The Loom of the Desert, by Idah Meacham Strobridge

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

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

As for becoming an integral part of all this one’s self—Ah, that was a different matter! The very thought of her cousin, Blanche Madison, and Roy—her husband—deliberately turning their backs on the refinements of civilization, and accepting the daily drudgery and routine of life on a cattle ranch, filled her with wondering amazement. When she fell to speculating on what their future years here would[2] be, she shuddered. From the crown of her sleek and perfectly poised little head, to the hollowed sole of her modishly booted foot, Miss Audrey Glendower was Bostonian.

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

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

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

He looked up with unconcealed pleasure in her presence[3] as he seated himself on the piazza—swinging his spurred heels against each other, while he leaned his head back against one of the pillars. Miss Glendower’s eyes rested on the burned, boyish face with delight. There was something so näive, so sweetly childish about him. It was simply delicious to hear his “Yes, ma’am,” or his “Which?” Just now his yellow hair lay in little damp rings on his forehead, like a baby’s just awakened from sleep. He sat with his big, dust-covered sombrero shoved back from a forehead guiltless of tan or freckles as the petals of a white rose. But the lower part of his face was roughened by wind and burned by the sun to an Indian red, making the blue eyes the bluer—those great, babyish eyes that looked out with a belying innocence from under their marvelous fringe of upcurling lashes. The blue eyes were well used to looking upon sights that would have shocked Miss Glendower’s New England training, could she have known; and the babyish lips were quite familiar with language that would have made her pale with horror and disgust to hear. But then, she didn’t know. Neither could he have understood her standpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

Then the storm caught them at its wildest. Suddenly[5] a tumble-weed, dry and uprooted from its slight moorings somewhere away on the far side of the flats, came whirling toward them broadside in the vortex of a mad rush of wind in which—without warning—they were in an instant enveloped. As the great, rolling, ball-like weed struck her horse, Miss Glendower took a tighter grip on the reins and steadied herself for the runaway rush into the dust storm and the darkness. The wild wind caught her, shrieked in her ears, tore at her habit as though to wrest it from her body, dragged at the braids of heavy hair until—loosened—the strands whipped about her head, a tangled mass of stinging lashes.

She was alone—drawn into the maelstrom of the mad element; alone—with the fury of the desert storm; alone—in the awful darkness it wrapped about her, the darkness of the strange storm and the darkness of the coming night. The frightened, furious horse beneath her terrified her less than the weird, rainless storm that had so swiftly slipped in between her and Mesquite, carrying her away into its unknown depths. Where was he? In spite of the mastering fear that was gaining upon her, in spite of her struggle for courage, was a consciousness which told her that more than all else—that more than everyone else in the world—it was Mesquite she wanted. Had others, to the number of a great army, ridden down to her rescue she would have turned away from them all to reach out her arms to the boy vaquero. Perhaps it was because she had seen his marvelous feats of daring in the saddle (for Mesquite was the star rider of the range), and she felt instinctively that he could help her as none other; perhaps it was because of the past days that had so drawn him toward her; perhaps (and most likely) it was because[6] he had but just been at her side. However it might be, she was praying with all her soul for his help—for him to come to her—while mile after mile she rode on, unable to either guide or slacken the stride of her horse. His pace had been terrific; and not until it had carried him out of the line of the storm, and up from the plain into the sand hills, did he lessen his speed. Then the hoofs were dragged down by the heavy sand, and the storm’s strength—all but spent—was left away back on the desert.

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

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

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

At last she drew back from him; and instantly his[7] arms were unlocked. She was free! Not a second of time would he clasp her unwillingly. Neither had spoken. Nor, after resetting the saddle, when he took her again in his arms and lifted her, as he would a little child, upon her horse, did they speak. Only when the ranch buildings—outlined against the darkness—showed dimly before them, and they knew that the ride was at an end, did he voice what was uppermost in his mind.

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

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

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

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

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

When Lawrence Irving arrived at the Madison ranch, his host, in the list of entertainment he was offering the Bostonian, promised an exhibition of[8] bronco riding that would stir even the beat of that serene gentleman’s well regulated pulse.

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

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

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

They, and the ranch hands who saw “Sobrepaso” (“the beautiful red devil,” Mrs. Madison called him) brought out into the gray, hard beaten square that formed the arena, felt a thrill of nervous expectancy—a chilling thrill—as Mesquite made ready to mount.[9] The horse was blindfolded ere the saddle was thrown on; but with all the fury of a fiend he fought—in turn—blanket, and saddle, and cincha. The jaquima was slipped on, the stirrups tied together under the horse’s belly, and all the while his squeals of rage and maddened snorts were those of an untamed beast that would battle to the death. The blind then was pulled up from his eyes, and—at the end of a sixty-foot riata—he was freed to go bucking and plunging in a fury of uncontrolled wrath around the enclosure. At last sweating and with every nerve twitching in his mad hatred of the meddling of Man he was brought to a standstill, and the blind was slipped down once more. He stood with all four feet braced stiffly, awkwardly apart, and his head down, while Mesquite hitched the cartridge belt (from which hung his pistol’s holster) in place; tightened the wide-brimmed, battered hat on his head; slipped the strap of a quirt on his wrist; looked at the fastenings of his big-rowelled, jingling spurs; and then (with a quick, upward glance at Miss Glendower—the first he had given her) he touched caressingly a little bunch of white primroses he had plucked that morning from their bed in the sand hills and pinned to the lapel of his unbuttoned vest.

Mesquite had gathered the reins into his left hand, and was ready for his cat-like spring into place. His left foot was thrust into the stirrup—there was the sweep of a long leg thrown across the saddle—a sinuous swing into place, and Mesquite—“the star rider of the range” had mounted the man killer. Quickly the blind was whipped up from the blood-shot eyes, the spurred heels gripped onto the cincha, there was a shout from his rider and a devilish sound from the mustang as he made his first upward leap, and then went[10] madly fighting his way around and around the enclosure.

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

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

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

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

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

On the bluff above, near the ore platform, were grouped a dozen houses. Fenceless, they faced the mill,[13] which day after day pounded away at the ore with a maddening monotony. All day, all night, the stamps kept up their ceaseless monotone. The weather-worn mill and drab adobe houses had stood there, year after year, through the heat of summer days, when the sun blistered and burned the whole valley, and in winter, when the winds of the desert moaned and wailed at the windows.

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

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

Yet, she was a creature meant for Life. What a beautiful woman she is, too, with all that brilliance of coloring—that copper-hued hair, and those great, velvety eyes, lovely in spite of their apathetic stare. What a model for some painter’s brush! Such beauty and such[14] apathy combined; such expressionless perfection of feature; “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null—dead perfection.”

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

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

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

Once—only once—in a whirlwind of revolt, she felt that she could endure it no longer—that she must break[15] away from the dull routine which made the measure of her days; felt that she must go out among happy human beings—to be in the rush and whirl of life under Pleasure’s sunshine—to bask in its warmth as others did. She longed to enjoy life as Youth enjoys; herself to be young once more. Yes, even to dance as she had danced when a girl! In the upheaval of her passionate revolt, flushed and trembling, she begged her husband to take her to one of the country balls of the neighborhood.

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

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

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

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

Martha Scott never again alluded to the meagre pleasures of her life. She went back to her work of cooking the coarse food which was their only fare; of mending the heavy, uncouth clothing which week-day and Sunday alike, was her husband’s only apparel; of washing and ironing the cheap calicoes, and coarse, unbleached muslins of her own poor, and scanty wardrobe, fulfilling her part as a bread-winner. The man never saw that he failed in performing the part of a[16] good and loving husband; and if anyone had pointed out to him that her existence was impoverished by his indifference and neglect, he still would have been unable to see wherein he had erred. He would have argued that she had enough to eat, enough to wear; that they owned their home—their neighbors having no better, nor any larger; he was laying aside money all the time; he did not drink; he never struck her. What more could any woman ask?

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

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

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

A few years ago there came a mining expert from San Francisco to examine the Yellow Bird mine; and with him came a younger man, who appeared to have no particular business but to look around at the country, and to fish and hunt. There is the finest kind of[17] sport for the hunter over in the Smoky Range; and this fellow, Baird—Alfred Baird was his name—spent much of his time there shooting antelope and deer.

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

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

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

Both were gone—the woman and the gold pieces; and it was characteristic of Old Scott that his first feelings[18] of grief and rage were not for the loss of his wife, but for the coins she had taken from the powder-can. He was like a maniac—breaking everything he had ever seen his wife use; tearing to pieces with his strong, sinewy hands every article of her clothing his eyes fell upon. He raved like a madman, and cursed like a fiend. Then he found her letter.

“Dear Fred:—

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

Your loving wife,
Martha J. Scott.”

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

To be sure, it did seem preposterous that a young[19] and handsome man, with refined tastes and education, should go away with a woman years older than himself, and one, too, who was uncouth in manner and in speech. However strange it looked to the world, the fact remained that they eloped. But both were well away before it was suspected that they had gone together. Old Scott volunteered no information to the curious; and his grim silence forbade the questions they would have asked. It was long before the truth was known, for people were slow to credit so strange a story.

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

She was radiant with happiness; and there was no apparent consciousness of wrong-doing. Baird always showed a gracious deference to all women, and to her he was devotion itself. The little attentions that will charm and captivate any woman—attentions to which she was so unused—fed her starved nature, and for the time satisfied without sating her. They sailed for the Islands, and were there a year. They kept to themselves, seeking no acquaintance with those around them—living but for one another. And those who saw them,[20] told they seemed thoroughly fond of each other. He was too much in love with himself and the surroundings which catered to his extravagant tastes, to have a great love for any woman; and she was scarcely the person, in spite of her beauty—the beauty of some magnificent animal—to inspire lasting affection in a man like Baird. He was shrewd enough to keep people at a distance, for unless one entered into conversation with her she might easily be taken for the really cultivated woman she looked. Yet the refined and aesthetic side of Alfred Baird’s nature—and there was such—much have met with some pretty severe shocks during a twelvemonth’s close companionship. Too indolent to work to support himself, he bore (he felt, heroically) any mortification he was subjected to, and was content in his degradation. But the woman herself was intensely happy; happier than, in all her dreary life, she had ever dreamed that mortals could be. She was in love with the beautiful new world, which was like a dream of fairy-land after her sordid life in the desolate valley. That Hawaiian year must have been a revelation of hitherto unimagined things to her. Baird’s moral sense was blunted by his past dissipations, but her moral sense was simply undeveloped. In her ignorance she had no definition of morality. The man was nothing to her except as an accessory to the fascinating life which she had allowed herself “while the money lasted.”

When the twelve months were run she philosophically admitted the end of it all, and parted with him—apparently—without a pang. If, at the moment of parting, any regrets were felt by either because of the separation, it was he, not she, who would have chosen to drift longer down the stream. The year had run its course; she would again take up the old[21] life. This could not last. Perhaps—who knows?—in time he might have palled on her. No doubt, in time, his weak nature would have wearied her; her own was too eager for strong emotions, to find in him a fitting mate.

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

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

Fires have burned as fiercely within that woman’s breast as ever burned the fires of Kilauea; and when they were ready to burst their bounds, she fled in her impulse to the coral isles of the peaceful Western sea, and there her ears heard the sound, and her heart learned the meaning of words that have left no visible sign upon her—the wondrous, sweet words of a dream, whispered to her unceasingly, while she[22] gave herself up to an enchantment as mad and bewildering as that of the rhythmic hula-hula.

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

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

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

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

They had cursed her for her uselessness; and had let the children throw dirt at her, and take her scant share of food away and give it to the dogs. Then they had laughed at her when one of the older grandchildren had spat at her; and when she had striven[24] to strike at the mocking, devilish face, and in her feebleness had failed, they had but laughed the louder while she shrieked out in her hatred of them all.

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

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

One day when she was faint and almost crazed from hunger, one of the boys (her own son’s son) had come with a meat bone and thrown it down before her; but when she reached out with trembling, fleshless hands to grasp it, he had jerked at the string to which it was tied, and snatched it away. Again and again he threw it toward her; again and again she tried to be quick enough to close her fingers upon it before he could jerk it from her. Then (when, at last, he was tired of the play) he had flung it only an arm’s length beyond her reach, and had run laughing down to the railroad to beg nickels from the passengers on the train. When he had gone a dog came and dropped down beside her, and gnawed the bone where it lay. She had crawled out into the sunshine that day, and lay huddled in a heap close to the door-flap at the wick-i-up entrance. The warm sunlight at first felt good to her chilled blood, and she had lain there long;[25] but finally when she would have dragged her feeble body within again, a young squaw (the one who had mated with the firstborn son, and was now ruler of the camp) had thrust her back with her foot, and said that her whining and crying were making the Great Spirit angry; and that henceforth she must stay outside the camp, for a punishment.

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

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

She was straight then and good to look at. All of the young men of her tribe had striven for her; and two had fought long—had fought wildly and wickedly. That was when the White Man had first come into the country of her people, and they had fought with[26] knives they had taken from the Whites. Knives long, and shining, and sharp. They had fought and slashed, and cut each other till the hard ground was red and slippery where they stood. Then—still fighting—they had fallen down, down; and where they fell, they died. Died for her—a squaw! Well, what of it, now? Tomorrow she, too, would die. She whom they, and others, had loved.

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

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

That was long ago. Not yesterday, nor last week,[27] nor last month; but so long ago that it did not even awaken in her an interest in remembering how he had taught her English words to say to him, and laughed with her when she said them so badly.

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

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

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

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

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

Then they would lead the pony off through the[28] greasewood. Along the stony trail across the upland to the foothills the little buckskin pony would pick his way, stumbling on the rocks while his burden would slip and shake about, lying across the saddle. Then they would lay her in a shallow place, and heaping earth and gravel over her, would come away. That was the way they had done with her mother, with Wi-o-chee, and the son who had died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was a handsome man of thirty—a man of feminine beauty rather than that which is masculine. And though dressed in rough corduroys and flannels, like his companion, they added to, rather than detracted from his picturesque charm. Slightly—almost delicately proportioned, he seemed to be taller than he really was. In spite of his great beauty, however, his face was not a satisfying one under the[31] scrutiny of a close observer, for it lacked character. There was refinement and a certain sweetness of temperament there, but the ensemble was essentially weak—it was the face of a man of whom one felt it would not be well for any believing, loving woman to pin her faith to.

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

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

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

“Sidney means well,” thought Keith trying to find excuse for him, “but he is weak—lamentably so—and sadly lacking in moral balance.” And never had Williston been so easily lead, so subservient to the will of another as now, since “that cursed Howard[32] woman” (as Keith called her under his breath) had got him into her toils.

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

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

“Strange,” he thought, “how a woman of that particular stamp gets a hold on some fellows! And with a whole world full of other women, too—sweet, good women who are ready to give a man the right sort of love and allegiance, if he’s a half-way decent sort of a fellow with anything at all worthy to give in exchange; God bless ’em!—and confound him! He[33] makes me angry; why can’t he pull himself together and be a man!”

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

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

That he must know it to be so, was but an added pain for her fierce nature to bear. Keith wondered if Williston had ever suspected, as she played her[34] part, the woman’s passionate and genuine attachment to himself. He hoped not, for the two men had been good comrades, though without the closer bond of a fine sympathy; and Keith’s wish was that their comradeship should continue, while he hoped the woman’s love, in time, would wear itself out. To Williston he had once tried to give a word of advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had been a day of opalescent lights, and through its translucence they (he and—she) could see the rest of the party on the sparkling waters, among the pleasure craft from other wooded islands, full of charm, near by. Only these two—he and she—were here on the broad veranda. The echo of distant laughter[36] came to them, but here was a languorous silence. Even the yellow-feathered warblers in the gilded cages above them had, for the time, hushed their songs.

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

Ah, well! He had asked her to marry him, and the pained look that came into her face was his answer even before he heard her say that for two years she had been another’s—a secretly-wedded wife. Why she should now tell her carefully guarded secret to him she herself could hardly have told. No one else knew. Her husband had asked that it should be their dear secret until he could send for her to come to him out in the land of the setting sun, where he had gone alone in the hope that he would find enough of the yellow metal grains so that he could provide her with a fitting home. Her guardian had not liked the man of her choice—had made objections to his attentions. Then there was the clandestine marriage. And then he had gone away to make a home for her. But she loved him; oh, yes! he was her choice of all the world, her hero always—her husband now. She was glad to have done as she did—there was nothing to regret, except the enforced separation. So she was keeping their secret while feeding her soul with the hope of reunion that his[37] rare letters brought. But she had faith. Some day—some day he would win the fortune that would pave the way to him; then he would send for her. Some day. And she was waiting. And she loved him; loved him. That was all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the sun climbed to the zenith, there was not the slightest wind stirring; the terrible heat lay, fold on fold, upon the palpitating earth. But noon came and brought a breeze from out of the south. Stronger and stronger it swept toward the blue mountains[39] lying away to the northward. It gathered up sand particles and dust, and shook them out into the air till the sunlight was dulled, and the great valley below showed through a mist of gold. All the afternoon the atmosphere was oppressively hot, while the wind hurried over valley and upland and mountain. All the afternoon the dust storm in billowy clouds hurried on, blowing—blowing—blowing. A whistling wind it was, keeping up its mournful song in the cracks of the unpainted cabin, and whipping the burlap awning over the door into ragged shreds at the edges. The dark green window shades flapped and rattled their length, carried out level from their fastenings by the force of the hot in-blowing wind.

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

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

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

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

He did not say anything; neither did he move.... If you come to think of it, those who sustain[40] great shocks seldom do anything unusual except in novels. In real life people cry out and exclaim over trifles; but let a really stupendous thing happen, and you may be very sure that they will be proportionately silent. The mind, incapable of instantly grasping the magnitude of what has happened, makes one to stand immovable and in silence.

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

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

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

As he pulled the buckboard out of the shed and put the horses before it, the first raindrops began to fall. Big splashing drops they were, puncturing the parched dust as they beat down upon it. Flashes of lightning split the heavens, and each flash made the earth—for the instant—noon-bright. When he had buckled the last strap his hands tightened on the[41] reins, and he swung himself up to the seat as the thunder’s batteries were turned loose on the earth in a tremendous volley that set the very ground trembling. The frightened horses, crouching, swerved aside an instant, and then leaped forward into the darkness. Along the winding road they swept, like part of the wild storm, toward the town that lay off in the darkness of the valley below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just for the imperceptible part of a second he hesitated.[45] His answer would be another unbreakable link in the chain he was forging for himself. Only the fraction of a second, though, he paused. Then his reply came, firm and decided:

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

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

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

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

Bayard Keith did not feel himself to be a hero.[46] Such men as he are never vainglorious; and Keith had no thought of questioning Life’s way of spelling “duty” as he saw it written. He was being loyal for the sake of loyalty, a sacrifice for love’s own sake than which no man can make greater, for he knew that his martyrdom would be in forever being misjudged by the woman for whose dear sake it was done. He would be misjudged, of course, by Sidney Williston, and by all the world, for that matter; but for them he did not care. He was simply doing what he thought was right that he himself should do—for Kathryn Verrill’s sake. Her love had been denied him. Now he must even forfeit her respect. All for love’s sake. None must ever know why he had done this hideous thing. They must be made to think that he—like others—had yielded to a mad love for the bad, beautiful woman. In his very silence under condemnation lay security for Kathryn Verrill’s happiness. Only he himself would ever know how great would be his agony in bearing the load he had undertaken. Oh, if there might be some other way than this! If there could be but some still unthought-of means of escape whereby he could serve his dear lady, and yet be freed from yoking his life with a woman from whom his whole being would revolt. How would he be able through all the years to come—years upon years—to bear his life, with her?

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

No one was astir in the lower town, save himself and the night watchman. Now and then he passed a dim light burning—here a low-turned burner in store or bank building; there the brighter glow of lamps[47] behind the ground glass of some saloon door. Halfway up the long street leading to the upper town he heard the rumble of an incoming train. Was Number Two on time, after all? Was a pitying Fate taking matters away from him, and into its own hands? Was escape being offered him?

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

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

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

“Sid: I have wired to your wife to come to you, and I have signed your name. By the time this reaches you she will be on her way here. It will be wiser, of course, for you to assume the sending of the message, and to give her the welcome she will expect. It will be wiser, too—if I may offer suggestions—to travel about with her for a while; to go away from this place, where she certainly would hear of your unfaithfulness should she remain. Then go back with her to your friends, and live out the balance of your life, in the old home, as you ought. I know you will feel I am not a fit one to preach, for I myself am[48] going away tonight, taking Gloria Howard with me. I know, too, how you will look at what I am doing; but I have neither excuses nor explanations to offer.

Bayard Keith.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bayard Keith was no saint; but as he crossed to the cars in the waxing light of day-dawn, his countenance[50] was transfigured by an indescribable look we do not expect to see—ever—on the face of mortal man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only when Bruno declared that he was going to America to make a great deal of money (saying[53] that the farm was not enough—that when he and Nanna were married he wanted they should be rich) that a ray of hope shone for Tony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One year; two years; three, came and went. Tony off in America was making money, and soon he could go home and they would be married in spite of her parents or Bruno. The fourth year he wrote her how the sum had grown—it was almost enough. Then she[54] began checking off the months ere he would return to her. Eighteen—sixteen—fourteen—now only twelve months more! A year, and Tony would be with her! Then half that year was gone. Six months, only, to wait! Happy little Nanna! And Tony was not less happy, away off there in his little stone cabin in the mountains, or hauling goods for the miners across the valley. His heart was so full of her that—almost—he forgot to think of the Indians when he was traveling along the road.

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

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

The wagon jolted and rattled on its way down the rocky road to the plain; and Tony’s big, beautiful[55] St. Bernard dog, Bono, followed in the dust sent skyward by the heavy wheels as they came upon the softer earth of the lowlands.

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

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

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

They swept and circled over a spot that was awful in its silence under the metallic brightness of the hot August sun. The men looked at each other; looked without speaking—for they understood. So without speech they rode on to the place where the warped irons from the burned wagon lay, and where a gaunt, nearly starved St. Bernard howled over something[56] that had once been his master. He had guarded the dead man through ten hot days—through ten long nights. Bono’s wail sounded long and mournful through the narrow pass where the whistling arrows had found them. Tony had never been neglectful before, and the dog could not understand it.

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

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

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

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

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

As the days grew hotter, its little thin hands became thinner, and it ate less and less of the boiled arroz[58] and papas the young mother sometimes brought when she came to dip water.

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

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

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

It was for Lucas she said her first word—the only word she had learned yet—“papa!” And she said it, he thought, as if she knew it was a love in no wise different from a father’s love that he gave her, poor little Anastacia, whose father—well, Lucas had never asked Carmelita to tell him. How could he? Poor child, let her keep her secret. Pobre Carmelita! Only sixteen and no mother. And could he—Lucas—see her beaten and abused by that old woman who took the labor of her hands and gave her nothing in return?—could he stand by when he saw the big welts and bruises, and not beg her to let him care for her and the niña?—such a little niña it was, too! Of a verity, he was no longer young; and there was his ugly pock-marked face, to say nothing of the scars the oso had given him that day when he, a youth,[59] had sent his knife to the hilt in the bear that so nearly cost him his life. The scars were horrible to see—horrible! But Carmelita (so young—so pretty!) did not seem to mind; and when the priest came again they were married, so that Carmelita had a husband and the pobrecita a father.

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

One day the robin did not come. That night, through the open windows of the front room, passers-by could see a table covered with a folded sheet. A very small table—it did not need to be large; but the bed had been taken out of the small, mean room to give space to those who came to look[60] at the poor, little, pinched face under a square of pink mosquito bar. There were lighted candles at the head and feet. Moths, flying in and out of the wide open window, fluttered about the flames. The rose-colored dress had been exchanged for one that was white and stiffly starched. Above the wee gray face was a wreath of artificial orange blossoms, but the wasted baby-fingers had been closed upon some natural sprays of lovely white hyacinths. The cloying sweetness of the blossoms mingled with the odor of cigarette smoke coming from the farther corners of the room, and the smell of a flaring kerosene lamp which stood near the window. It flickered uncertainly in the breeze, and alternately lighted or threw into shadow the dark faces clustered about the doorway of the second room. Those who in curiosity lingered for a moment outside the little adobe house could hear voices speaking in the soft language of Spain.

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

Carmelita herself was now sitting apathetically by the coffin. She dully realized what tomorrow was to be; but she could not understand what this meant.[61] She had cried a little at first, but now her eyes were dry. Still, she was sorry—it had been such a good little baby, and no trouble at all!

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

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

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

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

Today, Lucas—on his sleek little cow-horse, Topo—was riding along the river road leading to the rancho; but not today would he rope the old blaze-face. There were others to be broken. Halfway from the bridge he met little Nicolás, who worked[62] for the señor, and passed him with a pleasant “Buenos dias!” without stopping. The boy had been his good amigo since the time he got him away from the maddened steer that would have gored him to death. There was nothing ’Colás would not do for his loved Lucas. But the older man cared not to stop and talk to him today, as was his custom; for he was gravely thinking of the little dead ’Stacia, and rode on. A hundred yards farther, and he heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs behind him, and Nicolás calling:

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

The señor and Carmelita! It was the truth—Nicolás would not lie. The truth; for the boy had listened behind the high fence of weather-beaten boards, and had heard them talk together. He, and the little stream that gurgled and laughed all day, had heard how they—the señor and Carmelita—would go away to the north when the month should end. For many months they two had loved—the Señor Metcalf and the wife of Lucas; had loved before Lucas had made her his wife—ay! even before the little ’Stacia had come. And the little ’Stacia was the señor’s—— Ah, Lucas would not say it of the dead pobrecita! For she was his—Lucas’s—by right of his love for her. Poor little Anastacia! And but that the little one would have been a trouble to the[63] Americano, they—the woman and the man—would have gone away together before; but he would not have it so. Now that the little one was no longer to trouble them, he would take the mother and go away to the new rancho he had just bought far over on the other side of the mountains.

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

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

Lucas struck him across the ribs with the end of the rope he was holding. The big roan head was lifted from the ground a second and then let fall, as[64] he squealed savagely. Again the rope made a hollow sound against the heaving sides. Again the maddened horse squealed. When the rope struck the third time, he gathered himself together uncertainly—hesitated—struggled an instant—staggered to his feet, and stood quivering in every muscle of his great body. His legs shook under him; and his head—with the bandaged eyes—moved from side to side unsteadily.

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

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

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

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

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

The gate opened and Metcalf came in. He turned and carefully fastened the gate behind him. He was[65] a third of the way across the corral when their eyes met.

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

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

Maddened, terrified, and with the dragging thing at his heels, the four-footed fury fought man, and earth, and air about him like the very demon that he was till he came to the gate that Lucas had set wide for him, and he saw again the waves of sage and[66] sand hills (little waves of sweet-scented sage) that rippled away to the mountains he knew. Out there was liberty; out there was the free life of old; and there he could get rid of the thing at his heels that—with all his kicking, and rearing, and plunging—still dragged at the end of the rope.

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

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

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

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

At the stroke of the hour a great crowd will stand in the prison yard, and gape at the scaffold, and see the drop fall, and—fascinated and frowning—gaze with straining eyes at the Thing dangling at the end of a hempen rope. A Soul will go out into immeasurable space. A purple mark on my throat will tell the story of death by strangulation. Two bodies will lie stark and dead tonight—his and mine. His will[68] be laid in the pine box that belongs to the dishonored dead; while mine will be housed in rosewood, and satin, and silver.

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

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

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

A lonely life? Yes; but remember there was money to be made in sheep-raising in the gray wastes; and I was willing to forego, for a time, all that civilization could give. So I dulled my recollections of the old life and the things that were dear to me, and went to work with a will in caring for the dusty, bleating, aimlessly-moving sheep. I wanted to be rich. Not[69] for the sake of riches, but to be independent of the toil of bread-winning. I longed with all my soul to have money, that I might gratify my old desires for travel away to the far ends of the earth. All my life I had dreamed of the day I was to turn my face to those old lands far away, which would be new lands to me. So I was glad to sacrifice myself for a few years in the monstrous stillness of the gray plains so that I might the sooner be free to go where I would.

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

“No; not yet will I go. I will wait yet a little longer. I will wait until I hold so much gold in my[70] hands that I need never return—need never again look upon the desert and its ways.”

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

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

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

There was a sudden clutching at my heart—a tension on the muscles that was an acute pain—a reeling[71] of the brain—and I found myself gazing eagerly into two eyes that as eagerly gazed back into mine. Dark eyes they were, smoldering with evil passions and the light of all things that are bad. The eyes of a man I had never known—had never seen; yet between whom and myself I felt existed a kinship stronger than any tie that my life had hitherto admitted. For one instant I saw those strange black eyes, blazing and baleful, the densely black hair worn rather long, the silky mustache brushed up from the corners of the mouth, the gleam of the sharp white teeth under a lifted lip, the smooth heavy eyebrows slightly curving upward at the outer edges, giving the face the expression we give to the pictures we make of Satan. These I saw. Then he was lost in the crowd.

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

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

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

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

As I stood looking and listening, there came again without warning that clutching at my heartstrings—that sharp pain in my left side—that same dizzying whirl of thoughts—that sickening fear of something (I knew not what) which I could not control; and[73] out of the flowing tide of faces I saw one not a stranger—he whom I did not know. His eyes held mine again; and in that moment something seemed to tell me that he was my everlasting curse. Through him would come things dread and evil; from him there was no escape. I looked long—my eyes starting in their sockets. I gasped—caught at the air—and lost consciousness.

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

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

I was with the Burnhams. We were eight in the party. Lucille Burnham (Joe’s sister) and I were betrothed. Betrothed after months and months of playing at love, and the making and unmaking of lovers’ quarrels. Each had thought the other meant nothing more than what makes for an idler’s pastime, until drifting on the current of old Nilus we[74] read the true love in each other’s heart, and the story (old as Egypt is old) was told over again there where it was told centuries before by men and women who loved in the land of the lotus.

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

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

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

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

The sight of that face under the shadow of the lateen sail—like a shadow cast by a carrion bird where it slowly moves above you in the desert—coming[75] as it did, in the midst of my days of love and new-found joy, left me unnerved and wrecked both mentally and physically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Nevada desert our train was side-tracked early one morning to allow the passing of the eastbound[76] express which was late. A vast level plain stretched its weary way in every direction. Only the twin lines of steel and the dark-red section house showed that the White Man’s footsteps had ever found their way into the stillness of the dreary plains.

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

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

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

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

On a ferry-boat crossing the bay from the Oakland[77] pier to San Francisco. I had just returned that morning from a four-months’ tour of Mexico. It was raining dismally, and everything about the shipping on the bay was dripping and dreary. Gray-white sea gulls circled and screamed; darting and dipping, they followed our wake, or dropped down into the foam churned up by the wheels. Winds—wet and salty, and fresh from the sea—tugged at our mackintoshes; and flapped the gowns and wraps of the women where—huddled together away from the rail—we stood under shelter. Sheets of flying fog—dense, dark and forbidding—went by; gray ghosts of the ocean’s uneasy dead. And back of the curtain of falling waters and fog, whistles shrieked shrilly, and the fog horns uttered their hideous sounds. Bellowing—moaning; moaning—bellowing; suddenly still.

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

It happened when, with a guide and some Club[78] friends, we went through the Chinatown slums of the city.

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

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

Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”—through “Ross Alley,” where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged. Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved; and once I passed a little child—a half-caste—toddling through the alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he stumbled[79] and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the hour of eleven he will hang for the murder of Carmen de la Guerra. At eleven I, too, must die. As the sheriff cuts the rope, and the evil Divided Soul swings out eternity-ward from the body which has housed it evilly, so will I die at that instant—death by strangulation. For a Divided Soul may not live when its twin is gone. Death. And then one body in the[82] rosewood casket, and one in its box of pine.

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

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

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

The Paiute nodded. It was evident that he “savvied.” He had shown Landis a copper ledge off in the mountains, two years before, and Landis had given him a hundred dollars. It was Indian Nick’s opinion that Landis was “heap pretty good man;” and he now recognized the value of silence until such a time as Landis would let him speak. Other white men had, before this, got him to show them prospects upon promises, and—without an exception—had cheated him out of his due. But Jon Landis was different. This big, quiet man who talked but little, and never laughed at all—him he would be “partner” with, and[84] show him the place down by the river where the black rock sample came from, and the bluffs where—underneath—a queer little spring (that wasn’t water) oozed forth, and lost itself a dozen feet away in the muddy current of the greater stream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The face of the bluffs—eroded and uneven—rose high above the river level; leaving but a narrow footway between their base and the stream, here at this point. Across by the other bank, was a growth of rabbit-wood and sage. A twisted, leafless buck-bush stood lonely and alone at the rim of a dry slough. The carcass of a dead horse—victim of some horse-hide hunter—furnished a gruesome feast for a half dozen magpies that fluttered chattering away as the two figures appeared on the top of the bluffs; and a coyote that had been the magpies’ companion, slipped away into the thicket of rabbit-wood. The river was deep here, and dirty with the debris brought down by its[86] rising waters. Froth, and broken twigs, and sticks swirled around in the eddies. To Landis, there was something unspeakably depressing about the place, though he was well used to the country in all its phases. Its very stillness seemed today to weigh on him.

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

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

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

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

He had been working but a short time when the pick point caught into something other than lumps of[87] clay; caught at it—clawed at it—and then dragged out (one—two—half a dozen) bones stripped of all flesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Jon Landis fought with the one who, with raised pick, stood ready to avenge the death of his father, and the desecration of his other dead. The struggle was not long, but they fought as men do who know that but one man shall live when the combat be done. Twice the pick descending almost struck the bared head of the white man; thrice his adversary forced him to the very water’s edge. Landis knew he was fighting for his life, and he watched his opportunity. It came. Eluding that rain of death-meant blows, he caught the Indian close to him, and with a quick movement flung the pick far out into the river.[89] Then they clinched in the final struggle for life that to the white man or the brown man is equally dear. Back and forth, swaying and bending, the hot breath of each in the other’s face, they moved over the narrow confine. It was not for long; for—with one mighty final effort—Landis wrenched himself loose, caught at the other, shoved—flung him off, and it was over. Jon Landis stood there alone.

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

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

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

Once in every three years he leaves his home among the mountains of eastern Oregon, and goes for a week to San Francisco by the sea. Once in every three years he may be seen there on the streets, in the parks, at the theaters, on the beach, at the Cliff or the Heights, as strangers are seen daily, and with nothing about him to mark him in any wise different from a thousand others. You might pass him dozens of times without particularly observing him, save that he is always accompanied by a woman so evidently of a different world than that which he has known, that your attention is at once arrested, and your curiosity is whetted to know the story—for story there is, you are sure. And what a story! One does not have to go to fiction for tales of the marvelous; and these two—he, roughened, bearded and browned, clothed[91] as the average American laborer taking a holiday; she, with the bearing of a gentlewoman, and dressed as they do who have found the treasure-trove that lies at the end of the rainbow—these two have a tragic story, all their own, that few know. It is this:

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

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

The wagon bumped and ground its wheels over the stones of the road here in the wash toward the row of tall greasewood, a dozen yards away. Over there they would halt for a noon rest. Over there they[92] would eat their noon meal—drink from their scanty water supply—and then resume the dreary journey.

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

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

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

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

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

After the arrow, the knife; and bloody corpses left[93] by a burning wagon. Things done to turn sick with horror the next lone wayfarers who should reach this gruesome spot. Human flesh and bone for the vultures of the air and the wolves of the desert to feed upon, till—taken from their preying talon and tooth—they might be laid in the shallow graves hollowed by the roadside.

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

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

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

The baby words of the White Man’s tongue were soon forgotten, and Indian gutterals took their place. The little feet were moccasined with deerskin, and the round cheeks daubed with paint. The little body was kept warm in a rabbitskin robe. Their food was[94] his food—grass seeds ground into paste, and game; and his friends were themselves. To all intents and purposes he had become an Indian.

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

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

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

The awful events of that long gone day in the desert were too deeply branded into his recollection ever to[95] be forgotten (young child though he was at the time); but the years had dimmed its horrors, and the associations of a lifetime had dulled his sensibilities.

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

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

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

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

What that meeting was, no one can say. She found him there surrounded by those who were his nearest and dearest—a brown-skinned wife and little bronze bairns—his! She stood face to face with him—she clasped hands with him; yet a lifetime and all the world lay between. Children of the loins of one[96] father—born of the same mother—these two had nothing in common between them—nothing—save the yearning for a something that was always to lie just beyond.

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

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

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

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

Once (when the bronze-brown woman was dead), he tried to accept civilized life as a finality. The month[97] had not rounded out to fullness when each saw the futility of the attempt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The third person in the group was an Indian. A Paiute fifty years old, but who looked twenty years older. Old George. His little withered brown face was puckered into a whimsical smile as with head aslant he looked up from where he sat on the bench that was built round a tree-box. This was his frequent[99] seat when the trains came in, and here he came daily to answer the inquisitive questions of people who deem themselves well bred.

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

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

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

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

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

“Henry, dear,” she asked, after they had settled themselves comfortably again in their compartment of the sleeping-car, “how do such creatures exist?[100] Do they work, or only sit idly in the sun waiting for someone to give them one or two nickels?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If this had happened some three thousand years ago, and she had lived on the banks of the Nile, and if you were a poet, or a recorder of history, no doubt you would have written her down a siren—a dark-eyed[102] charmer of men—a sorceress of Egypt; but she lived on the Humboldt river instead, and all this happened within the last four decades, and she was only a squaw of one of our North American tribes. Neither was she a pretty squaw judged by our cañons of beauty. Yet are not such things matters of geography governed by traditions? And when a man is bewitched by a man, brown-skinned or white, he is very apt to see charms where another cannot discover them.

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

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

Now George—being an Indian, being a Paiute—had never heard of Colley Cibber, else he might have been[103] reminded that “we shall find no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman—scorned! slighted! dismissed without a parting pang.” Neither did George—being a Paiute Indian—know the meaning of the word “Nemesis.”

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

Troubles came thick and fast to Old George. He had begun to be called “Old” George now. One day while he was handling a cartridge it accidentally exploded and tore away part of his hand. This hampered him in what work he got to do; and sometimes because of it he was refused employment. Then the evil fate that had chosen him for a plaything, threw him from a train running at full speed, and left him lying on the[104] track with broken legs, and pitifully crippled. He got well after many weary months while Susan nursed him, and between whiles of nursing earned the living for the dwellers within the camp. When Spring came, Susan died.

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

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

Long, long after his children were grown, and the old grandmother was dead, and George was living in his camp with grandchildren about him, the woman came again—she, Sophy, came to him—trying to win him back now that the woman he cared most for was dead. Sophy at last had tired of her revenge, had tired of jealousy and strife; had tired of everything in life[105] but the one man who had once cast her off. Doctor Jim was dead—had died many years before. And so she came to the one she cared for still—as even she had cared most for. For George she cared always; so she came and stood at his door. Many snows had come and gone since his blood had moved at her will; and now it was too late for her influence to weigh with him. He was old; and when he sat before the campfire and saw a woman’s face move to and fro in the the smoke wreaths, it was the face of the woman who best loved him, always—not the face of the one he had loved for a time—that he saw.

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

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

George paid for the folly of his youth, as the transgressor usually does have to pay. If you live by the sea in the East, you will perhaps call this a punishment for George laid upon him as a rebuke by the “hand of[106] divine Providence.” But if your home is by the Western sea, and you have knocked about a bit on the rough trails in the West, you will mayhap see in it only the workings of “natural law.”

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

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

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

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

The two men who met upon the mesa had been drawing slowly together on the long white road winding up toward the mountain a dozen miles away. The dust, raised by the shuffling feet of their horses, floated—a long streamer of white—down toward the muddy, crooked river in the valley far below. The dust had whitened, too, the slouch hats and worn blue overalls they wore; and their faces were marked with furrows, burned deep by the harsh, relentless sun of the plains. It was pouring its rays down now with the fierce malignance of some demon bent on destroying every vestige of plant-life that had the temerity to put forth its young shoots; and save for the scant bunch-grass, and the sage, and the greasewood, and a few distant and scattering junipers that grew dark upon the mountains beyond, no growth of vegetation was to be seen. It was within an hour of noon, and the scorching rays descended upon the blistered earth through a silver-gray[108] haze that—reaching across the valley—quivered over the scene like the heat that comes through an open furnace-door.

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

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

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

“Yaas,” drawled the other, “they’ve been shot among so much they’re gittin’ scarry. Me an’ my pardner are campin’ over at the mine with them Dagos there; but we don’t see many bunches of horses around, nohow. Guess we’ll skin out next week, an’ go over to The Cedars. I don’t s’pose——” he moved his horse nearer to the wagon, and bent a contemplative gaze upon one of the front wheels—“I don’t s’pose Austin an’ the Kid’ll kick if we do crowd over on their lay-out a little; for there must be near a thousand head[109] o’ mustangs over ’round them Cedars that ain’t never heard a gun yit. So’t there’d be good shootin’ for all of us, an’ plenty o’ horses to go ’round. Hey?”

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

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

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

The smaller man accepted. Turning the square over and giving each side a cursory glance, he picked off the tin tag—a tiny star—and set his jaws into an inviting corner, bending it back and forth in his endeavor to wrench off a generous mouthful. Passing it in silence back to the owner (who regaled himself also with a[110] like quantity before returning it to his pocket), and having—with the aid of thumbnail and forefinger—snapped the shining little star at a big horse-fly that was industriously sucking blood from the roan’s back, he remarked:

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

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

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

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

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

The saddle-horse fell into a jog trot again to the pricking of the spur; and the sorry span started the wagon groaning and rattling on its way up the road[111] whose furrows were cut deep by the great teams that hauled sulphur and borax from the furthest mountains down to the railroad in the valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy, who had been ailing, was asleep now; but[112] the flushed cheeks, and parched lips that were always calling for water, were cause enough for the fear that came over Austin as he sat there. What if this were but the beginning of a long fever? Suppose there should be a serious illness for him?

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

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

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

Austin drew his breath in sharply. Oh, merciful God! how long was this way of living to last? Why, he might live on thirty—forty—fifty years yet! Penniless, what was their future to be? To return to that[113] world which, through their past years, had surrounded them with all those things that make life worth living, would be to tempt a worse fate than awaited them here. The desolation which spread around them in the foothills of the bare, lonely mountains was as naught to the humiliation of returning to the peopled places where most would know them, yet few would choose to recognize.

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

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

Before him was memory’s moving panorama of a splendid past. Out of the many pictures—plainer than all the rest—rose the face of the man who had befriended him; the one to whom he owed all he had ever been, or enjoyed. The one but for whom he would have been left, when a boy, to the chill charity of strangers. From that generous hand he had received an education befitting the heir to great wealth, and that noble heart had given such love and care as few sons receive from a parent. He could now, in recollection, see the austere[114] face of his guardian softening into affectionate smiles as his tender gaze fell on his two wards—himself, and the pretty, willful Mildred. Only they whom he so fondly loved knew the great depths of tenderness and gentleness in his nature. It stung Austin now to think of it; it shamed him as well.

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

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

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

When the sun had gone down behind their mountain, and a welcome coolness had settled itself over the burning ground, they went to sit by the spring that[115] bubbled out of the hillside. All through the twilight they sat without speaking, their thoughts far away. Then darkness came and hid the barren hills, mercifully shutting from their sight the pitiful poverty of the life that was now theirs. A soft west wind sprung up; and the balmy night air, cool and dry, seemed to have driven away much of the illness the boy had felt through the day. They sat in a silence unbroken only by the crickets’ perpetual shrilling, the hoot of a ground owl, and a coyote yelping to its mate across the cañon. When the first prolonged cry pierced the air, the slight form had nestled instinctively closer to Austin. Then the mournful wail of the little gray ghost of the plains grew fainter and fainter, and finally ceased altogether, as he trotted away over the ridge, in quest of a freshly-skinned carcass where some unfortunate horse had fallen a victim to the sure aim of some horse hunter.

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

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

“Harvey,”—the voice was almost a whisper—“we have seen some happy days—sometimes—and you have[116] always been good to me; but, do you—— I mean, when you remember what we have lost, and what we are and must always remain, do you find in this life we are living, compensation enough for all that we suffer? Do you? Tell me!”

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

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

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

The morrow’s sun shone blood-red—an enormous ruby disc, in the east through the smoky haze that[117] hung over the valley still. By eight o’clock the air was stifling, and the men standing about camp ready for the second day’s run were impatient to be off. It was easier to endure the heat when in the saddle and in action, than to be idling here at the corral. They were wondering at Austin’s delay. And most of them had been swearing. Finally, Black Joaquin was told to go across to the white speck on the foothills, and “hustle him up;” for they were short of men to do the work, if he did not come. So the Mexican threw himself across the saddle, and digging his spurs into the flanks of the ugly-looking sorrel, loped over the hill to Austin’s camp.

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

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

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

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

“Young Ashton had returned home from a prolonged[118] tour of Europe to find that Morton (who, though not related to him, has always assumed the part of an indulgent father) had just wedded his ward, Miss Mildred Walters, a handsome young woman many years his junior; and whose play-fellow he—Ashton—had been when a boy, but whom she had not seen for a number of years. She had matured into a beautiful, attractive woman, and Ashton soon fell a willing victim to her charms. Soon after, society of the Hub was startled and shocked to hear of the elopement of Harvey Ashton with his benefactor’s wife.

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

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

“The friend who recognized the couple at once communicated[119] with the deserted husband, who, it is reported, is on his way West in quest of the erring pair.”

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

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

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

The burros, too, crossed the bridge that night, and morning found them browsing along the foothills nestling against the mountains across the valley, where feed was better. Near the base of the mountain, and not far from the little railroad station, was a graveyard. Treeless, flowerless, unfenced. There were no headstones, ’tis true; but the graves were well banked[120] with broken rock, to keep the hungry coyotes and badgers from digging up the dead.

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

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

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

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

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

However, on all sides opinion was the same, if differently expressed. The fact of his being a gentleman had not prevented him from becoming a fool—chiefest of fools—else he never would have trusted so implicitly in old Zeke Runkle’s misrepresentations of the group of mining claims in those foothills that lay just below the Monarch group. The Monarch was[122] the talk of the camp for its richness. If there was a fortune in the one group (he argued to himself), then why not also in those so nearly adjoining. At any rate, it seemed to him it was his one chance to find a fortune by a short cut; so, paying for them with all he had, save a few hundreds that afterwards went for useless development work, the mines became his. The camp welcomed him into its midst, and winked, and grinned when he wasn’t looking; and (to a man) voted him “an easy thing!”

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

Old Zeke Runkle’s annual swindles had been a camp joke for a score of years; but Sherwood—being an in-experienced stranger—saw only in him an honest (if usually drunken) prospector. A kindly, if simple, old man, too; for Zeke had generously made him a gift of an entire mining claim which had not been included in the original number—one quite distinct from the original group. True, it seemed to be but an undeveloped claim—its one tunnel only running in ten or fifteen feet. And the gift had been tendered him at the suggestion of Cadwallader, from whom Sherwood was surprised to receive evidence of a kindly feeling which had not been previously displayed. That this unusual interest in him had surprised old Zeke, too, was plain; for he seemed puzzled at first, as though it were not possible for him to comprehend Cadwallader’s meaning. After a few whispered words from the younger man, however, Zeke’s face had brightened with understanding, and he turned to Sherwood insisting he must accept it. The unexpected part Cadwallader had taken,[123] and the old man’s unselfish attitude, showed to Sherwood such a fine glimpse of Western good-fellowship that he warmed to the place and the people as he had done at no time before. It turned the scale and the bargain was closed.

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

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

Almost a double score of years had gone since the place knew human voice or human movement, save when some lone prospector passed along the brush-grown street that crept upward with the cañon’s slope. The dead town’s very stillness and desolation were full of charm, albeit tempered with that sadness a ruin always has for the beholder. For through the empty doorways came the whisperings of those who were gone; and looking through the sashless windows as you rode by, you saw wraithlike figures pass and repass within. It might have been only the wind’s breath as it rustled the dark leaves of branches overhanging the crumbling walls, and the ghosts, mayhap, were but the waving boughs which tremulously[124] moved over the gray adobes; but when you were there—in that stillness and amid all that mystery—you felt it was true. You hushed your quickening breath to listen for the breath of some other. You moved through the silence with wide-lidded eyes looking for—you knew not what. You felt yourself out of place there—an alien. Only the lizards on the decaying walls, and the little brown birds that pecked at berries growing on the bushes along the creek, and the cottontails that scurried away to hide in the brush, seemed to have honest claim there.

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

So the Summer found him putting every pulse-throb into his labor. Was it not for her that he wanted it?[125] For what other end was he working, than to win the maid who had come into this land of enchantment? To him, it was as Paradise—these great broad levels of alkali, and sand (blotches of white on a blur of gray) and the sagebrush and greasewood-covered foothills that lay, fold upon fold, against the base of grim mountains—prickly with splintered and uncovered rocks.

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

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

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

“Daddy, dear,” she had said, standing behind his chair, with both arms tight clasped around his neck, “I’ve made up my mind to do something that is going to surprise you. Listen; I’m not going with Mamma and the girls when she shuts up the house for the Summer. But, I—am—going—with—you! Oh, yes, I am![126] No, no! Not a word! I’ve always wanted to know what a mining camp was like; and this is my golden opportunity. You know you do want me there. Say so! While you are putting up the new works, I can go roaming over the country in old clothes. Listen to that, Daddy—old clothes! A lovely Summer; and not a cent spent on gowns!”

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

On the levels or on the heights, she was day by day finding life a new and a beautiful thing. It was all so good; so fresh, and sweet, and strong! How easily she had fitted into her new surroundings and the new order of things—crude though they were, beyond any of her preconceived ideas. And now how far away seemed all the other Summers she had ever known. She felt that, after all, this was the real life. The other (that which Jean and Lili had their part in) was to her, now, as something known only in a dream. She was learning a grander, fuller sense of living since all that other world was shut away. So (companioned by her would-be lovers, Hume Sherwood and Elwyn Cadwallader, through a Summer of glad, free, full indrawn breaths) she rode the days away, while under the campaign hat she wore her face was being browned by the desert winds. Hot winds. But, oh, how she had learned to love their ardent touch! No sun was ever too hot, nor road too rough or long, to keep her back from this life in the open; and in the saddle[127] she had come to know the valleys and mountains as one born to them.

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

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

Death had come when he was alone; there had been[128] none to close the staring eyes. He had been near to starvation; there was scarcely any food within the cabin; there were no comforts. Years of toiling for something that was always just beyond; and a lonely death at the end—that was the story.

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

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

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

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

The latter had kept men continuously at work on his newly acquired property since coming into possession of them; but the faith that was his in the beginning, grew fainter with the waning of Summer. Autumn brought decided doubt. With the coming of Winter came a certainty of their worthlessness, he knew he had been befooled by a sharp trickster, but how far his ignorance had been played upon he did not yet know. Nevertheless, he felt he had well earned the[129] titles the camp had bestowed on him, for the claims, he found, were but relocations that had been abandoned years before as utterly worthless. He had simply thrown his dollars into the deep sea.

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

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

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

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

“What has happened?” shouted the Judge. “Everything has happened—everything. Of course, you don’t understand. I don’t, myself—all of it. Somebody (I haven’t found out yet who, but I will!) put up that miserable old rascal—that drunken thief of a Zeke Runkle—to palming off on Sherwood as a bona fide mine, the worst fake I ever heard of. Hey? What? Why! a dug-out, I tell you—a hole in the cliff—a tunnel-like cellar-above-ground, if you want, that Crazy Dan, it seems, used to store away bacon, and flour, and potatoes in, more than thirty years ago. Just an old store-room, nothing else. That’s what! Made him a present of it (the foxy old rascal) so the law couldn’t touch him. Oh, he’s a clever swindler! I’m sorry for Sherwood—mighty sorry for him. I like the fellow; there’s good stuff in him. It’s a —— A—hum! But, for the life of me I can’t see old Zeke’s object; for he made nothing by it. Somebody must have put him up to it—mark[131] my words. And I’d like to know who.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The letter from her father was hurriedly scrawled, “so that Sherwood can take it down to you,” it said. There were but a dozen brief sentences: He couldn’t be with her, after all, on Christmas eve—he had about closed the deal with Akerman, and there was much business to settle up. She was to pack their suit-cases[132] and trunks at once; to be ready to start home any day. He hoped (didn’t know—but hoped) to leave the evening of Christmas day, etc. There was a postscript: “Akerman (acting on my advice) bought Sherwood’s little group today for seven hundred and fifty dollars; which is just seven hundred and fifty dollars more than they are worth—as mining claims. But Akerman wants the ground for other purposes, and will use it in connection with his other property. I’m glad for the boy’s sake he got it, for I guess Sherwood needed the money. Of course he hasn’t said so (he’s too much of a thoroughbred to whimper) but I don’t believe he has a nickel left.”

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

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

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

She laughed to herself in anticipation of his surprise. Then her face sobered, remembering that—for the first time—she would make the trip alone. She knew every inch of the way. She wasn’t afraid; there was nothing to harm her. And by taking her coffee and toast by lamplight, she would be with him by nine[133] o’clock. As she fell asleep that night she was wishing some good fortune might come to Hume Sherwood, making his Christmas eve less lonely.

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

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

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

Mountain Boy snuffed at the dust-laden air and broke into the long stride that soon carried them into the foothills. At times the wind nearly swept her from the saddle, but she loped on and on. Then she gained the high ground; and the dust that had smarted her eyes and nostrils lay far below. It was misty, and the wind came in strong buffetings. Up, and still up they climbed. The rain-clouds were surely keeping their burden back for her! But, nay! she had almost reached the mill—was almost under shelter, when the storm swept down upon her and the waters fell in a[134] flood. Drenched and disheveled she reached the mill. Disappointment and consternation awaited her—her father was not there! Nearly two hours before—just the time she was leaving the valley—the Judge, with Mr. Akerman, had driven away by the north road to take the morning express from the station above, and were now at the county seat thirty miles away, if they had met with no mishap.

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

A feeling of numbness came over her, a something that was neither terror nor awe, yet which held something of each. As time went on she seemed to have been riding hours innumerable—it seemed days since she had seen a human face. Down, farther down must she go. She was becoming exhausted, and the sleet was chilling her to the very center of her being. It was terrible—terrible! To reach the valley and shelter! There on the mountain the wind shrieked and howled about her; the air was filled with voices that were deafening, dizzying, frightful. The horse himself was half mad with fright. Twice he had almost thrown her as thunder claps and flashes of lightning had seemed to surround them on all sides. Three miles yet to shelter! Could she stand it? But where—where[135] was there nearer relief? Ah! the Spencer tunnel—— There would be safety there till the worst of the storm was over. A turn of the rein, and Mountain Boy was running straight for the old tunnel under the cliffs.

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

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

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

When the riderless bay had come into camp, Sherwood[136] (half mad with an awful fear) had hurried away to the hills, lashing his span without mercy over the storm-washed road—or out through the open country where the road was gullied out. When in the up-piled drift where the flood had left it—he found the gray campaign hat he knew so well, a sickening fear fell upon him as though he had already looked upon the face of the dead. At length he thought of the tunnel, after fruitless search elsewhere; and there—in the dug-out that had been palmed off on him as a joke on his credulity, he found his heart’s desire. After all, Spencer’s old store-room—his cellar-above-ground—was worth a king’s ransom—when valued by this man and this maid.

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

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

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

The box refused to move, even when Sherwood’s pick—used as a lever—was applied; so, swinging it over his head, he brought the pick down into the box,[137] shattering the lid into pieces. It was more than half filled with small rusty tin cans, bearing soiled and torn labels, on which were the printed words in colors still bright: “Preston & Merrill’s Yeast Powder.” A case of baking powder of a sort popular five-and-thirty years before. Strange!

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

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

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

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

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

“And,” added Sherwood, after they had gone into[138] the now empty waiting-room, “I wanted to see you, sir, before you left.”

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

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

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

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

“This child’s mother took me ‘for better or worse’ twenty-five years ago this very night, when I hadn’t[139] a dollar in the world that I could call my own—married me on an hour’s notice, and without any wedding guests or wedding gowns. She trusted me and loved me well enough to take me as I was, and to trust to the future (God bless her!) and neither of us have ever had cause to regret it.”

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

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

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

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

“Why, bless my soul! This takes my breath away.[140] You young people—what whirlwinds you are! You—Yes, yes, but—— Hey? What’s that? I did? I know; but—— What? I should rather think it would be a surprise to mother and the girls to bring a son home to Christmas dinner. Oh, yes, I know; but—— What’s that you say? Her mother did——! Yes, yes, I know.... Well, well, my lad, I don’t know but you’re right. Her mother—— Love is the one thing—the rest doesn’t matter. Evy, child, it is for you to say.”

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

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

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

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

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

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Loom of the Desert

THE LOOM OF THE DESERT

FOREWORD

MESQUITE

THE REVOLT OF MARTHA SCOTT

AN OLD SQUAW

GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

IN NANNA’S PALM

THE VENGEANCE OF LUCAS

A SHEPHERD OF THE SILENT WASTES

BY THE OIL SEEP UNDER THE BLUFF

THE BLUE-EYED CHIEF

ACCORDING TO ONE’S STANDPOINT

WHERE THE BURROS BROWSED

AT THE WILL OF THE WATERS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE