“Or-r-rder! Scene second. Summit of mountain--moonlight Peaks of Snowdon
in distance. Right--lonely cabin. Enter slowly up defile, Sol, Mrs. Sol,
the ‘Pet.’ Advance slowly to cabin. Suppressed shriek from the
‘Pet,’ who rushes to recumbent figure--Left--discovered lying beside
cabin-door. ‘’Tis he! Hist! he sleeps!’ Throws blanket over him, and
retires up stage--so.” Here Sol achieved a vile imitation of the “Pet’s”
 most enchanting stage-manner. “Mrs. Sol advances--Center--throws open
door. Shriek! ‘’Tis Mornie, the lost found!’ The ‘Pet’ advances: ‘And
the father is?’--‘Not Rand!’ The ‘Pet’ kneeling: ‘Just Heaven, I thank
thee!’ No, it is--’”

“Hush!” said Rand appealingly, looking toward the cabin.

“Hush it is!” said the actor good-naturedly. “But it’s all right, Mr.
Rand: we’ll pull you through.”

Later in the morning, Rand learned that Mornie’s ill-fated connection
with the Star Variety Troupe had been a source of anxiety to Mrs. Sol,
and she had reproached herself for the girl’s infelicitous debut.

“But, Lord bless you, Mr. Rand!” said Sol, “it was all in the way of
business. She came to us--was fresh and new. Her chance, looking at
it professionally, was as good as any amateur’s; but what with her
relations here, and her bein’ known, she didn’t take. We lost money on
her! It’s natural she should feel a little ugly. We all do when we get
sorter kicked back onto ourselves, and find we can’t stand alone. Why,
you wouldn’t believe it,” he continued, with a moist twinkle of his
black eyes; “but the night I lost my little Rosey, of diphtheria in Gold
Hill, the child was down on the bills for a comic song; and I had to
drag Mrs. Sol on, cut up as she was, and filled up with that much of Old
Bourbon to keep her nerves stiff, so she could do an old gag with me
to gain time, and make up the ‘variety.’ Why, sir, when I came to the
front, I was ugly! And when one of the boys in the front row sang out,
‘Don’t expose that poor child to the night air, Sol,’--meaning Mrs.
Sol,--I acted ugly. No, sir, it’s human nature; and it was quite natural
that Mornie, when she caught sight o’ Mrs. Sol’s face last night, should
rise up and cuss us both. Lord, if she’d only acted like that! But the
old lady got her quiet at last; and, as I said before, it’s all right,
and we’ll pull her through. But don’t YOU thank us: it’s a little matter
betwixt us and Mornie. We’ve got everything fixed, so that Mrs. Sol can
stay right along. We’ll pull Mornie through, and get her away from this,
and her baby too, as soon as we can. You won’t get mad if I tell you
something?” said Sol, with a half-apologetic laugh. “Mrs. Sol was
rather down on you the other day, hated you on sight, and preferred
your brother to you; but when she found he’d run off and left YOU,
you,--don’t mind my sayin’,--a ‘mere boy,’ to take what oughter be
HIS place, why, she just wheeled round agin’ him. I suppose he
got flustered, and couldn’t face the music. Never left a word of
explanation? Well, it wasn’t exactly square, though I tell the old woman
it’s human nature. He might have dropped a hint where he was goin’.
Well, there, I won’t say a word more agin’ him. I know how you feel.
Hush it is.”

It was the firm conviction of the simple-minded Sol that no one knew
the various natural indications of human passion better than himself.
Perhaps it was one of the fallacies of his profession that the
expression of all human passion was limited to certain conventional
signs and sounds. Consequently, when Rand colored violently, became
confused, stammered, and at last turned hastily away, the good-hearted
fellow instantly recognized the unfailing evidence of modesty and
innocence embarrassed by recognition. As for Rand, I fear his shame
was only momentary. Confirmed in the belief of his ulterior wisdom and
virtue, his first embarrassment over, he was not displeased with this
halfway tribute, and really believed that the time would come when
Mr. Sol should eventually praise his sagacity and reservation,
and acknowledge that he was something more than a mere boy. He,
nevertheless, shrank from meeting Mornie that morning, and was glad that
the presence of Mrs. Sol relieved him from that duty.

The day passed uneventfully. Rand busied himself in his usual
avocations, and constructed a temporary shelter for himself and Sol
beside the shaft, besides rudely shaping a few necessary articles of
furniture for Mrs. Sol.

“It will be a little spell yet afore Mornie’s able to be moved,”
 suggested Sol, “and you might as well be comfortable.”

Rand sighed at this prospect, yet presently forgot himself in the
good humor of his companion, whose admiration for himself he began to
patronizingly admit. There was no sense of degradation in accepting the
friendship of this man who had traveled so far, seen so much, and yet,
as a practical man of the world, Rand felt was so inferior to himself.
The absence of Miss Euphemia, who had early left the mountain, was a
source of odd, half-definite relief. Indeed, when he closed his eyes to
rest that night, it was with a sense that the reality of his situation
was not as bad as he had feared. Once only, the figure of his
brother--haggard, weary, and footsore, on his hopeless quest, wandering
in lonely trails and lonelier settlements--came across his fancy; but
with it came the greater fear of his return, and the pathetic figure was
banished. “And, besides, he’s in Sacramento by this time, and like
as not forgotten us all,” he muttered; and, twining this poppy and
mandragora around his pillow, he fell asleep.

His spirits had quite returned the next morning, and once or twice he
found himself singing while at work in the shaft. The fear that Ruth
might return to the mountain before he could get rid of Mornie, and
the slight anxiety that had grown upon him to know something of his
brother’s movements, and to be able to govern them as he wished, caused
him to hit upon the plan of constructing an ingenious advertisement to
be published in the San Francisco journals, wherein the missing Ruth
should be advised that news of his quest should be communicated to him
by “a friend,” through the same medium, after an interval of two weeks.
Full of this amiable intention, he returned to the surface to dinner.
Here, to his momentary confusion, he met Miss Euphemia, who, in absence
of Sol, was assisting Mrs. Sol in the details of the household.

If the honest frankness with which that young lady greeted him was not
enough to relieve his embarrassment, he would have forgotten it in
the utterly new and changed aspect she presented. Her extravagant
walking-costume of the previous day was replaced by some bright calico,
a little white apron, and a broad-brimmed straw-hat, which seemed to
Rand, in some odd fashion, to restore her original girlish simplicity.
The change was certainly not unbecoming to her. If her waist was not
as tightly pinched, a la mode, there still was an honest, youthful
plumpness about it; her step was freer for the absence of her high-heel
boots; and even the hand she extended to Rand, if not quite so small as
in her tight gloves, and a little brown from exposure, was magnetic in
its strong, kindly grasp. There was perhaps a slight suggestion of the
practical Mr. Sol in her wholesome presence; and Rand could not help
wondering if Mrs. Sol had ever been a Gold Hill “Pet” before her
marriage with Mr. Sol. The young girl noticed his curious glance.

“You never saw me in my rehearsal dress before,” she said, with a laugh.
“But I’m not ‘company’ to-day, and didn’t put on my best harness to
knock round in. I suppose I look dreadful.”

“I don’t think you look bad,” said Rand simply.

“Thank you,” said Euphemia, with a laugh and a courtesy. “But this isn’t
getting the dinner.”

As part of that operation evidently was the taking-off of her hat,
the putting-up of some thick blond locks that had escaped, and the
rolling-up of her sleeves over a pair of strong, rounded arms, Rand
lingered near her. All trace of the “Pet’s” previous professional
coquetry was gone,--perhaps it was only replaced by a more natural one;
but as she looked up, and caught sight of Rand’s interested face, she
laughed again, and colored a little. Slight as was the blush, it was
sufficient to kindle a sympathetic fire in Rand’s own cheeks, which was
so utterly unexpected to him that he turned on his heel in confusion. “I
reckon she thinks I’m soft and silly, like Ruth,” he soliloquized, and,
determining not to look at her again, betook himself to a distant and
contemplative pipe. In vain did Miss Euphemia address herself to the
ostentatious getting of the dinner in full view of him; in vain did
she bring the coffee-pot away from the fire, and nearer Rand, with the
apparent intention of examining its contents in a better light; in vain,
while wiping a plate, did she, absorbed in the distant prospect, walk
to the verge of the mountain, and become statuesque and forgetful. The
sulky young gentleman took no outward notice of her.

Mrs. Sol’s attendance upon Mornie prevented her leaving the cabin, and
Rand and Miss Euphemia dined in the open air alone. The ridiculousness
of keeping up a formal attitude to his solitary companion caused Rand
to relax; but, to his astonishment, the “Pet” seemed to have become
correspondingly distant and formal. After a few moments of discomfort,
Rand, who had eaten little, arose, and “believed he would go back to
work.”

“Ah, yes!” said the “Pet,” with an indifferent air, “I suppose you must.
Well, good-by, Mr. Pinkney.”

Rand turned. “YOU are not going?” he asked, in some uneasiness.

“I’VE got some work to do too,” returned Miss Euphemia a little curtly.

“But,” said the practical Rand, “I thought you allowed that you were
fixed to stay until to-morrow?”

But here Miss Euphemia, with rising color and slight acerbity of voice,
was not aware that she was “fixed to stay” anywhere, least of all when
she was in the way. More than that, she MUST say--although perhaps it
made no difference, and she ought not to say it--that she was not in
the habit of intruding upon gentlemen who plainly gave her to understand
that her company was not desirable. She did not know why she said
this--of course it could make no difference to anybody who didn’t, of
course, care--but she only wanted to say that she only came here
because her dear friend, her adopted mother,--and a better woman never
breathed,--had come, and had asked her to stay. Of course, Mrs. Sol was
an intruder herself--Mr. Sol was an intruder--they were all intruders:
she only wondered that Mr. Pinkney had borne with them so long. She knew
it was an awful thing to be here, taking care of a poor--poor, helpless
woman; but perhaps Mr. Rand’s BROTHER might forgive them, if he
couldn’t. But no matter, she would go--Mr. Sol would go--ALL would go;
and then, perhaps, Mr, Rand--

She stopped breathless; she stopped with the corner of her apron against
her tearful hazel eyes; she stopped with--what was more remarkable than
all--Rand’s arm actually around her waist, and his astonished, alarmed
face within a few inches of her own.

“Why, Miss Euphemia, Phemie, my dear girl! I never meant anything like
THAT,” said Rand earnestly. “I really didn’t now! Come now!”

“You never once spoke to me when I sat down,” said Miss Euphemia, feebly
endeavoring to withdraw from Rand’s grasp.

“I really didn’t! Oh, come now, look here! I didn’t! Don’t! There’s a
dear--THERE!”

This last conclusive exposition was a kiss. Miss Euphemia was not quick
enough to release herself from his arms. He anticipated that act a full
half-second, and had dropped his own, pale and breathless.

The girl recovered herself first. “There, I declare, I’m forgetting Mrs.
Sol’s coffee!” she exclaimed hastily, and, snatching up the coffee-pot,
disappeared. When she returned, Rand was gone. Miss Euphemia busied
herself demurely in clearing up the dishes, with the tail of her
eye sweeping the horizon of the summit level around her. But no Rand
appeared. Presently she began to laugh quietly to herself. This occurred
several times during her occupation, which was somewhat prolonged. The
result of this meditative hilarity was summed up in a somewhat grave
and thoughtful deduction as she walked slowly back to the cabin: “I do
believe I’m the first woman that that boy ever kissed.”

Miss Euphemia staid that day and the next, and Rand forgot his
embarrassment. By what means I know not, Miss Euphemia managed to
restore Rand’s confidence in himself and in her, and in a little ramble
on the mountain-side got him to relate, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the
particulars of his rescue of Mornie from her dangerous position on the
broken trail.

“And, if you hadn’t got there as soon as you did, she’d have fallen?”
 asked the “Pet.”

“I reckon,” returned Rand gloomily: “she was sorter dazed and crazed
like.”

“And you saved her life?”

“I suppose so, if you put it that way,” said Rand sulkily.

“But how did you get her up the mountain again?”

“Oh! I got her up,” returned Rand moodily.

“But how? Really, Mr. Rand, you don’t know how interesting this is. It’s
as good as a play,” said the “Pet,” with a little excited laugh.

“Oh, I carried her up!”

“In your arms?”

“Y-e-e-s.”

Miss Euphemia paused, and bit off the stalk of a flower, made a wry
face, and threw it away from her in disgust.

Then she dug a few tiny holes in the earth with her parasol, and buried
bits of the flower-stalk in them, as if they had been tender memories.
“I suppose you knew Mornie very well?” she asked.

“I used to run across her in the woods,” responded Rand shortly, “a year
ago. I didn’t know her so well then as--” He stopped.

“As what? As NOW?” asked the “Pet” abruptly. Rand, who was coloring
over his narrow escape from a topic which a delicate kindness of Sol had
excluded from their intercourse on the mountain, stammered, “as YOU do,
I meant.”

The “Pet” tossed her head a little. “Oh! I don’t know her at all--except
through Sol.”

Rand stared hard at this. The “Pet,” who was looking at him intently,
said, “Show me the place where you saw Mornie clinging that night.”

“It’s dangerous,” suggested Rand.

“You mean I’d be afraid! Try me! I don’t believe she was SO dreadfully
frightened!”

“Why?” asked Rand, in astonishment.

“Oh--because--”

Rand sat down in vague wonderment.

“Show it to me,” continued the “Pet,” “or--I’ll find it ALONE!”

Thus challenged, he rose, and, after a few moments’ climbing, stood with
her upon the trail. “You see that thorn-bush where the rock has fallen
away. It was just there. It is not safe to go farther. No, really! Miss
Euphemia! Please don’t! It’s almost certain death!”

But the giddy girl had darted past him, and, face to the wall of
the cliff, was creeping along the dangerous path. Rand followed
mechanically. Once or twice the trail crumbled beneath her feet; but
she clung to a projecting root of chaparral, and laughed. She had almost
reached her elected goal, when, slipping, the treacherous chaparral she
clung to yielded in her grasp, and Rand, with a cry, sprung forward.

But the next instant she quickly transferred her hold to a cleft in
the cliff, and was safe. Not so her companion. The soil beneath him,
loosened by the impulse of his spring, slipped away: he was falling with
it, when she caught him sharply with her disengaged hand, and together
they scrambled to a more secure footing.

“I could have reached it alone,” said the “Pet,” “if you’d left me
alone.”

“Thank Heaven, we’re saved!” said Rand gravely.

“AND WITHOUT A ROPE,” said Miss Euphemia significantly.

Rand did not understand her. But, as they slowly returned to the summit,
he stammered out the always difficult thanks of a man who has been
physically helped by one of the weaker sex. Miss Euphemia was quick to
see her error.

“I might have made you lose your footing by catching at you,” she said
meekly. “But I was so frightened for you, and could not help it.”

The superior animal, thoroughly bamboozled, thereupon complimented her
on her dexterity.

“Oh, that’s nothing!” she said, with a sigh. “I used to do the
flying-trapeze business with papa when I was a child, and I’ve not
forgotten it.” With this and other confidences of her early life, in
which Rand betrayed considerable interest, they beguiled the tedious
ascent. “I ought to have made you carry me up,” said the lady, with a
little laugh, when they reached the summit; “but you haven’t known me as
long as you have Mornie, have you?” With this mysterious speech she bade
Rand “good-night,” and hurried off to the cabin.

And so a week passed by,--the week so dreaded by Rand, yet passed so
pleasantly, that at times it seemed as if that dread were only a trick
of his fancy, or as if the circumstances that surrounded him were
different from what he believed them to be. On the seventh day the
doctor had staid longer than usual; and Rand, who had been sitting with
Euphemia on the ledge by the shaft, watching the sunset, had barely
time to withdraw his hand from hers, as Mrs. Sol, a trifle pale and
wearied-looking, approached him.

“I don’t like to trouble you,” she said,--indeed, they had seldom
troubled him with the details of Mornie’s convalescence, or even her
needs and requirements,--“but the doctor is alarmed about Mornie, and
she has asked to see you. I think you’d better go in and speak to her.
You know,” continued Mrs. Sol delicately, “you haven’t been in there
since the night she was taken sick, and maybe a new face might do her
good.”

The guilty blood flew to Rand’s face as he stammered, “I thought I’d be
in the way. I didn’t believe she cared much to see me. Is she worse?”

“The doctor is looking very anxious,” said Mrs. Sol simply.

The blood returned from Rand’s face, and settled around his heart. He
turned very pale. He had consoled himself always for his complicity
in Ruth’s absence, that he was taking good care of Mornie, or--what
is considered by most selfish natures an equivalent--permitting or
encouraging some one else to “take good care of her;” but here was
a contingency utterly unforeseen. It did not occur to him that this
“taking good care” of her could result in anything but a perfect
solution of her troubles, or that there could be any future to her
condition but one of recovery. But what if she should die? A sudden
and helpless sense of his responsibility to Ruth, to HER, brought him
trembling to his feet.

He hurried to the cabin, where Mrs. Sol left him with a word of caution:
“You’ll find her changed and quiet,--very quiet. If I was you, I
wouldn’t say anything to bring back her old self.”

The change which Rand saw was so great, the face that was turned to him
so quiet, that, with a new fear upon him, he would have preferred the
savage eyes and reckless mien of the old Mornie whom he hated. With his
habitual impulsiveness he tried to say something that should express
that fact not unkindly, but faltered, and awkwardly sank into the chair
by her bedside.

“I don’t wonder you stare at me now,” she said in a far-off voice. “It
seems to you strange to see me lying here so quiet. You are thinking how
wild I was when I came here that night. I must have been crazy, I think.
I dreamed that I said dreadful things to you; but you must forgive me,
and not mind it. I was crazy then.” She stopped, and folded the blanket
between her thin fingers. “I didn’t ask you to come here to tell you
that, or to remind you of it; but--but when I was crazy, I said so many
worse, dreadful things of HIM; and you--YOU will be left behind to tell
him of it.”

Rand was vaguely murmuring something to the effect that “he knew she
didn’t mean anything,” that “she musn’t think of it again,” that “he’d
forgotten all about it,” when she stopped him with a tired gesture.

“Perhaps I was wrong to think, that, after I am gone, you would care to
tell him anything. Perhaps I’m wrong to think of it at all, or to care
what he will think of me, except for the sake of the child--his child,
Rand--that I must leave behind me. He will know that IT never abused
him. No, God bless its sweet heart! IT never was wild and wicked and
hateful, like its cruel, crazy mother. And he will love it; and you,
perhaps, will love it too--just a little, Rand! Look at it!” She tried
to raise the helpless bundle beside her in her arms, but failed. “You
must lean over,” she said faintly to Rand. “It looks like him, doesn’t
it?”

Rand, with wondering, embarrassed eyes, tried to see some resemblance,
in the little blue-red oval, to the sad, wistful face of his brother,
which even then was haunting him from some mysterious distance. He
kissed the child’s forehead, but even then so vaguely and perfunctorily,
that the mother sighed, and drew it closer to her breast.

“The doctor says,” she continued in a calmer voice, “that I’m not doing
as well as I ought to. I don’t think,” she faltered, with something of
her old bitter laugh, “that I’m ever doing as well as I ought to, and
perhaps it’s not strange now that I don’t. And he says that, in case
anything happens to me, I ought to look ahead. I have looked ahead.
It’s a dark look ahead, Rand--a horror of blackness, without kind faces,
without the baby, without--without HIM!”

She turned her face away, and laid it on the bundle by her side. It was
so quiet in the cabin, that, through the open door beyond, the faint,
rhythmical moan of the pines below was distinctly heard.

“I know it’s foolish; but that is what ‘looking ahead’ always meant to
me,” she said, with a sigh. “But, since the doctor has been gone, I’ve
talked to Mrs. Sol, and find it’s for the best. And I look ahead, and
see more clearly. I look ahead, and see my disgrace removed far away
from HIM and you. I look ahead, and see you and HE living together
happily, as you did before I came between you. I look ahead, and see
my past life forgotten, my faults forgiven; and I think I see you both
loving my baby, and perhaps loving me a little for its sake. Thank you,
Rand, thank you!”

For Rand’s hand had caught hers beside the pillow, and he was standing
over her, whiter than she. Something in the pressure of his hand
emboldened her to go on, and even lent a certain strength to her voice.

“When it comes to THAT, Rand, you’ll not let these people take the baby
away. You’ll keep it HERE with you until HE comes. And something tells
me that he will come when I am gone. You’ll keep it here in the pure air
and sunlight of the mountain, and out of those wicked depths below; and
when I am gone, and they are gone, and only you and Ruth and baby
are here, maybe you’ll think that it came to you in a cloud on the
mountain,--a cloud that lingered only long enough to drop its burden,
and faded, leaving the sunlight and dew behind. What is it, Rand? What
are you looking at?”

“I was thinking,” said Rand in a strange altered voice, “that I must
trouble you to let me take down those duds and furbelows that hang on
the wall, so that I can get at some traps of mine behind them.” He
took some articles from the wall, replaced the dresses of Mrs. Sol, and
answered Mornie’s look of inquiry.

“I was only getting at my purse and my revolver,” he said, showing them.
“I’ve got to get some stores at the Ferry by daylight.”

Mornie sighed. “I’m giving you great trouble, Rand, I know; but it won’t
be for long.”

He muttered something, took her hand again, and bade her “good-night.”
 When he reached the door, he looked back. The light was shining full
upon her face as she lay there, with her babe on her breast, bravely
“looking ahead.”


IV.


THE CLOUDS PASS.


It was early morning at the Ferry. The “up coach” had passed, with
lights unextinguished, and the “outsides” still asleep. The ferryman had
gone up to the Ferry Mansion House, swinging his lantern, and had found
the sleepy-looking “all night” bar-keeper on the point of withdrawing
for the day on a mattress under the bar. An Indian half-breed, porter
of the Mansion House, was washing out the stains of recent nocturnal
dissipation from the bar-room and veranda; a few birds were twittering
on the cotton-woods beside the river; a bolder few had alighted upon
the veranda, and were trying to reconcile the existence of so much
lemon-peel and cigar-stumps with their ideas of a beneficent Creator.
A faint earthly freshness and perfume rose along the river banks. Deep
shadow still lay upon the opposite shore; but in the distance, four
miles away, Morning along the level crest of Table Mountain walked with
rosy tread.

The sleepy bar-keeper was that morning doomed to disappointment; for
scarcely had the coach passed, when steps were heard upon the veranda,
and a weary, dusty traveller threw his blanket and knapsack to the
porter, and then dropped into a vacant arm-chair, with his eyes fixed
on the distant crest of Table Mountain. He remained motionless for some
time, until the bar-keeper, who had already concocted the conventional
welcome of the Mansion House, appeared with it in a glass, put it upon
the table, glanced at the stranger, and then, thoroughly awake, cried
out,--

“Ruth Pinkney--or I’m a Chinaman!”

The stranger lifted his eyes wearily. Hollow circles were around their
orbits; haggard lines were in his checks. But it was Ruth.

He took the glass, and drained it at a single draught. “Yes,” he said
absently, “Ruth Pinkney,” and fixed his eyes again on the distant rosy
crest.

“On your way up home?” suggested the bar-keeper, following the direction
of Ruth’s eyes.

“Perhaps.”

“Been upon a pasear, hain’t yer? Been havin’ a little tear round
Sacramento,--seein’ the sights?”

Ruth smiled bitterly. “Yes.”

The bar-keeper lingered, ostentatiously wiping a glass. But Ruth again
became abstracted in the mountain, and the barkeeper turned away.

How pure and clear that summit looked to him! how restful and steadfast
with serenity and calm! how unlike his own feverish, dusty, travel-worn
self! A week had elapsed since he had last looked upon it,--a week of
disappointment, of anxious fears, of doubts, of wild imaginings, of
utter helplessness. In his hopeless quest of the missing Mornie, he
had, in fancy, seen this serene eminence haunting his remorseful,
passion-stricken soul. And now, without a clew to guide him to her
unknown hiding-place, he was back again, to face the brother whom he had
deceived, with only the confession of his own weakness. Hard as it was
to lose forever the fierce, reproachful glances of the woman he loved,
it was still harder, to a man of Ruth’s temperament, to look again
upon the face of the brother he feared. A hand laid upon his shoulder
startled him. It was the bar-keeper.

“If it’s a fair question, Ruth Pinkney, I’d like to ask ye how long ye
kalkilate to hang around the Ferry to-day.”

“Why?” demanded Ruth haughtily.

“Because, whatever you’ve been and done, I want ye to have a square
show. Ole Nixon has been cavoortin’ round yer the last two days,
swearin’ to kill you on sight for runnin’ off with his darter. Sabe?
Now, let me ax ye two questions. FIRST, Are you heeled?”

Ruth responded to this dialectical inquiry affirmatively by putting his
hand on his revolver.

“Good! Now, SECOND, Have you got the gal along here with you?”

“No,” responded Ruth in a hollow voice.

“That’s better yet,” said the man, without heeding the tone of
the reply. “A woman--and especially THE woman in a row of this
kind--handicaps a man awful.” He paused, and took up the empty glass.
“Look yer, Ruth Pinkney, I’m a square man, and I’ll be square with you.
So I’ll just tell you you’ve got the demdest odds agin’ ye. Pr’aps ye
know it, and don’t keer. Well, the boys around yer are all sidin’ with
the old man Nixon. It’s the first time the old rip ever had a hand in
his favor: so the boys will see fair play for Nixon, and agin’ YOU. But
I reckon you don’t mind him!”

“So little, I shall never pull trigger on him,” said Ruth gravely.

The bar-keeper stared, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, thar’s
that Kanaka Joe, who used to be sorter sweet on Mornie,--he’s an ugly
devil,--he’s helpin’ the old man.”

The sad look faded from Ruth’s eyes suddenly. A certain wild Berserker
rage--a taint of the blood, inherited from heaven knows what Old-World
ancestry, which had made the twin-brothers’ Southwestern eccentricities
respected in the settlement--glowed in its place. The barkeeper noted
it, and augured a lively future for the day’s festivities. But it faded
again; and Ruth, as he rose, turned hesitatingly towards him.

“Have you seen my brother Rand lately?”

“Nary.”

“He hasn’t been here, or about the Ferry?”

“Nary time.”

“You haven’t heard,” said Ruth, with a faint attempt at a smile, “if
he’s been around here asking after me,--sorter looking me up, you know?”

“Not much,” returned the bar-keeper deliberately. “Ez far ez I know
Rand,--that ar brother o’ yours,--he’s one of yer high-toned chaps ez
doesn’t drink, thinks bar-rooms is pizen, and ain’t the sort to come
round yer, and sling yarns with me.”

Ruth rose; but the hand that he placed upon the table, albeit a powerful
one, trembled so that it was with difficulty he resumed his knapsack.
When he did so, his bent figure, stooping shoulders, and haggard face,
made him appear another man from the one who had sat down. There was a
slight touch of apologetic deference and humility in his manner as he
paid his reckoning, and slowly and hesitatingly began to descend the
steps.

The bar-keeper looked after him thoughtfully. “Well, dog my skin!”
 he ejaculated to himself, “ef I hadn’t seen that man--that same Ruth
Pinkney--straddle a friend’s body in this yer very room, and dare a
whole crowd to come on, I’d swar that he hadn’t any grit in him. Thar’s
something up!”

But here Ruth reached the last step, and turned again.

“If you see old man Nixon, say I’m in town; if you see that --------
----” (I regret to say that I cannot repeat his exact, and brief
characterization of the present condition and natal antecedents of
Kanaka Joe), “say I’m looking out for him,” and was gone.

He wandered down the road, towards the one long, straggling street of
the settlement. The few people who met him at that early hour greeted
him with a kind of constrained civility; certain cautious souls hurried
by without seeing him; all turned and looked after him; and a few
followed him at a respectful distance. A somewhat notorious practical
joker and recognized wag at the Ferry apparently awaited his coming with
something of invitation and expectation, but, catching sight of Ruth’s
haggard face and blazing eyes, became instantly practical, and by no
means jocular in his greeting. At the top of the hill, Ruth turned to
look once more upon the distant mountain, now again a mere cloud-line
on the horizon. In the firm belief that he would never again see the sun
rise upon it, he turned aside into a hazel-thicket, and, tearing out a
few leaves from his pocket-book, wrote two letters,--one to Rand, and
one to Mornie, but which, as they were never delivered, shall not burden
this brief chronicle of that eventful day. For, while transcribing them,
he was startled by the sounds of a dozen pistol-shots in the direction
of the hotel he had recently quitted. Something in the mere sound
provoked the old hereditary fighting instinct, and sent him to his feet
with a bound, and a slight distension of the nostrils, and sniffing of
the air, not unknown to certain men who become half intoxicated by
the smell of powder. He quickly folded his letters, and addressed
them carefully, and, taking off his knapsack and blanket, methodically
arranged them under a tree, with the letters on top. Then he examined
the lock of his revolver, and then, with the step of a man ten years
younger, leaped into the road. He had scarcely done so when he was
seized, and by sheer force dragged into a blacksmith’s shop at the
roadside. He turned his savage face and drawn weapon upon his assailant,
but was surprised to meet the anxious eyes of the bar-keeper of the
Mansion House.

“Don’t be a d----d fool,” said the man quickly. “Thar’s fifty agin’ you
down thar. But why in h-ll didn’t you wipe out old Nixon when you had
such a good chance?”

“Wipe out old Nixon?” repeated Ruth.

“Yes; just now, when you had him covered.”

“What!”

The bar-keeper turned quickly upon Ruth, stared at him, and then
suddenly burst into a fit of laughter. “Well, I’ve knowed you two were
twins, but damn me if I ever thought I’d be sold like this!” And he
again burst into a roar of laughter.

“What do you mean?” demanded Ruth savagely.

“What do I mean?” returned the barkeeper. “Why, I mean this. I mean that
your brother Rand, as you call him, he’z bin--for a young feller, and
a pious feller--doin’ about the tallest kind o’ fightin’ to-day that’s
been done at the Ferry. He laid out that ar Kanaka Joe and two of his
chums. He was pitched into on your quarrel, and he took it up for you
like a little man. I managed to drag him off, up yer in the hazel-bush
for safety, and out you pops, and I thought you was him. He can’t be
far away. Halloo! There they’re comin’; and thar’s the doctor, trying to
keep them back!”

A crowd of angry, excited faces, filled the road suddenly; but before
them Dr. Duchesne, mounted, and with a pistol in his hand, opposed their
further progress.

“Back in the bush!” whispered the barkeeper. “Now’s your time!”

But Ruth stirred not. “Go you back,” he said in a low voice, “find Rand,
and take him away. I will fill his place here.” He drew his revolver,
and stepped into the road.

A shout, a report, and the spatter of red dust from a bullet near his
feet, told him he was recognized. He stirred not; but another shout, and
a cry, “There they are--BOTH of ‘em!” made him turn.

His brother Rand, with a smile on his lip and fire in his eye, stood by
his side. Neither spoke. Then Rand, quietly, as of old, slipped his hand
into his brother’s strong palm. Two or three bullets sang by them;
a splinter flew from the blacksmith’s shed: but the brothers, hard
gripping each other’s hands, and looking into each other’s faces with a
quiet joy, stood there calm and imperturbable.

There was a momentary pause. The voice of Dr. Duchesne rose above the
crowd.

“Keep back, I say! keep back! Or hear me!--for five years I’ve worked
among you, and mended and patched the holes you’ve drilled through
each other’s carcasses--Keep back, I say!--or the next man that pulls
trigger, or steps forward, will get a hole from me that no surgeon can
stop. I’m sick of your bungling ball practice! Keep back!--or, by the
living Jingo, I’ll show you where a man’s vitals are!”

There was a burst of laughter from the crowd, and for a moment the twins
were forgotten in this audacious speech and coolly impertinent presence.

“That’s right! Now let that infernal old hypocritical drunkard, Mat
Nixon, step to the front.”

The crowd parted right and left, and half pushed, half dragged Nixon
before him.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor, “this is the man who has just shot at Rand
Pinkney for hiding his daughter. Now, I tell you, gentlemen, and I tell
him, that for the last week his daughter, Mornie Nixon, has been under
my care as a patient, and my protection as a friend. If there’s anybody
to be shot, the job must begin with me!”

There was another laugh, and a cry of “Bully for old Sawbones!” Ruth
started convulsively, and Rand answered his look with a confirming
pressure of his hand.

“That isn’t all, gentlemen: this drunken brute has just shot at a
gentleman whose only offence, to my knowledge, is, that he has, for the
last week, treated her with a brother’s kindness, has taken her into his
own home, and cared for her wants as if she were his own sister.”

Ruth’s hand again grasped his brother’s. Rand colored and hung his head.

“There’s more yet, gentlemen. I tell you that that girl, Mornie Nixon,
has, to my knowledge, been treated like a lady, has been cared for as
she never was cared for in her father’s house, and, while that father
has been proclaiming her shame in every bar-room at the Ferry, has had
the sympathy and care, night and day, of two of the most accomplished
ladies of the Ferry,--Mrs. Sol Saunders, gentlemen, and Miss Euphemia.”

There was a shout of approbation from the crowd. Nixon would have
slipped away, but the doctor stopped him.

“Not yet! I’ve one thing more to say. I’ve to tell you, gentlemen, on my
professional word of honor, that, besides being an old hypocrite, this
same old Mat Nixon is the ungrateful, unnatural GRANDFATHER of the first
boy born in the district.”

A wild huzza greeted the doctor’s climax. By a common consent the crowd
turned toward the Twins, who, grasping each other’s hands, stood apart.
The doctor nodded his head. The next moment the Twins were surrounded,
and lifted in the arms of the laughing throng, and borne in triumph to
the bar-room of the Mansion House.

“Gentlemen,” said the bar-keeper, “call for what you like: the Mansion
House treats to-day in honor of its being the first time that Rand
Pinkney has been admitted to the bar.”

*****

It was agreed, that, as her condition was still precarious, the news
should be broken to her gradually and indirectly. The indefatigable
Sol had a professional idea, which was not displeasing to the Twins. It
being a lovely summer afternoon, the couch of Mornie was lifted out on
the ledge, and she lay there basking in the sunlight, drinking in the
pure air, and looking bravely ahead in the daylight as she had in the
darkness, for her couch commanded a view of the mountain flank. And,
lying there, she dreamed a pleasant dream, and in her dream saw Rand
returning up the mountain-trail. She was half conscious that he had good
news for her; and, when he at last reached her bedside, he began gently
and kindly to tell his news. But she heard him not, or rather in her
dream was most occupied with his ways and manners, which seemed unlike
him, yet inexpressibly sweet and tender. The tears were fast coming in
her eyes, when he suddenly dropped on his knees beside her, threw away
Rand’s disguising hat and coat, and clasped her in his arms. And by that
she KNEW it was Ruth.

But what they said; what hurried words of mutual explanation and
forgiveness passed between them; what bitter yet tender recollections
of hidden fears and doubts, now forever chased away in the rain of tears
and joyous sunshine of that mountain-top, were then whispered;
whatever of this little chronicle that to the reader seems strange and
inconsistent (as all human record must ever be strange and imperfect,
except to the actors) was then made clear,--was never divulged by them,
and must remain with them forever. The rest of the party had withdrawn,
and they were alone. But when Mornie turned, and placed the baby in its
father’s arms, they were so isolated in their happiness, that the lower
world beneath them might have swung and drifted away, and left that
mountain-top the beginning and creation of a better planet.

*****

“You know all about it now,” said Sol the next day, explaining the
previous episodes of this history to Ruth: “you’ve got the whole plot
before you. It dragged a little in the second act, for the actors
weren’t up in their parts. But for an amateur performance, on the whole,
it wasn’t bad.”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Rand impulsively, “how we’d have got on
without Euphemia. It’s too bad she couldn’t be here to-day.”

“She wanted to come,” said Sol; “but the gentleman she’s engaged to came
up from Marysville last night.”

“Gentleman--engaged!” repeated Rand, white and red by turns.

“Well, yes. I say, ‘gentleman,’ although he’s in the variety profession.
She always said,” said Sol, quietly looking at Rand, “that she’d never
marry OUT of it.”



AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG.


The first intimation given of the eccentricity of the testator was, I
think, in the spring of 1854. He was at that time in possession of a
considerable property, heavily mortgaged to one friend, and a wife of
some attraction, on whose affections another friend held an encumbering
lien. One day it was found that he had secretly dug, or caused to be
dug, a deep trap before the front-door of his dwelling, into which a few
friends, in the course of the evening, casually and familiarly dropped.
This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point to the existence of
a certain humor in the man, which might eventually get into literature,
although his wife’s lover--a man of quick discernment, whose leg was
broken by the fall--took other views. It was some weeks later, that,
while dining with certain other friends of his wife, he excused
himself from the table to quietly re-appear at the front-window with a
three-quarter inch hydraulic pipe, and a stream of water projected at
the assembled company. An attempt was made to take public cognizance of
this; but a majority of the citizens of Red Dog, who were not at dinner,
decided that a man had a right to choose his own methods of diverting
his company. Nevertheless, there were some hints of his insanity; his
wife recalled other acts clearly attributable to dementia; the crippled
lover argued from his own experience that the integrity of her limbs
could only be secured by leaving her husband’s house; and the mortgagee,
fearing a further damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause
of all this anxiety took matters into his own hands, and disappeared.

When we next heard from him, he had, in some mysterious way, been
relieved alike of his wife and property, and was living alone
at Rockville fifty miles away, and editing a newspaper. But that
originality he had displayed when dealing with the problems of his own
private life, when applied to politics in the columns of “The Rockville
Vanguard” was singularly unsuccessful. An amusing exaggeration,
purporting to be an exact account of the manner in which the opposing
candidate had murdered his Chinese laundryman, was, I regret to
say, answered only by assault and battery. A gratuitous and purely
imaginative description of a great religious revival in Calaveras, in
which the sheriff of the county--a notoriously profane sceptic--was
alleged to have been the chief exhorter, resulted only in the withdrawal
of the county advertising from the paper. In the midst of this practical
confusion he suddenly died. It was then discovered, as a crowning
proof of his absurdity, that he had left a will, bequeathing his entire
effects to a freckle-faced maid-servant at the Rockville Hotel. But that
absurdity became serious when it was also discovered that among these
effects were a thousand shares in the Rising Sun Mining Company, which a
day or two after his demise, and while people were still laughing at
his grotesque benefaction, suddenly sprang into opulence and celebrity.
Three millions of dollars was roughly estimated as the value of the
estate thus wantonly sacrificed. For it is only fair to state, as a
just tribute to the enterprise and energy of that young and thriving
settlement, that there was not probably a single citizen who did not
feel himself better able to control the deceased humorist’s property.
Some had expressed a doubt of their ability to support a family; others
had felt perhaps too keenly the deep responsibility resting upon them
when chosen from the panel as jurors, and had evaded their public
duties; a few had declined office and a low salary: but no one shrank
from the possibility of having been called upon to assume the functions
of Peggy Moffat, the heiress.

The will was contested,--first by the widow, who it now appeared had
never been legally divorced from the deceased; next by four of his
cousins, who awoke, only too late, to a consciousness of his moral
and pecuniary worth. But the humble legatee--a singularly plain,
unpretending, uneducated Western girl--exhibited a dogged pertinacity
in claiming her rights. She rejected all compromises. A rough sense of
justice in the community, while doubting her ability to take care of the
whole fortune, suggested that she ought to be content with three hundred
thousand dollars. “She’s bound to throw even THAT away on some derned
skunk of a man, natoorally; but three millions is too much to give a
chap for makin’ her onhappy. It’s offerin’ a temptation to cussedness.”
 The only opposing voice to this counsel came from the sardonic lips of
Mr. Jack Hamlin. “Suppose,” suggested that gentleman, turning abruptly
on the speaker,--“suppose, when you won twenty thousand dollars of me
last Friday night--suppose that, instead of handing you over the money
as I did--suppose I’d got up on my hind-legs, and said, ‘Look yer, Bill
Wethersbee, you’re a d----d fool. If I give ye that twenty thousand,
you’ll throw it away in the first skin-game in ‘Frisco, and hand it over
to the first short-card sharp you’ll meet. There’s a thousand,--enough
for you to fling away,--take it and get!’ Suppose what I’d said to you
was the frozen truth, and you know’d it, would that have been the square
thing to play on you?” But here Wethersbee quickly pointed out the
inefficiency of the comparison by stating that HE had won the money
fairly with a STAKE. “And how do you know,” demanded Hamlin savagely,
bending his black eyes on the astounded casuist,--“how do you know that
the gal hezn’t put down a stake?” The man stammered an unintelligible
reply. The gambler laid his white hand on Wethersbee’s shoulder. “Look
yer, old man,” he said, “every gal stakes her WHOLE pile,--you can bet
your life on that,--whatever’s her little game. If she took to keerds
instead of her feelings, if she’d put up ‘chips’ instead o’ body and
soul, she’d bust every bank ‘twixt this and ‘Frisco! You hear me?”

Somewhat of this idea was conveyed, I fear not quite as sentimentally,
to Peggy Moffat herself. The best legal wisdom of San Francisco,
retained by the widow and relatives, took occasion, in a private
interview with Peggy, to point out that she stood in the quasi-criminal
attitude of having unlawfully practised upon the affections of an insane
elderly gentleman, with a view of getting possession of his property,
and suggested to her that no vestige of her moral character would remain
after the trial, if she persisted in forcing her claims to that issue.
It is said that Peggy, on hearing this, stopped washing the plate she
had in her hands, and, twisting the towel around her fingers, fixed her
small pale blue eyes at the lawyer.

“And ez that the kind o’ chirpin these critters keep up?”

“I regret to say, my dear young lady,” responded the lawyer, “that the
world is censorious. I must add,” he continued, with engaging frankness,
“that we professional lawyers are apt to study the opinion of the world,
and that such will be the theory of--our side.”

“Then,” said Peggy stoutly, “ez I allow I’ve got to go into court to
defend my character, I might as well pack in them three millions too.”

There is hearsay evidence that Peg added to this speech a wish and
desire to “bust the crust” of her traducers, and, remarking that “that
was the kind of hairpin” she was, closed the conversation with an
unfortunate accident to the plate, that left a severe contusion on the
legal brow of her companion. But this story, popular in the bar-rooms
and gulches, lacked confirmation in higher circles. Better authenticated
was the legend related of an interview with her own lawyer. That
gentleman had pointed out to her the advantage of being able to show
some reasonable cause for the singular generosity of the testator.

“Although,” he continued, “the law does not go back of the will for
reason or cause for its provisions, it would be a strong point with the
judge and jury--particularly if the theory of insanity were set up--for
us to show that the act was logical and natural. Of course you have--I
speak confidently, Miss Moffat--certain ideas of your own why the late
Mr. Byways was so singularly generous to you.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Peg decidedly.

“Think again. Had he not expressed to you--you understand that this is
confidential between us, although I protest, my dear young lady, that
I see no reason why it should not be made public--had he not given
utterance to sentiments of a nature consistent with some future
matrimonial relations?” But here Miss Peg’s large mouth, which had been
slowly relaxing over her irregular teeth, stopped him.

“If you mean he wanted to marry me--No!”

“I see. But were there any conditions--of course you know the law takes
no cognizance of any not expressed in the will; but still, for the sake
of mere corroboration of the bequest--do you know of any conditions on
which he gave you the property?”

“You mean did he want anything in return?”

“Exactly, my dear young lady.”

Peg’s face on one side turned a deep magenta color, on the other a
lighter cherry, while her nose was purple, and her forehead an Indian
red. To add to the effect of this awkward and discomposing dramatic
exhibition of embarrassment, she began to wipe her hands on her dress,
and sat silent.

“I understand,” said the lawyer hastily. “No matter--the conditions WERE
fulfilled.”

“No!” said Peg amazedly. “How could they be until he was dead?”

It was the lawyer’s turn to color and grow embarrassed.

“He DID say something, and make some conditions,” continued Peg, with a
certain firmness through her awkwardness; “but that’s nobody’s business
but mine and his’n. And it’s no call o’ yours or theirs.”

“But, my dear Miss Moffat, if these very conditions were proofs of his
right mind, you surely would not object to make them known, if only to
enable you to put yourself in a condition to carry them out.”

“But,” said Peg cunningly, “s’pose you and the Court didn’t think ‘em
satisfactory? S’pose you thought ‘em QUEER? Eh?”

With this helpless limitation on the part of the defence, the case came
to trial. Everybody remembers it,--how for six weeks it was the daily
food of Calaveras County; how for six weeks the intellectual and moral
and spiritual competency of Mr. James Byways to dispose of his property
was discussed with learned and formal obscurity in the court, and with
unlettered and independent prejudice by camp-fires and in bar-rooms. At
the end of that time, when it was logically established that at least
nine-tenths of the population of Calaveras were harmless lunatics, and
everybody else’s reason seemed to totter on its throne, an exhausted
jury succumbed one day to the presence of Peg in the court-room. It was
not a prepossessing presence at any time; but the excitement, and an
injudicious attempt to ornament herself, brought her defects into a
glaring relief that was almost unreal. Every freckle on her face
stood out and asserted itself singly; her pale blue eyes, that gave no
indication of her force of character, were weak and wandering, or
stared blankly at the judge; her over-sized head, broad at the base,
terminating in the scantiest possible light-colored braid in the middle
of her narrow shoulders, was as hard and uninteresting as the wooden
spheres that topped the railing against which she sat.

The jury, who for six weeks had had her described to them by the
plaintiffs as an arch, wily enchantress, who had sapped the failing
reason of Jim Byways, revolted to a man. There was something so
appallingly gratuitous in her plainness, that it was felt that three
millions was scarcely a compensation for it. “Ef that money was give to
her, she earned it SURE, boys: it wasn’t no softness of the old man,”
 said the foreman. When the jury retired, it was felt that she had
cleared her character: when they re-entered the room with their verdict,
it was known that she had been awarded three millions damages for its
defamation.

She got the money. But those who had confidently expected to see
her squander it were disappointed: on the contrary, it was presently
whispered that she was exceedingly penurious. That admirable woman, Mrs.
Stiver of Red Dog, who accompanied her to San Francisco to assist her in
making purchases, was loud in her indignation. “She cares more for two
bits than I do for five dollars. She wouldn’t buy anything at the ‘City
of Paris,’ because it was ‘too expensive,’ and at last rigged herself
out, a perfect guy, at some cheap slop-shops in Market Street. And after
all the care Jane and me took of her, giving up our time and experience
to her, she never so much as made Jane a single present.” Popular
opinion, which regarded Mrs. Stiver’s attention as purely speculative,
was not shocked at this unprofitable denouement; but when Peg refused to
give anything to clear the mortgage off the new Presbyterian Church, and
even declined to take shares in the Union Ditch, considered by many
as an equally sacred and safe investment, she began to lose favor.
Nevertheless, she seemed to be as regardless of public opinion as she
had been before the trial; took a small house, in which she lived with
an old woman who had once been a fellow-servant, on apparently terms of
perfect equality, and looked after her money. I wish I could say that
she did this discreetly; but the fact is, she blundered. The same dogged
persistency she had displayed in claiming her rights was visible in
her unsuccessful ventures. She sunk two hundred thousand dollars in
a worn-out shaft originally projected by the deceased testator; she
prolonged the miserable existence of “The Rockville Vanguard” long after
it had ceased to interest even its enemies; she kept the doors of
the Rockville Hotel open when its custom had departed; she lost the
co-operation and favor of a fellow-capitalist through a trifling
misunderstanding in which she was derelict and impenitent; she had three
lawsuits on her hands that could have been settled for a trifle. I note
these defects to show that she was by no means a heroine. I quote her
affair with Jack Folinsbee to show she was scarcely the average woman.

That handsome, graceless vagabond had struck the outskirts of Red Dog
in a cyclone of dissipation which left him a stranded but still rather
interesting wreck in a ruinous cabin not far from Peg Moffat’s virgin
bower. Pale, crippled from excesses, with a voice quite tremulous from
sympathetic emotion more or less developed by stimulants, he lingered
languidly, with much time on his hands, and only a few neighbors. In
this fascinating kind of general deshabille of morals, dress, and the
emotions, he appeared before Peg Moffat. More than that, he occasionally
limped with her through the settlement. The critical eye of Red Dog took
in the singular pair,--Jack, voluble, suffering, apparently overcome by
remorse, conscience, vituperation, and disease; and Peg, open-mouthed,
high-colored, awkward, yet delighted; and the critical eye of Red Dog,
seeing this, winked meaningly at Rockville. No one knew what passed
between them; but all observed that one summer day Jack drove down the
main street of Red Dog in an open buggy, with the heiress of that town
beside him. Jack, albeit a trifle shaky, held the reins with something
of his old dash; and Mistress Peggy, in an enormous bonnet with
pearl-colored ribbons a shade darker than her hair, holding in her
short, pink-gloved fingers a bouquet of yellow roses, absolutely glowed
crimson in distressful gratification over the dash-board. So these two
fared on, out of the busy settlement, into the woods, against the rosy
sunset. Possibly it was not a pretty picture: nevertheless, as the dim
aisles of the solemn pines opened to receive them, miners leaned upon
their spades, and mechanics stopped in their toil to look after them.
The critical eye of Red Dog, perhaps from the sun, perhaps from the
fact that it had itself once been young and dissipated, took on a kindly
moisture as it gazed.

The moon was high when they returned. Those who had waited to
congratulate Jack on this near prospect of a favorable change in his
fortunes were chagrined to find, that, having seen the lady safe home,
he had himself departed from Red Dog. Nothing was to be gained from Peg,
who, on the next day and ensuing days, kept the even tenor of her way,
sunk a thousand or two more in unsuccessful speculation, and made no
change in her habits of personal economy. Weeks passed without any
apparent sequel to this romantic idyl. Nothing was known definitely
until Jack, a month later, turned up in Sacramento, with a billiard-cue
in his hand, and a heart overcharged with indignant emotion. “I don’t
mind saying to you, gentlemen, in confidence,” said Jack to a circle of
sympathizing players,--“I don’t mind telling you regarding this thing,
that I was as soft on that freckled-faced, red-eyed, tallow-haired gal,
as if she’d been--a--a--an actress. And I don’t mind saying, gentlemen,
that, as far as I understand women, she was just as soft on me. You
kin laugh; but it’s so. One day I took her out buggy-riding,--in style,
too,--and out on the road I offered to do the square thing, just as if
she’d been a lady,--offered to marry her then and there. And what did
she do?” said Jack with a hysterical laugh. “Why, blank it all! OFFERED
ME TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK ALLOWANCE--PAY TO BE STOPPED WHEN I WASN’T
AT HOME!” The roar of laughter that greeted this frank confession was
broken by a quiet voice asking, “And what did YOU say?”--“Say?” screamed
Jack, “I just told her to go to ---- with her money.”--“They say,”
 continued the quiet voice, “that you asked her for the loan of two
hundred and fifty dollars to get you to Sacramento--and that you got
it.”--“Who says so roared Jack. Show me the blank liar.” There was a
dead silence. Then the possessor of the quiet voice, Mr. Jack Hamlin,
languidly reached under the table, took the chalk, and, rubbing the end
of his billiard-cue, began with gentle gravity: “It was an old friend of
mine in Sacramento, a man with a wooden leg, a game eye, three fingers
on his right hand, and a consumptive cough. Being unable, naturally,
to back himself, he leaves things to me. So, for the sake of argument,”
 continued Hamlin, suddenly laying down his cue, and fixing his wicked
black eyes on the speaker, “say it’s ME!”

I am afraid that this story, whether truthful or not, did not tend
to increase Peg’s popularity in a community where recklessness and
generosity condoned for the absence of all the other virtues; and it is
possible, also, that Red Dog was no more free from prejudice than other
more civilized but equally disappointed matchmakers. Likewise, during
the following year, she made several more foolish ventures, and lost
heavily. In fact, a feverish desire to increase her store at almost any
risk seemed to possess her. At last it was announced that she intended
to reopen the infelix Rockville Hotel, and keep it herself.

Wild as this scheme appeared in theory, when put into practical
operation there seemed to be some chance of success. Much, doubtless,
was owing to her practical knowledge of hotel-keeping, but more to
her rigid economy and untiring industry. The mistress of millions,
she cooked, washed, waited on table, made the beds, and labored like
a common menial. Visitors were attracted by this novel spectacle. The
income of the house increased as their respect for the hostess lessened.
No anecdote of her avarice was too extravagant for current belief. It
was even alleged that she had been known to carry the luggage of guests
to their rooms, that she might anticipate the usual porter’s gratuity.
She denied herself the ordinary necessaries of life. She was poorly
clad, she was ill-fed--but the hotel was making money.

A few hinted of insanity; others shook their heads, and said a curse was
entailed on the property. It was believed, also, from her appearance,
that she could not long survive this tax on her energies, and already
there was discussion as to the probable final disposition of her
property.

It was the particular fortune of Mr. Jack Hamlin to be able to set the
world right on this and other questions regarding her.

A stormy December evening had set in when he chanced to be a guest of
the Rockville Hotel. He had, during the past week, been engaged in the
prosecution of his noble profession at Red Dog, and had, in the graphic
language of a coadjutor, “cleared out the town, except his fare in the
pockets of the stage-driver.” “The Red Dog Standard” had bewailed his
departure in playful obituary verse, beginning, “Dearest Johnny, thou
hast left us,” wherein the rhymes “bereft us” and “deplore” carried
a vague allusion to “a thousand dollars more.” A quiet contentment
naturally suffused his personality, and he was more than usually lazy
and deliberate in his speech. At midnight, when he was about to retire,
he was a little surprised, however, by a tap on his door, followed by
the presence of Mistress Peg Moffat, heiress, and landlady of Rockville
hotel.

Mr. Hamlin, despite his previous defence of Peg, had no liking for her.
His fastidious taste rejected her uncomeliness; his habits of thought
and life were all antagonistic to what he had heard of her niggardliness
and greed. As she stood there, in a dirty calico wrapper, still redolent
with the day’s cuisine, crimson with embarrassment and the recent heat
of the kitchen range, she certainly was not an alluring apparition.
Happily for the lateness of the hour, her loneliness, and the infelix
reputation of the man before her, she was at least a safe one. And I
fear the very consciousness of this scarcely relieved her embarrassment.

“I wanted to say a few words to ye alone, Mr. Hamlin,” she began, taking
an unoffered seat on the end of his portmanteau, “or I shouldn’t hev
intruded. But it’s the only time I can ketch you, or you me; for I’m
down in the kitchen from sunup till now.”

She stopped awkwardly, as if to listen to the wind, which was rattling
the windows, and spreading a film of rain against the opaque darkness
without. Then, smoothing her wrapper over her knees, she remarked, as if
opening a desultory conversation, “Thar’s a power of rain outside.”

Mr. Hamlin’s only response to this meteorological observation was a
yawn, and a preliminary tug at his coat as he began to remove it.

“I thought ye couldn’t mind doin’ me a favor,” continued Peg, with a
hard, awkward laugh, “partik’ly seein’ ez folks allowed you’d sorter bin
a friend o’ mine, and hed stood up for me at times when you hedn’t any
partikler call to do it. I hevn’t” she continued, looking down on her
lap, and following with her finger and thumb a seam of her gown,--“I
hevn’t so many friends ez slings a kind word for me these times that
I disremember them.” Her under lip quivered a little here; and, after
vainly hunting for a forgotten handkerchief, she finally lifted the hem
of her gown, wiped her snub nose upon it, but left the tears still in
her eyes as she raised them to the man, Mr. Hamlin, who had by this time
divested himself of his coat, stopped unbuttoning his waistcoat, and
looked at her.

“Like ez not thar’ll be high water on the North Fork, ef this rain keeps
on,” said Peg, as if apologetically, looking toward the window.

The other rain having ceased, Mr. Hamlin began to unbutton his waistcoat
again.

“I wanted to ask ye a favor about Mr.--about--Jack Folinsbee,” began Peg
again hurriedly. “He’s ailin’ agin, and is mighty low. And he’s losin’
a heap o’ money here and thar, and mostly to YOU. You cleaned him out of
two thousand dollars last night--all he had.”

“Well?” said the gambler coldly.

“Well, I thought ez you woz a friend o’ mine, I’d ask ye to let up a
little on him,” said Peg, with an affected laugh. “You kin do it. Don’t
let him play with ye.”

“Mistress Margaret Moffat,” said Jack, with lazy deliberation, taking
off his watch, and beginning to wind it up, “ef you’re that much stuck
after Jack Folinsbee, YOU kin keep him off of me much easier than I kin.
You’re a rich woman. Give him enough money to break my bank, or break
himself for good and all; but don’t keep him forlin’ round me in hopes
to make a raise. It don’t pay, Mistress Moffat--it don’t pay!”

A finer nature than Peg’s would have misunderstood or resented the
gambler’s slang, and the miserable truths that underlaid it. But she
comprehended him instantly, and sat hopelessly silent.

“Ef you’ll take my advice,” continued Jack, placing his watch and chain
under his pillow, and quietly unloosing his cravat, “you’ll quit this
yer forlin’, marry that chap, and hand over to him the money and the
money-makin’ that’s killin’ you. He’ll get rid of it soon enough. I
don’t say this because I expect to git it; for, when he’s got that
much of a raise, he’ll make a break for ‘Frisco, and lose it to some
first-class sport THERE. I don’t say, neither, that you mayn’t be in
luck enough to reform him. I don’t say, neither--and it’s a derned sight
more likely!--that you mayn’t be luckier yet, and he’ll up and die afore
he gits rid of your money. But I do say you’ll make him happy NOW; and,
ez I reckon you’re about ez badly stuck after that chap ez I ever saw
any woman, you won’t be hurtin’ your own feelin’s either.”

The blood left Peg’s face as she looked up. “But that’s WHY I can’t give
him the money--and he won’t marry me without it.”

Mr. Hamlin’s hand dropped from the last button of his waistcoat.
“Can’t--give--him--the--money?” he repeated slowly.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because--because I LOVE him.”

Mr. Hamlin rebuttoned his waistcoat, and sat down patiently on the bed.
Peg arose, and awkwardly drew the portmanteau a little nearer to him.

“When Jim Byways left me this yer property,” she began, looking
cautiously around, “he left it to me on CONDITIONS; not conditions ez
waz in his WRITTEN will, but conditions ez waz SPOKEN. A promise I made
him in this very room, Mr. Hamlin,--this very room, and on that very bed
you’re sittin’ on, in which he died.”

Like most gamblers, Mr. Hamlin was superstitious. He rose hastily from
the bed, and took a chair beside the window. The wind shook it as if the
discontented spirit of Mr. Byways were without, re-enforcing his last
injunction.

“I don’t know if you remember him,” said Peg feverishly, “he was a man
ez hed suffered. All that he loved--wife, fammerly, friends--had gone
back on him. He tried to make light of it afore folks; but with me,
being a poor gal, he let himself out. I never told anybody this. I don’t
know why he told ME; I don’t know,” continued Peg, with a sniffle, “why
he wanted to make me unhappy too. But he made me promise, that, if he
left me his fortune, I’d NEVER, NEVER--so help me God!--never share it
with any man or woman that I LOVED; I didn’t think it would be hard to
keep that promise then, Mr. Hamlin; for I was very poor, and hedn’t a
friend nor a living bein’ that was kind to me, but HIM.”

“But you’ve as good as broken your promise already,” said Hamlin.
“You’ve given Jack money, as I know.”

“Only what I made myself. Listen to me, Mr. Hamlin. When Jack proposed
to me, I offered him about what I kalkilated I could earn myself. When
he went away, and was sick and in trouble, I came here and took this
hotel. I knew that by hard work I could make it pay. Don’t laugh at me,
please. I DID work hard, and DID make it pay--without takin’ one cent of
the fortin’. And all I made, workin’ by night and day, I gave to him. I
did, Mr. Hamlin. I ain’t so hard to him as you think, though I might be
kinder, I know.”

Mr. Hamlin rose, deliberately resumed his coat, watch, hat, and
overcoat. When he was completely dressed again, he turned to Peg. “Do
you mean to say that you’ve been givin’ all the money you made here to
this A 1 first-class cherubim?”

“Yes; but he didn’t know where I got it. O Mr. Hamlin! he didn’t know
that.”

“Do I understand you, that he’s bin buckin agin Faro with the money that
you raised on hash? And YOU makin’ the hash?”

“But he didn’t know that, he wouldn’t hev took it if I’d told him.”

“No, he’d hev died fust!” said Mr. Hamlin gravely. “Why, he’s that
sensitive--is Jack Folinsbee--that it nearly kills him to take money
even of ME. But where does this angel reside when he isn’t fightin’ the
tiger, and is, so to speak, visible to the naked eye?”

“He--he--stops here,” said Peg, with an awkward blush.

“I see. Might I ask the number of his room--or should I be a--disturbing
him in his meditations?” continued Jack Hamlin, with grave politeness.

“Oh! then you’ll promise? And you’ll talk to him, and make HIM promise?”

“Of course,” said Hamlin quietly.

“And you’ll remember he’s sick--very sick? His room’s No. 44, at the end
of the hall. Perhaps I’d better go with you?”

“I’ll find it.”

“And you won’t be too hard on him?”

“I’ll be a father to him,” said Hamlin demurely, as he opened the door
and stepped into the hall. But he hesitated a moment, and then turned,
and gravely held out his hand. Peg took it timidly. He did not seem
quite in earnest; and his black eyes, vainly questioned, indicated
nothing. But he shook her hand warmly, and the next moment was gone.

He found the room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and
a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without
further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale
dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed,
extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant
startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man’s eyes; there
was palsy in his trembling limbs; there was dissolution in his feverish
breath.

“What’s up?” he asked huskily and nervously.

“I am, and I want YOU to get up too.”

“I can’t, Jack. I’m regularly done up.” He reached his shaking hand
towards a glass half-filled with suspicious, pungent-smelling liquid;
but Mr. Hamlin stayed it.

“Do you want to get back that two thousand dollars you lost?”

“Yes.”

“Well, get up, and marry that woman down stairs.”

Folinsbee laughed half hysterically, half sardonically.

“She won’t give it to me.”

“No; but I will.”

“YOU?”

“Yes.”

Folinsbee, with an attempt at a reckless laugh, rose, trembling and with
difficulty, to his swollen feet. Hamlin eyed him narrowly, and then bade
him lie down again. “To-morrow will do,” he said, “and then--”

“If I don’t--”

“If you don’t,” responded Hamlin, “why, I’ll just wade in and CUT YOU
OUT!”

But on the morrow Mr. Hamlin was spared that possible act of disloyalty;
for, in the night, the already hesitating spirit of Mr. Jack Folinsbee
took flight on the wings of the south-east storm. When or how it
happened, nobody knew. Whether this last excitement and the near
prospect of matrimony, or whether an overdose of anodyne, had hastened
his end, was never known. I only know, that, when they came to awaken
him the next morning, the best that was left of him--a face still
beautiful and boy-like--looked up coldly at the tearful eyes of Peg
Moffat. “It serves me right, it’s a judgment,” she said in a low whisper
to Jack Hamlin; “for God knew that I’d broken my word, and willed all my
property to him.”

She did not long survive him. Whether Mr. Hamlin ever clothed with
action the suggestion indicated in his speech to the lamented Jack that
night, is not of record. He was always her friend, and on her demise
became her executor. But the bulk of her property was left to a distant
relation of handsome Jack Folinsbee, and so passed out of the control of
Red Dog forever.



THE GREAT DEADWOOD MYSTERY


It was growing quite dark in the telegraph-office at Cottonwood,
Tuolumne County, California. The office, a box-like enclosure, was
separated from the public room of the Miners’ Hotel by a thin partition;
and the operator, who was also news and express agent at Cottonwood,
had closed his window, and was lounging by his news-stand preparatory
to going home. Without, the first monotonous rain of the season was
dripping from the porches of the hotel in the waning light of a December
day. The operator, accustomed as he was to long intervals of idleness,
was fast becoming bored.

The tread of mud-muffled boots on the veranda, and the entrance of two
men, offered a momentary excitement. He recognized in the strangers two
prominent citizens of Cottonwood; and their manner bespoke business. One
of them proceeded to the desk, wrote a despatch, and handed it to the
other interrogatively.

“That’s about the way the thing p’ints,” responded his companion
assentingly.

“I reckoned it only squar to use his dientical words?”

“That’s so.”

The first speaker turned to the operator with the despatch.

“How soon can you shove her through?”

The operator glanced professionally over the address and the length of
the despatch.

“Now,” he answered promptly.

“And she gets there?”

“To-night. But there’s no delivery until to-morrow.”

“Shove her through to-night, and say there’s an extra twenty left here
for delivery.”

The operator, accustomed to all kinds of extravagant outlay for
expedition, replied that he would lay this proposition with the
despatch, before the San Francisco office. He then took it and read
it--and re-read it. He preserved the usual professional apathy,--had
doubtless sent many more enigmatical and mysterious messages,--but
nevertheless, when he finished, he raised his eyes inquiringly to his
customer. That gentleman, who enjoyed a reputation for equal spontaneity
of temper and revolver, met his gaze a little impatiently. The operator
had recourse to a trick. Under the pretence of misunderstanding the
message, he obliged the sender to repeat it aloud for the sake of
accuracy, and even suggested a few verbal alterations, ostensibly
to insure correctness, but really to extract further information.
Nevertheless, the man doggedly persisted in a literal transcript of his
message. The operator went to his instrument hesitatingly.

“I suppose,” he added half-questioningly, “there ain’t no chance of
a mistake. This address is Rightbody, that rich old Bostonian that
everybody knows. There ain’t but one?”

“That’s the address,” responded the first speaker coolly.

“Didn’t know the old chap had investments out here,” suggested the
operator, lingering at his instrument.

“No more did I,” was the insufficient reply.

For some few moments nothing was heard but the click of the instrument,
as the operator worked the key, with the usual appearance of imparting
confidence to a somewhat reluctant hearer who preferred to talk himself.
The two men stood by, watching his motions with the usual awe of
the unprofessional. When he had finished, they laid before him two
gold-pieces. As the operator took them up, he could not help saying,--

“The old man went off kinder sudden, didn’t he? Had no time to write?”

“Not sudden for that kind o’ man,” was the exasperating reply.

But the speaker was not to be disconcerted. “If there is an answer--” he
began.

“There ain’t any,” replied the first speaker quietly.

“Why?”

“Because the man ez sent the message is dead.”

“But it’s signed by you two.”

“On’y ez witnesses--eh?” appealed the first speaker to his comrade.

“On’y ez witnesses,” responded the other.

The operator shrugged his shoulders. The business concluded, the first
speaker slightly relaxed. He nodded to the operator, and turned to the
bar-room with a pleasing social impulse. When their glasses were set
down empty, the first speaker, with a cheerful condemnation of the hard
times and the weather, apparently dismissed all previous proceedings
from his mind, and lounged out with his companion. At the corner of the
street they stopped.

“Well, that job’s done,” said the first speaker, by way of relieving the
slight social embarrassment of parting.

“Thet’s so,” responded his companion, and shook his hand.

They parted. A gust of wind swept through the pines, and struck a faint
Aeolian cry from the wires above their heads; and the rain and the
darkness again slowly settled upon Cottonwood.

The message lagged a little at San Francisco, laid over half an hour
at Chicago, and fought longitude the whole way; so that it was past
midnight when the “all night” operator took it from the wires at Boston.
But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and
a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark snow-bound
streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered rayless houses, to
a certain formal square ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he
ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and
pulled a bronze bell-knob, that somewhere within those chaste recesses,
after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a
stranger was waiting without--as he ought. Despite the lateness of the
hour, there was a slight glow from the windows, clearly not enough
to warm the messenger with indications of a festivity within, but yet
bespeaking, as it were, some prolonged though subdued excitement. The
sober servant who took the despatch, and receipted for it as gravely as
if witnessing a last will and testament, respectfully paused before
the entrance of the drawing-room. The sound of measured and rhetorical
speech, through which the occasional catarrhal cough of the New-England
coast struggled, as the only effort of nature not wholly repressed, came
from its heavily-curtained recesses; for the occasion of the evening had
been the reception and entertainment of various distinguished persons,
and, as had been epigrammatically expressed by one of the guests, “the
history of the country” was taking its leave in phrases more or less
memorable and characteristic. Some of these valedictory axioms were
clever, some witty, a few profound, but always left as a genteel
contribution to the entertainer. Some had been already prepared, and,
like a card, had served and identified the guest at other mansions.

The last guest departed, the last carriage rolled away, when the servant
ventured to indicate the existence of the despatch to his master,
who was standing on the hearth-rug in an attitude of wearied
self-righteousness. He took it, opened it, read it, re-read it, and
said,--

“There must be some mistake! It is not for me. Call the boy, Waters.”

Waters, who was perfectly aware that the boy had left, nevertheless
obediently walked towards the hall-door, but was recalled by his master.

“No matter--at present!”

“It’s nothing serious, William?” asked Mrs. Rightbody, with languid
wifely concern.

“No, nothing. Is there a light in my study?”

“Yes. But, before you go, can you give me a moment or two?”

Mr. Rightbody turned a little impatiently towards his wife. She had
thrown herself languidly on the sofa; her hair was slightly disarranged,
and part of a slippered foot was visible. She might have been a
finely-formed woman; but even her careless deshabille left the general
impression that she was severely flannelled throughout, and that any
ostentation of womanly charm was under vigorous sanitary SURVEILLANCE.

“Mrs. Marvin told me to-night that her son made no secret of his serious
attachment for our Alice, and that, if I was satisfied, Mr. Marvin would
be glad to confer with you at once.”

The information did not seem to absorb Mr. Rightbody’s wandering
attention, but rather increased his impatience. He said hastily, that he
would speak of that to-morrow; and partly by way of reprisal, and partly
to dismiss the subject, added--

“Positively James must pay some attention to the register and the
thermometer. It was over 70 degrees to-night, and the ventilating
draught was closed in the drawing-room.”

“That was because Professor Ammon sat near it, and the old gentleman’s
tonsils are so sensitive.”

“He ought to know from Dr. Dyer Doit that systematic and regular
exposure to draughts stimulates the mucous membrane; while fixed air
over 60 degrees invariably--”

“I am afraid, William,” interrupted Mrs. Rightbody, with feminine
adroitness, adopting her husband’s topic with a view of thereby
directing him from it,--“I’m afraid that people do not yet appreciate
the substitution of bouillon for punch and ices. I observed that Mr.
Spondee declined it, and, I fancied, looked disappointed. The fibrine
and wheat in liqueur-glasses passed quite unnoticed too.”

“And yet each half-drachm contained the half-digested substance of
a pound of beef. I’m surprised at Spondee!” continued Mr. Rightbody
aggrievedly. “Exhausting his brain and nerve force by the highest
creative efforts of the Muse, he prefers perfumed and diluted alcohol
flavored with carbonic acid gas. Even Mrs. Faringway admitted to me
that the sudden lowering of the temperature of the stomach by the
introduction of ice--”

“Yes; but she took a lemon ice at the last Dorothea Reception, and asked
me if I had observed that the lower animals refused their food at a
temperature over 60 degrees.”

Mr. Rightbody again moved impatiently towards the door. Mrs. Rightbody
eyed him curiously.

“You will not write, I hope? Dr. Keppler told me to-night that your
cerebral symptoms interdicted any prolonged mental strain.”

“I must consult a few papers,” responded Mr. Rightbody curtly, as he
entered his library.

It was a richly-furnished apartment, morbidly severe in its decorations,
which were symptomatic of a gloomy dyspepsia of art, then quite
prevalent. A few curios, very ugly, but providentially equally rare,
were scattered about. There were various bronzes, marbles, and casts,
all requiring explanation, and so fulfilling their purpose of promoting
conversation, and exhibiting the erudition of their owner. There were
souvenirs of travel with a history, old bric-a-brac with a pedigree,
but little or nothing that challenged attention for itself alone. In all
cases the superiority of the owner to his possessions was admitted. As
a natural result, nobody ever lingered there, the servants avoided the
room, and no child was ever known to play in it.

Mr. Rightbody turned up the gas, and from a cabinet of drawers,
precisely labelled, drew a package of letters. These he carefully
examined. All were discolored, and made dignified by age; but some, in
their original freshness, must have appeared trifling, and inconsistent
with any correspondent of Mr. Rightbody. Nevertheless, that gentleman
spent some moments in carefully perusing them, occasionally referring
to the telegram in his hand. Suddenly there was a knock at the door.
Mr. Rightbody started, made a half-unconscious movement to return the
letters to the drawer, turned the telegram face downwards, and then,
somewhat harshly, stammered,--

“Eh? Who’s there? Come in.”

“I beg your pardon, papa,” said a very pretty girl, entering, without,
however, the slightest trace of apology or awe in her manner, and taking
a chair with the self-possession and familiarity of an habitue of the
room; “but I knew it was not your habit to write late, so I supposed you
were not busy. I am on my way to bed.”

She was so very pretty, and withal so utterly unconscious of it, or
perhaps so consciously superior to it, that one was provoked into a
more critical examination of her face. But this only resulted in a
reiteration of her beauty, and perhaps the added facts that her dark
eyes were very womanly, her rich complexion eloquent, and her chiselled
lips fell enough to be passionate or capricious, notwithstanding that
their general effect suggested neither caprice, womanly weakness, nor
passion.

With the instinct of an embarrassed man, Mr. Rightbody touched the topic
he would have preferred to avoid.

“I suppose we must talk over to-morrow,” he hesitated, “this matter of
yours and Mr. Marvin’s? Mrs. Marvin has formally spoken to your mother.”

Miss Alice lifted her bright eyes intelligently, but not joyfully;
and the color of action, rather than embarrassment, rose to her round
cheeks.

“Yes, HE said she would,” she answered simply.

“At present,” continued Mr. Rightbody still awkwardly, “I see no
objection to the proposed arrangement.”

Miss Alice opened her round eyes at this.

“Why, papa, I thought it had been all settled long ago! Mamma knew it,
you knew it. Last July, mamma and you talked it over.”

“Yes, yes,” returned her father, fumbling his papers; “that is--well, we
will talk of it to-morrow.” In fact, Mr. Rightbody HAD intended to
give the affair a proper attitude of seriousness and solemnity by due
precision of speech, and some apposite reflections, when he should
impart the news to his daughter, but felt himself unable to do it now.
“I am glad, Alice,” he said at last, “that you have quite forgotten your
previous whims and fancies. You see WE are right.”

“Oh! I dare say, papa, if I’m to be married at all, that Mr. Marvin is
in every way suitable.”

Mr. Rightbody looked at his daughter narrowly. There was not the
slightest impatience nor bitterness in her manner: it was as well
regulated as the sentiment she expressed.

“Mr. Marvin is--” he began.

“I know what Mr. Marvin IS,” interrupted Miss Alice; “and he has
promised me that I shall be allowed to go on with my studies the same as
before. I shall graduate with my class; and, if I prefer to practise my
profession, I can do so in two years after our marriage.”

“In two years?” queried Mr. Rightbody curiously.

“Yes. You see, in case we should have a child, that would give me time
enough to wean it.”

Mr. Rightbody looked at this flesh of his flesh, pretty and palpable
flesh as it was; but, being confronted as equally with the brain of his
brain, all he could do was to say meekly,--

“Yes, certainly. We will see about all that to-morrow.”

Miss Alice rose. Something in the free, unfettered swing of her arms as
she rested them lightly, after a half yawn, on her lithe hips, suggested
his next speech, although still distrait and impatient.

“You continue your exercise with the health-lift yet, I see.”

“Yes, papa; but I had to give up the flannels. I don’t see how mamma
could wear them. But my dresses are high-necked, and by bathing I
toughen my skin. See!” she added, as, with a child-like unconsciousness,
she unfastened two or three buttons of her gown, and exposed the white
surface of her throat and neck to her father, “I can defy a chill.”

Mr. Rightbody, with something akin to a genuine playful, paternal laugh,
leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

“It’s getting late, Ally,” he said parentally, but not dictatorially.
“Go to bed.”

“I took a nap of three hours this afternoon,” said Miss Alice, with
a dazzling smile, “to anticipate this dissipation. Good-night, papa.
To-morrow, then.”

“To-morrow,” repeated Mr. Rightbody, with his eyes still fixed upon the
girl vaguely. “Good-night.”

Miss Alice tripped from the room, possibly a trifle the more
light-heartedly that she had parted from her father in one of his rare
moments of illogical human weakness. And perhaps it was well for the
poor girl that she kept this single remembrance of him, when, I fear, in
after-years, his methods, his reasoning, and indeed all he had tried to
impress upon her childhood, had faded from her memory.

For, when she had left, Mr. Rightbody fell again to the examination of
his old letters. This was quite absorbing; so much so, that he did not
notice the footsteps of Mrs. Rightbody, on the staircase as she passed
to her chamber, nor that she had paused on the landing to look through
the glass half-door on her husband, as he sat there with the letters
beside him, and the telegram opened before him. Had she waited a
moment later, she would have seen him rise, and walk to the sofa with a
disturbed air and a slight confusion; so that, on reaching it, he seemed
to hesitate to lie down, although pale and evidently faint. Had she
still waited, she would have seen him rise again with an agonized
effort, stagger to the table, fumblingly refold and replace the papers
in the cabinet, and lock it, and, although now but half-conscious, hold
the telegram over the gas-flame till it was consumed.

For, had she waited until this moment, she would have flown
unhesitatingly to his aid, as, this act completed, he staggered again,
reached his hand toward the bell, but vainly, and then fell prone upon
the sofa.

But alas! no providential nor accidental hand was raised to save him,
or anticipate the progress of this story. And when, half an hour later,
Mrs. Rightbody, a little alarmed, and more indignant at his violation of
the doctor’s rules, appeared upon the threshold, Mr. Rightbody lay upon
the sofa, dead!

With bustle, with thronging feet, with the irruption of strangers, and
a hurrying to and fro, but, more than all, with an impulse and emotion
unknown to the mansion when its owner was in life, Mrs. Rightbody
strove to call back the vanished life, but in vain. The highest medical
intelligence, called from its bed at this strange hour, saw only the
demonstration of its theories made a year before. Mr. Rightbody was
dead--without doubt, without mystery, even as a correct man should
die--logically, and indorsed by the highest medical authority.

But even in the confusion, Mrs. Rightbody managed to speed a messenger
to the telegraph-office for a copy of the despatch received by Mr.
Rightbody, but now missing.

In the solitude of her own room, and without a confidant, she read these
words:--


                           “[Copy.]

  “To MR. ADAMS RIGHTBODY, BOSTON, MASS.

  “Joshua Silsbie died suddenly this morning.  His last request was
   that you should remember your sacred compact with him of thirty
   years ago.
         (Signed)                       “SEVENTY-FOUR.
                                        “SEVENTY-FIVE.”


In the darkened home, and amid the formal condolements of their friends
who had called to gaze upon the scarcely cold features of their late
associate, Mrs. Rightbody managed to send another despatch. It was
addressed to “Seventy-Four and Seventy-Five,” Cottonwood. In a few hours
she received the following enigmatical response:--

“A horse-thief named Josh Silsbie was lynched yesterday morning by the
Vigilantes at Deadwood.”


PART II.


The spring of 1874 was retarded in the California sierras; so much so,
that certain Eastern tourists who had early ventured into the Yo
Semite Valley found themselves, one May morning, snow-bound against the
tempestuous shoulders of El Capitan. So furious was the onset of the
wind at the Upper Merced Canyon, that even so respectable a lady as Mrs.
Rightbody was fain to cling to the neck of her guide to keep her seat
in the saddle; while Miss Alice, scorning all masculine assistance,
was hurled, a lovely chaos, against the snowy wall of the chasm. Mrs.
Rightbody screamed; Miss Alice raged under her breath, but scrambled to
her feet again in silence.

“I told you so!” said Mrs. Rightbody, in an indignant whisper, as
her daughter again ranged beside her. “I warned you especially,
Alice--that--that--”

“What?” interrupted Miss Alice curtly.

“That you would need your chemiloons and high boots,” said Mrs.
Rightbody, in a regretful undertone, slightly increasing her distance
from the guides.

Miss Alice shrugged her pretty shoulders scornfully, but ignored her
mother’s implication.

“You were particularly warned against going into the valley at this
season,” she only replied grimly.

Mrs. Rightbody raised her eyes impatiently.

“You know how anxious I was to discover your poor father’s strange
correspondent, Alice. You have no consideration.”

“But when YOU HAVE discovered him--what then?” queried Miss Alice.

“What then?”

“Yes. My belief is, that you will find the telegram only a mere business
cipher, and all this quest mere nonsense.”

“Alice! Why, YOU yourself thought your father’s conduct that night very
strange. Have you forgotten?”

The young lady had NOT, but, for some far-reaching feminine reason,
chose to ignore it at that moment, when her late tumble in the snow was
still fresh in her mind.

“And this woman, whoever she may be--” continued Mrs. Rightbody.

“How do you know there’s a woman in the case?” interrupted Miss Alice,
wickedly I fear.

“How do--I--know--there’s a woman?” slowly ejaculated Mrs. Rightbody,
floundering in the snow and the unexpected possibility of such a
ridiculous question. But here her guide flew to her assistance, and
estopped further speech. And, indeed, a grave problem was before them.

The road that led to their single place of refuge--a cabin, half hotel,
half trading-post, scarce a mile away--skirted the base of the rocky
dome, and passed perilously near the precipitous wall of the
valley. There was a rapid descent of a hundred yards or more to
this terrace-like passage; and the guides paused for a moment of
consultation, cooly oblivious, alike to the terrified questioning of
Mrs. Rightbody, or the half-insolent independence of the daughter. The
elder guide was russet-bearded, stout, and humorous: the younger was
dark-bearded, slight, and serious.

“Ef you kin git young Bunker Hill to let you tote her on your shoulders,
I’ll git the Madam to hang on to me,” came to Mrs. Rightbody’s horrified
ears as the expression of her particular companion.

“Freeze to the old gal, and don’t reckon on me if the daughter starts in
to play it alone,” was the enigmatical response of the younger guide.

Miss Alice overheard both propositions; and, before the two men returned
to their side, that high-spirited young lady had urged her horse down
the declivity.

Alas! at this moment a gust of whirling snow swept down upon her. There
was a flounder, a mis-step, a fatal strain on the wrong rein, a fall,
a few plucky but unavailing struggles, and both horse and rider slid
ignominiously down toward the rocky shelf. Mrs. Rightbody screamed.
Miss Alice, from a confused debris of snow and ice, uplifted a vexed and
coloring face to the younger guide, a little the more angrily, perhaps,
that she saw a shade of impatience on his face.

“Don’t move, but tie one end of the ‘lass’ under your arms, and throw me
the other,” he said quietly.

“What do you mean by ‘lass’--the lasso?” asked Miss Alice disgustedly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then why don’t you say so?”

“O Alice!” reproachfully interpolated Mrs. Rightbody, encircled by the
elder guide’s stalwart arm.

Miss Alice deigned no reply, but drew the loop of the lasso over her
shoulders, and let it drop to her round waist. Then she essayed to
throw the other end to her guide. Dismal failure! The first fling nearly
knocked her off the ledge; the second went all wild against the
rocky wall; the third caught in a thorn-bush, twenty feet below her
companion’s feet. Miss Alice’s arm sunk helplessly to her side, at which
signal of unqualified surrender, the younger guide threw himself half
way down the slope, worked his way to the thorn-bush, hung for a moment
perilously over the parapet, secured the lasso, and then began to pull
away at his lovely burden. Miss Alice was no dead weight, however, but
steadily half-scrambled on her hands and knees to within a foot or two
of her rescuer. At this too familiar proximity, she stood up, and leaned
a little stiffly against the line, causing the guide to give an extra
pull, which had the lamentable effect of landing her almost in his arms.

As it was, her intelligent forehead struck his nose sharply, and I
regret to add, treating of a romantic situation, caused that somewhat
prominent sign and token of a hero to bleed freely. Miss Alice instantly
clapped a handful of snow over his nostrils.

“Now elevate your right arm,” she said commandingly.

He did as he was bidden, but sulkily.

“That compresses the artery.”

No man, with a pretty woman’s hand and a handful of snow over his mouth
and nose, could effectively utter a heroic sentence, nor, with his arm
elevated stiffly over his head, assume a heroic attitude. But, when his
mouth was free again, he said half-sulkily, half-apologetically,--

“I might have known a girl couldn’t throw worth a cent.”

“Why?” demanded Miss Alice sharply.

“Because--why--because--you see--they haven’t got the experience,” he
stammered feebly.

“Nonsense! they haven’t the CLAVICLE--that’s all! It’s because I’m a
woman, and smaller in the collar-bone, that I haven’t the play of the
fore-arm which you have. See!” She squared her shoulders slightly, and
turned the blaze of her dark eyes full on his. “Experience, indeed! A
girl can learn anything a boy can.”

Apprehension took the place of ill-humor in her hearer. He turned his
eyes hastily away, and glanced above him. The elder guide had gone
forward to catch Miss Alice’s horse, which, relieved of his rider, was
floundering toward the trail. Mrs. Rightbody was nowhere to be seen. And
these two were still twenty feet below the trail!

There was an awkward pause.

“Shall I put you up the same way?” he queried. Miss Alice looked at
his nose, and hesitated. “Or will you take my hand?” he added in surly
impatience. To his surprise, Miss Alice took his hand, and they began
the ascent together.

But the way was difficult and dangerous. Once or twice her feet slipped
on the smoothly-worn rock beneath; and she confessed to an inward
thankfulness when her uncertain feminine hand-grip was exchanged for his
strong arm around her waist. Not that he was ungentle; but Miss Alice
angrily felt that he had once or twice exercised his superior masculine
functions in a rough way; and yet the next moment she would have
probably rejected the idea that she had even noticed it. There was no
doubt, however, that he WAS a little surly.

A fierce scramble finally brought them back in safety to the trail;
but in the action Miss Alice’s shoulder, striking a projecting bowlder,
wrung from her a feminine cry of pain, her first sign of womanly
weakness. The guide stopped instantly.

“I am afraid I hurt you?”

She raised her brown lashes, a trifle moist from suffering, looked in
his eyes, and dropped her own. Why, she could not tell. And yet he had
certainly a kind face, despite its seriousness; and a fine face, albeit
unshorn and weather-beaten. Her own eyes had never been so near to any
man’s before, save her lover’s; and yet she had never seen so much in
even his. She slipped her hand away, not with any reference to him,
but rather to ponder over this singular experience, and somehow felt
uncomfortable thereat.

Nor was he less so. It was but a few days ago that he had accepted the
charge of this young woman from the elder guide, who was the recognized
escort of the Rightbody party, having been a former correspondent of her
father’s. He had been hired like any other guide, but had undertaken
the task with that chivalrous enthusiasm which the average Californian
always extends to the sex so rare to him. But the illusion had passed;
and he had dropped into a sulky, practical sense of his situation,
perhaps fraught with less danger to himself. Only when appealed to by
his manhood or her weakness, he had forgotten his wounded vanity.

He strode moodily ahead, dutifully breaking the path for her in the
direction of the distant canyon, where Mrs. Rightbody and her friend
awaited them. Miss Alice was first to speak. In this trackless,
uncharted terra incognita of the passions, it is always the woman who
steps out to lead the way.

“You know this place very well. I suppose you have lived here long?”

“Yes.”

“You were not born here--no?”

A long pause.

“I observe they call you ‘Stanislaus Joe.’ Of course that is not your
real name?” (Mem.--Miss Alice had never called him ANYTHING, usually
prefacing any request with a languid, “O-er-er, please, mister-er-a!”
 explicit enough for his station.)

“No.”

Miss Alice (trotting after him, and bawling in his ear).--“WHAT name did
you say?”

The Man (doggedly).--“I don’t know.” Nevertheless, when they reached the
cabin, after an half-hour’s buffeting with the storm, Miss Alice applied
herself to her mother’s escort, Mr. Ryder.

“What’s the name of the man who takes care of my horse?”

“Stanislaus Joe,” responded Mr. Ryder.

“Is that all?”

“No. Sometimes he’s called Joe Stanislaus.”

Miss Alice (satirically).--“I suppose it’s the custom here to send young
ladies out with gentlemen who hide their names under an alias?”

Mr. Ryder (greatly perplexed).--“Why, dear me, Miss Alice, you allers
‘peared to me as a gal as was able to take keer--”

Miss Alice (interrupting with a wounded, dove-like timidity).--“Oh,
never mind, please!”

The cabin offered but scanty accommodation to the tourists; which fact,
when indignantly presented by Mrs. Rightbody, was explained by the
good-humored Ryder from the circumstance that the usual hotel was only a
slight affair of boards, cloth, and paper, put up during the season, and
partly dismantled in the fall. “You couldn’t be kept warm enough there,”
 he added. Nevertheless Miss Alice noticed that both Mr. Ryder and
Stanislaus Joe retired there with their pipes, after having prepared the
ladies’ supper, with the assistance of an Indian woman, who apparently
emerged from the earth at the coming of the party, and disappeared as
mysteriously.

The stars came out brightly before they slept; and the next morning
a clear, unwinking sun beamed with almost summer power through the
shutterless window of their cabin, and ironically disclosed the details
of its rude interior. Two or three mangy, half-eaten buffalo-robes,
a bearskin, some suspicious-looking blankets, rifles and saddles,
deal-tables, and barrels, made up its scant inventory. A strip of faded
calico hung before a recess near the chimney, but so blackened by
smoke and age that even feminine curiosity respected its secret. Mrs.
Rightbody was in high spirits, and informed her daughter that she was at
last on the track of her husband’s unknown correspondent. “Seventy-Four
and Seventy-Five represent two members of the Vigilance Committee, my
dear, and Mr. Ryder will assist me to find them.”

“Mr. Ryder!” ejaculated Miss Alice, in scornful astonishment.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Rightbody, with a suspicious assumption of sudden
defence, “you injure yourself, you injure me, by this exclusive
attitude. Mr. Ryder is a friend of your father’s, an exceedingly
well-informed gentleman. I have not, of course, imparted to him the
extent of my suspicions. But he can help me to what I must and will
know. You might treat him a little more civilly--or, at least, a little
better than you do his servant, your guide. Mr. Ryder is a gentleman,
and not a paid courier.”

Miss Alice was suddenly attentive. When she spoke again, she asked,
“Why do you not find out something about this Silsbie--who died--or was
hung--or something of that kind?”

“Child!” said Mrs. Rightbody, “don’t you see there was no Silsbie, or,
if there was, he was simply the confidant of that--woman?”

A knock at the door, announcing the presence of Mr. Ryder and Stanislaus
Joe with the horses, checked Mrs. Rightbody’s speech. As the animals
were being packed, Mrs. Rightbody for a moment withdrew in confidential
conversation with Mr. Ryder, and, to the young lady’s still greater
annoyance, left her alone with Stanislaus Joe. Miss Alice was not in
good temper, but she felt it necessary to say something.

“I hope the hotel offers better quarters for travellers than this in
summer,” she began.

“It does.”

“Then this does not belong to it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Who lives here, then?”

“I do.”

“I beg your pardon,” stammered Miss Alice, “I thought you lived where we
hired--where we met you--in--in--You must excuse me.”

“I’m not a regular guide; but as times were hard, and I was out of grub,
I took the job.”

“Out of grub!” “job!” And SHE was the “job.” What would Henry Marvin
say? It would nearly kill him. She began herself to feel a little
frightened, and walked towards the door.

“One moment, miss!”

The young girl hesitated. The man’s tone was surly, and yet indicated a
certain kind of half-pathetic grievance. HER curiosity got the better of
her prudence, and she turned back.

“This morning,” he began hastily, “when we were coming down the valley,
you picked me up twice.”

“I picked YOU up?” repeated the astonished Alice.

“Yes, CONTRADICTED me: that’s what I mean,--once when you said those
rocks were volcanic, once when you said the flower you picked was a
poppy. I didn’t let on at the time, for it wasn’t my say; but all the
while you were talking I might have laid for you--”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice haughtily.

“I might have entrapped you before folks. But I only want you to know
that I’M right, and here are the books to show it.”

He drew aside the dingy calico curtain, revealed a small shelf of
bulky books, took down two large volumes,--one of botany, one
of geology,--nervously sought his text, and put them in Alice’s
outstretched hands.

“I had no intention--” she began, half-proudly, half-embarrassedly.

“Am I right, miss?” he interrupted.

“I presume you are, if you say so.”

“That’s all, ma’am. Thank you!”

Before the girl had time to reply, he was gone. When he again returned,
it was with her horse, and Mrs. Rightbody and Ryder were awaiting her.
But Miss Alice noticed that his own horse was missing.

“Are you not going with us?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, indeed!”

Miss Alice felt her speech was a feeble conventionalism; but it was all
she could say. She, however, DID something. Hitherto it had been her
habit to systematically reject his assistance in mounting to her seat.
Now she awaited him. As he approached, she smiled, and put out her
little foot. He instantly stooped; she placed it in his hand, rose
with a spring, and for one supreme moment Stanislaus Joe held her
unresistingly in his arms. The next moment she was in the saddle; but
in that brief interval of sixty seconds she had uttered a volume in a
single sentence,--

“I hope you will forgive me!”

He muttered a reply, and turned his face aside quickly as if to hide it.

Miss Alice cantered forward with a smile, but pulled her hat down over
her eyes as she joined her mother. She was blushing.


PART III.


Mr. Ryder was as good as his word. A day or two later he entered Mrs.
Rightbody’s parlor at the Chrysopolis Hotel in Stockton, with the
information that he had seen the mysterious senders of the despatch, and
that they were now in the office of the hotel waiting her pleasure. Mr.
Ryder further informed her that these gentlemen had only stipulated that
they should not reveal their real names, and that they be introduced to
her simply as the respective “Seventy-Four” and “Seventy-Five” who had
signed the despatch sent to the late Mr. Rightbody.

Mrs. Rightbody at first demurred to this; but, on the assurance from Mr.
Ryder that this was the only condition on which an interview would be
granted, finally consented.

“You will find them square men, even if they are a little rough, ma’am.
But, if you’d like me to be present, I’ll stop; though I reckon, if
ye’d calkilated on that, you’d have had me take care o’ your business by
proxy, and not come yourself three thousand miles to do it.”

Mrs. Rightbody believed it better to see them alone.

“All right, ma’am. I’ll hang round out here; and ef ye should happen to
have a ticklin’ in your throat, and a bad spell o’ coughin’, I’ll drop
in, careless like, to see if you don’t want them drops. Sabe?”

And with an exceedingly arch wink, and a slight familiar tap on Mrs.
Rightbody’s shoulder, which might have caused the late Mr. Rightbody to
burst his sepulchre, he withdrew.

A very timid, hesitating tap on the door was followed by the entrance of
two men, both of whom, in general size, strength, and uncouthness,
were ludicrously inconsistent with their diffident announcement.
They proceeded in Indian file to the centre of the room, faced Mrs.
Rightbody, acknowledged her deep courtesy by a strong shake of the hand,
and, drawing two chairs opposite to her, sat down side by side.

“I presume I have the pleasure of addressing--” began Mrs. Rightbody.

The man directly opposite Mrs. Rightbody turned to the other
inquiringly.

The other man nodded his head, and replied,--

“Seventy-Four.”

“Seventy-Five,” promptly followed the other.

Mrs. Rightbody paused, a little confused.

“I have sent for you,” she began again, “to learn something more of
the circumstances under which you gentlemen sent a despatch to my late
husband.”

“The circumstances,” replied Seventy-Four quietly, with a side-glance at
his companion, “panned out about in this yer style. We hung a man named
Josh Silsbie, down at Deadwood, for hoss-stealin’. When I say WE, I
speak for Seventy-Five yer as is present, as well as representin’, so to
speak, seventy-two other gents as is scattered. We hung Josh Silsbie on
squar, pretty squar, evidence. Afore he was strung up, Seventy-Five yer
axed him, accordin’ to custom, ef ther was enny thing he had to say,
or enny request that he allowed to make of us. He turns to Seventy-Five
yer, and--”

Here he paused suddenly, looking at his companion.

“He sez, sez he,” began Seventy-Five, taking up the narrative,--“he sez,
‘Kin I write a letter?’ sez he. Sez I, ‘Not much, ole man: ye’ve got
no time.’ Sez he, ‘Kin I send a despatch by telegraph?’ I sez, ‘Heave
ahead.’ He sez,--these is his dientikal words,--‘Send to Adam Rightbody,
Boston. Tell him to remember his sacred compack with me thirty years
ago.’”

“‘His sacred compack with me thirty years ago,’” echoed
Seventy-Four,--“his dientikal words.”

“What was the compact?” asked Mrs. Rightbody anxiously.

Seventy-Four looked at Seventy-Five, and then both arose, and retired
to the corner of the parlor, where they engaged in a slow but whispered
deliberation. Presently they returned, and sat down again.

“We allow,” said Seventy-Four, quietly but decidedly, “that YOU know
what that sacred compact was.”

Mrs. Rightbody lost her temper and her truthfulness together. “Of
course,” she said hurriedly, “I know. But do you mean to say that you
gave this poor man no further chance to explain before you murdered
him?”

Seventy-Four and Seventy-Five both rose again slowly, and retired.
When they returned again, and sat down, Seventy-Five, who by this time,
through some subtile magnetism, Mrs. Rightbody began to recognize as the
superior power, said gravely,--

“We wish to say, regarding this yer murder, that Seventy-Four and me
is equally responsible; that we reckon also to represent, so to
speak, seventy-two other gentlemen as is scattered; that we are ready,
Seventy-Four and me, to take and holt that responsibility, now and at
any time, afore every man or men as kin be fetched agin us. We wish to
say that this yer say of ours holds good yer in Californy, or in any
part of these United States.”

“Or in Canady,” suggested Seventy-Four.

“Or in Canady. We wouldn’t agree to cross the water, or go to furrin
parts, unless absolutely necessary. We leaves the chise of weppings to
your principal, ma’am, or being a lady, ma’am, and interested, to
any one you may fetch to act for him. An advertisement in any of the
Sacramento papers, or a playcard or handbill stuck unto a tree near
Deadwood, saying that Seventy-Four or Seventy-Five will communicate with
this yer principal or agent of yours, will fetch us--allers.”

Mrs. Rightbody, a little alarmed and desperate, saw her blunder. “I mean
nothing of the kind,” she said hastily. “I only expected that you might
have some further details of this interview with Silsbie; that perhaps
you could tell me--” a bold, bright thought crossed Mrs. Rightbody’s
mind--“something more about HER.”

The two men looked at each other.

“I suppose your society have no objection to giving me information about
HER,” said Mrs. Rightbody eagerly.

Another quiet conversation in the corner, and the return of both men.

“We want to say that we’ve no objection.”

Mrs. Rightbody’s heart beat high. Her boldness had made her penetration
good. Yet she felt she must not alarm the men heedlessly.

“Will you inform me to what extent Mr. Rightbody, my late husband, was
interested in her?”

This time it seemed an age to Mrs. Rightbody before the men returned
from their solemn consultation in the corner. She could both hear
and feel that their discussion was more animated than their previous
conferences. She was a little mortified, however, when they sat down, to
hear Seventy-Four say slowly,--

“We wish to say that we don’t allow to say HOW much.”

“Do you not think that the ‘sacred compact’ between Mr. Rightbody and
Mr. Silsbie referred to her?”

“We reckon it do.”

Mrs. Rightbody, flushed and animated, would have given worlds had her
daughter been present to hear this undoubted confirmation of her theory.
Yet she felt a little nervous and uncomfortable even on this threshold
of discovery.

“Is she here now?”

“She’s in Tuolumne,” said Seventy-Four.

“A little better looked arter than formerly,” added Seventy-Five.

“I see. Then Mr. Silsbie ENTICED her away?”

“Well, ma’am, it WAS allowed as she runned away. But it wasn’t proved,
and it generally wasn’t her style.”

Mrs. Rightbody trifled with her next question.

“She was pretty, of course?”

The eyes of both men brightened.

“She was THAT!” said Seventy-Four emphatically.

“It would have done you good to see her!” added Seventy-Five.

Mrs. Rightbody inwardly doubted it; but, before she could ask another
question, the two men again retired to the corner for consultation. When
they came back, there was a shade more of kindliness and confidence in
their manner; and Seventy-Four opened his mind more freely.

“We wish to say, ma’am, looking at the thing, by and large, in a
far-minded way, that, ez YOU seem interested, and ez Mr. Rightbody was
interested, and was, according to all accounts, deceived and led away by
Silsbie, that we don’t mind listening to any proposition YOU might make,
as a lady--allowin’ you was ekally interested.”

“I understand,” said Mrs. Rightbody quickly. “And you will furnish me
with any papers?”

The two men again consulted.

“We wish to say, ma’am, that we think she’s got papers, but--”

“I MUST have them, you understand,” interrupted Mrs. Rightbody, “at any
price.

“We was about to say, ma’am,” said Seventy-Four slowly, “that,
considerin’ all things,--and you being a lady--you kin have HER, papers,
pedigree, and guaranty, for twelve hundred dollars.”

It has been alleged that Mrs. Rightbody asked only one question more,
and then fainted. It is known, however, that by the next day it
was understood in Deadwood that Mrs. Rightbody had confessed to the
Vigilance Committee that her husband, a celebrated Boston millionaire,
anxious to gain possession of Abner Springer’s well-known sorrel mare,
had incited the unfortunate Josh Silsbie to steal it; and that finally,
failing in this, the widow of the deceased Boston millionaire was now in
personal negotiation with the owners.

Howbeit, Miss Alice, returning home that afternoon, found her mother
with a violent headache.

“We will leave here by the next steamer,” said Mrs. Rightbody languidly.
“Mr. Ryder has promised to accompany us.”

“But, mother--”

“The climate, Alice, is over-rated. My nerves are already suffering
from it. The associations are unfit for you, and Mr. Marvin is naturally
impatient.”

Miss Alice colored slightly.

“But your quest, mother?”

“I’ve abandoned it.”

“But I have not,” said Alice quietly. “Do you remember my guide at the
Yo Semite,--Stanislaus Joe? Well, Stanislaus Joe is--who do you think?”

Mrs. Rightbody was languidly indifferent.

“Well, Stanislaus Joe is the son of Joshua Silsbie.”

Mrs. Rightbody sat upright in astonishment

“Yes. But mother, he knows nothing of what we know. His father treated
him shamefully, and set him cruelly adrift years ago; and, when he was
hung, the poor fellow, in sheer disgrace, changed his name.”

“But, if he knows nothing of his father’s compact, of what interest is
this?”

“Oh, nothing! Only I thought it might lead to something.”

Mrs. Rightbody suspected that “something,” and asked sharply, “And pray
how did YOU find it out? You did not speak of it in the valley.”

“Oh! I didn’t find it out till to-day,” said Miss Alice, walking to the
window. “He happened to be here, and--told me.”


PART IV.


If Mrs. Rightbody’s friends had been astounded by her singular and
unexpected pilgrimage to California so soon after her husband’s decease,
they were still more astounded by the information, a year later, that
she was engaged to be married to a Mr. Ryder, of whom only the scant
history was known, that he was a Californian, and former correspondent
of her husband. It was undeniable that the man was wealthy, and
evidently no mere adventurer; it was rumored that he was courageous and
manly: but even those who delighted in his odd humor were shocked at his
grammar and slang.

It was said that Mr. Marvin had but one interview with his father-in-law
elect, and returned so supremely disgusted, that the match was broken
off. The horse-stealing story, more or less garbled, found its way
through lips that pretended to decry it, yet eagerly repeated it. Only
one member of the Rightbody family--and a new one--saved them from utter
ostracism. It was young Mr. Ryder, the adopted son of the prospective
head of the household, whose culture, manners, and general elegance,
fascinated and thrilled Boston with a new sensation. It seemed to many
that Miss Alice should, in the vicinity of this rare exotic, forget her
former enthusiasm for a professional life; but the young man was pitied
by society, and various plans for diverting him from any mesalliance
with the Rightbody family were concocted.

It was a wintry night, and the second anniversary of Mr. Rightbody’s
death, that a light was burning in his library. But the dead man’s chair
was occupied by young Mr. Ryder, adopted son of the new proprietor of
the mansion; and before him stood Alice, with her dark eyes fixed on the
table.

“There must have been something in it, Joe, believe me. Did you never
hear your father speak of mine?”

“Never.”

“But you say he was college-bred, and born a gentleman, and in his youth
he must have had many friends.”

“Alice,” said the young man gravely, “when I have done something to
redeem my name, and wear it again before these people, before YOU, it
would be well to revive the past. But till then--”

But Alice was not to be put down. “I remember,” she went on, scarcely
heeding him, “that, when I came in that night, papa was reading a
letter, and seemed to be disconcerted.”

“A letter?”

“Yes; but,” added Alice, with a sigh, “when we found him here
insensible, there was no letter on his person. He must have destroyed
it.”

“Did you ever look among his papers? If found, it might be a clew.”

The young man glanced toward the cabinet. Alice read his eyes, and
answered,--

“Oh, dear, no! The cabinet contained only his papers, all perfectly
arranged,--you know how methodical were his habits,--and some old
business and private letters, all carefully put away.”

“Let us see them,” said the young man, rising.

They opened drawer after drawer; files upon files of letters and
business papers, accurately folded and filed. Suddenly Alice uttered a
little cry, and picked up a quaint ivory paper-knife lying at the bottom
of a drawer.

“It was missing the next day, and never could be found: he must have
mislaid it here. This is the drawer,” said Alice eagerly.

Here was a clew. But the lower part of the drawer was filled with
old letters, not labelled, yet neatly arranged in files. Suddenly he
stopped, and said, “Put them back, Alice, at once.”

“Why?”

“Some of these letters are in my father’s handwriting.”

“The more reason why I should see them,” said the girl imperatively.
“Here, you take part, and I’ll take part, and we’ll get through
quicker.”

There was a certain decision and independence in her manner which he had
learned to respect. He took the letters, and in silence read them
with her. They were old college letters, so filled with boyish dreams,
ambitions, aspirations, and utopian theories, that I fear neither of
these young people even recognized their parents in the dead ashes of
the past. They were both grave, until Alice uttered a little hysterical
cry, and dropped her face in her hands. Joe was instantly beside her.

“It’s nothing, Joe, nothing. Don’t read it, please; please, don’t. It’s
so funny! it’s so very queer!”

But Joe had, after a slight, half-playful struggle, taken the letter
from the girl. Then he read aloud the words written by his father thirty
years ago.

“I thank you, dear friend, for all you say about my wife and boy. I
thank you for reminding me of our boyish compact. He will be ready
to fulfil it, I know, if he loves those his father loves, even if you
should marry years later. I am glad for your sake, for both our sakes,
that it is a boy. Heaven send you a good wife, dear Adams, and a
daughter, to make my son equally happy.”

Joe Silsbie looked down, took the half-laughing, half-tearful face in
his hands, kissed her forehead, and, with tears in his grave eyes, said,
“Amen!”

*****

I am inclined to think that this sentiment was echoed heartily by Mrs.
Rightbody’s former acquaintances, when, a year later, Miss Alice was
united to a professional gentleman of honor and renown, yet who was
known to be the son of a convicted horse-thief. A few remembered the
previous Californian story, and found corroboration therefor; but a
majority believed it a just reward to Miss Alice for her conduct to Mr.
Marvin, and, as Miss Alice cheerfully accepted it in that light, I do
not see why I may not end my story with happiness to all concerned.



A LEGEND OF SAMMTSTADT.


It was the sacred hour of noon at Sammtstadt. Everybody was at dinner;
and the serious Kellner of “Der Wildemann” glanced in mild reproach at
Mr. James Clinch, who, disregarding that fact and the invitatory
table d’hote, stepped into the street. For Mr. Clinch had eaten a
late breakfast at Gladbach, was dyspeptic and American, and, moveover,
preoccupied with business. He was consequently indignant, on entering
the garden-like court and cloister-like counting-house of “Von Becheret,
Sons, Uncles, and Cousins,” to find the comptoir deserted even by the
porter, and was furious at the maidservant, who offered the sacred
shibboleth “Mittagsessen” as a reasonable explanation of the solitude.
“A country,” said Mr. Clinch to himself, “that stops business at mid-day
to go to dinner, and employs women-servants to talk to business-men, is
played out.”

He stepped from the silent building into the equally silent Kronprinzen
Strasse. Not a soul to be seen anywhere. Rows on rows of two-storied,
gray-stuccoed buildings that might be dwellings, or might be offices,
all showing some traces of feminine taste and supervision in a flower
or a curtain that belied the legended “Comptoir,” or “Direction,” over
their portals. Mr. Clinch thought of Boston and State Street, of New
York and Wall Street, and became coldly contemptuous.

Yet there was clearly nothing to do but to walk down the formal rows of
chestnuts that lined the broad Strasse, and then walk back again. At the
corner of the first cross-street he was struck with the fact that two
men who were standing in front of a dwelling-house appeared to be as
inconsistent, and out of proportion to the silent houses, as were the
actors on a stage to the painted canvas thoroughfares before which they
strutted. Mr. Clinch usually had no fancies, had no eye for quaintness;
besides, this was not a quaint nor romantic district, only an entrepot
for silks and velvets, and Mr. Clinch was here, not as a tourist, but as
a purchaser. The guidebooks had ignored Sammtstadt, and he was too
good an American to waste time in looking up uncatalogued curiosities.
Besides, he had been here once before,--an entire day!

One o’clock. Still a full hour and a half before his friend would
return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once
been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its
ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was
not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront
put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned
disgustedly away. Born near a “lake” larger than the German Ocean,
he resented a pool of water twenty-five feet in diameter under that
alluring title; and, a frequenter of the Adirondacks, he could scarce
contain himself over a bit of rock-work twelve feet high. “A country,”
 said Mr. Clinch, “that--” but here he remembered that he had once seen
in a park in his native city an imitation of the Drachenfels in plaster,
on a scale of two inches to the foot, and checked his speech.

He turned into the principal allee of the town. There was a long white
building at one end,--the Bahnhof: at the other end he remembered a
dye-house. He had, a year ago, met its hospitable proprietor: he would
call upon him now.

But the same solitude confronted him as he passed the porter’s lodge
beside the gateway. The counting-house, half villa, half factory, must
have convoked its humanity in some out-of-the-way refectory, for the
halls and passages were tenantless. For the first time he began to be
impressed with a certain foreign quaintness in the surroundings; he
found himself also recalling something he had read when a boy, about
an enchanted palace whose inhabitants awoke on the arrival of
a long-predestined Prince. To assure himself of the absolute
ridiculousness of this fancy, he took from his pocket the business-card
of its proprietor, a sample of dye, and recalled his own personality in
a letter of credit. Having dismissed this idea from his mind, he lounged
on again through a rustic lane that might have led to a farmhouse, yet
was still, absurdly enough, a part of the factory gardens. Crossing
a ditch by a causeway, he presently came to another ditch and another
causeway, and then found himself idly contemplating a massive, ivy-clad,
venerable brick wall. As a mere wall it might not have attracted his
attention; but it seemed to enter and bury itself at right angles in the
side-wall of a quite modern-looking dwelling. After satisfying himself
of this fact, he passed on before the dwelling, but was amazed to see
the wall reappear on the other side exactly the same--old, ivy-grown,
sturdy, uncompromising, and ridiculous.

Could it actually be a part of the house? He turned back, and repassed
the front of the building. The entrance door was hospitably open. There
was a hall and a staircase, but--by all that was preposterous!--they
were built OVER and AROUND the central brick intrusion. The wall
actually ran through the house! “A country,” said Mr. Clinch to himself,
“where they build their houses over ruins to accommodate them, or save
the trouble of removal, is,--” but a very pleasant voice addressing him
here stopped his usual hasty conclusion.

“Guten Morgen!”

Mr. Clinch looked hastily up. Leaning on the parapet of what appeared
to be a garden on the roof of the house was a young girl, red-cheeked,
bright-eyed, blond-haired. The voice was soft, subdued, and mellow; it
was part of the new impression he was receiving, that it seemed to be
in some sort connected with the ivy-clad wall before him. His hat was in
his hand as he answered,--

“Guten Morgen!”

“Was the Herr seeking anything?”

“The Herr was only waiting a longtime-coming friend, and had strayed
here to speak with the before-known proprietor.”

“So? But, the before-known proprietor sleeping well at present after
dinner, would the Herr on the terrace still a while linger?”

The Herr would, but looked around in vain for the means to do it. He
was thinking of a scaling-ladder, when the young woman reappeared at the
open door, and bade him enter.

Following the youthful hostess, Mr. Clinch mounted the staircase, but,
passing the mysterious wall, could not forbear an allusion to it. “It is
old, very old,” said the girl: “it was here when I came.”

“That was not very long ago,” said Mr. Clinch gallantly.

“No; but my grandfather found it here too.”

“And built over it?”

“Why not? It is very, very hard, and SO thick.”

Mr. Clinch here explained, with masculine superiority, the existence of
such modern agents as nitro-glycerine and dynamite, persuasive in their
effects upon time-honored obstructions and encumbrances.

“But there was not then what you call--this--ni--nitro-glycerine.”

“But since then?”

The young girl gazed at him in troubled surprise. “My great-grandfather
did not take it away when he built the house: why should we?”

“Oh!”

They had passed through a hall and dining-room, and suddenly stepped
out of a window upon a gravelled terrace. From this a few stone steps
descended to another terrace, on which trees and shrubs were growing;
and yet, looking over the parapet, Mr. Clinch could see the road some
twenty feet below. It was nearly on a level with, and part of, the
second story of the house. Had an earthquake lifted the adjacent
ground? or had the house burrowed into a hill? Mr. Clinch turned to his
companion, who was standing close beside him, breathing quite audibly,
and leaving an impression on his senses as of a gentle and fragrant
heifer.

“How was all this done?”

The maiden did not know. “It was always here.”

Mr. Clinch reascended the steps. He had quite forgotten his impatience.
Possibly it was the gentle, equable calm of the girl, who, but for her
ready color, did not seem to be moved by anything; perhaps it was the
peaceful repose of this mausoleum of the dead and forgotten wall that
subdued him, but he was quite willing to take the old-fashioned chair
on the terrace which she offered him, and follow her motions with not
altogether mechanical eyes as she drew out certain bottles and glasses
from a mysterious closet in the wall. Mr. Clinch had the weakness of a
majority of his sex in believing that he was a good judge of wine and
women. The latter, as shown in the specimen before him, he would have
invoiced as a fair sample of the middle-class German woman,--healthy,
comfort-loving, home-abiding, the very genius of domesticity. Even in
her virgin outlines the future wholesome matron was already forecast,
from the curves of her broad hips, to the flat lines of her back and
shoulders. Of the wine he was to judge later. THAT required an even more
subtle and unimpassioned intellect.

She placed two bottles before him on the table,--one, the traditional
long-necked, amber-colored Rheinflasche; the other, an old, quaint,
discolored, amphorax-patterned glass jug. The first she opened.

“This,” she said, pointing to the other, “cannot be opened.”

Mr. Clinch paid his respects first to the opened bottle, a good quality
of Niersteiner. With his intellect thus clarified, he glanced at the
other.

“It is from my great-grandfather. It is old as the wall.”

Mr. Clinch examined the bottle attentively. It seemed to have no cork.
Formed of some obsolete, opaque glass, its twisted neck was apparently
hermetically sealed by the same material. The maiden smiled, as she
said,--

“It cannot be opened now without breaking the bottle. It is not good
luck to do so. My grandfather and my father would not.”

But Mr. Clinch was still examining the bottle. Its neck was flattened
towards the mouth; but a close inspection showed it was closed by some
equally hard cement, but not glass.

“If I can open it without breaking the bottle, have I your permission?”

A mischievous glance rested on Mr. Clinch, as the maiden answered,--

“I shall not object; but for what will you do it?”

“To taste it, to try it.”

“You are not afraid?”

There was just enough obvious admiration of Mr. Clinch’s audacity in the
maiden’s manner to impel him to any risk. His only answer was to take
from his pocket a small steel instrument. Holding the neck of the bottle
firmly in one hand, he passed his thumb and the steel twice or thrice
around it. A faint rasping, scratching sound was all the wondering girl
heard. Then, with a sudden, dexterous twist of his thumb and finger, to
her utter astonishment he laid the top of the neck, neatly cut off, in
her hand.

“There’s a better and more modern bottle than you had before,” he said,
pointing to the cleanly-divided neck, “and any cork will fit it now.”

But the girl regarded him with anxiety. “And you still wish to taste the
wine?”

“With your permission, yes!”

He looked up in her eyes. There was permission: there was something
more, that was flattering to his vanity. He took the wine-glass, and,
slowly and in silence, filled it from the mysterious flask.

The wine fell into the glass clearly, transparently, heavily, but
still and cold as death. There was no sparkle, no cheap ebullition,
no evanescent bubble. Yet it was so clear, that, but for a faint
amber-tinting, the glass seemed empty. There was no aroma, no ethereal
diffusion from its equable surface. Perhaps it was fancy, perhaps it was
from nervous excitement; but a slight chill seemed to radiate from the
still goblet, and bring down the temperature of the terrace. Mr. Clinch
and his companion both insensibly shivered.

But only for a moment. Mr. Clinch raised the glass to his lips. As he
did so, he remembered seeing distinctly, as in a picture before him, the
sunlit terrace, the pretty girl in the foreground,--an amused spectator
of his sacrilegious act,--the outlying ivy-crowned wall, the grass-grown
ditch, the tall factory chimneys rising above the chestnuts, and the
distant poplars that marked the Rhine.

The wine was delicious; perhaps a TRIFLE, only a trifle, heady. He was
conscious of a slight exaltation. There was also a smile upon the girl’s
lip and a roguish twinkle in her eye as she looked at him.

“Do you find the wine to your taste?” she asked.

“Fair enough, I warrant,” said Mr. Clinch with ponderous gallantry; “but
methinks ‘tis nothing compared with the nectar that grows on those ruby
lips. Nay, by St. Ursula, I swear it!”

No sooner had this solemnly ridiculous speech passed the lips of the
unfortunate man than he would have given worlds to have recalled it. He
knew that he must be intoxicated; that the sentiment and language were
utterly unlike him, he was miserably aware; that he did not even know
exactly what it meant, he was also hopelessly conscious. Yet feeling all
this,--feeling, too, the shame of appearing before her as a man who had
lost his senses through a single glass of wine,--nevertheless he rose
awkwardly, seized her hand, and by sheer force drew her towards him, and
kissed her. With an exclamation that was half a cry and half a laugh,
she fled from him, leaving him alone and bewildered on the terrace.

For a moment Mr. Clinch supported himself against the open window,
leaning his throbbing head on the cold glass. Shame, mortification, an
hysterical half-consciousness of his utter ridiculousness, and yet an
odd, undefined terror of something, by turns possessed him. Was he ever
before guilty of such perfect folly? Had he ever before made such a
spectacle of himself? Was it possible that he, Mr. James Clinch, the
coolest head at a late supper,--he, the American, who had repeatedly
drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table--could be transformed
into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was
conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort
of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to
him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to lose all
consciousness.

But only for an instant. With a strong effort of his will he again
recalled himself, his situation, his surroundings, and, above all, his
appointment. He rose to his feet, hurriedly descended the terrace-steps,
and, before he well knew how, found himself again on the road. Once
there, his faculties returned in full vigor; he was again himself.
He strode briskly forward toward the ditch he had crossed only a few
moments before, but was suddenly stopped. It was filled with water. He
looked up and down. It was clearly the same ditch; but a flowing stream
thirty feet wide now separated him from the other bank.

The appearance of this unlooked-for obstacle made Mr. Clinch doubt the
full restoration of his faculties. He stepped to the brink of the flood
to bathe his head in the stream, and wash away the last vestiges of his
potations. But as he approached the placid depths, and knelt down he
again started back, and this time with a full conviction of his own
madness; for reflected from its mirror-like surface was a figure he
could scarcely call his own, although here and there some trace of his
former self remained.

His close-cropped hair, trimmed a la mode, had given way to long,
curling locks that dropped upon his shoulders. His neat mustache was
frightfully prolonged, and curled up at the ends stiffly. His Piccadilly
collar had changed shape and texture, and reached--a mass of lace--to a
point midway of his breast! His boots,--why had he not noticed his boots
before?--these triumphs of his Parisian bootmaker, were lost in hideous
leathern cases that reached half way up his thighs. In place of his
former high silk hat, there lay upon the ground beside him the awful
thing he had just taken off,--a mass of thickened felt, flap, feather,
and buckle that weighed at least a stone.

A single terrible idea now took possession of him. He had been “sold,”
 “taken in,” “done for.” He saw it all. In a state of intoxication he
had lost his way, had been dragged into some vile den, stripped of his
clothes and valuables, and turned adrift upon the quiet town in this
shameless masquerade. How should he keep his appointment? how inform
the police of this outrage upon a stranger and an American citizen? how
establish his identity? Had they spared his papers? He felt feverishly
in his breast. Ah!--his watch? Yes, a watch--heavy, jewelled,
enamelled--and, by all that was ridiculous, FIVE OTHERS! He ran his
hands into his capacious trunk hose. What was this? Brooches, chains,
finger-rings,--one large episcopal one,--ear-rings, and a handful
of battered gold and silver coins. His papers, his memorandums, his
passport--all proofs of his identity--were gone! In their place was the
unmistakable omnium gatherum of an accomplished knight of the road. Not
only was his personality, but his character, gone forever.

It was a part of Mr. Clinch’s singular experience that this last stroke
of ill fortune seemed to revive in him something of the brutal instinct
he had felt a moment before. He turned eagerly about with the intention
of calling some one--the first person he met--to account. But the house
that he had just quitted was gone. The wall! Ah, there it was, no
longer purposeless, intrusive, and ivy-clad, but part of the buttress
of another massive wall that rose into battlements above him. Mr. Clinch
turned again hopelessly toward Sammtstadt. There was the fringe of
poplars on the Rhine, there were the outlying fields lit by the same
meridian sun; but the characteristic chimneys of Sammtstadt were gone.
Mr. Clinch was hopelessly lost.

The sound of a horn breaking the stillness recalled his senses. He now
for the first time perceived that a little distance below him, partly
hidden in the trees, was a queer, tower-shaped structure with chains
and pulleys, that in some strange way recalled his boyish reading.
A drawbridge and portcullis! And on the battlement a figure in a
masquerading dress as absurd as his own, flourishing a banner and
trumpet, and trying to attract his attention.

“Was wollen Sie?”

“I want to see the proprietor,” said Mr. Clinch, choking back his rage.

There was a pause, and the figure turned apparently to consult with
some one behind the battlements. After a moment he reappeared, and in a
perfunctory monotone, with an occasional breathing spell on the trumpet,
began,--

“You do give warranty as a good knight and true, as well as by the bones
of the blessed St. Ursula, that you bear no ill will, secret enmity,
wicked misprise or conspiracy, against the body of our noble lord
and master Von Kolnsche? And you bring with you no ambush, siege, or
surprise of retainers, neither secret warrant nor lettres de cachet, nor
carry on your knightly person poisoned dagger, magic ring, witch-powder,
nor enchanted bullet, and that you have entered into no unhallowed
alliance with the Prince of Darkness, gnomes, hexies, dragons, Undines,
Loreleis, nor the like?”

“Come down out of that, you d----d old fool!” roared Mr. Clinch, now
perfectly beside himself with rage,--“come down, and let me in!”

As Mr. Clinch shouted out the last words, confused cries of recognition
and welcome, not unmixed with some consternation, rose from the
battlements: “Ach Gott!” “Mutter Gott--it is he! It is Jann, Der
Wanderer. It is himself.” The chains rattled, the ponderous drawbridge
creaked and dropped; and across it a medley of motley figures rushed
pellmell. But, foremost among them, the very maiden whom he had left not
ten minutes before flew into his arms, and with a cry of joyful greeting
sank upon his breast. Mr. Clinch looked down upon the fair head and long
braids. It certainly was the same maiden, his cruel enchantress; but
where did she get those absurd garments?

“Willkommen,” said a stout figure, advancing with some authority, and
seizing his disengaged hand, “where hast thou been so long?”

Mr. Clinch, by no means placated, coldly dropped the extended hand.
It was NOT the proprietor he had known. But there was a singular
resemblance in his face to some one of Mr. Clinch’s own kin; but who,
he could not remember. “May I take the liberty of asking your name?” he
asked coldly.

The figure grinned. “Surely; but, if thou standest upon punctilio, it
is for ME to ask thine, most noble Freiherr,” said he, winking upon his
retainers. “Whom have I the honor of entertaining?”

“My name is Clinch,--James Clinch of Chicago, Ill.”

A shout of laughter followed. In the midst of his rage and mortification
Mr. Clinch fancied he saw a shade of pain and annoyance flit across the
face of the maiden. He was puzzled, but pressed her hand, in spite of
his late experiences, reassuringly. She made a gesture of silence to
him, and then slipped away in the crowd.

“Schames K’l’n’sche von Schekargo,” mimicked the figure, to the
unspeakable delight of his retainers. “So! THAT is the latest French
style. Holy St. Ursula! Hark ye, nephew! I am not a travelled man. Since
the Crusades we simple Rhine gentlemen have staid at home. But I call
myself Kolnsche of Koln, at your service.”

“Very likely you are right,” said Mr. Clinch hotly, disregarding the
caution of his fair companion; “but, whoever YOU are, I am a stranger
entitled to protection. I have been robbed.”

If Mr. Clinch had uttered an exquisite joke instead of a very angry
statement, it could not have been more hilariously received. He paused,
grew confused, and then went on hesitatingly,--

“In place of my papers and credentials I find only these.” And he
produced the jewelry from his pockets.

Another shout of laughter and clapping of hands followed this second
speech; and the baron, with a wink at his retainers, prolonged the
general mirth by saying, “By the way, nephew, there is little doubt but
there has been robbery--somewhere.”

“It was done,” continued Mr. Clinch, hurrying to make an end of his
explanation, “while I was inadvertently overcome with liquor,--drugged
liquor.”

The laughter here was so uproarious that the baron, albeit with tears
of laughter in his own eyes, made a peremptory gesture of silence. The
gesture was peculiar to the baron, efficacious and simple. It consisted
merely in knocking down the nearest laugher. Having thus restored
tranquillity, he strode forward, and took Mr. Clinch by the hand. “By
St. Adolph, I did doubt thee a moment ago, nephew; but this last frank
confession of thine shows me I did thee wrong. Willkommen zu Hause,
Jann, drunk or sober, willcommen zu Cracowen.”

More and more mystified, but convinced of the folly of any further
explanation, Mr. Clinch took the extended hand of his alleged uncle, and
permitted himself to be led into the castle. They passed into a large
banqueting-hall adorned with armor and implements of the chase. Mr.
Clinch could not help noticing, that, although the appointments were
liberal and picturesque, the ventilation was bad, and the smoke from the
huge chimney made the air murky. The oaken tables, massive in carving
and rich in color, were unmistakably greasy; and Mr. Clinch slipped on
a piece of meat that one of the dozen half-wild dogs who were occupying
the room was tearing on the floor. The dog, yelping, ran between the
legs of a retainer, precipitating him upon the baron, who instantly,
with the “equal foot” of fate, kicked him and the dog into a corner.

“And whence came you last?” asked the baron, disregarding the little
contretemps, and throwing himself heavily on an oaken settle, while
he pushed a queer, uncomfortable-looking stool, with legs like a
Siamese-twin-connected double X, towards his companion.

Mr. Clinch, who had quite given himself up to fate, answered
mechanically,--

“Paris.”

The baron winked his eye with unutterable, elderly wickedness. “Ach
Gott! it is nothing to what it was when I was your age. Ah! there was
Manon,--Sieur Manon we used to call her. I suppose she’s getting old
now. How goes on the feud between the students and the citizens? Eh? Did
you go to the bal in la Cite?”

Mr. Clinch stopped the flow of those Justice-Shallow-like reminiscences
by an uneasy exclamation. He was thinking of the maiden who had
disappeared so suddenly. The baron misinterpreted his nervousness. “What
ho, within there!--Max, Wolfgang,--lazy rascals! Bring some wine.”

At the baleful word Mr. Clinch started to his feet. “Not for me! Bring
me none of your body-and-soul-destroying poison! I’ve enough of it!”

The baron stared. The servitors stared also.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Clinch, recalling himself slowly; “but I
fear that Rhine wine does not agree with me.”

The baron grinned. Perceiving, however, that the three servitors grinned
also, he kicked two of them into obscurity, and felled the third to
the floor with his fist. “Hark ye, nephew,” he said, turning to the
astonished Clinch, “give over this nonsense! By the mitre of Bishop
Hatto, thou art as big a fool as he!”

“Hatto,” repeated Clinch mechanically. “What! he of the Mouse Tower?”

“Ay, of the Mouse Tower!” sneered the baron. “I see you know the story.”

“Why am I like him?” asked Mr. Clinch in amazement.

The baron grinned. “HE punished the Rhenish wine as thou dost, without
judgment. He had--”

“The jim-jams,” said Mr. Clinch mechanically again.

The baron frowned. “I know not what gibberish thou sayest by ‘jim-jams’;
but he had, like thee, the wildest fantasies and imaginings; saw snakes,
toads, rats, in his boots, but principally rats; said they pursued him,
came to his room, his bed--ach Gott!”

“Oh!” said Mr. Clinch, with a sudden return to his firmer self and his
native inquiring habits; “then THAT is the fact about Bishop Hatto of
the story?”

“His enemies made it the subject of a vile slander of an old friend of
mine,” said the baron; “and those cursed poets, who believe everything,
and then persuade others to do so,--may the Devil fly away with
them!--kept it up.”

Here were facts quite to Mr. Clinch’s sceptical mind. He forgot himself
and his surroundings.

“And that story of the Drachenfels?” he asked insinuatingly,--“the
dragon, you know. Was he too--”

The baron grinned. “A boar transformed by the drunken brains of the
Bauers of the Siebengebirge. Ach Gott! Ottefried had many a hearty laugh
over it; and it did him, as thou knowest, good service with the nervous
mother of the silly maiden.”

“And the seven sisters of Schonberg?” asked Mr. Clinch persuasively.

“‘Schonberg! Seven sisters!’ What of them?” demanded the baron sharply.

“Why, you know,--the maidens who were so coy to their suitors,
and--don’t you remember?--jumped into the Rhine to avoid them.”

“‘Coy? Jumped into the Rhine to avoid suitors’?” roared the baron,
purple with rage. “Hark ye, nephew! I like not this jesting. Thou
knowest I married one of the Schonberg girls, as did thy father. How
‘coy’ they were is neither here nor there; but mayhap WE might tell
another story. Thy father, as weak a fellow as thou art where a
petticoat is concerned, could not as a gentleman do other than he did.
And THIS is his reward? Ach Gott! ‘Coy!’ And THIS, I warrant, is the way
the story is delivered in Paris.”

Mr. Clinch would have answered that this was the way he read it in a
guidebook, but checked himself at the hopelessness of the explanation.
Besides, he was on the eve of historic information; he was, as it were,
interviewing the past; and, whether he would ever be able to profit by
the opportunity or not, he could not bear to lose it. “And how about the
Lorelei--is she, too, a fiction?” he asked glibly.

“It was said,” observed the baron sardonically, “that when thou
disappeared with the gamekeeper’s daughter at Obercassel--Heaven knows
where!--thou wast swallowed up in a whirlpool with some creature. Ach
Gott! I believe it! But a truce to this balderdash. And so thou wantest
to know of the ‘coy’ sisters of Schoenberg? Hark ye, Jann, that cousin
of thine is a Schonberg. Call you her ‘coy’? Did I not see thy greeting?
Eh? By St. Adolph, knowing thee as she does to be robber and thief, call
you her greeting ‘coy’?”

Furious as Mr. Clinch inwardly became under these epithets, he felt that
his explanation would hardly relieve the maiden from deceit, or himself
from weakness. But out of his very perplexity and turmoil a bright idea
was born. He turned to the baron,--

“Then you have no faith in the Rhine legends?”

The baron only replied with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders.

“But what if I told you a new one?”

“You?”

“Yes; a part of my experience?”

The baron was curious. It was early in the afternoon, just after dinner.
He might be worse bored.

“I’ve only one condition,” added Mr. Clinch: “the young lady--I mean, of
course, my cousin--must hear it too.”

“Oh, ay! I see. Of course--the old trick! Well, call the jade. But mark
ye, Sir Nephew, no enchanted maidens and knights. Keep to thyself. Be as
thou art, vagabond Jann Kolnische, knight of the road.--What ho there,
scoundrels! Call the Lady Wilhemina.”

It was the first time Mr. Clinch had heard his fair friend’s name; but
it was not, evidently, the first time she had seen him, as the very
decided wink the gentle maiden dropped him testified. Nevertheless,
with hands lightly clasped together, and downcast eyes, she stood before
them.

Mr. Clinch began. Without heeding the baron’s scornful grin, he
graphically described his meeting, two years before, with a Lorelei, her
usual pressing invitation, and his subsequent plunge into the Rhine.

“I am free to confess,” added Mr. Clinch, with an affecting glance to
Wilhelmina, “that I was not enamoured of the graces of the lady, but was
actuated by my desire to travel, and explore hitherto unknown regions. I
wished to travel, to visit--”

“Paris,” interrupted the baron sarcastically.

“America,” continued Mr. Clinch.

“What?”--“America.”

“‘Tis a gnome-like sounding name, this Meriker. Go on, nephew: tell us
of Meriker.”

With the characteristic fluency of his nation, Mr. Clinch described his
landing on those enchanted shores, viz, the Rhine Whirlpool and Hell
Gate, East River, New York. He described the railways, tram-ways,
telegraphs, hotels, phonograph, and telephone. An occasional oath broke
from the baron, but he listened attentively; and in a few moments Mr.
Clinch had the raconteur’s satisfaction of seeing the vast hall slowly
filling with open-eyed and open-mouthed retainers hanging upon his
words. Mr. Clinch went on to describe his astonishment at meeting on
these very shores some of his own blood and kin. “In fact,” said Mr.
Clinch, “here were a race calling themselves ‘Clinch,’ but all claiming
to have descended from Kolnische.”

“And how?” sneered the baron.

“Through James Kolnische and Wilhelmina his wife,” returned Mr. Clinch
boldly. “They emigrated from Koln and Crefeld to Philadelphia, where
there is a quarter named Crefeld.” Mr. Clinch felt himself shaky as to
his chronology, but wisely remembered that it was a chronology of the
future to his hearers, and they could not detect an anachronism. With
his eyes fixed upon those of the gentle Wilhelmina, Mr. Clinch now
proceeded to describe his return to his fatherland, but his astonishment
at finding the very face of the country changed, and a city standing
on those fields he had played in as a boy; and how he had wandered
hopelessly on, until he at last sat wearily down in a humble cottage
built upon the ruins of a lordly castle. “So utterly travel-worn and
weak had I become,” said Mr. Clinch, with adroitly simulated pathos,
“that a single glass of wine offered me by the simple cottage maiden
affected me like a prolonged debauch.”

A long-drawn snore was all that followed this affecting climax. The
baron was asleep; the retainers were also asleep. Only one pair of eyes
remained open,--arch, luminous, blue,--Wilhelmina’s.

“There is a subterranean passage below us to Linn. Let us fly!” she
whispered.

“But why?”

“They always do it in the legends,” she murmured modestly.

“But your father?”

“He sleeps. Do you not hear him?”

Certainly somebody was snoring. But, oddly enough, it seemed to be
Wilhelmina. Mr. Clinch suggested this to her.

“Fool, it is yourself!”

Mr. Clinch, struck with the idea, stopped to consider. She was right. It
certainly WAS himself.

With a struggle he awoke. The sun was shining. The maiden was looking at
him. But the castle--the castle was gone!

“You have slept well,” said the maiden archly. “Everybody does after
dinner at Sammtstadt. Father has just awakened, and is coming.”

Mr. Clinch stared at the maiden, at the terrace, at the sky, at the
distant chimneys of Sammtstadt, at the more distant Rhine, at the table
before him, and finally at the empty glass. The maiden smiled. “Tell
me,” said Mr. Clinch, looking in her eyes, “is there a secret passage
underground between this place and the Castle of Linn?”

“An underground passage?”

“Ay--whence the daughter of the house fled with a stranger knight.”

“They say there is,” said the maiden, with a gentle blush.

“Can you show it to me?”

She hesitated. “Papa is coming: I’ll ask him.”

I presume she did. At least the Herr Consul at Sammtstadt informs me of
a marriage-certificate issued to one Clinch of Chicago, and Kolnische of
Koln; and there is an amusing story extant in the Verein at Sammtstadt,
of an American connoisseur of Rhine wines, who mistook a flask of Cognac
and rock-candy, used for “craftily qualifying” lower grades of wine to
the American standard, for the rarest Rudesheimerberg.



VIEWS FROM A GERMAN SPION


Outside of my window, two narrow perpendicular mirrors, parallel
with the casement, project into the street, yet with a certain
unobtrusiveness of angle that enables them to reflect the people who
pass, without any reciprocal disclosure of their own. The men and women
hurrying by not only do not know they are observed, but, what is worse,
do not even see their own reflection in this hypocritical plane, and
are consequently unable, through its aid, to correct any carelessness
of garb, gait, or demeanor. At first this seems to be taking an unfair
advantage of the human animal, who invariably assumes an attitude
when he is conscious of being under human focus. But I observe that my
neighbors’ windows, right and left, have a similar apparatus, that this
custom is evidently a local one, and the locality is German. Being
an American stranger, I am quite willing to leave the morality of the
transaction with the locality, and adapt myself to the custom: indeed,
I had thought of offering it, figuratively, as an excuse for any
unfairness of observation I might make in these pages. But my German
mirrors reflect without prejudice, selection, or comment; and the
American eye, I fear, is but mortal, and like all mortal eyes,
figuratively as well as in that literal fact noted by an eminent
scientific authority, infinitely inferior to the work of the best German
opticians.

And this leads me to my first observation, namely, that a majority of
those who pass my mirror have weak eyes, and have already invoked the
aid of the optician. Why are these people, physically in all else so
much stronger than my countrymen, deficient in eyesight? Or, to omit the
passing testimony of my Spion, and take my own personal experience, why
does my young friend Max, brightest of all schoolboys, who already
wears the cap that denotes the highest class,--why does he shock me by
suddenly drawing forth a pair of spectacles, that upon his fresh, rosy
face would be an obvious mocking imitation of the Herr Papa--if German
children could ever, by any possibility, be irreverent? Or why does the
Fraulein Marie, his sister, pink as Aurora, round as Hebe, suddenly
veil her blue eyes with a golden lorgnette in the midst of our polyglot
conversation? Is it to evade the direct, admiring glance of the
impulsive American? Dare I say NO? Dare I say that that frank, clear,
honest, earnest return of the eye, which has on the Continent most
unfairly brought my fair countrywomen under criticism, is quite as
common to her more carefully-guarded, tradition-hedged German sisters?
No, it is not that. Is it any thing in these emerald and opal tinted
skies, which seem so unreal to the American eye, and for the first time
explain what seemed the unreality of German art? in these mysterious yet
restful Rhine fogs, which prolong the twilight, and hang the curtain
of romance even over mid-day? Surely not. Is it not rather, O Herr
Professor profound in analogy and philosophy!--is it not rather
this abominable black-letter, this elsewhere-discarded, uncouth,
slowly-decaying text known as the German Alphabet, that plucks out the
bright eyes of youth, and bristles the gateways of your language with a
chevaux de frise of splintered rubbish? Why must I hesitate whether it
is an accident of the printer’s press, or the poor quality of the paper,
that makes this letter a “k” or a “t”? Why must I halt in an emotion or
a thought because “s” and “f” are so nearly alike? Is it not enough that
I, an impulsive American, accustomed to do a thing first, and reflect
upon it afterwards, must grope my way through a blind alley of
substantives and adjectives, only to find the verb of action in an
obscure corner, without ruining my eyesight in the groping?

But I dismiss these abstract reflections for a fresh and active
resentment. This is the fifth or sixth dog that has passed my Spion,
harnessed to a small barrow-like cart, and tugging painfully at a
burden so ludicrously disproportionate to his size, that it would seem a
burlesque, but for the poor dog’s sad sincerity. Perhaps it is because
I have the barbarian’s fondness for dogs, and for their lawless, gentle,
loving uselessness, that I rebel against this unnatural servitude. It
seems as monstrous as if a child were put between the shafts, and made
to carry burdens; and I have come to regard those men and women, who in
the weakest perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying
idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents.
Pegasus harnessed to the Thracian herdsman’s plough was no more of a
desecration. I fancy the poor dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the
performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to
assume it is PLAY; and I have seen a little “colley” running along,
barking, and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, before a load
that any one out of this locality would have thought the direst cruelty.
Nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to become accustomed to
it. When his cruel taskmaster halts with his wares, instantly the dog,
either by sitting down in his harness, or crawling over the shafts, or
by some unmistakable dog-like trick, utterly scatters any such delusion
of even the habit of servitude. The few of his race who do not work in
this ducal city seem to have lost their democratic canine sympathies,
and look upon him with something of that indifferent calm with which
yonder officer eyes the road-mender in the ditch below him. He loses
even the characteristics of species. The common cur and mastiff look
alike in harness. The burden levels all distinctions. I have said that
he was generally sincere in his efforts. I recall but one instance to
the contrary. I remember a young colley who first attracted my attention
by his persistent barking. Whether he did this, as the plough-boy
whistled, “for want of thought,” or whether it was a running protest
against his occupation, I could not determine, until one day I noticed,
that, in barking, he slightly threw up his neck and shoulders, and that
the two-wheeled barrow-like vehicle behind him, having its weight evenly
poised on the wheels by the trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled
him by this movement to cunningly throw the center of gravity and the
greater weight on the man,--a fact which that less sagacious brute never
discerned. Perhaps I am using a strong expression regarding his driver.
It may be that the purely animal wants of the dog, in the way of food,
care, and shelter, are more bountifully supplied in servitude than in
freedom; becoming a valuable and useful property, he may be cared for
and protected as such (an odd recollection that this argument had been
used forcibly in regard to human slavery in my own country strikes me
here); but his picturesqueness and poetry are gone, and I cannot
help thinking that the people who have lost this gentle, sympathetic,
characteristic figure from their domestic life and surroundings have not
acquired an equal gain through his harsh labors.

To the American eye there is, throughout the length and breadth of
this foreign city, no more notable and striking object than the average
German house-servant. It is not that she has passed my Spion a dozen
times within the last hour,--for here she is messenger, porter, and
commissionnaire, as well as housemaid and cook,--but that she is always
a phenomenon to the American stranger, accustomed to be abused in
his own country by his foreign Irish handmaiden. Her presence is as
refreshing and grateful as the morning light, and as inevitable and
regular. When I add that with the novelty of being well served is
combined the satisfaction of knowing that you have in your household an
intelligent being who reads and writes with fluency, and yet does not
abstract your books, nor criticise your literary composition; who is
cleanly clad, and neat in her person, without the suspicion of having
borrowed her mistress’s dresses; who may be good-looking without the
least imputation of coquetry or addition to her followers; who is
obedient without servility, polite without flattery, willing and replete
with supererogatory performance, without the expectation of immediate
pecuniary return, what wonder that the American householder translated
into German life feels himself in a new Eden of domestic possibilities
unrealized in any other country, and begins to believe in a present and
future of domestic happiness! What wonder that the American bachelor
living in German lodgings feels half the terrors of the conjugal future
removed, and rushes madly into love--and housekeeping! What wonder that
I, a long-suffering and patient master, who have been served by the
reticent but too imitative Chinaman; who have been “Massa” to the
childlike but untruthful negro; who have been the recipient of the
brotherly but uncertain ministrations of the South-Sea Islander, and
have been proudly disregarded by the American aborigine, only in due
time to meet the fate of my countrymen at the hands of Bridget the
Celt,--what wonder that I gladly seize this opportunity to sing the
praises of my German handmaid! Honor to thee, Lenchen, wherever
thou goest! Heaven bless thee in thy walks abroad! whether with that
tightly-booted cavalryman in thy Sunday gown and best, or in blue
polka-dotted apron and bare head as thou trottest nimbly on mine
errands,--errands which Bridget o’Flaherty would scorn to undertake, or,
undertaking, would hopelessly blunder in. Heaven bless thee, child,
in thy early risings and in thy later sittings, at thy festive board
overflowing with Essig and Fett, in the mysteries of thy Kuchen, in the
fulness of thy Bier, and in thy nightly suffocations beneath mountainous
and multitudinous feathers! Good, honest, simple-minded, cheerful,
duty-loving Lenchen! Have not thy brothers, strong and dutiful as thou,
lent their gravity and earnestness to sweeten and strengthen the fierce
youth of the Republic beyond the seas? and shall not thy children
inherit the broad prairies that still wait for them, and discover the
fatness thereof, and send a portion transmuted in glittering shekels
back to thee?

Almost as notable are the children whose round faces have as frequently
been reflected in my Spion. Whether it is only a fancy of mine that
the average German retains longer than any other race his childish
simplicity and unconsciousness, or whether it is because I am more
accustomed to the extreme self-assertion and early maturity of American
children, I know not; but I am inclined to believe that among no
other people is childhood as perennial, and to be studied in such
characteristic and quaint and simple phases as here. The picturesqueness
of Spanish and Italian childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime
and the conscious attitudinizing of the Latin races. German children are
not exuberant or volatile: they are serious,--a seriousness, however,
not to be confounded with the grave reflectiveness of age, but only the
abstract wonderment of childhood; for all those who have made a loving
study of the young human animal will, I think, admit that its dominant
expression is GRAVITY, and not playfulness, and will be satisfied
that he erred pitifully who first ascribed “light-heartedness” and
“thoughtlessness” as part of its phenomena. These little creatures I
meet upon the street,--whether in quaint wooden shoes and short woollen
petticoats, or neatly booted and furred, with school knapsacks jauntily
borne upon little square shoulders,--all carry likewise in their round
chubby faces their profound wonderment and astonishment at the big busy
world into which they have so lately strayed. If I stop to speak with
this little maid who scarcely reaches to the top-boots of yonder cavalry
officer, there is less of bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little
face than of grave wonder at the foreign accent and strange ways of
this new figure obtruded upon her limited horizon. She answers honestly,
frankly, prettily, but gravely. There is a remote possibility that I
might bite; and, with this suspicion plainly indicated in her round
blue eyes, she quietly slips her little red hand from mine, and moves
solemnly away. I remember once to have stopped in the street with a fair
countrywoman of mine to interrogate a little figure in sabots,--the
one quaint object in the long, formal perspective of narrow, gray
bastard-Italian facaded houses of a Rhenish German Strasse. The sweet
little figure wore a dark-blue woollen petticoat that came to its knees;
gray woollen stockings covered the shapely little limbs below; and
its very blonde hair, the color of a bright dandelion, was tied in a
pathetic little knot at the back of its round head, and garnished with
an absurd green ribbon. Now, although this gentlewoman’s sympathies were
catholic and universal, unfortunately their expression was limited to
her own mother-tongue. She could not help pouring out upon the child the
maternal love that was in her own womanly breast, nor could she withhold
the “baby-talk” through which it was expressed. But, alas! it was in
English. Hence ensued a colloquy, tender and extravagant on the part of
the elder, grave and wondering on the part of the child. But the lady
had a natural feminine desire for reciprocity, particularly in the
presence of our emotion-scorning sex, and as a last resource she emptied
the small silver of her purse into the lap of the coy maiden. It was
a declaration of love, susceptible of translation at the nearest
cake-shop. But the little maid, whose dress and manner certainly did not
betray an habitual disregard of gifts of this kind, looked at the coin
thoughtfully, but not regretfully. Some innate sense of duty, equally
strong with that of being polite to strangers, filled her consciousness.
With the utterly unexpected remark that her father ‘did not allow her
to take money’, the queer little figure moved away, leaving the two
Americans covered with mortification. The rare American child who could
have done this would have done it with an attitude. This little German
bourgeoise did it naturally. I do not intend to rush to the deduction
that German children of the lower classes habitually refuse pecuniary
gratuities: indeed, I remember to have wickedly suggested to my
companion, that, to avoid impoverishment in a foreign land, she should
not repeat the story nor the experiment. But I simply offer it as a
fact, and to an American, at home or abroad, a novel one.

I owe to these little figures another experience quite as strange.
It was at the close of a dull winter’s day,--a day from which all
out-of-door festivity seemed to be naturally excluded: there was a
baleful promise of snow in the air and a dismal reminiscence of it under
foot, when suddenly, in striking contrast with the dreadful bleakness
of the street, a half dozen children, masked and bedizened with cheap
ribbons, spangles, and embroidery, flashed across my Spion. I was quick
to understand the phenomenon. It was the Carnival season. Only the night
before I had been to the great opening masquerade,--a famous affair, for
which this art-loving city is noted, and to which strangers are drawn
from all parts of the Continent. I remember to have wondered if
the pleasure-loving German in America had not broken some of his
conventional shackles in emigration; for certainly I had found the
Carnival balls of the “Lieder Kranz Society” in New York, although
decorous and fashionable to the American taste, to be wild dissipations
compared with the practical seriousness of this native performance, and
I hailed the presence of these children in the open street as a promise
of some extravagance, real, untrammelled, and characteristic. I seized
my hat and--OVERCOAT,--a dreadful incongruity to the spangles that had
whisked by, and followed the vanishing figures round the corner. Here
they were re-enforced by a dozen men and women, fantastically, but not
expensively arrayed, looking not unlike the supernumeraries of some
provincial opera troupe. Following the crowd, which already began to
pour in from the side-streets, in a few moments I was in the broad,
grove-like allee, and in the midst of the masqueraders.

I remember to have been told that this was a characteristic annual
celebration of the lower classes, anticipated with eagerness, and
achieved with difficulty, indeed, often only through the alternative of
pawning clothing and furniture to provide the means for this ephemeral
transformation. I remember being warned, also, that the buffoonery was
coarse, and some of the slang hardly fit for “ears polite.” But I am
afraid that I was not shocked at the prodigality of these poor people,
who purchased a holiday on such hard conditions; and, as to the
coarseness of the performance, I felt that I certainly might go where
these children could.

At first the masquerading figures appeared to be mainly composed of
young girls of ages varying from nine to eighteen. Their costumes--if
what was often only the addition of a broad, bright-colored stripe to
the hem of a short dress could be called a COSTUME--were plain, and
seemed to indicate no particular historical epoch or character. A
general suggestion of the peasant’s holiday attire was dominant in
all the costumes. Everybody was closely masked. All carried a short,
gayly-striped baton of split wood, called a Pritsche, which, when struck
sharply on the back or shoulders of some spectator or sister-masker,
emitted a clattering, rasping sound. To wander hand in hand down this
broad allee, to strike almost mechanically, and often monotonously,
at each other with their batons, seemed to be the extent of that wild
dissipation. The crowd thickened. Young men with false noses, hideous
masks, cheap black or red cotton dominoes, soldiers in uniform, crowded
past each other, up and down the promenade, all carrying a Pritsche,
and exchanging blows with each other, but always with the same slow
seriousness of demeanor, which, with their silence, gave the performance
the effect of a religious rite. Occasionally some one shouted: perhaps a
dozen young fellows broke out in song; but the shout was provocative of
nothing, the song faltered as if the singers were frightened at their
own voices. One blithe fellow, with a bear’s head on his fur-capped
shoulders, began to dance; but, on the crowd stopping to observe
him seriously, he apparently thought better of it, and slipped away.
Nevertheless, the solemn beating of Pritschen over each other’s backs
went on. I remember that I was followed the whole length of the allee by
a little girl scarcely twelve years old, in a bright striped skirt and
black mask, who from time to time struck me over the shoulders with a
regularity and sad persistency that was peculiarly irresistible to
me; the more so, as I could not help thinking that it was not half as
amusing to herself. Once only did the ordinary brusque gallantry of the
Carnival spirit show itself. A man with an enormous pair of horns, like
a half-civilized satyr, suddenly seized a young girl and endeavored to
kiss her. A slight struggle ensued, in which I fancied I detected in the
girl’s face and manner the confusion and embarrassment of one who
was obliged to overlook, or seem to accept, a familiarity that was
distasteful, rather than be laughed at for prudishness or ignorance. But
the incident was exceptional. Indeed, it was particularly notable to my
American eyes to find such decorum where there might easily have been
the greatest license. I am afraid that an American mob of this class
would have scarcely been as orderly and civil under the circumstances.
They might have shown more humor; but there would have probably been
more effrontery: they might have been more exuberant; they would
certainly have been drunker. I did not notice a single masquerader
unduly excited by liquor: there was not a word or motion from the
lighter sex that could have been construed into an impropriety. There
was something almost pathetic to me in this attempt to wrest gayety and
excitement out of these dull materials; to fight against the blackness
of that wintry sky, and the stubborn hardness of the frozen soil, with
these painted sticks of wood; to mock the dreariness of their poverty
with these flaunting raiments. It did not seem like them, or rather,
consistent with my idea of them. There was incongruity deeper than their
bizarre externals; a half-melancholy, half-crazy absurdity in their
action, the substitution of a grim spasmodic frenzy for levity, that
rightly or wrongly impressed me. When the increasing gloom of the
evening made their figures undistinguishable, I turned into the first
cross-street. As I lifted my hat to my persistent young friend with the
Pritsche, I fancied she looked as relieved as myself. If, however, I
was mistaken; if that child’s pathway through life be strewn with rosy
recollections of the unresisting back of the stranger American; if any
burden, O Gretchen! laid upon thy young shoulders, be lighter for the
trifling one thou didst lay upon mine,--know, then, that I, too, am
content.

And so, day by day, has my Spion reflected the various changing forms
of life before it. It has seen the first flush of spring in the broad
allee, when the shadows of tiny leaflets overhead were beginning to
checker the cool, square flagstones. It has seen the glare and fulness
of summer sunshine and shadow, the flying of November gold through the
air, the gaunt limbs, and stark, rigid, death-like whiteness of winter.
It has seen children in their queer, wicker baby-carriages, old men and
women, and occasionally that grim usher of death, in sable cloak and
cocked hat,--a baleful figure for the wandering invalid tourist to
meet,--who acts as undertaker for this ducal city, and marshals the
last melancholy procession. I well remember my first meeting with this
ominous functionary. It was an early autumnal morning; so early, that
the long formal perspective of the allee, and the decorous, smooth
vanishing-lines of cream-and-gray fronted houses, were unrelieved by a
single human figure. Suddenly a tall black spectre, as theatrical and
as unreal as the painted scenic distance, turned the corner from a
cross-street, and moved slowly towards me. A long black cloak, falling
from its shoulders to its feet, floated out on either side like sable
wings; a cocked hat trimmed with crape, and surmounted by a hearse-like
feather, covered a passionless face; and its eyes, looking neither left
nor right, were fixed fatefully upon some distant goal. Stranger as I
was to this Continental ceremonial figure, there was no mistaking his
functions as the grim messenger, knocking “with equal foot” on every
door; and, indeed, so perfectly did he act and look his role, that there
was nothing ludicrous in the extraordinary spectacle. Facial expression
and dignity of bearing were perfect; the whole man seemed saturated with
the accepted sentiment of his office. Recalling the half-confused
and half-conscious ostentatious hypocrisy of the American sexton, the
shameless absurdities of the English mutes and mourners, I could not
help feeling, that, if it were demanded that Grief and Fate should be
personified, it were better that it should be well done. And it is
one observation of my Spion, that this sincerity and belief is the
characteristic of all Continental functionaries.

It is possible that my Spion has shown me little that is really
characteristic of the people, and the few observations I have made I
offer only as an illustration of the impressions made upon two-thirds of
American strangers in the larger towns of Germany. Assimilation goes on
more rapidly than we are led to imagine. As I have seen my friend Karl,
fresh and awkward in his first uniform, lounging later down the allee
with the blase listlessness of a full-blown militaire, so I have seen
American and English residents gradually lose their peculiarities, and
melt and merge into the general mass. Returning to my Spion after
a flying trip through Belgium and France, as I look down the long
perspective of the Strasse, I am conscious of recalling the same style
of architecture and humanity at Aachen, Brussels, Lille, and Paris, and
am inclined to believe that, even as I would have met, in a journey of
the same distance through a parallel of the same latitude in America, a
greater diversity of type and character, and a more distinct flavor of
locality, even so would I have met a more heterogeneous and picturesque
display from a club window on Fifth Avenue, New York, or Montgomery
Street, San Francisco.





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