BOOK VII.
THE BED ROCK.
CHAPTER I.
IN THE TRACK OF A STORM.
A quarter of an hour before the messenger of Peter Dumphy had reached Poinsett's office, Mr. Poinsett had received a more urgent message. A telegraph despatched from San Antonio had been put into his hands. Its few curt words, more significant to an imaginative man than rhetorical expression, ran as follows:—
"Mission Church destroyed. Father Felipe safe. Blessed Trinity in ruins and Dolores missing. My house spared. Come at once.—Maria Sepulvida."
The following afternoon at four o'clock Arthur Poinsett reached San Geronimo, within fifteen miles of his destination. Here the despatch was confirmed with some slight local exaggeration.
"Saints and devils! There is no longer a St. Anthony! The temblor has swallowed him!" said the innkeeper, sententiously. "It is the end of all! Such is the world. Thou wilt find stones on stones instead of houses, Don Arturo. Wherefore another glass of the brandy of France, or the whisky of the American, as thou dost prefer. But of San Antonio—nothing!—Absolutely—perfectly—truly nothing!"
In spite of this cheering prophecy, Mr. Poinsett did not wait for the slow diligence, but mounting a fleet mustang dashed off in quest of the missing Mission. He was somewhat relieved at the end of an hour by the far-off flash of the sea, the rising of the dark green fringe of the Mission orchard and Encinal, and above it the white dome of one of the Mission towers. But at the next moment Arthur checked his horse and rubbed his eyes in wonder. Where was the other tower? He put spurs to his horse again and dashed off at another angle, and again stopped and gazed. There was but one tower remaining. The Mission Church must have been destroyed!
Perhaps it was this discovery, perhaps it was some instinct stronger than this; but when Arthur had satisfied himself of this fact he left the direct road, which would have brought him to the Mission, and diverged upon the open plain towards the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity. A fierce wind from the sea swept the broad llano and seemed to oppose him, step by step—a wind so persistent and gratuitous that it appeared to Arthur to possess a moral quality, and as such was to be resisted and overcome by his superior will. Here, at least, all was unchanged; here was the dead, flat monotony of land and sky. Here was the brittle, harsh stubble of the summer fields, sun-baked and wind-dried; here were the long stretches of silence, from which even the harrying wind made no opposition nor complaint; here were the formless specks of slowly-moving cattle, even as he remembered them before. A momentary chill came over him as he recalled his own perilous experience on these plains, a momentary glow suffused his cheek as he thought of his rescue by the lovely but cold recluse. Again he heard the name of "Philip" softly whispered in his ears, again he felt the flood of old memories sweep over him as he rode, even as he had felt them when he lay that day panting upon the earth. And yet Arthur had long since convinced his mind that he was mistaken in supposing that Donna Dolores had addressed him at that extreme moment as "Philip;" he had long since believed it was a trick of his disordered and exhausted brain; the conduct of Dolores towards himself, habitually restrained by grave courtesy, never justified him in directly asking the question, nor suggested any familiarity that might have made it probable. She had never alluded to it again—but had apparently forgotten it. Not so Arthur! He had often gone over that memorable scene, with a strange, tormenting pleasure that was almost a pain. It was the one incident of his life, for whose poetry he was not immediately responsible—the one genuine heart-thrill whose sincerity he had not afterwards stopped to question in his critical fashion, the one enjoyment that had not afterwards appeared mean and delusive. And now the heroine of this episode was missing, and he might never perhaps see her again! And yet when he first heard the news he was conscious of a strange sense of relief—rather let me say of an awakening from a dream, that though delicious, had become dangerous and might unfit him for the practical duties of his life. Donna Dolores had never affected him as a real personage—at least the interest he felt in her was, he had always considered, due to her relations to some romantic condition of his mind, and her final disappearance from the plane of his mental vision was only the exit of an actress from the mimic stage. It seemed only natural that she should disappear as mysteriously as she came. There was no shock even to the instincts of his ordinary humanity—it was no catastrophe involving loss of life or even suffering to the subject or spectator.
Such at least was Mr. Poinsett's analysis of his own mental condition on the receipt of Donna Maria's telegram. It was the cool self-examination of a man who believed himself cold-blooded and selfish, superior to the weakness of ordinary humanity, and yet was conscious of neither pride nor disgrace in the belief. Yet when he diverged from his direct road to the Mission, and turned his horse's head toward the home of Donna Dolores, he was conscious of a new impulse and anxiety that was stronger than his reason. Unable as he was to resist it, he still took some satisfaction in believing that it was nearly akin to that feeling which years before had driven him back to Starvation Camp in quest of the survivors. Suddenly his horse recoiled with a bound that would have unseated a less skilful rider. Directly across his path stretched a chasm in the level plain—thirty feet broad and as many feet in depth, and at its bottom in undistinguishable confusion lay the wreck of the corral of the Blessed Trinity!
Except for the enormous size and depth of this fissure Arthur might have mistaken it for the characteristic cracks in the sunburnt plain, which the long dry summer had wrought upon its surface, some of which were so broad as to task the agility of his horse. But a second glance convinced him of the different character of the phenomenon. The earth had not cracked asunder nor separated, but had sunk. The width of the chasm below was nearly equal to the width above; the floor of this valley in miniature was carpeted by the same dry, brittle herbs and grasses which grew upon the plain around him.
In the pre-occupation of the last hour he had forgotten the distance he had traversed. He had evidently ridden faster than he had imagined. But if this was really the corral, the walls of the Rancho should now be in sight at the base of the mountain! He turned in that direction. Nothing was to be seen! Only the monotonous plain stretched before him, vast and unbroken. Between the chasm where he stood and the falda of the first low foot-hills neither roof nor wall nor ruin rose above the dull, dead level!
An ominous chill ran through his veins, and for an instant the reins slipped through his relaxed fingers. Good God! Could this have been what Donna Maria meant, or had there been a later convulsion of Nature? He looked around him. The vast, far-stretching plain, desolate and trackless as the shining ocean beyond, took upon itself an awful likeness to that element! Standing on the brink of the revealed treachery of that yawning chasm, Arthur Poinsett read the fate of the Rancho. In the storm that had stirred the depths of this motionless level, the Rancho and its miserable inmates had foundered and gone down!
Arthur's first impulse was to push on towards the scene of the disaster, in the vague hope of rendering some service. But the chasm before him was impassable, and seemed to continue to the sea beyond. Then he reflected that the catastrophe briefly told in Donna Maria's despatch had happened twenty-four hours before, and help was perhaps useless now. He cursed the insane impulse that had brought him here, aimlessly and without guidance, and left him powerless even to reach the object of his quest. If he had only gone first to the Mission, asked the advice and assistance of Father Felipe, or learned at least the full details of the disaster! He uttered an oath, rare to his usual calm expression, and wheeling his horse, galloped fiercely back towards the Mission.
Night had deepened over the plain. With the going down of the sun a fog that had been stealthily encompassing the coast-line stole with soft step across the shining beach, dulled its lustre, and then moved slowly and solemnly upon the plain, blotting out the Point of Pines, at first salient with its sparkling Lighthouse, but now undistinguishable from the grey sea above and below, until it reached the galloping horse and its rider, and then, as it seemed to Arthur, isolated them from the rest of the world—from even the pencilled outlines of the distant foot-hills, that it at last sponged from the blue-grey slate before him. At times the far-off tolling of a fog-bell came faintly to his ear, but all sound seemed to be blotted out by the fog; even the rapid fall of his horse's hoofs was muffled and indistinct. By degrees the impression that he was riding in a dream overcame him, and was accepted by him without questioning or deliberation.
It seemed to be a consistent part of the dream or vision when he rode—or rather as it seemed to him, was borne by the fog—into the outlying fields and lanes of the Mission. A few lights, with a nimbus of fog around them, made the narrow street of the town appear still more ghostly and unreal as he plunged through its obscurity towards the plaza and church. Even by the dim grey light he could see that one of the towers had fallen, and that the eastern wing and Refectory were a mass of shapeless ruin. And what would at another time have excited his surprise now only struck him as a natural part of his dream,—the church a blaze of light and filled with thronging worshippers! Still possessed by his strange fancy, Arthur Poinsett dismounted, led his horse beneath the shed beside the remaining tower, and entered the building. The body and nave of the church were intact; the outlandish paintings still hung from the walls; the waxen effigies of the Blessed Virgin and the saints still leaned from their niches, yellow and lank, and at the high altar Father Felipe was officiating. As he entered a dirge broke from the choir; he saw that the altar and its offerings were draped in black, and in the first words uttered by the priest Arthur recognised the mass for the dead! The feverish impatience that had filled his breast and heightened the colour of his cheeks for the last hour was gone. He sunk upon a bench beside one of the worshippers and buried his face in his hands. The voice of the organ rose again faintly; the quaint-voiced choir awoke, the fumes of incense filled the church, and the monotonous accents of the priest fell soothingly upon his ear, and Arthur seemed to sleep. I say seemed to sleep, for ten minutes later he came to himself with a start as if awakening from a troubled dream, with the voice of Padre Felipe in his ear, and the soft, caressing touch of Padre Felipe on his shoulder. The worshippers had dispersed, the church was dark save a few candles still burning on the high altar, and for an instant he could not recall himself.
"I knew you would come, son," said Padre Felipe; "but where is she? Did you bring her with you?"
"Who?" asked Arthur, striving to recall his scattered senses.
"Who? Saints preserve us, Don Arturo! She who sent for you—Donna Maria! Did you not get her message?"
Arthur replied that he had only just arrived, and had at once hastened to the Mission. For some reason that he was ashamed to confess he did not say that he had tried to reach the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity, nor did he admit that he had forgotten for the last two hours even the existence of Donna Maria. "You were having a mass for the dead, Father Felipe?—you have then suffered here?"
He paused anxiously, for in his then confused state of mind he doubted how much of his late consciousness had been real or visionary.
"Mother of God," said Father Felipe, eyeing Arthur curiously. "You know not then for whom was this mass? You know not that a saint has gone—that Donna Dolores has at last met her reward?"
"I have heard—that is, Donna Maria's despatch said—that she was missing," stammered Arthur, feeling, with a new and unsupportable disbelief in himself, that his face was very pale and his voice uncertain.
"Missing!" echoed Father Felipe, with the least trace of impatience in his voice. "Missing! She will be found when the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity is restored—when the ruins of the casa, sunk fifty feet below the surface, are brought again to the level of the plain. Missing, Don Arturo!—ah!—missing indeed!—for ever! always, entirely!"
Moved perhaps by something in Arthur's face, Padre Felipe sketched in a few graphic pictures the details of the catastrophe already forecast by Arthur. It was a repetition of the story of the sunken corral. The earthquake had not only levelled the walls of the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity, but had opened a grave-like chasm fifty feet below it, and none had escaped to tell the tale. The faithful vaqueros had rushed from the trembling and undulating plain to the Rancho, only to see it topple into a yawning abyss that opened to receive it. Don Juan, Donna Dolores, the faithful Manuela, and Alejandro, the major domo, with a dozen peons and retainers, went down with the crumbling walls. No one had escaped. Was it not possible to dig in the ruins for the bodies? Mother of God! had not Don Arturo been told that the earth at the second shock had closed over the sunken ruins, burying beyond mortal resurrection all that the Rancho contained? They were digging, but hopelessly—a dozen men. They might—weeks hence—discover the bodies—but who knows?
The meek, fatalistic way that Father Felipe accepted the final doom of Donna Dolores exasperated Arthur beyond bounds. In San Francisco a hundred men would have been digging night and day in the mere chance of recovering the buried family. Here—but Arthur remembered the sluggish, helpless retainers of Salvatierra, the dreadful fatalism which affected them on the occurrence of this mysterious catastrophe, even as shown in the man before him, their accepted guide and leader—and shuddered. Could anything be done? Could he not, with Dumphy's assistance, procure a gang of men from San Francisco? And then came the instinct of caution, always powerful with a nature like Arthur's. If these people, most concerned in the loss of their friends, their relations, accepted it so hopelessly, what right had he—a mere stranger—to interfere?
"But come, my son," said Padre Felipe, laying his large soft hand, parentally, on Arthur's shoulder. "Come, come with me to my rooms. Thanks to the Blessed Virgin I have still shelter and a roof to offer you. Ah!" he added, stroking Arthur's riding-coat, and examining critically as if he had been a large child, "what have we—what is this, eh? You are wet with this heretic fog—eh? Your hands are cold, and your cheeks hot. You have fatigue! Possibly—most possibly, hunger! No! No! It is so. Come with me, come!" and drawing Arthur's passive arm through his own, he opened the vestry door, and led him across the little garden, choked with débris and plaster of the fallen tower, to a small adobe building that had been the Mission schoolroom. It was now hastily fitted up as Padre Felipe's own private apartment and meditative cell. A bright fire burned in the low, oven-like hearth. Around the walls hung various texts illustrating the achievement of youthful penmanship with profound religious instruction. At the extremity of the room there was a small organ. Midway and opposite the hearth was a deep embrasured window—the window at which two weeks before, Mr. Jack Hamlin had beheld the Donna Dolores. "She spent much of her time here, dear child, in the instruction of the young," said Father Felipe, taking a huge pinch of snuff, and applying a large red bandana handkerchief to his eyes and nose. "It is her best monument! Thanks to her largess—and she was ever free-handed, Don Arturo, to the Church—the foundation of the Convent of our Lady of Sorrows, her own patron saint, thou seest here. Thou knowest, possibly—most possibly as her legal adviser—that long ago, by her will, the whole of the Salvatierra Estate is a benefaction to the Holy Church, eh?"
"No, I don't!" said Arthur, suddenly, awakening with a glow of Protestant and heretical objection that was new to him, and eyeing Padre Felipe with the first glance of suspicion he had ever cast upon that venerable ecclesiastic. "No, sir, I never heard any intimation or suggestion of the kind from the late Donna Dolores. On the contrary, I was engaged"——
"Pardon—pardon me, my son," interrupted Father Felipe, taking another large pinch of snuff. "It is not now, scarce twenty-four hours since the dear child was translated—not in her masses and while her virgin strewments are not yet faded—that we will talk of this" (he blew his nose violently). "No! All in good time—thou shalt see! But I have something here," he continued, turning over some letters and papers in his desk. "Something for you—possibly, most possibly, more urgent. It is a telegraphic despatch for you, to my care."
He handed a yellow envelope to Arthur. But Poinsett's eyes were suddenly fixed upon a card which lay upon Padre Felipe's table, and which the Padre's search for the despatch had disclosed. Written across its face was the name of Colonel Culpepper Starbottle of Siskiyou! "Do you know that man?" asked Poinsett, holding the despatch unopened in his hand, and pointing to the card.
Father Felipe took another pinch of snuff. "Possibly—most possibly! A lawyer, I think—I think! Some business of the Church property! I have forgotten. But your despatch, Don Arturo. What says it? It does not take you from us? And you—only an hour here?"
Father Felipe paused, and looking up innocently, found the eyes of Arthur regarding him gravely. The two men examined each other intently. Arthur's eyes, at last, withdrew from the clear, unshrinking glance of Padre Felipe, unabashed but unsatisfied. A sudden recollection of the thousand and one scandals against the Church, and wild stories of its far-reaching influence—a swift remembrance of the specious craft and cunning charged upon the religious order of which Padre Felipe was a member—scandals that he had hitherto laughed at as idle—flashed through his mind. Conscious that he was now putting himself in a guarded attitude before the man with whom he had always been free and outspoken, Arthur, after a moment's embarrassment that was new to him, turned for relief to the despatch and opened it. In an instant it drove all other thoughts from his mind. Its few words were from Dumphy and ran, characteristically, as follows: "Gabriel Conroy arrested for murder of Victor Ramirez. What do you propose? Answer."
Arthur rose to his feet. "When does the up-stage pass through San Geronimo?" he asked, hurriedly.
"At midnight!" returned Padre Felipe. "Surely, my son, you do not intend"——
"And it is now nine o'clock," continued Arthur, consulting his watch. "Can you procure me a fresh horse? It is of the greatest importance, Father," he added, recovering his usual frankness.
"Ah! it is urgent!—it is a matter"——suggested the Padre, gently.
"Of life and death!" responded Arthur gravely.
Father Felipe rang a bell and gave some directions to a servant, while Arthur, seating himself at the table, wrote an answer to the despatch. "I can trust you to send it as soon as possible to the telegraph office," he said, handing it to Father Felipe.
The Padre took it in his hand, but glanced anxiously at Arthur. "And Donna Maria?" he said, hesitatingly; "you have not seen her yet! Surely you will stop at the Blessed Fisherman, if only for a moment, eh?"
Arthur drew his riding-coat and cape over his shoulders with a mischievous smile. "I am afraid not, Father; I shall trust to you to explain that I was recalled suddenly, and that I had not time to call; knowing the fascinations of your society, Father, she will not begrudge the few moments I have spent with you."
Before Father Felipe could reply the servant entered with the announcement that the horse was ready.
"Good-night, Father Felipe," said Arthur, pressing the priest's hands warmly, with every trace of his former suspiciousness gone. "Good night. A thousand thanks for the horse. In speeding the parting guest," he added, gravely, "you have perhaps done more for the health of my soul than you imagine—good-night. Adios!"
With a light laugh in his ears, the vision of a graceful, erect figure, waving a salute from a phantom steed, an inward rush of the cold grey fog, and muffled clatter of hoofs over the mouldy and mossy marbles in the churchyard, Father Felipe parted from his guest. He uttered a characteristic adjuration, took a pinch of snuff, and closing the door, picked up the card of the gallant Colonel Starbottle and tossed it into the fire.
But the perplexities of the holy Father ceased not with the night. At an early hour in the morning, Donna Maria Sepulvida appeared before him at breakfast, suspicious, indignant, and irate.
"Tell me, Father Felipe," she said, hastily, "did the Don Arturo pass the night here?"
"Truly no, my daughter," answered the Padre, cautiously. "He was here but for a little"——
"And he went away when?" interrupted Donna Maria.
"At nine."
"And where?" continued Donna Maria, with a rising colour.
"To San Francisco, my child; it was business of great importance—but sit down, sit, little one! This impatience is of the devil, daughter, you must calm yourself."
"And do you know, Father Felipe, that he went away without coming near me?" continued Donna Maria, in a higher key, scarcely heeding her ghostly confessor.
"Possibly, most possibly! But he received a despatch—it was of the greatest importance."
"A despatch!" repeated Donna Maria, scornfully. "Truly—from whom?"
"I know not, my child," said Father Felipe, gazing at the pink cheeks, indignant eyes, and slightly swollen eyelids of his visitor; "this impatience—this anger is most unseemly."
"Was it from Mr. Dumphy?" reiterated Donna Maria, stamping her little foot.
Father Felipe drew back his chair. Through what unhallowed spell had this woman—once the meekest and humblest of wives—become the shrillest and most shrewest of widows? Was she about to revenge herself on Arthur for her long suffering with the late Don José? Father Felipe pitied Arthur now and prospectively.
"Are you going to tell me?" said Donna Maria, tremulously, with alarming symptoms of hysteria.
"I believe it was from Mr. Dumphy," stammered Padre Felipe. "At least the answer Don Arturo gave me to send in reply—only these words, 'I will return at once'—was addressed to Mr. Dumphy. But I know not what was the message he received."
"You don't!" said Donna Maria, rising to her feet, with white in her cheek, fire in her eyes, and a stridulous pitch in her voice. "You don't! Well! I will tell you! It was the same news that this brought." She took a telegraphic despatch from her pocket and shook it in the face of Father Felipe. "There! read it! That was the news sent to him! That was the reason why he turned and ran away like a coward as he is! That was the reason why he never came near me, like a perjured traitor as he is! That is the reason why he came to you with his fastidious airs and, his supercilious smile—and his—his—Oh, how I HATE HIM! That is why!—read it! read it! Why don't you read it?" (She had been gesticulating with it, waving it in the air wildly, and evading every attempt of Father Felipe to take it from her.) "Read it! Read it and see why! Read and see that I am ruined!—a beggar—a cajoled and tricked and deceived woman—between these two villains, Dumphy and Mis—ter—Arthur—Poin—sett! Ah! Read it—or are you a traitor too? You and Dolores and all"——
She crumpled the paper in her hands, threw it on the floor, whitened suddenly round the lips, and then followed the paper as suddenly, at full length, in a nervous spasm at Father Felipe's feet. Father Felipe gazed, first at the paper and then at the rigid form of his friend. He was a man, an old one—with some experience of the sex, and I regret to say he picked up the paper first, and straightened it out. It was a telegraphic despatch in the following words:—
"Sorry to say telegram just received that earthquake has dropped out lead of Conroy Mine! Everything gone up! Can't make further advances or sell stock.—Dumphy."
Father Felipe bent over Donna Maria and raised her in his arms. "Poor little one!" he said. "But I don't think Arthur knew it."
CHAPTER II.
THE YELLOW ENVELOPE.
For once, by a cruel irony, the adverse reports regarding the stability of the Conroy mine were true. A few stockholders still clung to the belief that it was a fabrication to depress the stock, but the fact as stated in Mr. Dumphy's despatch to Donna Maria was in possession of the public. The stock, fell to $35, to $30, to $10—to nothing! An hour after the earthquake it was known in One Horse Gulch that the "lead" had "dropped" suddenly, and that a veil of granite of incalculable thickness had been upheaved between the seekers and the treasure, now lost in the mysterious depths below. The vein was gone! Where?—no one could tell. There were various theories, more or less learned: there was one party who believed in the "subsidence" of the vein, another who believed in the "interposition" of the granite, but all tending to the same conclusion—the inaccessibility of the treasure. Science pointed with stony finger to the evidence of previous phenomena of the same character visible throughout the Gulch. But the grim "I told you so" of Nature was, I fear, no more satisfactory to the dwellers of One Horse Gulch than the ordinary prophetic distrust of common humanity.
The news spread quickly and far. It overtook several wandering Californians in Europe, and sent them to their bankers with anxious faces; it paled the cheeks of one or two guardians of orphan children, frightened several widows, drove a confidential clerk into shameful exile, and struck Mr. Raynor in Boston with such consternation, that people for the first time suspected that he had backed his opinion of the resources of California with capital. Throughout the length and breadth of the Pacific slope it produced a movement of aggression which the earthquake had hitherto failed to cover. The probabilities of danger to life and limb by a recurrence of the shock had been dismissed from the public consideration, but this actual loss of characteristic property awakened the gravest anxiety. If Nature claimed the privilege of at any time withdrawing from that implied contract under which so many of California's best citizens had occupied and improved the country, it was high time that something should be done. Thus spake an intelligent and unfettered press. A few old residents talked of returning to the East.
During this excitement Mr. Dumphy bore himself toward the world generally with perfect self-confidence, and, if anything, an increased aggressiveness. His customers dared not talk of their losses before him, or exhibit a stoicism unequal to his own.
"It's a bad business," he would say; "what do you propose?" And as the one latent proposition in each human breast was the return of the money invested, and as no one dared to make that proposition, Mr. Dumphy was, as usual, triumphant. In this frame of mind Mr. Poinsett found him on his return from the Mission of San Antonio, the next morning.
"Bad news, I suppose, down there," said Mr. Dumphy, briskly; "and I reckon the widow, though she has been luckier than her neighbours, don't feel particularly lively, eh? I'm devilish sorry for you, Poinsett, though, as a man, you can see that the investment was a good one. But you can't make a woman understand business. Eh? Well, the Rancho's worth double the mortgage, I reckon. Eh? Ugly, ain't she—of course! Said she'd been swindled? That's like a woman! You and me know 'em! eh, Poinsett?" Mr. Dumphy emitted his characteristic bark, and winked at his visitor.
Arthur looked up in unaffected surprise. "If you mean Mrs. Sepulvida," he said, coldly, "I haven't seen her. I was on my way there when your telegram recalled me. I had some business with Padre Felipe."
"You don't know then that the Conroy mine has gone up with the earthquake, eh? Lead dropped out—eh? and the widow's fifty-six thousand?"—here Mr. Dumphy snapped his finger and thumb, to illustrate the lame and impotent conclusion of Donna Maria's investment—"don't you know that?"
"No," said Arthur, with perfect indifference and a languid abstraction that awed Mr. Dumphy more than anxiety; "no, I don't. But I imagine that isn't the reason you telegraphed me."
"No," returned Dumphy, still eyeing Poinsett keenly for a possible clue to this singular and unheard-of apathy to the condition of the fortune of the woman his visitor was about to marry. "No—of course!"
"Well!" said Arthur, with that dangerous quiet which was the only outward sign of interest and determination in his nature. "I'm going up to One Horse Gulch to offer my services as counsel to Gabriel Conroy. Now for the details of this murder, which, by the way, I don't believe Gabriel committed, unless he's another man than the one I knew! After that you can tell me your business with me, for I don't suppose you telegraphed to me on his account solely. Of course, at first you felt it was to your interest to get him and his wife out of the way, now that Ramirez is gone. But now, if you please, let me know what you know about this murder."
Mr. Dumphy thus commanded, and completely under the influence of Arthur's quiet will, briefly recounted the particulars already known to the reader, of which he had been kept informed by telegraph.
"He's been recaptured," added Dumphy, "I learn by a later despatch; and I don't reckon there'll be another attempt to lynch him. I've managed that," he continued, with a return of his old self-assertion. "I've got some influence there!"
For the first time during the interview Arthur awoke from his pre-occupation, and glanced keenly at Dumphy. "Of course," he returned, coolly, "I don't suppose you such a fool as to allow the only witness you have of your wife's death to be sacrificed—even if you believed that the impostor who was personating your wife had been charged with complicity in a capital crime and had fled from justice. You're not such a fool as to believe that this Mrs. Conroy won't try to help her husband, that she evidently loves, by every means in her power—that she won't make use of any secret she may have that concerns you to save him and herself. No, Mr. Peter Dumphy," said Arthur significantly; "no, you're too much of a business man not to see that." As he spoke he noted the alternate flushing and paling of Mr. Dumphy's face, and read—I fear with the triumphant and instinctive consciousness of a superior intellect—that Mr. Dumphy had been precisely such a fool, and had failed!
"I reckon nobody will put much reliance on the evidence of a woman charged with a capital crime," said Mr. Dumphy, with a show of confidence he was far from feeling.
"Suppose that she and Gabriel both swear that she knows your abandoned wife, for instance; suppose that they both swear that she and you connived to personate Grace Conroy for the sake of getting the title to this mine; suppose that she alleges that she repented and married Gabriel, as she did, and suppose that they both admit the killing of this Ramirez—and assert that you were persecuting them through him, and still are; suppose that they show that he forged a second grant to the mine—through your instigation?"
"It's a lie," interrupted Dumphy, starting to his feet; "he did it from jealousy."
"Can you prove his motives?" said Arthur.
"But the grant was not in my favour—it was to some old Californian down in the Mission of San Antonio. I can prove that," said Dumphy, excitedly.
"Suppose you can? Nobody imagines you so indiscreet as to have had another grant conveyed to you directly, while you were negotiating with Gabriel for his. Don't be foolish! I know you had nothing to do with the forged grant. I am only suggesting how you have laid yourself open to the charges of a woman of whom you are likely to make an enemy, and might have made an ally. If you calculate to revenge Ramirez, consider first if you care to have it proved that he was a confidential agent of yours—as they will, if you don't help them. Never mind whether they committed the murder. You are not their judge or accuser. You must help them for your own sake. No!" continued Arthur, after a pause, "congratulate yourself that the Vigilance Committee did not hang Gabriel Conroy, and that you have not to add revenge to the other motives of a desperate and scheming woman."
"But are you satisfied that Mrs. Conroy is really the person who stands behind Colonel Starbottle and personates my wife?"
"I am," replied Arthur, positively.
Dumphy hesitated a moment. Should he tell Arthur of Colonel Starbottle's interview with him, and the delivery and subsequent loss of the mysterious envelope? Arthur read his embarrassment plainly, and precipitated his decision with a single question.
"Have you had any further interview with Colonel Starbottle?"
Thus directly adjured. Dumphy hesitated no longer, but at once repeated the details of his late conversation with Starbottle, his successful bribery of the Colonel, the delivery of the sealed envelope under certain conditions, and its mysterious disappearance. Arthur heard him through with quiet interest, but when Mr. Dumphy spoke of the loss of the envelope, he fixed his eyes on Mr. Dumphy's with a significance that was unmistakable.
"You say you lost this envelope trusted to your honour!" said Arthur, with slow and insulting deliberation. "Lost it, without having opened it or learned its contents? That was very unfortunate, Mr. Dumphy, ve-ry un-for-tu-nate!"
The indignation of an honourable man at the imputation of some meanness foreign to his nature is weak compared with the anger of a rascal accused of an offence which he might have committed, but didn't. Mr. Dumphy turned almost purple! It was so evident that he had not been guilty of concealing the envelope, and did not know its contents, that Arthur was satisfied.
"He denied any personal knowledge of Mrs. Conroy in this affair?" queried Arthur.
"Entirely! He gave me to understand that his instructions were received from another party unknown to me," said Dumphy. "Look yer, Poinsett—you're wrong! I don't believe it is that woman."
Arthur shook his head. "No one else possesses the information necessary to blackmail you. No one else has a motive in doing it."
The door opened to a clerk bearing a card. Mr. Dumphy took it impatiently and read aloud, "Colonel Starbottle of Siskiyou!" He then turned an anxious face to Poinsett.
"Good," said that gentleman, quietly; "admit him." As the clerk disappeared, Arthur turned to Dumphy, "I suppose it was to meet this man you sent for me?"
"Yes," returned Dumphy, with a return of his old brusqueness.
"Then hold your tongue, and leave everything to me."
The door opened as he spoke to Colonel Starbottle's frilled shirt and expanding bosom, followed at a respectful interval by the gallant Colonel himself. He was evidently surprised by the appearance of Mr. Dumphy's guest, but by no means dashed in his usual chivalrous port and bearing. "My legal adviser, Mr. Poinsett," said Dumphy, introducing Arthur briefly.
The gallant Colonel bowed stiffly, while Arthur, with a smile of fascinating courtesy and deference that astonished Dumphy in proportion as it evidently flattered and gratified Colonel Starbottle, stepped forward and extended his hand. "As a younger member of the profession I can hardly claim the attention of one so experienced as Colonel Starbottle, but as the friend of poor Henry Beeswinger, I can venture to take the hand of the man who so gallantly stood by him as his second, two years ago."
"Ged, sir," said Colonel Starbottle, absolutely empurpling with pleasure, and exploding his handkerchief from his sweltering breast. "Ged! you—er—er—do me proud! I am—er—gratified, sir, to meet any friend of—er—er—gentleman like Hank Beeswinger! I remember the whole affair, sir, as if it was yesterday. I do!" with an oath. "Gratifying, Mr. Poinsett, to every gentleman concerned. Your friend, sir,—I'm proud to meet you—I am,——me!—killed, sir, second fire! Dropped like a gentleman,——me! No fuss; no reporters; no arrests. Friends considerate. Blank me, sir, one of the finest, d—— me, I may say, sir, one of the very finest—er—meetings in which I have—er—participated. Glad to know you, sir. You call to mind, sir, one of the—er—highest illustrations of a code of honour—that—er—er—under the present—er—degrading state of public sentiment is er—er—passing away. We are drifting sir, drifting—drifting to er—er—political and social condition, where the Voice of Honour, sir, is drowned by the Yankee watchword of Produce and Trade. Trade, sir, blank me!" Colonel Starbottle paused with a rhetorical full stop, blew his nose, and gazed at the ceiling with a plaintive suggestion that the days of chivalry had indeed passed, and that American institutions were indeed retrograding; Mr. Dumphy leaned back in his chair in helpless irritability; Mr. Arthur Poinsett alone retained an expression of courteous and sympathising attention.
"I am the more gratified at meeting Colonel Starbottle," said Arthur, gravely, "from the fact that my friend and client here, Mr. Dumphy is at present in a condition where he most needs the consideration and understanding of a gentleman and a man of honour. A paper, which has been entrusted to his safe keeping and custody as a gentleman, has disappeared since the earthquake, and it is believed that during the excitement of that moment it was lost! The paper is supposed to be intact, as it was in an envelope that had never been opened, and whose seals were unbroken. It is a delicate matter, but I am rejoiced that the gentleman who left the paper in trust is the honourable Colonel Starbottle, whom I know by reputation, and the gentleman who suffered the misfortune of losing it is my personal friend Mr. Dumphy. It enables me at once to proffer my services as mediator, or as Mr. Dumphy's legal adviser and friend, to undertake all responsibility in the matter."
The tone and manner were so like Colonel Starbottle's own, that Dumphy looked from Arthur to Colonel Starbottle in hopeless amazement. The latter gentleman dropped his chin and fixed a pair of astonished and staring eyes upon Arthur. "Do I understand—that—er—this gentleman, Mr. Dumphy, has placed you in possession of any confidential statement—that—er"——
"Pardon me, Colonel Starbottle," interrupted Arthur, rising with dignity, "the facts I have just stated are sufficient for the responsibility I assume in this case. I learn from my client that a sealed paper placed in his hands is missing. I have from him the statement that I am bound to believe, that it passed from his hands unopened; where, he knows not. This is a matter, between gentlemen, serious enough without further complication!"
"And the paper and envelope are lost?" continued Colonel Starbottle, still gazing at Arthur.
"Are lost," returned Arthur, quietly. "I have advised my friend, Mr. Dumphy, that as a man of honour, and a business man, he is by no means freed through this unfortunate accident from any promise or contract that he may have entered into with you concerning it. Any deposit as a collateral for its safe delivery which he might have made, or has promised to make, is clearly forfeited. This he has been waiting only for your appearance to hand to you." Arthur crossed to Mr. Dumphy's side and laid his hand lightly upon his shoulder, but with a certain significance of grip palpable to Mr. Dumphy, who, after looking into his eyes, took out his cheque book. When he had filled in a duplicate of the cheque he had given Colonel Starbottle two days before, Arthur took it from his hand and touched the bell. "As we will not burden Colonel Starbottle unnecessarily, your cashier's acceptance of this paper will enable him to use it henceforth at his pleasure, and as I expect to have the pleasure of the Colonel's company to my office, will you kindly have this done at once?"
The clerk appeared, and at Mr. Poinsett's direction, took the cheque from the almost passive fingers of Mr. Dumphy.
"Allow me to express my perfect satisfaction with—er—er your explanation!" said Colonel Starbottle, extending one hand to Arthur, while at the same moment he gracefully readjusted his shirt-bosom with the other. "Trouble yourself no further—regarding the—er—er—paper. I trust it will—er—yet be found; if not, sir, I shall—er—er—" added the Colonel, with honourable resignation, "hold myself personally responsible to my client, blank me!"
"Was there no mark upon the envelope by which it might be known without explaining its contents?" suggested Arthur.
"None, sir, a plain yellow envelope. Stop!" said the Colonel, striking his forehead with his hand. "Ged, sir! I do remember now that during our conversation I made a memorandum, —— me, a memorandum upon the face of it, across it, a name, Ged, sir, the very name of the party you were speaking of—Gabriel Conroy!"
"You wrote the name of Gabriel Conroy upon it! Good! That may lead to its identification without exposing its contents," returned Arthur. "Well, sir?"
The last two words were addressed to Mr. Dumphy's clerk, who had entered during the Colonel's speech and stood staring alternately at him and his employer, holding the accepted cheque in his hand.
"Give it to the gentleman," said Dumphy, curtly.
The man obeyed. Colonel Starbottle took the cheque, folded it, and placed it somewhere in the moral recesses of his breast-pocket. That done, he turned to Mr. Dumphy. "I need not say—er—that—er—as far as my personal counsel and advice to my client can prevail, it will be my effort to prevent litigation in this—er—delicate affair. Should the envelope—er—er—turn up! you will of course—er—send it to me, who am—er—personally responsible for it. Ged, sir," continued the Colonel, "I should be proud to conclude this affair, conducted as it has been on your side with the strictest honour, over the—er—festive-board—but—er—business prevents me! I leave here in one hour for One Horse Gulch!"
Both Mr. Dumphy and Poinsett involuntarily started.
"One Horse Gulch?" repeated Arthur.
"—— me! yes! Ged, sir, I'm retained in a murder case there; the case of this man Gabriel Conroy."
Arthur cast a swift precautionary look at Dumphy. "Then perhaps we may be travelling companions?" he said to Starbottle, smiling pleasantly. "I am going there too. Perhaps my good fortune may bring us in friendly counsel. You are engaged"——
"For the prosecution," interrupted Starbottle, slightly expanding his chest. "At the request of relatives of the murdered man—a Spanish gentleman of—er—er—large and influential family connections, I shall assist the District Attorney, my old friend, Nelse Buckthorne!"
The excitement kindled in Arthur's eyes luckily did not appear in his voice. It was still pleasant to Colonel Starbottle's ear, as, after a single threatening glance of warning at the utterly mystified and half exploding Dumphy, he turned gracefully toward him. "And if, by the fortunes of war, we should be again on opposite sides, my dear Colonel, I trust that our relations may be as gratifying as they have been to-day. One moment! I am going your way. Let me beg you to take my arm a few blocks and a glass of wine afterwards as a stirrup-cup on our journey." And with a significant glance at Dumphy, Arthur Poinsett slipped Colonel Starbottle's arm deftly under his own, and actually marched off with that doughty warrior, a blushing, expanding, but not unwilling captive.
When the door closed Mr. Dumphy resumed his speech and action in a single expletive. What more he might have said is not known, for at the same moment he caught sight of his clerk, who had entered hastily at the exit of the others, but who now stood awed and abashed by Mr. Dumphy's passion. "Dash it all! what in dash are you dashingly doing here, dash you?"
"Sorry, sir," said the unlucky clerk; "but overhearing that gentleman say there was writing on the letter that you lost by which it might be identified, sir—we think we've found it—that is, we know where it is!"
"How?" said Dumphy, starting up eagerly.
"When the shock came that afternoon," continued the clerk, "the express bag for Sacramento and Marysville had just been taken out by the expressman, and was lying on top of the waggon. The horses started to run at the second shock, and the bag fell and was jammed against a lamp-post in front of our window, bursting open as it did so and spilling some letters and papers on the side-walk. One of our night watchmen helped the expressman pick up the scattered letters, and picked up among them a plain yellow envelope with no address but the name of Gabriel Conroy written in pencil across the end. Supposing it had dropped from some package in the express bag, he put it back again in the bag. When you asked about a blank envelope missing from your desk, he did not connect it with the one he had picked up, for that had writing on it. We sent to the express office just now, and found that they had stamped it, and forwarded it to Conroy at One Horse Gulch, just as they had always done with his letters sent to our care. That's the way of it. Daresay it's there by this time, in his hands, sir, all right!"
CHAPTER III.
GABRIEL MEETS HIS LAWYER.
Gabriel's petition on behalf of Mr. Hamlin was promptly granted by the sheriff. The waggon was at once put into requisition to convey the wounded man—albeit screaming and protesting—to the Grand Conroy Hotel, where, in company with his faithful henchman, he was left, to all intents a free man, and a half an hour later a demented one, tossing in a burning fever.
Owing to the insecure condition of the county jail at One Horse Gulch, and possibly some belief in the equal untrustworthiness of the people, the sheriff conducted his prisoner, accompanied by Olly, to Wingdam. Nevertheless, Olly's statement of the changed condition of public sentiment, or rather its pre-occupation with a calamity of more absorbing interest, was in the main correct. The news of the recapture of Gabriel by his legal guardian awoke no excitement nor comment. More than this, there was a favourable feeling toward the prisoner. The action of the Vigilance Committee had been unsuccessful, and had terminated disastrously to the principal movers therein. It is possible that the morality of their action was involved in their success. Somehow the whole affair had not resulted to the business interests of the Gulch. The three most prominent lynchers were dead—and clearly in error! The prisoner, who was still living, was possibly in the right. The Silverpolis Messenger, which ten days before had alluded to the "noble spectacle of a free people outraged in their holiest instincts, appealing to the first principles of Justice and Order, and rallying as a single man to their support," now quietly buried the victims and their motives from the public eye beneath the calm statement that they met their fate "while examining the roof of the Court House with a view to estimate the damage caused by the first shock of the earthquake." The Banner favoured the same idea a little less elegantly, and suggested ironically that hereafter "none but experts should be allowed to go foolin' round the statue of Justice." I trust that the intelligent reader will not accuse me of endeavouring to cast ridicule upon the general accuracy of spontaneous public emotion, nor the infallibility of the true democratic impulse, which (I beg to quote from the Messenger), "in the earliest ages of our history enabled us to resist legalised aggression, and take the reins of government into our own hands," or (I now refer to the glowing language of the Banner), "gave us the right to run the machine ourselves and boss the job." And I trust that the reader will observe in this passing recognition of certain inconsistencies in the expression and action of these people, only the fidelity of a faithful chronicler, and no intent of churlish criticism nor moral or political admonition, which I here discreetly deprecate and disclaim.
Nor was there any opposition when Gabriel, upon the motion of Lawyer Maxwell, was admitted to bail pending the action of the Grand Jury, nor any surprise when Mr. Dumphy's agent and banker came forward as his bondsman for the sum of fifty thousand dollars. By one of those strange vicissitudes in the fortunes of mining speculation, this act by Mr. Dumphy was looked upon as an evidence of his trust in the future of the unfortunate mine of which Gabriel had been original locator and superintendent, and under that belief the stock rallied slightly. "It was a mighty sharp move of Pete Dumphy's bailin' thet Gabe, right in face of that there 'dropped lead' in his busted-up mine! Oh, you've got to set up all night to get any points to show him!" And, to their mutual surprise, Mr. Dumphy found himself more awe-inspiring than ever at One Horse Gulch, and Gabriel found himself a free man, with a slight popular flavour of martyrdom about him.
As he still persistently refused to enter again upon the premises which he had deeded to his wife on the day of the murder, temporary lodgings were found for him and Olly at the Grand Conroy Hotel. And here Mrs. Markle, although exhibiting to Lawyer Maxwell the greatest concern in Gabriel's trouble, by one of those inconsistencies of the sex which I shall not attempt to explain, treated the unfortunate accused with a degree of cold reserve that was as grateful, I fear, to Gabriel, as it was unexpected. Indeed, I imagine that if the kind-hearted widow had known the real comfort and assurance that the exasperating Gabriel extracted from her first cold and constrained greeting, she would have spent less of her time in consultation with Maxwell regarding his defence. But perhaps I am doing a large-hearted and unselfish sex a deep injustice. So I shall content myself with transcribing part of a dialogue which took pace between them at the Grand Conroy.
Mrs. Markle (loftily, and regarding the ceiling with cold abstraction): "We can't gin ye here, Mister Conroy, the French style and attention ye're kinder habitooal to in your own house on the Hill, bein' plain folks and mounting ways. But we know our place, and don't reckon to promise the comforts of a home! Wot with lookin' arter forty reg'lar and twenty-five transient—ef I don't happen to see ye much myself, Mr. Conroy, ye'll understand. Ef ye ring thet there bell one o' the help will be always on hand. Yer lookin' well, Mr. Conroy. And bizness, I reckon" (the reader will here observe a ladylike ignoring of Gabriel's special trouble), "ez about what it allers waz, though judging from remarks of transients, it's dull!"
Gabriel (endeavouring to conceal a large satisfaction under the thin glowing of conventional sentiment): "Don't let me nor Olly put ye out a cent, Mrs. Markle—a change bein' ordered by Olly's physicians—and variety bein', so to speak, the spice o' life! And ye're lookin' well, Mrs. Markle; that ez" (with a sudden alarm at the danger of compliment), "so to speak, ez peart and strong-handed ez ever! And how's thet little Manty o' yours gettin' on? Jist how it was thet me and Olly didn't get to see ye before ez mighty queer! Times and times ag'in" (with shameless mendacity) "hez me and thet child bin on the p'int o' coming, and suthin' hez jest chipped in and interfered!"
Mrs. Markle (with freezing politeness): "You do me proud! I jest dropped in ez a matter o' not bein' able allers to trust to help. Good night, Mister Conroy. I hope I see you well! Ye kin jest" (retiring with matronly dignity), "ye kin jest touch onto that bell thar, if ye're wantin' anything, and help'll come to ye! Good-night!"
Olly (appearing a moment later at the door of Gabriel's room, truculent and suspicious): "Afore I'd stand thar—chirpin' with thet crockidill—and you in troubil, and not knowin' wot's gone o' July—I'd pizen myself!"
Gabriel (blushing to the roots of his hair, and conscience-stricken to his inmost soul): "It's jest passin' the time o' day, Olly, with old friends—kinder influencin' the public sentyment and the jury. Thet's all. It's the advice o' Lawyer Maxwell, ez ye didn't get to hear, I reckon,—thet's all!"
But Gabriel's experience in the Grand Conroy Hotel was not, I fear, always as pleasant. A dark-faced, large-featured woman, manifestly in mourning, and as manifestly an avenging friend of the luckless deceased, in whose taking off Gabriel was supposed to be so largely instrumental, presently appeared at the Grand Conroy Hotel, waiting the action of the Grand Jury. She was accompanied by a dark-faced elderly gentleman, our old friend Don Pedro—she being none other than the unstable-waisted Manuela of Pacific Street—and was, I believe, in the opinion of One Horse Gulch, supposed to be charged with convincing and mysterious evidence against Gabriel Conroy. The sallow-faced pair had a way of meeting in the corridors of the hotel and conversing in mysterious whispers in a tongue foreign to One Horse Gulch and to Olly, strongly suggestive of revenge and concealed stilettos, that was darkly significant! Happily, however, for Gabriel, he was presently relieved from their gloomy espionage by the interposition of a third party—Sal Clark. That individual, herself in the deepest mourning, and representing the deceased in his holiest affections, it is scarcely necessary to say at once resented the presence of the strangers. The two women glared at each other at the public table, and in a chance meeting in the corridor of the hotel.
"In the name of God, what have we here in this imbecile and forward creature, and why is this so and after this fashion?" asked Manuela of Don Pedro.
"Of a verity, I know not," replied Don Pedro, "it is most possibly a person visited of God!—a helpless being of brains. Peradventure, a person filled with aguardiente or the whisky of the Americans. Have a care, little one, thou smallest Manuela" (she weighed at least three hundred pounds), "that she does thee no harm!"
Meanwhile Miss Sarah Clark relieved herself to Mrs. Markle in quite as positive language. "Ef that black mulattar and that dried-up old furriner reckons they're going to monopolise public sentyment in this yer way they're mighty mistaken. Ef thar ever was a shameless piece et's thet old woman—and, goodness knows, the man's a poor critter enyway! Ef anybody's goin' to take the word of that woman under oath, et's mor'n Sal Clark would do—that's all! Who ez she—enyway? I never heard her name mentioned afore!"
And ridiculous as it may seem to the unprejudiced reader, this positive expression and conviction of Miss Clark, like all positive convictions, was not without its influence on the larger unimpanelled Grand Jury of One Horse Gulch, and, by reflection, at last on the impanelled jury itself.
"When you come to consider, gentlemen," said one of those dangerous characters—a sagacious, far-seeing juror—"when you come to consider that the principal witness o' the prosecution and the people at the inquest don't know this yer Greaser woman, and kinder throws off her testimony, and the prosecution don't seem to agree, it looks mighty queer. And I put it to you as far-minded men, if it ain't mighty queer? And this yer Sal Clark one of our own people."
An impression at once inimical to the new mistress and stranger, and favourable to the accused Gabriel, instantly took possession of One Horse Gulch.
Meanwhile the man who was largely responsible for this excitement and these conflicting opinions maintained a gravity and silence as indomitable and impassive as his alleged victim, then slumbering peacefully in the little cemetery on Round Hill. He conversed but little even with his counsel and friend, Lawyer Maxwell, and received with his usual submissiveness and gentle deprecatoriness the statement of that gentleman that Mr. Dumphy had already bespoken the services of one of the most prominent lawyers of San Francisco—Mr. Arthur Poinsett—to assist in the defence. When Maxwell added that Mr. Poinsett had expressed a wish to hold his first consultation with Gabriel privately, the latter replied with his usual simplicity, "I reckon I've nowt to say to him ez I hain't said to ye, but it's all right!"
"Then I'll expect you over to my office at eleven to-morrow?" asked Maxwell.
"Thet's so," responded Gabriel, "though I reckon thet anything you and him might fix up to be dumped onto thet jury would be pleasin' and satisfactory to me."
At a few minutes of eleven the next morning Mr. Maxwell, in accordance with a previous understanding with Mr. Poinsett, put on his hat and left his office in the charge of that gentleman that he might receive and entertain Gabriel in complete privacy and confidence. As Arthur sat there alone, fine gentleman as he was and famous in his profession, he was conscious of a certain degree of nervousness that galled his pride greatly. He was about to meet the man whose cherished sister six years ago he had stolen! Such, at least, Arthur felt was Gabriel's opinion. He had no remorse nor consciousness of guilt or wrongdoing in that act. But in looking at the fact in his professional habit of viewing both sides of a question, he made this allowance for the sentiment of the prosecution, and putting himself, in his old fashion, in the position of his opponent, he judged that Gabriel might consistently exhibit some degree of indignation at their first meeting. That there was, however, really any moral question involved, he did not believe. The girl, Grace Conroy, had gone with him readily, after a careful and honourable statement of the facts of her situation, and Gabriel's authority or concern in any subsequent sentimental complication he utterly denied. That he, Arthur, had acted in a most honourable, high-minded, and even weakly generous fashion towards Grace, that he had obeyed her frivolous whims as well as her most reasonable demands, that he had gone back to Starvation Camp on a hopeless quest just to satisfy her, that everything had happened exactly as he had predicted, and that when he had returned to her he found that she had deserted him—these—these were the facts that were incontrovertible! Arthur was satisfied that he had been honourable and even generous—he was quite convinced that this very nervousness that he now experienced, was solely the condition of a mind too sympathetic even with the feelings of an opponent in affliction. "I must not give way to this absurd Quixotic sense of honour," said this young gentleman to himself, severely.
Nevertheless, at exactly eleven o'clock, when the staircase creaked with the strong steady tread of the giant Gabriel, Arthur felt a sudden start to his pulse. There was a hesitating rap at the door—a rap that was so absurdly inconsistent with the previous tread on the staircase—as inconsistent as were all the mental and physical acts of Gabriel—that Arthur was amused and reassured. "Come in," he said, with a return of his old confidence, and the door opened to Gabriel, diffident and embarrassed.
"I was told by Lawyer Maxwell," said Gabriel slowly, without raising his eyes, and only dimly cognisant of the slight, strong, elegant figure before him—"I was told that Mr. Arthur Poinsett reckoned to see me to-day at eleven o'clock—so I came. Be you Mr. Poinsett?" (Gabriel here raised his eyes)—"be you, eh?—God A'mighty! why, it's—eh?—why—I want to know!—it can't be!—yes, it is!" He stopped—the recognition was complete!
Arthur did not move. If he had expected an outburst from the injured man before him he was disappointed. Gabriel passed his hard palm vaguely and confusedly across his forehead and through his hair, and lifted and put back behind his ears two tangled locks. And then, without heeding Arthur's proffered hand, yet without precipitation, anger, or indignation, he strode toward him, and asked calmly and quietly, as Arthur himself might have done, "Where is Grace?"
"I don't know," said Arthur, bluntly. "I have not known for years. I have never known her whereabouts, living or dead, since the day I left her at a logger's house to return to Starvation Camp to bring help to you." (Arthur could not resist italicising the pronoun, nor despising himself for doing it when he saw that the full significance of his emphasis touched the man before him.) "She was gone when I returned; where, no one knew! I traced her to the Presidio, but there she had disappeared."
Gabriel raised his eyes to Arthur's. The impression of nonchalant truthfulness which Arthur's speech always conveyed to his hearer, an impression that he did not prevaricate because he was not concerned sufficiently in his subject, was further sustained by his calm, clear eyes. But Gabriel did not speak, and Arthur went on—
"She left the logger's camp voluntarily, of her own free will, and doubtless for some reason that seemed sufficient to her. She abandoned me—if I may so express myself—left my care, relieved me of the responsibility I held towards her relatives"—he continued, with the first suggestion of personal apology in his tones—"without a word of previous intimation. Possibly she might have got tired of waiting for me. I was absent two weeks. It was the tenth day after my departure that she left the logger's hut."
Gabriel put his hand in his pocket and deliberately drew out the precious newspaper slip he had once shown to Olly. "Then thet thar 'Personal' wozent writ by you, and thet P. A. don't stand for Philip Ashley?" asked Gabriel, with a hopeless dejection in his tone.
Arthur glanced quickly over the paper, and smiled. "I never saw this before," he said. "What made you think I did it?" he asked curiously.
"Because July—my wife that was—said that P. A. meant you," said Gabriel, simply.
"Oh! she said so, did she?" said Arthur, still smiling.
"She did. And ef it wasn't you, who was it?"
"I really don't know," returned Arthur, carelessly; "possibly it might have been herself. From what I have heard of your wife, I think this might be one, and perhaps the most innocent, of her various impostures."
Gabriel cast down his eyes and for a moment was gravely silent. Then the look of stronger inquiry and intelligence that he had worn during the interview faded utterly from his face, and he began again in his old tone of apology. "For answerin' all my questions, I'm obliged to ye, Mr. Ashley, and it's right good in ye to remember ol' times, and ef I hev often thought hard on ye, ye'll kinder pass that by ez the nat'rel allowin's of a man ez was worried about a sister ez hasn't been heerd from sens she left with ye. And ye mustn't think this yer meetin' was o' my seekin'. I kinder dropped in yer," he added wearily, "to see a man o' the name o' Poinsett. He allowed to be yer at eleving o'clock—mebbee it's airly yet—mebbee I've kinder got wrong o' the place!" and he glanced apologetically around the room.
"My name is Poinsett," said Arthur, smiling, "the name of Philip Ashley, by which you knew me, was merely the one I assumed when I undertook the long overland trip." He said this in no tone of apology or even explanation, but left the impression on Gabriel's mind that a change of name, like a change of dress, was part of the outfit of a gentleman emigrant. And looking at the elegant young figure before him, it seemed exceedingly plausible. "It was as Arthur Poinsett, the San Francisco lawyer, that I made this appointment with you, and it is now as your old friend Philip Ashley that I invite your confidence, and ask you to tell me frankly the whole of this miserable business. I have come to help you, Gabriel, for your own—for your sister's sake. And I think I can do it!" He held out his hand again, and this time not in vain; with a sudden frank gesture it was taken in both of Gabriel's, and Arthur felt that the greatest difficulty he had anticipated in his advocacy of Gabriel's cause had been surmounted.
"He has told me the whole story, I think," said Arthur, two hours later, when Maxwell returned and found his associate thoughtfully sitting beside the window alone. "And I believe it. He is as innocent of this crime as you or I. Of that I have always been confident. How far he is accessory after the fact—I know he is not accessory before—is another question. But his story, that to me is perfectly convincing, I am afraid won't do before a jury and the world generally. It involves too much that is incredible, and damning to him secondarily if believed. We must try something else. As far as I can see, really, it seems that his own suggestion of a defence, as you told it to me, has more significance in it than the absurdity you only saw. We must admit the killing, and confine ourselves to showing excessive provocation. I know something of the public sentiment here, and the sympathies of the average jury, and if Gabriel should tell them the story he has just told me, they would hang him at once! Unfortunately for him, the facts show a complication of property interests and impostures on the part of his wife, of which he is perfectly innocent, and which are not really the motive of the murder, but which the jury would instantly accept as a sufficient motive. We must fight, understand, this very story from the outset; you will find it to be the theory of the prosecution; but if we can keep him silent it cannot be proved except by him. The facts are such that if he had really committed the murder he could have defied prosecution, but through his very stupidity and blind anxiety to shield his wife, he has absolutely fixed the guilt upon himself."
"Then you don't think that Mrs. Conroy is the culprit?" asked Maxwell.
"No," said Arthur; "she is capable, but not culpable. The real murderer has never been suspected nor his presence known to One Horse Gulch. But I must see him again, and Olly, and you must hunt up a Chinaman—one Ah Fe—whom Gabriel tells me brought him the note, and who is singularly enough missing, now that he is wanted."
"But you can't use a Chinaman's evidence before a jury?" interrupted Maxwell.
"Not directly; but I can find Christian Caucasians who would be willing to swear to the facts he supplied them with. I shall get at the facts in a few days—and then, my dear fellow," continued Arthur, laying his hand familiarly and patronisingly on the shoulder of his senior, "and then you and I will go to work to see how we can get rid of them."
When Gabriel recounted the events of the day to Olly, and described his interview with Poinsett, she became furiously indignant. "And did that man mean to say he don't know whether Gracey is livin' or dead? And he pertendin' to hev bin her bo?"
"In coorse," explained Gabriel; "ye disremember, Olly, that Gracey never hez let on to me, her own brother, whar she ez, and she wouldn't be going to tell a stranger. Thar's them personals as she never answered!"
"Mebbe she didn't want to speak to him ag'in," said Olly, fiercely, with a toss of her curls. "I'd like to know what he'd bin' sayin' to her—like his impudence. Enny how he ought to hev found her out, and she his sweetheart! Why didn't he go right off to the Presidio? What did he come back for? Not find her, indeed! Why, Gabe, do you suppose as July won't find you out soon—why, I bet anythin' she knows jest whar you are" (Gabriel trembled and felt an inward sinking), "and is on'y waitin' to come forward to the trial. And yer you are taken in ag'in and fooled by these yer lawyers!—you old Gabe, you. Let me git at thet Philip—Ashley Poinsett—thet's all!"
CHAPTER IV.
WHAT AH FE DOES NOT KNOW.
Thus admonished by the practical-minded Olly, Gabriel retired precipitately to the secure fastnesses of Conroy's Hill, where, over a consolatory pipe in his deserted cabin, he gave himself up to reflections upon the uncertainty of the sex and the general vagaries of womanhood. At such times he would occasionally extend his wanderings to the gigantic pine tree which still towered pre-eminently above its fellows in ominous loneliness, and seated upon one of its outlying roots, would gently philosophise to himself regarding his condition, the vicissitudes of fortune, the awful prescience of Olly, and the beneficence of a Creator who permitted such awkward triviality and uselessness as was incarnate in himself to exist at all! Sometimes, following the impulse of habit, he would encroach abstractedly upon the limits of his own domain, and find himself under the shadow of his own fine house on the hill, from which, since that eventful parting with his wife, he had always rigidly withheld his foot. As soon as he would make this alarming discovery, he would turn back in honourable delicacy and a slight sense of superstitious awe. Retreating from one of these involuntary incursions one day, in passing through an opening in a little thicket of "buckeye" near his house, he stumbled over a small workbasket lying in the withered grass, apparently mislaid or forgotten. Gabriel instantly recognised it as the property of his wife, and as quickly recalled the locality as one of her favourite resorts during the excessive mid-day heats. He hesitated and then passed on, and then stopped and returned again awkwardly and bashfully. To have touched any property of his wife's, after their separation, was something distasteful and impossible to Gabriel's sense of honour; to leave it there the spoil of any passing Chinaman, or the prey of the elements, was equally inconsistent with a certain respect which Gabriel had for his wife's weaknesses. He compromised by picking it up with the intention of sending it to Lawyer Maxwell, as his wife's trustee. But in doing this, to Gabriel's great alarm (for he would as soon have sacrificed the hand that held this treasure as to have exposed its contents in curiosity or suspicion), part of that multitudinous contents overflowed and fell on the ground, and he was obliged to pick them up and replace them. One of them was a baby's shirt—so small it filled the great hand that grasped it. In Gabriel's emigrant experience, as the frequent custodian and nurse of the incomplete human animal, he was somewhat familiar with those sacred, mummy-like enwrappings usually unknown to childless men, and he recognised it at once.
He did not replace it in the basket, but, with a suffused cheek and an increased sense of his usual awkwardness, stuffed it into the pocket of his blouse. Nor did he send the basket to Lawyer Maxwell, as he had intended, and in fact omitted any allusion to it in his usual account to Olly of his daily experience. For the next two days he was peculiarly silent and thoughtful, and was sharply reprimanded by Olly for general idiocy and an especial evasion of some practical duties.
"Yer's them lawyers hez been huntin' ye to come over and examine that there Chinaman, Ah Fe, ez is jest turned up ag'in, and you ain't no whar to be found; and Lawyer Maxwell sez it's a most important witness. And whar' bouts was ye found? Down in the Gulch, chirpin' and gossipin' with that Arkansas family, and totin' round Mrs. Welch's baby. And you a growed man, with a fammerly of yer own to look after. I wonder ye ain't got more sabe!—prancin' round in this yer shiftless way, and you on trial, and accused o' killin' folks. Yer a high ole Gabe—rentin' yerself out fur a dry nuss for nothin'!"
Gabriel (colouring and hastily endeavouring to awaken Olly's feminine sympathies): "It waz the powerfullest, smallest baby—ye oughter get to see it, Olly! 'Tain't bigger nor a squirrel—on'y two weeks old yesterday!"
Olly (outwardly scornful, but inwardly resolving to visit the phenomenon next week): "Don't stand yawpin' here, but waltz down to Lawyer Maxwell and see that Chinaman."
Gabriel reached the office of Lawyer Maxwell just as that gentleman and Arthur Poinsett were rising from a long, hopeless, and unsatisfactory examination of Ah Fe. The lawyers had hoped to be able to establish the fact of Gabriel's remoteness from the scene of the murder by some corroborating incident or individual that Ah Fe could furnish in support of the detailed narrative he had already given. But it did not appear that any Caucasian had been encountered or met by Ah Fe at the time of his errand. And Ah Fe's memory of the details he had already described was apparently beginning to be defective; it was evident nothing was to be gained from him even if he had been constituted a legal witness. And then, more than all, he was becoming sullen!
"We are afraid that we haven't made much out of your friend, Ah Fe," said Arthur, taking Gabriel's hand. "You might try if you can revive his memory, but it looks doubtful."
Gabriel gazed at Ah Fe intently—possibly because he was the last person who had spoken to his missing wife. Ah Fe returned the gaze, discharging all expression from his countenance, except a slight suggestion of the habitual vague astonishment always seen in the face of a newborn infant. Perhaps this peculiar expression, reminding Gabriel as it did of the phenomenon in the Welch family, interested him. But the few vague wandering questions he put were met by equally vague answers. Arthur rose in some impatience; Lawyer Maxwell wiped away the smile that had been lingering around his mouth. The interview was ended.
Arthur and Maxwell passed down the narrow stairway arm in arm. Gabriel would have followed them with Ah Fe, but turning toward that Mongolian, he was alarmed by a swift spasm of expression that suddenly convulsed Ah Fe's face. He winked both his eyes with the velocity of sheet-lightning, nodded his head with frightful rapidity, and snapped and apparently dislocated every finger on his right hand. Gabriel gazed at him in open-mouthed wonder.
"All litee!" said Ah Fe, looking intently at Gabriel.
"Which?" asked Gabriel.
"All litee! You shabbee 'all litee!' She say 'all litee.'"
"Who's she?" asked Gabriel, in sudden alarm.
"You lifee!—shabbee?—Missee Conloy! She likee you—shabbee? Me likee you!—shabbee? Miss Conloy she say 'all litee!' You shabbee shelliff?"
"Which?" said Gabriel.
"Shelliff! Man plenty chokee bad man!"
"Sheriff, I reckon," suggested Gabriel, with great gravity.
"Um! Shelliff. Mebbe you shabbee him bimeby. He chokee bad man. Much chokee. Chokee like hellee! He no chokee you. No. Shabbee? She say 'shelliff no chokee you.' Shabbee?"
"I see," said Gabriel, significantly.
"She say," continued Ah Fe, with gasping swiftness, "she say you talkee too much. She say me talkee too much. She say Maxwellee talkee too much. All talkee too much. She say 'no talkee!' Shabbee? She say 'ash up!' Shabbee? She say 'dly up!' Shabbee? She say 'bimeby plenty talkee—bimeby all litee!' Shabbee?"
"But whar ez she—whar kin I git to see her?" asked Gabriel.
Ah Fe's face instantly discharged itself of all expression. A wet sponge could not have more completely obliterated all pencilled outline of character or thought from his blank slate-coloured physiognomy than did Gabriel's simple question. He returned his questioner's glance with ineffable calmness and vacancy, patiently drew the long sleeves of his blouse still further over his varnished fingers, crossed them submissively and Orientally before him, and waited apparently for Gabriel to become again intelligible.
"Look yer," said Gabriel, with gentle persuasiveness, "ef it's the same to ye, you'd be doin' me a heap o' good ef you'd let on whar thet July—thet Mrs. Conroy ez. Bein' a man ez in his blindness bows down to wood and stun, ye ain't supposed to allow fur a Christian's feelings. But I put to ye ez a far-minded brethren—a true man and a man whatsoever his colour that it's a square thing fur ye to allow to me whar thet woman ez ez my relation by marriage ez hidin'! Allowin' it's one o' my idols—I axes you as a brother Pagan—whar ez she?"
A faint, flickering smile of pathetic abstraction and simplicity, as of one listening to far-off but incomprehensible music stole over Ah Fe's face. Then he said kindly, gently, but somewhat vaguely and unsatisfactorily—
"Me no shabbee Melican man. Me washee shirtee! dollah and hap dozen!"
CHAPTER V.
THE PEOPLE V. JOHN DOE alias GABRIEL CONROY, AND JANE ROE alias JULIE CONROY. BEFORE BOOMPOINTER, J.
The day of the trial was one of exacting and absorbing interest to One Horse Gulch. Long before ten o'clock the Court-room, and even the halls and corridors of the lately rehabilitated Court House, were thronged with spectators. It is only fair to say that by this time the main points at issue were forgotten. It was only remembered that some of the first notabilities of the State had come up from Sacramento to attend the trial; that one of the most eminent lawyers in San Francisco had been engaged for the prisoner at a fee variously estimated from fifty to one hundred thousand dollars, and that the celebrated Colonel Starbottle of Siskiyou was to assist in the prosecution; that a brisk duel of words, and it was confidently hoped, a later one of pistols, would grow out of this forensic encounter; that certain disclosures affecting men and women of high social standing were to be expected; and, finally, that in some mysterious way a great political and sectional principle (Colonel Starbottle was from the South and Mr. Poinsett from the North) was to be evolved and upheld during the trial—these were the absorbing fascinations to One Horse Gulch.
At ten o'clock Gabriel, accompanied by his counsel, entered the Court-room, followed by Colonel Starbottle. Judge Boompointer, entering at the same moment, bowed distantly to Arthur, and familiarly to Colonel Starbottle. In his otium off the bench, he had been chaffed by the District Attorney, and had lost large sums at play with Colonel Starbottle. Nevertheless he was a trifle uneasy under the calmly critical eyes of the famous young advocate from San Francisco. Arthur was too wise to exhibit his fastidiousness before the Court; nevertheless, Judge Boompointer was dimly conscious that he would on that occasion have preferred that the Clerk who sat below him had put on a cleaner shirt, and himself refrained from taking off his cravat and collar, as was his judicial habit on the Wingdam circuit. There was some slight prejudice on the part of the panel to this well-dressed young lawyer, which they were pleased to specify and define more particularly as his general "airiness." Seeing which, Justice, on the bench, became more dignified, and gazed severely at the panel and at Arthur.
In the selection of the jury there was some difficulty; it was confidently supposed that the prisoner's counsel would challenge the array on the ground of the recent Vigilance excitement, but public opinion was disappointed when the examination of the defence was confined to trivial and apparently purposeless inquiry into the nativity of the several jurors. A majority of those accepted by the defence were men of Southern birth and education. Colonel Starbottle, who, as a representative of the peculiar chivalry of the South, had always adopted this plan himself, in cases where his client was accused of assault and battery, or even homicide, could not in respect to his favourite traditions object to it. But when it was found that there were only two men of Northern extraction on the jury, and that not a few of them had been his own clients, Colonel Starbottle thought he had penetrated the theory of the defence.
I regret that Colonel Starbottle's effort, admirably characterised by the Banner as "one of the most scathing and Junius-like gems of legal rhetoric ever known to the Californian Bar," has not been handed down to me in extenso. Substantially, however, it appeared that Colonel Starbottle had never before found himself in "so peculiar, so momentous, so—er—delicate a position. A position, sir—er—er—gentlemen, fraught with the deepest social, professional—er—er—he should not hesitate to say, upon his own personal responsibility, a position of the deepest political significance! Colonel Starbottle was aware that this statement might be deprecated—nay, even assailed by some. But he did not retract that statement. Certainly not in the presence of that jury, in whose intelligent faces he saw—er—er—er—justice—inflexible justice!—er—er—mingled and—er—mixed with—with chivalrous instinct, and suffused with the characteristic—er—er—glow of—er—er—!" (I regret to add that at this supreme moment, as the Colonel was lightly waving away with his fat right hand the difficulties of rhetoric, a sepulchral voice audible behind the jury suggested "Robinson County whisky" as the origin of the phenomena the Colonel hesitated to describe. The judge smiled blandly and directed the deputy sheriff to preserve order. The deputy obeyed the mandate by looking over into the crowd behind the jury, and saying, in an audible tone, "You'd better dry up thar, Joe White, or git out o' that!" and the Colonel, undismayed, proceeded.) "He well understood the confidence placed by the defence in these gentlemen. He had reason to believe that an attempt would be made to show that this homicide was committed in accordance with certain—er—er—principles held by honourable men—that the act was retributive, and in defence of an invasion of domestic rights and the sanctity of wedlock. But he should show them its fallacy. He should show them that only a base pecuniary motive influenced the prisoner. He should show them—er—er—that the accused had placed himself, firstly, by his antecedent acts, and, secondly, by the manner of the later act, beyond the sympathies of honourable men. He should show them a previous knowledge of certain—er—er—indiscretions on the part of the prisoner's wife, and a condonation by the prisoner of those indiscretions, that effectually debarred the prisoner from the provisions of the code; he should show an inartistic, he must say, even on his own personal responsibility, a certain ungentlemanliness, in the manner of the crime that refused to clothe it with the—er—er—generous mantle of chivalry. The crime of which the prisoner was accused might have—er—er—been committed by a Chinaman or a nigger. Colonel Starbottle did not wish to be misunderstood. It was not in the presence of—er—Beauty—" (the Colonel paused, drew out his handkerchief, and gracefully waved it in the direction of the dusky Manuela and the truculent Sal—both ladies acknowledging the courtesy as an especial and isolated tribute, and exchanging glances of the bitterest hatred)—"it is not, gentlemen, in the presence of an all-sufficient and enthralling sex that I would seek to disparage their influence with man. But I shall prove that this absorbing—er—er—passion, this—er—er—delicious—er—er—fatal weakness, that rules the warlike camp, the—er—er—stately palace, as well as the—er—er—cabin of the base-born churl, never touched the calculating soul of Gabriel Conroy! Look at him, gentlemen! Look at him, and say upon your oaths, upon your experience as men of gallantry, if he is a man to sacrifice himself for a woman. Look at him, and say truly, as men personally responsible for their opinions, if he is a man to place himself in a position of peril through the blandishments of—er—er—Beauty, or sacrifice himself upon the—er—er—altar of Venus!"
Every eye was turned upon Gabriel. And certainly at that moment he did not bear any striking resemblance to a sighing Amintor or a passionate Othello. His puzzled, serious face, which had worn a look of apologetic sadness, was suffused at this direct reference of the prosecution; and the long, heavy lower limbs, which he had diffidently tucked away under his chair to reduce the elevation of his massive knees above the ordinary level of one of the court-room chairs, retired still further. Finding himself, during the Colonel's rhetorical pause, still the centre of local observation, he slowly drew from his pocket a small comb, and began awkwardly to comb his hair, with an ineffective simulation of pre-occupation and indifference.
"Yes, sir," continued the Colonel, with that lofty forensic severity so captivating to the spectator, "you may comb yer hair" (hyar was the Colonel's pronunciation), "but yer can't comb it so as to make this intelligent jury believe that it is fresh from the hands of—er—er—Delilah."
The Colonel then proceeded to draw an exceedingly poetical picture of the murdered Ramirez—"a native, appealing to the sympathies of every Southern man, a native of the tropics, impulsive, warm, and peculiarly susceptible, as we all are, gentlemen, to the weaknesses of the heart." The Colonel "would not dwell further upon this characteristic of the deceased. There were within the sound of his voice, visible to the sympathising eyes of the jury, two beings who had divided his heart's holiest affections—their presence was more eloquent than words. This man," continued the Colonel, "a representative of one of our oldest Spanish families—a family that recalled the days of—er—er—the Cid and Don John—this man had been the victim at once of the arts of Mrs. Conroy and the dastardly fears of Gabriel Conroy; of the wiles of the woman and the stealthy steel of the man."
"Colonel Starbottle would show that personating the character and taking the name of Grace Conroy, an absent sister of the accused, Mrs. Conroy, then really Madame Devarges, sought the professional aid of the impulsive and generous Ramirez to establish her right to a claim then held by the accused—in fact, wrongfully withheld from his own sister, Grace Conroy. That Ramirez, believing implicitly in the story of Madame Devarges with the sympathy of an overflowing nature, gave her that aid until her marriage with Gabriel exposed the deceit. Colonel Starbottle would not characterise the motives of such a marriage. It was apparent to the jury. They were intelligent men, and would detect the unhallowed combination of two confederates, under the sacrament of a holy institution, to deceive the trustful Ramirez. It was a nuptial feast at which—er—er—Mercury presided, and not—er—er—Hymen. Its only issue was fraud and murder. Having obtained possession of the property in a common interest, it was necessary to remove the only witness of the fraud, Ramirez. The wife found a willing instrument in the husband. And how was the deed committed? Openly and in the presence of witnesses? Did Gabriel even assume a virtue, and under the pretext of an injured husband challenge the victim to the field of honour? No! No, gentlemen. Look at the murderer, and contrast his enormous bulk with the—er—slight, graceful, youthful figure of the victim, and you will have an idea of the—er—er—enormity of the crime."
After this exordium came the testimony—i.e., facts coloured more or less unconsciously, according to the honest prejudices of the observer, his capacity to comprehend the fact he had observed, and his disposition to give his theory regarding that fact rather than the fact itself. And when the blind had testified to what they saw, and the halt had stated where they walked and ran, the prosecution rested with a flush of triumph.
They had established severally: that the deceased had died from the effects of a knife wound; that Gabriel had previously quarrelled with him and was seen on the hill within a few hours of the murder; that he had absconded immediately after, and that his wife was still a fugitive, and that there was ample motive for the deed in the circumstances surrounding the prisoner.
Much of this was shaken on cross-examination. The surgeon who made the autopsy was unable to say whether the deceased, being consumptive, might not have died from consumption that very night. The witness who saw Gabriel pushing the deceased along the road, could not swear positively whether the deceased were not pulling Gabriel instead, and the evidence of Mrs. Conroy's imposture was hearsay only. Nevertheless bets were offered in favour of Starbottle against Poinsett—that being the form in which the interest of One Horse Gulch crystallised itself.
When the prosecution rested, Mr. Poinsett, as counsel for defence, moved for the discharge of the prisoner, no evidence having been shown of his having had any relations with or knowledge of the deceased until the day of the murder, and none whatever of his complicity with the murderess, against whom the evidence of the prosecution and the arguments of the learned prosecuting attorney were chiefly directed.
Motion overruled. A sigh of relief went up from the spectators and the jury. That any absurd technical objection should estop them from that fun which as law-abiding citizens they had a right to expect, seemed oppressive and scandalous; and when Arthur rose to open for the defence, it was with an instinctive consciousness that his audience were eyeing him as a man who had endeavoured to withdraw from a race.
Ridiculous as it seemed in reason, it was enough to excite Arthur's flagging interest and stimulate his combativeness. With ready tact he fathomed the expectation of the audience, and at once squarely joined issue with the Colonel.
Mr. Poinsett differed from his learned friend in believing this case was at all momentous or peculiar. It was a quite common one—he was sorry to say a very common one—in the somewhat hasty administration of the law in California. He was willing to admit a peculiarity in his eloquent brother's occupying the line of attack, when his place was as clearly at his, Mr. Poinsett's side. He should overlook some irregularities in the prosecution from this fact, and from the natural confusion of a man possessing Colonel Starbottle's quick sympathies, who found himself arrayed against his principles. He should, however, relieve them from that confusion, by stating that there really was no principle involved beyond the common one of self-preservation. He was willing to admit the counsel's ingenious theory that Mrs. Conroy—who was not mentioned in the indictment, or indeed any other person not specified—had committed the deed for which his client was charged. But as they were here to try Gabriel Conroy only, he could not see the relevancy of the testimony to that fact. He should content himself with the weakness of the accusation. He should not occupy their time, but should call at once to the stand the prisoner; the man who, the jury would remember, was now, against all legal precedent, actually, if not legally, placed again in peril of his life, in the very building which but a few days before had seen his danger and his escape.
He should call Gabriel Conroy!
There was a momentary sensation in the court. Gabriel uplifted his huge frame slowly, and walked quietly toward the witness-box. His face slightly flushed under the half-critical, half-amused gaze of the spectators, and those by whom he brushed as he made his way through the crowd noticed that his breathing was hurried. But when he reached the box, his face grew more composed, and his troubled eyes presently concentrated their light fixedly upon Colonel Starbottle. Then the clerk mumbled the oath, and he took his seat.
"What is your name?" asked Arthur.
"I reckon ye mean my real name?" queried Gabriel, with a touch of his usual apology.
"Yes, certainly, your real name, sir," replied Arthur, a little impatiently.
Colonel Starbottle pricked up his ears, and lifting his eyes, met Gabriel's dull, concentrated fires full in his own.
Gabriel then raised his eyes indifferently to the ceiling. "My real name—my genooine name—is Johnny Dumbledee, J-o-n-n-y, Johnny, D-u-m-b-i-l-d-e, Johnny Dumbledee!"
There was a sudden thrill, and then a stony silence. Arthur and Maxwell rose to their feet at the same moment. "What?" said both those gentlemen, sharply, in one breath.
"Johnny Dumbledee," repeated Gabriel, slowly and with infinite deliberation; "Johnny Dumbledee ez my real name. I hev frequent," he added, turning around in easy confidence to the astonished Judge Boompointer, "I hev frequent allowed I was Gabriel Conroy—the same not being the truth. And the woman ez I married—her name was Grace Conroy, and the heap o' lies ez thet old liar over thar" (he indicated the gallant Colonel Starbottle with his finger) "hez told passes my pile! Thet woman, my wife ez was and ez—waz Grace Conroy." (To the Colonel, gravely:) "You hear me! And the only imposture, please your Honour and this yer Court, and you gentl'men, was ME!"
CHAPTER VI.
IN REBUTTAL.
The utter and complete astonishment created by Gabriel's reply was so generally diffused that the equal participation of Gabriel's own counsel in this surprise was unobserved. Maxwell would have risen again hurriedly, but Arthur laid his hand on his shoulder.
"The man his gone clean mad!—this is suicide," whispered Maxwell, excitedly. "We must get him off the stand. You must explain!"
"Hush!" said Arthur, quietly. "Not a word! Show any surprise and we're lost!"
In another instant all eyes were fixed upon Arthur, who had remained standing, outwardly calm. There was but one idea dominant in the audience. What revelation would the next question bring? The silence became almost painful as Arthur quietly and self-containedly glanced around the Court-room and at the jury, as if coolly measuring the effect of a carefully-planned dramatic sensation. Then, when every neck was bent forward and every ear alert, Arthur turned nonchalantly yet gracefully to the bench.
"We have no further questions to ask, your Honour," he said, quietly, and sat down.
The effect of this simple, natural, and perfectly consistent action was tremendous! In the various triumphs of Arthur's successful career, he felt that he had never achieved as universal and instantaneous popularity. Gabriel was forgotten; the man who had worked up this sensation—a sensation whose darkly mysterious bearing upon the case no one could fathom, or even fared to fathom, but a sensation that each man confidently believed held the whole secret of the crime—this man was the hero! Had it been suggested, the jury would have instantly given a verdict for this hero's client without leaving their seats. The betting was two to one on Arthur. I beg to observe that I am writing of men, impulsive, natural, and unfettered in expression and action by any tradition of logic or artificial law—a class of beings much idealised by poets, and occasionally, I believe, exalted by latter-day philosophers.
Judge Boompointer looked at Colonel Starbottle. That gentleman, completely stunned and mystified by the conduct of the defence, fumbled his papers, coughed, expanded his chest, rose, and began the cross-examination.
"You have said your name was—er—er—Johnny—er—er—(the Colonel was here obliged to consult his papers)—er—John Dumbledee. What was your idea, Mr. Dumbledee, in—er—assuming the name of—er—er—Gabriel Conroy?"
Objected to by counsel for defence. Argument:—Firstly, motives, like beliefs, not admissible; case cited, Higginbottom v. Smithers. Secondly, not called out on Direct Ex.; see Swinke v. Swanke, opinion of Muggins, J., 2 Cal. Rep. Thirdly, witness not obliged to answer questions tending to self-crimination. Objection overruled by the Court. Precedent not cited; real motive, Curiosity. Boompointer, J. Question repeated:—
"What was your idea or motive in assuming the name of Gabriel Conroy?"
Gabriel (cunningly, and leaning confidentially over the arm of his chair): "Wot would be your idee of a motif?"
The witness, amidst much laughter, was here severely instructed by the Court that the asking of questions was not the function of a witness. The witness must answer.
Gabriel: "Well, Gabriel Conroy was a purty name—the name of a man ez I onst knew ez died in Starvation Camp. It kinder came easy, ez a sort o' interduckshun, don't ye see, Jedge, toe his sister Grace, ez was my wife. I kinder reckon, between you and me, ez thet name sorter helped the courtin' along—she bein' a shy critter, outer her own fammerly."
Question: "In your early acquaintance with the deceased, were you not known to him as Gabriel Conroy always, and not as—er—er—Johnny Dumbledee?"
Arthur Poinsett here begged to call the attention of the Court to the fact that it had not yet been shown that Gabriel—that is Johnny Dumbledee—has ever had any early acquaintance with the deceased. The Court would not fail to observe that counsel on the direct examination had restricted themselves to a simple question—the name of the prisoner.
Objection sustained by Judge Boompointer, who was beginning to be anxious to get at the facts. Whereat Colonel Starbottle excepted, had no more questions to ask, and Gabriel was commanded to stand aside.
Betting now five to one on Arthur Poinsett; Gabriel's hand, on leaving the witness box, shaken cordially by a number of hitherto disinterested people. Hurried consultation between defendant's counsel. A note handed to Colonel Starbottle. Intense curiosity manifested by Manuela and Sal regarding a closely veiled female, who enters a moment later, and is conducted with an excess of courtesy to a seat by the gallant Colonel. General impatience of audience and jury.
The defence resumed. Michael O'Flaherty called; nativity, County Kerry, Ireland. Business, miner. On the night of the murder, while going home from work, met deceased on Conroy's Hill, dodging in among the trees, for all the wurreld like a thafe. A few minutes later overtook Gabriel Conroy half a mile farther on, on the same road, going in same direction as witness, and walked with him to Lawyer Maxwell's office. Cross examined: Is naturalised. Always voted the Dimmycratic ticket. Was always opposed to the Government—bad cess to it—in the ould counthry, and isn't thet mane to go back on his principles here. Doesn't know that a Chinaman has affirmed to the same fact of Gabriel's alibi. Doesn't know what an alibi is; thinks he would if he saw it. Believes a Chinaman is worse nor a nigger. Has noticed that Gabriel was left-handed.
Amadee Michet, sworn for defence; nativity, France. Business, foreman of La Parfait Union. Frequently walks to himself in the beautiful grove on Conroy's Hill. Comes to him on the night of the 15th, Gabriel Conroy departing from his house. It is then seven hours, possibly more, not less. The night is fine. This Gabriel salutes him in the American fashion, and is gone. Eastward. Ever to the east. Watches M. Conroy because he wears a triste look, as if there were great sadness here (in the breast of the witness' blouse). Sees him vanish in the gulch. Returns to the hill and there overhears voices, a man's and a woman's. The woman's voice is that of Madame Conroy. The man's voice is to him strange and not familiar. Will swear positively it was not Gabriel's. Remains on the hill about an hour. Did not see Gabriel again. Saw a man and woman leave the hill and pass by the Wingdam road as he was going home. To the best of his belief the woman was Mrs. Conroy. Do not know the man. Is positive it was not Gabriel Conroy. Why? Eh! Mon Dieu, is it possible that one should mistake a giant?
Cross examined. Is a patriot—do not know what is this Democrat you call. Is a hater of aristocrats. Do not know if the deceased was an aristocrat. Was not enraged with Madame Conroy. Never made love to her. Was not jilted by her. This is all what you call too theen, eh? Has noticed that the prisoner was left-handed.
Helling Dittmann; nativity, Germany. Does not know the deceased; does know Gabriel. Met him the night of the 15th on the road from Wingdam; thinks it was after eight o'clock. He was talking to a Chinaman.
Cross examined. Has not been told that these are the facts stated by the Chinaman. Believes a Chinaman as good as any other man. Don't know what you mean. How comes dese dings? Has noticed the prisoner used his left hand efery dime.
Dr. Pressnitz recalled. Viewed the body at nine o'clock on the 16th. The blood-stains on the linen and the body had been slightly obliterated and diluted with water, as if they had been subjected to a watery application. There was an unusually heavy dew at seven o'clock that evening, not later. Has kept a meteorological record for the last three years. Is of the opinion that this saturation might be caused by dew falling on a clot of coagulated blood. The same effect would not be noticeable on a freshly bleeding wound. The hygrometer showed no indication of a later fall of dew. The night was windy and boisterous after eight o'clock, with no humidity. Is of the opinion that the body, as seen by him, first assumed its position before eight o'clock. Would not swear positively that the deceased expired before that time. Would swear positively that the wounds were not received after eight o'clock. From the position of the wound, should say it was received while the deceased was in an upright position, and the arm raised as if in struggling. From the course of the wound should say it could not have been dealt from the left hand of an opponent. On the cross examination, Dr. Pressnitz admitted that many so-called "left-handed men" were really ambidexterous. Was of the opinion that perspiration would not have caused the saturation of the dead man's linen. The saturation was evidently after death—the blood had clotted. Dr. Pressnitz was quite certain that a dead man did not perspire.
The defence rested amid a profound sensation. Colonel Starbottle, who had recovered his jaunty spirits, apparently influenced by his animated and gallant conversation with the veiled female, rose upon his short stubby feet, and withdrawing his handkerchief from his breast, laid it upon the table before him. Then carefully placing the ends of two white pudgy fingers upon it, Colonel Starbottle gracefully threw his whole weight upon their tips, and leaning elegantly toward the veiled figure, called "Grace Conroy."
The figure arose, slight, graceful, elegant; hesitated a moment, and then slipped a lissom shadow through the crowd, as a trout glides through a shallow, and before the swaying, moving mass had settled to astonished rest, stood upon the witness-stand. Then with a quick dexterous movement she put aside the veil, that after the Spanish fashion was both bonnet and veil, and revealed a face so exquisitely beautiful and gracious, that even Manuela and Sal were awed into speechless admiration. She took the oath with downcast lids, whose sweeping fringes were so perfect that this very act of modesty seemed to the two female critics as the most artistic coquetry, and then raised her dark eyes and fixed them upon Gabriel.
Colonel Starbottle waved his hand with infinite gallantry.
"What is—er—your name?"
"Grace Conroy."
"Have you a brother by the name of Gabriel Conroy?"
"I have."
"Look around the Court and see if you can recognise him."
The witness with her eyes still fixed on Gabriel pointed him out with her gloved finger. "I do. He is there!"
"The prisoner at the bar?"
"Yes."
"He is Gabriel Conroy?"
"He is."
"How long is it since you have seen him?"
"Six years."
"Where did you see him last, and under what circumstances?"
"At Starvation Camp, in the Sierras. I left there to get help for him and my sister."
"And you have never seen him since?"
"Never!"
"Are you aware that among the—er—er—unfortunates who perished, a body that was alleged to be yours was identified?"
"Yes."
"Can you explain that circumstance?"
"Yes. When I left I wore a suit of boy's clothes. I left my own garments for Mrs. Peter Dumphy, one of our party. It was her body, clothed in my garments, that was identified as myself."
"Have you any proof of that fact other than your statement?"
"Yes. Mr. Peter Dumphy, the husband of Mrs. Dumphy, my brother Gabriel Conroy, and"——
"May it please the Court" (the voice was Arthur Poinsett's, cool, quiet, and languidly patient), "may it please the Court, we of the defence—to save your Honour and the jury some time and trouble—are willing to admit this identification of our client as Gabriel Conroy, and the witness, without further corroboration than her own word, as his sister. Your Honour and the gentlemen of the jury will not fail to recognise in the evidence of our client as to his own name and origin, a rash, foolish, and, on behalf of myself and my colleague, I must add, unadvised attempt to save the reputation of the wife he deeply loves from the equally unadvised and extraneous evidence brought forward by the prosecution. But we must insist, your Honour, that all this is impertinent to the real issue, the killing of Victor Ramirez by John Doe, alias Gabriel Conroy. Admitting the facts just testified to by the witness, Grace Conroy, we have no cross examination to make."
The fact of the witness, which had been pale and self-possessed, flushed suddenly as she turned her eyes upon Arthur Poinsett. But that self-contained scamp retained an unmoved countenance as, at Judge Boompointer's unusually gracious instruction that the witness might retire, Grace Conroy left the stand. To a question from the Court, Colonel Starbottle intimated that he should offer no further evidence in rebuttal.
"May it please the Court," said Arthur, quietly, "if we accept the impeachment by a sister of a brother on trial for his life, without comment or cross examination, it is because we are confident—legally confident—of showing the innocence of that brother by other means. Recognising the fact that this trial is not for the identification of the prisoner under any name or alias, but simply upon the issue of the fact whether he did or did not commit murder upon the body of Victor Ramirez, as specified in the indictment, we now, waiving all other issues, prepare to prove his innocence by a single witness. That this witness was not produced earlier, was unavoidable; that his testimony was not outlined in the opening, was due to the fact that only within the last half-hour had he been within the reach of the mandate of this Court. He would call Henry Perkins!"
There was a slight stir among the spectators by the door as they made way to a quaint figure that, clad in garments of a bygone fashion, with a pale, wrinkled, yellow face, and grey hair, from which the dye had faded, stepped upon the stand.
Is a translator of Spanish and searcher of deeds to the Land Commission. Is called an expert. Recognises the prisoner at the bar. Saw him only once, two days before the murder, in passing over Conroy's Hill. He was sitting on the doorstep of a deserted cabin with a little girl by his side. Saw the deceased twice. Once when he came to Don Pedro's house in San Francisco to arrange for the forgery of a grant that should invalidate one already held by the prisoner's wife. Saw the deceased again, after the forgery, on Conroy's Hill, engaged in conversation with the prisoner's wife. Deceased appeared to be greatly excited, and suddenly drew a knife and made an attack upon the prisoner's wife. Witness reached forward and interposed in defence of the woman, when the deceased turned upon him in a paroxysm of insane rage, and a struggle took place between them for the possession of the knife, witness calling for help. Witness did not succeed in wresting the knife from the hands of deceased; it required all his strength to keep himself from bodily harm. In the midst of the struggle witness heard steps approaching, and again called for help.
The witness' call was responded to by a voice in broken English, unintelligible to witness, apparently the voice of a Chinaman. At the sound of the voice and the approach of footsteps, the deceased broke from witness, and running backward a few steps, plunged the knife into his own breast and fell. Witness ran to his side and again called for help. Deceased turned upon him with a ghastly smile and said, "Bring any one here and I'll accuse you before them of my murder!" Deceased did not speak again, but fell into a state of insensibility. Witness became alarmed, reflecting upon the threat of the deceased, and did not go for help. While standing irresolutely by the body, Mrs. Conroy, the prisoner's wife, came upon him. Confessed to her the details just described, and the threat of the deceased. She advised the instant flight of the witness, and offered to go with him herself. Witness procured a horse and buggy from a livery stable, and at half-past nine at night took Mrs. Conroy from the hillside near the road, where she was waiting. Drove to Markleville that night, where he left her under an assumed name, and came alone to San Francisco and the Mission of San Antonio. Here he learned from the last witness, the prisoner's sister, Grace Conroy, of the arrest of her brother for murder. Witness at once returned to One Horse Gulch, only to find the administration of justice in the hands of a Vigilance Committee. Feeling that his own life might be sacrificed without saving the prisoner's, he took refuge in a tunnel on Conroy's Hill. It chanced to be the same tunnel which Gabriel Conroy and his friend afterwards sought in escaping from the Vigilance Committee after the earthquake. Witness, during the absence of Gabriel, made himself known to Mr. Jack Hamlin, Gabriel's friend and comrade in flight, and assured him of the witness's intention to come forward whenever a fair trial could be accorded to Gabriel. After the re-arrest and bailing of Gabriel, witness returned to San Francisco to procure evidence regarding the forged grant, and proofs of Ramirez's persecution of Mrs. Conroy. Had brought with him the knife, and had found the cutler who sold it to deceased eight months before, when deceased first meditated an assault on Mrs. Conroy. Objected to, and objection overruled by a deeply interested and excited Court.
"That is all," said Arthur.
Colonel Starbottle, seated beside Grace Conroy, did not, for a moment, respond to the impatient eyes of the audience in the hush that followed. It was not until Grace Conroy whispered a few words in his ear, that the gallant Colonel lifted his dilated breast and self-complacent face above the level of the seated counsel.
"What—er—er—was the reason—why did the—er—er—deeply anxious wife, who fled with you, and thus precipitated the arrest of her husband—why did not she return with you to clear him from suspicion? Why does she remain absent?"
"She was taken ill—dangerously ill at Markleville. The excitement and fatigue of the journey had brought on premature confinement. A child was born"——
There was a sudden stir among the group beside the prisoner's chair. Colonel Starbottle, with a hurried glance at Grace Conroy, waved his hand toward the witness and sat down. Arthur Poinsett rose. "We ask a moment's delay, your Honour. The prisoner has fallen in a fit."
CHAPTER VII.
A FAMILY GREETING.
When Gabriel opened his eyes to consciousness, he was lying on the floor of the jury room, his head supported by Olly, and a slight, graceful, womanly figure, that had been apparently bending over him, in the act of slowly withdrawing from his awakening gaze. It was his sister Grace.
"Thar, you're better now," said Olly, taking her brother's hand, and quietly ignoring her sister, on whom Gabriel's eyes were still fixed. "Try and raise yourself inter this chair. Thar—thar now—that's a good old Gabe—thar! I reckon you're more comfortable!"
"It's Gracey!" whispered Gabriel, hoarsely, with his eyes still fixed upon the slight, elegantly dressed woman, who now, leaning against the doorway, stood coldly regarding him. "It's Gracey—your sister, Olly!"
"Ef you mean the woman who hez been tryin' her best to swar away your life, and kem here allowin' to do it—she ain't no sister o' mine—not," added Olly, with a withering glance at the simple elegance of her sister's attire, "not even ef she does trapse in yer in frills and tuckers—more shame for her!"
"If you mean," said Grace, coldly, "the girl whose birthright you took away by marrying the woman who stole it, if you mean the girl who rightfully bears the name that you denied, under oath, in the very shadow of the gallows, she claims nothing of you but her name."
"Thet's so," said Gabriel, simply. He dropped his head between his great hands, and a sudden tremor shook his huge frame.
"Ye ain't goin' to be driv inter histeriks agin along o' that crockidill," said Olly, bending over her brother in alarm. "Don't ye—don't ye cry, Gabe!" whimpered Olly, as a few drops oozed between Gabriel's fingers; "don't ye take on, darling, afore her!"
The two sisters glared at each other over the helpless man between them. Then another woman entered who looked sympathetically at Gabriel and then glared at them both. It was Mrs Markle. At which, happily for Gabriel, the family bickering ceased.
"It's all over, Gabriel! you're clar!" said Mrs. Markle, ignoring the sympathies as well as the presence of the two other ladies. "Here's Mr. Poinsett."
He entered quickly, but stopped and flushed slightly under the cold eyes of Grace Conroy. But only for a moment. Coming to Gabriel's side, he said, kindly, "Gabriel, I congratulate you. The acting District Attorney has entered a nolle prosequi, and you are discharged."
"Ye mean I kin go?" said Gabriel, suddenly lifting his face.
"Yes. You are as free as air."
"And ez to her?" asked Gabriel, quickly.
"Who do you mean?" replied Arthur, involuntarily glancing in the direction of Grace, whose eyes dropped scornfully before him.
"My wife—July—is she clar too?"
"As far as this trial is concerned, yes," returned Arthur, with a trifle less interest in his voice, which Gabriel was quick to discern.
"Then I'll go," said Gabriel, rising to his feet. He made a few steps to the door and then hesitated, stopped, and turned toward Grace. As he did so his old apologetic, troubled, diffident manner returned.
"Ye'll exkoos me, miss," he said, looking with troubled eyes upon his newly-found sister, "ye'll exkoos me, ef I haven't the time now to do the agreeable and show ye over yer property on Conroy's Hill. But it's thar! It's all thar, ez Lawyer Maxwell kin testify. It's all thar and the house is open, ez it always was to ye, ez the young woman who keeps the house kin tell ye. I'd go thar with ye ef I hed time, but I'm startin' out now, to-night, to see July. To see my wife, Miss Conroy, to see July ez is expectin'! And I reckon thar'll be a baby—a pore little, helpless newborn baby—ony so long!" added Gabriel, exhibiting his forefinger as a degree of mensuration; "and ez a fammerly man, being ladies, I reckon you reckon I oughter be thar." (I grieve to state that at this moment the ladies appealed to exchanged a glance of supreme contempt, and am proud to record that Lawyer Maxwell and Mr. Poinsett exhibited the only expression of sympathy with the speaker that was noticeable in the group.)
Arthur detected it and said, I fear none the less readily for that knowledge—
"Don't let us keep you, Gabriel; we understand your feelings. Go at once."
"Take me along, Gabe," said Olly, flashing her eyes at her sister, and then turning to Gabriel with a quivering upper lip.
Gabriel turned, swooped his tremendous arm around Olly, lifted her bodily off her feet, and saying, "You're my own little girl," vanished through the doorway.
This movement reduced the group to Mrs. Markle and Grace Conroy, confronted by Mr. Poinsett and Maxwell. Mrs. Markle relieved an embarrassing silence by stepping forward and taking the arm of Lawyer Maxwell and leading him away. Arthur and Grace were left alone.
For the first time in his life Arthur lost his readiness and self-command. He glanced awkwardly at the woman before him, and felt that neither conventional courtesy nor vague sentimental recollection would be effective here.
"I am waiting for my maid," said Grace, coldly; "if, as you return to the Court-room, you will send her here, you will oblige me."
Arthur bowed confusedly.
"Your maid"——
"Yes; you know her, I think, Mr. Poinsett," continued Grace, lifting her arched brows with cold surprise. "Manuela!"
Arthur turned pale and red. He was conscious of being not only awkward but ridiculous.
"Pardon me—perhaps I am troubling you—I will go myself," said Grace, contemptuously.
"One moment, Miss Conroy," said Arthur, instinctively stepping before her as she moved as if to pass him, "one moment, I beg." He paused, and then said, with less deliberation and more impulsively than had been his habit for the last six years, "You will, perhaps, be more forgiving to your brother if you know that I, who have had the pleasure of meeting you since—you were lost to us all—I, who have not had his pre-occupation of interest in another—even I, have been as blind, as foolish, as seemingly heartless as he. You will remember this, Miss Conroy—I hope quite as much for its implied compliment to your complete disguise, and an evidence of the success of your own endeavours to obliterate your identity, as for its being an excuse for your brother's conduct, if not for my own. I did not know you."
Grace Conroy paused and raised her dark eyes to his.
"You spoke of my brother's pre-occupation with—with the woman for whom he would have sacrificed anything—me—his very life! I can—I am a woman—I can understand that! You have forgotten, Don Arturo, you have forgotten—pardon me—I am not finding fault—it is not for me to find fault—but you have forgotten—Donna Maria Sepulvida!"
She swept by him with a rustle of silk and lace, and was gone. His heart gave a sudden bound; he was about to follow her, when he was met at the door by the expanding bosom of Colonel Starbottle.
"Permit me, sir, as a gentleman, as a man of—er—er—er—honour! to congratulate you, sir! When we—er—er—parted in San Francisco I did not think that I would have the—er—er—pleasure—a rare pleasure to Colonel Starbottle, sir, in his private as well as his—er—er—public capacity, of—er—er—a PUBLIC APOLOGY. Ged, sir! I have made it! Ged, sir! when I entered that nolle pros., I said to myself, 'Star., this is an apology—an apology, sir! But you are responsible, sir, you are responsible, Star.! personally responsible!'"
"I thank you," said Arthur, abstractedly, still straining his eyes after the retreating figure of Grace Conroy, and trying to combat a sudden instinctive jealously of the man before him, "I thank you, Colonel, on behalf of my client and myself."
"Ged, sir," said Colonel Starbottle, blocking up the way, with a general expansiveness of demeanour, "Ged, sir, this is not all. You will remember that our recent interview in San Francisco was regarding another and a different issue. That, sir, I am proud to say, the developments of evidence in this trial have honourably and—er—er—as a lawyer, I may say, have legally settled. With the—er—er—identification and legal—er—er—rehabilitation of Grace Conroy, that claim of my client falls to the ground. You may state to your client, Mr. Poinsett, that—er—er—upon my own personal responsibility I abandon the claim."
Arthur Poinsett stopped and looked fixedly at the gallant Colonel. Even in his sentimental pre-occupation the professional habit triumphed.
"You withdraw Mrs. Dumphy's claim upon Mr. Dumphy?" he said, slowly.
Colonel Starbottle did not verbally reply, but that gallant warrior allowed the facial muscles on the left side of his face to relax so that one eye was partially closed.
"Yes, sir,—there is a matter of a few thousand dollars that—er—er—you understand, I am—er—er—personally responsible for."
"That will never be claimed, Colonel Starbottle," said Arthur, smiling, "and I am only echoing, I am sure, the sentiments of the man most concerned, who is approaching us—Mr. Dumphy."
CHAPTER VIII.
IN WHICH THE FOOTPRINTS RETURN.
Mr. Jack Hamlin was in very bad case. When Dr. Duchesne, who had been summoned from Sacramento, arrived, that eminent surgeon had instantly assumed such light-heartedness and levity toward his patient, such captiousness toward Pete, with an occasional seriousness of demeanour when he was alone, that, to those who knew him, it was equal to an unfavourable prognosis. Indeed, he evaded the direct questioning of Olly, who had lately constituted herself a wondrously light-footed, soft-handed assistant of Pete, until one day, when they were alone, he asked more seriously than was his wont if Mr. Hamlin had ever spoken of his relations, or if she knew of any of his friends who were accessible.
Olly had already turned this subject over in her womanly mind, and had thought once or twice of writing to the Blue Moselle, but on the direct questioning of the doctor, and its peculiar significance, she recalled Jack's confidences on their midnight ride, and the Spanish beauty he had outlined; and so one evening, when she was alone with her patient, and the fever was low, and Jack lay ominously patient and submissive, she began—what the doctor had only lately abandoned—probing a half-healed wound.
"I reckon you'd hev been a heap more comfortable ef this thing hed happened to ye down thar in San Antonio," said Olly.
Jack rolled his dark eyes wonderingly upon his fair persecutor.
"You know you'd hev had thet thar sweetheart o' yours—thet Mexican woman—sittin' by ye, instead o' me—and Pete," suggested the artful Olympia.
Jack nearly leaped from the bed.
"Do you reckon I'd hev rung myself in as a wandering cripple—a tramp thet hed got peppered—on a lady like her? Look yer, Olly," continued Mr. Hamlin, raising himself on his elbow, "if you've got the idea thet thet woman is one of them hospital sharps—one of them angels who waltz round a sick man with a bottle of camphor in one hand and a tract in the other—you had better disabuse your mind of it at once, Miss Conroy; take a back seat and wait for a new deal. And don't you go to talkin' of thet lady as my sweetheart—it's—it's—sacrilegious—and the meanest kind of a bluff."
As the day of the trial drew near, Mr. Hamlin had expressed but little interest in it, and had evidently only withheld his general disgust of Gabriel's weakness from consideration of his sister. Once Mr. Hamlin condescended to explain his apparent coldness.
"There's a witness coming, Olly, that'll clear your brother—more shame for him—the man ez did kill Ramirez. I'm keeping my sympathies for that chap. Don't you be alarmed. If that man don't come up to the scratch I will. So—don't you go whining round. And ef you'll take my advice, you'll keep clear o' that Court, and let them lawyers fight it out. It will be time enough for you to go when they send for me."
"But you can't move—you ain't strong enough," said Olly.
"I reckon Pete will get me there some way, if he has to pack me on his back. I ain't a heavy weight now," said Jack, looking sadly at his thin white hands; "I've reckoned on that, and even if I should pass in my checks, there's an affidavit already sworn to in Maxwell's hands."
Nevertheless, on the day of the trial, Olly, still doubtful of Gabriel, and still mindful of his capacity to develop "God-forsaken mulishness," was nervous and uneasy, until a messenger arrived from Maxwell with a note to Hamlin, carrying the tidings of the appearance of Perkins in Court, and closing with a request for Olly's presence.
"Who's Perkins?" asked Olly, as she reached for her hat in nervous excitement.
"He's no slouch," said Jack, sententiously. "Don't ask questions. It's all right with Gabriel now," he added, assuringly. "He's as good as clear. Run away, Miss Conroy. Hold up a minit! There, kiss me! Look here, Olly, say!—do you take any stock in that lost sister of yours that your fool of a brother is always gabbing about? You do? Well, you are as big a fool as he. There! There!—never mind now—she's turned up at last! Much good may it do you. One! two!—go!" and as Olly's pink ribbons flashed through the doorway, Mr. Hamlin lay down again with a twinkle in his eye.
He was alone. The house was very quiet and still; most of the guests, and the hostess and her assistant, were at the all-absorbing trial; even the faithful Pete, unconscious of any possible defection of his assistant, Olly, had taken the opportunity to steal away to hear the arguments of counsel. As the retreating footsteps of Olly echoed along the vacant corridor, he felt that he possessed the house completely.
This consciousness to a naturally active man, bored by illness and the continuous presence of attendants, however kind and devoted, was at first a relief. Mr. Hamlin experienced an instant desire to get up and dress himself, to do various things which were forbidden—but which now an overruling Providence had apparently placed within his reach. He rose with great difficulty, and a physical weakness that seemed altogether inconsistent with the excitement he was then feeling, and partially dressed himself. Then he was suddenly overtaken with great faintness and vertigo, and struggling to the open window, fell in a chair beside it. The cool breeze revived him for a moment, and he tried to rise, but found it impossible. Then the faintness and vertigo returned, and he seemed to be slipping away somewhere—not altogether unpleasantly, nor against his volition—somewhere where there was darkness and stillness and rest. And then he slipped back, almost instantly as it seemed to him, to a room full of excited and anxious people, all extravagantly, and as he thought, ridiculously concerned about himself. He tried to assure them that he was all right, and not feeling any worse for his exertion, but was unable to make them understand him. Then followed Night, replete with pain, and filled with familiar voices that spoke unintelligibly, and then Day, devoted to the monotonous repetition of the last word or phrase that the doctor, or Pete, or Olly had used, or the endless procession of Olly's pink ribbons, and the tremulousness of a window curtain, or the black, sphinx-like riddle of a pattern on the bed-quilt or the wall-paper. Then there was sleep that was turbulent and conscious, and wakefulness that was lethargic and dim, and then infinite weariness, and then lapses of utter vacuity—the occasional ominous impinging of the shadow of death.
But through this chaos there was always a dominant central figure—a figure partly a memory, and, as such, surrounded by consistent associations; partly a reality and incongruous with its surroundings—the figure of Donna Dolores! But whether this figure came back to Mr. Hamlin out of the dusky arches of the Mission Church in a cloud of incense, besprinkling him with holy water, or whether it bent over him, touching his feverish lips with cool drinks, or smoothing his pillow, a fact utterly unreal and preposterous seen against the pattern of the wall-paper, or sitting on the familiar chair by his bedside—it was always there. And when, one day, the figure stayed longer, and the interval of complete consciousness seemed more protracted, Mr. Hamlin, with one mighty effort, moved his lips, and said feebly—
"Donna Dolores!"
The figure started, leaned its beautiful face, blushing a celestial rosy red, above his own, put its finger to its perfect lips, and said in plain English—
"Hush! I am Gabriel Conroy's sister."
CHAPTER IX.
IN WHICH MR. HAMLIN PASSES.
With his lips sealed by the positive mandate of the lovely spectre, Mr. Hamlin resigned himself again to weakness and sleep. When he awoke, Olly was sitting by his bedside; the dusky figure of Pete, spectacled and reading a good book, was dimly outlined against the window—but that was all. The vision—if vision it was—had fled.
"Olly," said Mr. Hamlin, faintly.
"Yes!" said Olly, opening her eyes in expectant sympathy.
"How long have I been dr—I mean how long has this—spell lasted?"
"Three days," said Olly.
"The —— you say!" (A humane and possibly weak consideration for Mr. Hamlin in his new weakness and suffering restricts me to a mere outline of his extravagance of speech.)
"But you're better now," supplemented Olly.
Mr. Hamlin began to wonder faintly if his painful experience of the last twenty-four hours were a part of his convalsecence. He was silent for a few moments and then suddenly turned his face toward Olly.
"Didn't you say something about—about—your sister, the other day?"
"Yes—she's got back," said Olly, curtly.
"Here?"
"Here."
"Well?" said Mr. Hamlin, a little impatiently.
"Well," returned Olly, with a slight toss of her curls, "she's got back and I reckon it's about time she did."
Strange to say, Olly's evident lack of appreciation of her sister seemed to please Mr. Hamlin—possibly because it agreed with his own idea of Grace's superiority and his inability to recognise or accept her as the sister of Gabriel.
"Where has she been all this while?" asked Jack, rolling his large hollow eyes over Olly.
"Goodness knows! Says she's bin livin' in some fammerly down in the South—Spanish, I reckon; thet's whar she gits those airs and graces."
"Has she ever been here—in this room?" asked Mr. Hamlin.
"Of course she has," said Olly. "When I left you to go with Gabe to see his wife at Wingdam, she volunteered to take my place. Thet waz while you waz flighty, Mr. Hamlin. But I reckon she admired to stay here on account of seein' her bo!"
"Her what?" asked Mr. Hamlin, feeling the blood fast rushing to his colourless face.
"Her bo," repeated Olly, "thet thar Ashley, or Poinsett—or whatever he calls hisself now!"
Mr. Hamlin here looked so singular, and his hand tightened so strongly around Olly's, that she hurriedly repeated to him the story of Grace's early wanderings, and her absorbing passion for their former associate, Arthur Poinsett. The statement was, in Olly's present state of mind, not favourable to Grace. "And she just came up yer only to see Arthur agin. Thet's all. And she nearly swearin' her brother's life away—and pretendin' it was only done to save the fammerly name. Jest ez if it hed been any more comfortable fur Gabriel to have been hung in his own name. And then goin' and accusin' thet innocent ole lamb, Gabe, of conspiring with July to take her name away. Purty goin's on, I reckon. And thet man Poinsett, by her own showin'—never lettin' on to see her nor us—nor anybody. And she sassin' me for givin' my opinion of him—and excusin' him by sayin' she didn't want him to know whar she was. And she refusin' to see July at all—and pore July lyin' thar at Wingdam, sick with a new baby. Don't talk to me about her!"
"But your sister didn't run away with—with—this chap. She went away to bring you help," interrupted Jack, hastily dragging Olly back to earlier history.
"Did she? Couldn't she trust her bo to go and get help and then come back fur her?—reckonin' he cared for her at all. No, she waz thet crazy after him she couldn't trust him outer her sight—and she left the camp and Gabe and ME for him. And then the idee of her talking to Gabriel about bein' disgraced by July. Ez ef she had never done anythin' to spile her own name, and puttin' on such airs and"——
"Dry up!" shouted Mr. Hamlin, turning with sudden savageness upon his pillow. "Dry up!—don't you see you're driving me half-crazy with your infernal buzzing?" He paused, as Olly stopped in mingled mortification and alarm, and then added in milder tones, "There, that'll do. I am not feeling well to-day. Send Dr. Duchesne to me if he's here. Stop one moment—there! good-bye, go!"
Olly had risen promptly. There was always something in Mr. Hamlin's positive tones that commanded an obedience that she would have refused to any other. Thoroughly convinced of some important change in Mr. Hamlin's symptoms, she sought the doctor at once. Perhaps she brought with her some of her alarm and anxiety, for a moment later that distinguished physician entered with less deliberation than was his habit. He walked to the bedside of his patient, and would have taken his hand, but Jack slipped his tell-tale pulse under the covers, and looking fixedly at the doctor, said—
"Can I be moved from here?"
"You can, but I should hardly advise"——
"I didn't ask that. This is a lone hand I'm playin', doctor, and if I'm euchred, tain't your fault. How soon?"
"I should say," said Dr. Duchesne, with professional caution, "that if no bad symptoms supervene" (he made here a half habitual but wholly ineffectual dive for Jack's pulse), "you might go in a week."
"I must go now!"
Dr. Duchesne bent over his patient. He was a quick as well as a patiently observing man, and he saw something in Jack's face that no one else had detected. Seeing this he said, "You can go now, at a great risk—the risk of your life."
"I'll take it!" said Mr. Hamlin, promptly. "I've been playin' agin odds," he added, with a faint but audacious smile, "for the last six months, and it's no time to draw out now. Go on, tell Pete to pack up and get me ready."
"Where are you going?" asked the doctor, quietly, still gazing at his patient.
"To!—blank!" said Mr. Hamlin, impulsively. Then recognising the fact that in view of his having travelling companions, some more definite and practicable locality was necessary, he paused a moment, and said, "To the Mission of San Antonio."
"Very well," said the doctor, gravely.
Strange to say, whether from the doctor's medication, or from the stimulus of some reserved vitality hitherto unsuspected, Mr. Hamlin from that moment rallied. The preparations for his departure were quickly made, and in a few hours he was ready for the road.
"I don't want to have anybody cacklin' around me," he said, in deprecation of any leave-taking. "I leave the board, they can go on with the game."
Notwithstanding which, at the last moment, Gabriel hung awkwardly and heavily around the carriage in which the invalid was seated.
"I'd foller arter ye, Mr. Hamlin, in a buggy," he interpolated, in gentle deprecation of his unwieldy and difficult bulk, "but I'm sorter kept yer with my wife—who is powerful weak along of a pore small baby—about so long—the same not bein' a fammerly man yourself, you don't kinder get the hang of. I thought it might please ye to know that I got bail yesterday for thet Mr. Perkins—ez didn't kill that thar Ramirez—the same havin' killed hisself—ez waz fetched out on the trial, which I reckon ye didn't get to hear. I admire to see ye lookin' so well, Mr. Hamlin, and I'm glad Olly's goin' with ye. I reckon Grace would hev gone too, but she's sorter skary about strangers, hevin' bin engaged these seving years to a young man by the name o' Poinsett ez waz one o' my counsel, and hevin' lately had a row with the same—one o' them lovers' fights—which bein' a young man yourself, ye kin kindly allow for."
"Drive on!" imprecated Mr. Hamlin furiously to the driver; "what are you waiting for?" and with the whirling wheels Gabriel dropped off apologetically in a cloud of dust, and Mr. Hamlin sack back exhaustedly on the cushions.
Notwithstanding, as he increased his distance from One Horse Gulch, his spirits seemed to rise, and by the time they had reached San Antonio he had recovered his old audacity and dash of manner, and raised the highest hopes in the breast of everybody but—his doctor. Yet that gentleman, after a careful examination of his patient one night, said privately to Pete, "I think this exaltation will last about three days longer. I am going to San Francisco. At the end of that time I shall return—unless you telegraph to me before that." He parted gaily from his patient, and seriously from everybody else. Before he left he sought out Padre Felipe. "I have a patient here, in a critical condition," said the doctor; "the hotel is no place for him. Is there any family here—any house that will receive him under your advice for a week? At the end of that time he will be better, or beyond our ministration. He is not a Protestant—he is nothing. You have had experience with the heathen, Father Felipe."
Father Felipe looked at Dr. Duchesne. The doctor's well-earned professional fame had penetrated even San Antonio; the doctor's insight and intelligence were visible in his manner, and touched the Jesuit instantly. "It is a strange case, my son; a sad case," he said, thoughtfully. "I will see."
He did. The next day, under the direction of Father Felipe, Mr. Hamlin was removed to the Rancho of the Blessed Fisherman, and notwithstanding the fact that its hostess was absent, was fairly installed as its guest. When Mrs. Sepulvida returned from her visit to San Francisco, she was at first astonished, then excited, and then, I fear, gratified.
For she at once recognised in this guest of Father Felipe the mysterious stranger whom she had, some weeks ago, detected on the plains of the Blessed Trinity. And Jack, despite his illness, was still handsome, and had, moreover, the melancholy graces of invalidism, which go far with an habitually ailing sex. And so she coddled Mr. Hamlin, and gave him her sacred hammock by day over the porch, and her best bedroom at night. And then, at the close of a pleasant day, she said, archly—
"I think I have seen you before, Mr. Hamlin—at the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity. You remember—the house of Donna Dolores?"
Mr. Hamlin was too observant of the sex to be impertinently mindful of another woman than his interlocutor, and assented with easy indifference.
Donna Maria (now thoroughly convinced that Mr. Hamlin's attentions on that eventful occasion were intended for herself, and even delightfully suspicious of some pre-arranged plan in his present situation): "Poor Donna Dolores! You know we have lost her for ever."
Mr. Hamlin asked, "When?"
"That dreadful earthquake on the 8th."
Mr. Hamlin, reflecting that the appearance of Grace Conroy was on the 10th, assented again abstractly.
"Ah, yes! so sad! And yet, perhaps, for the best. You know the poor girl had a hopeless passion for her legal adviser—the famous Arthur Poinsett! Ah! you did not? Well, perhaps it was only merciful that she died before she knew how insincere that man's attentions were. You are a believer in special Providences, Mr. Hamlin?"
Mr. Hamlin (doubtfully): "You mean a run of luck?"
Donna Maria (rapidly, ignoring Mr. Hamlin's illustration): "Well, perhaps I have reason to say so. Poor Donna Dolores was my friend. Yet, would you believe there were people—you know how ridiculous is the gossip of a town like this—there are people who believed that he was paying attention to ME!"
Mrs. Sepulvida hung her head archly. There was a long pause. Then Mr. Hamlin called faintly—
"Pete!"
"Yes, Mars Jack."
"Ain't it time to take that medicine?"
When Dr. Duchesne returned he ignored all this little byplay, and even the anxious inquiries of Olly, and said to Mr. Hamlin—
"Have you any objection to my sending for Dr. Mackintosh—a devilish clever fellow?"
And Mr. Hamlin had none. And so, after a private telegram, Dr. Mackintosh arrived, and for three or four hours the two doctors talked in an apparently unintelligible language, chiefly about a person whom Mr. Hamlin was satisfied did not exist. And when Dr. Mackintosh left, Dr. Duchesne, after a very earnest conversation with him on their way to the stage office, drew a chair beside Mr. Hamlin's bed.
"Jack!"
"Yes, sir."
"Have you got everything fixed—all right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Jack!"
"Yes, sir."
"You've made Pete very happy this morning."
Jack looked up at Dr. Duchesne's critical face, and the doctor went on gravely—
"Confessing religion to him—saying you believed as he did!"
A faint laugh glimmered in the dark hollows of Jack's eyes.
"The old man," he said, explanatory, "has been preachin' mighty heavy at me ever since t'other doctor came, and I reckoned it might please him to allow that everything he said was so. You see the old man's bin right soft on me, and between us, doctor, I ain't much to give him in exchange. It's no square game!"
"Then you believe you're going to die?" said the doctor, gravely.
"I reckon."
"And you have no directions to give me?"
"There's a black hound at Sacramento—Jim Briggs, who borrowed and never gave back my silver-mounted Derringers, that I reckoned to give to you! Tell him he'd better give them up or I'll"——
"Jack," interrupted Dr. Duchesne, with infinite gentleness, laying his hand on the invalid's arm, "you must not think of me."
Jack pressed his friend's hand.
"There's my diamond pin up the spout at Wingdam, and the money gone to Lawyer Maxwell to pay witnesses for that old fool Gabriel. And then when Gabriel and me was escaping I happened to strike the very man, Perkins, who was Gabriel's principal witness, and he was dead broke, and I had to give him my solitaire ring to help him get away and be on hand for Gabriel. And Olly's got my gold specimen to be made into a mug for that cub of that old she tiger—Gabriel's woman—that Madame Devarges. And my watch—who has got my watch?" said Mr. Hamlin, reflectively.
"Never mind those things, Jack. Have you any word to send—to—anybody?"
"No."
There was a long pause. In the stillness the ticking of a clock on the mantel became audible. Then there was a laugh in the ante-room, where a professional brother of Jack's had been waiting, slightly under the influence of grief and liquor.
"Scotty ought to know better than to kick up a row in a decent woman's house," whispered Jack, faintly. "Tell him to dry up, or I'll"——
But his voice was failing him, and the sentence remained incomplete.
"Doc——" (after a long effort).
"Jack."
"Don't—let—on—to Pete—I fooled—him."
"No, Jack."
They were both still for several minutes. And then Dr. Duchesne softly released his hand and laid that of his patient, white and thin, upon the coverlid before him. Then he rose gently and opened the door of the ante-room. Two or three eager faces confronted him. "Pete," he said, gravely, "I want Pete—no one else."
The old negro entered with a trembling step. And then catching sight of the white face on the pillow, he uttered one cry—a cry replete with all the hysterical pathos of his race, and ran and dropped on his knees beside—it! And then the black and the white face were near together, and both were wet with tears.
Dr. Duchesne stepped forward and would have laid his hand gently upon the old servant's shoulder. But he stopped, for suddenly both of the black hands were lifted wildly in the air, and the black face with rapt eyeballs turned toward the ceiling, as if they had caught sight of the steadfast blue beyond. Perhaps they had.
"O de Lord God! whose prechiss blood washes de brack sheep and de white sheep all de one colour! O de Lamb ob God! Sabe, sabe dis por', dis por' boy. O Lord God, for MY sake. O de Lord God, dow knowst fo' twenty years Pete, ole Pete, has walked in dy ways—has found de Lord and Him crucified!—and has been dy servant. O de Lord God—O de bressed Lord, ef it's all de same to you, let all dat go fo' nowt. Let ole Pete go! and send down dy mercy and forgiveness fo' him!"
CHAPTER X.
IN THE OLD CABIN AGAIN.
There was little difficulty in establishing the validity of Grace Conroy's claim to the Conroy grant under the bequest of Dr. Devarges. Her identity was confirmed by Mr. Dumphy—none the less readily that it relieved him of a distressing doubt about the late Mrs. Dumphy, and did not affect his claim to the mineral discovery which he had purchased from Gabriel and his wife. It was true that since the dropping of the lead the mine had been virtually abandoned, and was comparatively of little market value. But Mr. Dumphy still clung to the hope that the missing lead would be discovered.
He was right. It was some weeks after the death of Mr. Hamlin that Gabriel and Olly stood again beneath the dismantled roof-tree and bare walls of his old cabin on Conroy Hill. But the visit this time was not one of confidential disclosure nor lonely contemplation, but with a practical view of determining whether this first home of the brother and sister could be repaired and made habitable, for Gabriel had steadily refused the solicitations of Grace that he should occupy his more recent mansion. Mrs. Conroy and infant were at the hotel.
"Thar, Olly," said Gabriel, "I reckon that a cartload o' boards and a few days' work with willin' hands, will put that thar shanty back ag'in ez it used to be when you and me waz childun."
"Yes," said Olly, abstractedly.
"We've had good times yer, Olly, you and me!"
"Yes," said Olly, with eyes still afar.
Gabriel looked down—a great way—on his sister, and then suddenly took her hand and sat down upon the doorstep, drawing her between his knees after the old fashion.
"Ye ain't hearkenin' to me, Olly dear!"
Whereat Miss Olympia instantly and illogically burst into tears, and threw her small arms about Gabriel's huge bulk. She had been capricious and fretful since Mr. Hamlin's death, and it may be that she embraced the dead man again in her brother's arms. Hut her outward expression was, "Gracey! I was thinking o' poor Gracey, Gabe!"
"Then," said Gabriel, with intense archness and cunning, "you was thinkin' o' present kempany, for ef I ain't blind, that's them coming up the hill."
There were two figures slowly coming up the hill outlined against the rosy sunset. A man and woman—Arthur Poinsett and Grace Conroy. Olly lifted her head and rose to her feet. They approached nearer. No one spoke. The next instant—impulsively I admit, inconsistently I protest—the sisters were in each other's arms. The two men looked at each other, awkward, reticent, superior.
Then the women having made quick work of it, the two men were treated to an equally illogical, inconsistent embrace. When Grace at last, crying and laughing, released Gabriel's neck from her sweet arms, Mr. Poinsett assumed the masculine attitude of pure reason.
"Now that you have found your sister, permit me to introduce you to my wife," he said to Gabriel, taking Grace's hand in his own.
Whereat Olly flew into Poinsett's arms, and gave him a fraternal and conciliatory kiss. Tableau.
"You don't look like a bride," said the practical Olly to Mrs. Poinsett, under her breath; "you ain't got no veil, no orange blossoms—and that black dress"——
"We've been married seven years, Olly," said the quick-eared and ready-witted Arthur.
And then these people began to chatter as if they had always been in the closest confidence and communion.
"You know," said Grace to her brother, "Arthur and I are going East, to the States, to-morrow, and really, Gabe, he says he will not leave here until you consent to take back your house—your wife's house, Gabe. You know WE" (there was a tremendous significance in this newly-found personal plural), "WE have deeded it all to you."
"I hev a dooty to per-form to Gracey," said Gabriel Conroy, with astute deliberation, looking at Mr. Poinsett, "a dooty to thet gal, thet must be done afore any transfer of this yer proputty is made. I hev to make restitution of certain papers ez hez fallen casooally into my hands. This yer paper," he added, drawing a soiled yellow envelope from his pocket, "kem to me a week ago, the same hevin' lied in the Express Office sens the trial. It belongs to Gracey, I reckon, and I hands it to her."
Grace tore open the envelope, glanced at its contents hurriedly, uttered a slight cry of astonishment, blushed, and put the paper into her pocket.
"This yer paper," continued Gabriel, gravely, drawing another from his blouse, "was found by me in the Empire Tunnel the night I was runnin' from the lynchers. It likewise b'longs to Gracey—and the world gin'rally. It's the record of Dr. Devarges' fust discovery of the silver lead on this yer hill, and," continued Gabriel, with infinite gravity, "wipes out, so to speak, this yer mineral right o' me and Mr. Dumphy and the stockholders gin'rally."
It was Mr. Poinsett's turn to take the paper from Gabriel's hands. He examined it attentively by the fading light. "That is so," he said, earnestly; "it is quite legal and valid."
"And thar ez one paper more," continued Gabriel, this time putting his hand in his bosom and drawing out a buckskin purse, from which he extracted a many-folded paper. "It's the grant that Dr. Devarges gave Gracey, thet thet pore Mexican Ramirez ez—maybe ye may remember—waz killed, handed to my wife, and July, my wife"—said Gabriel, with a prodigious blush—"hez been sorter keepin' IN TRUST for Gracey!"
He gave the paper to Arthur, who received it, but still retained a warm grasp of Gabriel's massive hand.
"And now," added Gabriel, "et's gettin' late, and I reckon et's about the square thing ef we'd ad-journ this yer meeting to the hotel, and ez you're goin' away, maybe ye'd make a partin' visit with yer wife, forgettin' and forgivin' like, to Mrs. Conroy and the baby—a pore little thing—that ye wouldn't believe it, Mr. Poinsett, looks like me!"
But Olly and Grace had drawn aside, and were in the midst of an animated conversation. And Grace was saying—
"So I took the stone from the fire, just as I take this" (she picked up a fragment of the crumbling chimney before her); "it looked black and burnt just like this; and I rubbed it hard on the blanket so, and it shone, just like silver, and Dr. Devarges said"——
"We are going, Grace," interrupted her husband, "we are going to see Gabriel's wife." Grace hesitated a moment, but as her husband took her arm he slightly pressed it with a certain matrimonial caution, whereupon with a quick impulsive gesture, Grace held out her hand to Olly, and the three gaily followed the bowed figure of Gabriel, as he strode through the darkening woods.
CHAPTER XI.
THE RETURN OF A FOOTPRINT.
I regret that no detailed account of the reconciliatory visit to Mrs. Conroy has been handed down, and I only gather a hint of it from after comments of the actors themselves. When the last words of parting had been said, and Grace and Arthur had taken their seats in the Wingdam coach, Gabriel bent over his wife's bedside,—
"It kinder seemed ez ef you and Mr. Poinsett recognised each other at first, July," said Gabriel.
"I have seen him before—not here! I don't think he'll ever trouble us much, Gabriel," said Mrs. Conroy, with a certain triumphant lighting of the cold fires of her grey eyes. "But look at the baby. He's laughing! He knows you, I declare!" And in Gabriel's rapt astonishment at this unprecedented display of intelligence in one so young, the subject was dropped.
"Why, where did you ever see Mrs. Conroy before?" asked Grace of her husband, when they had reached Wingdam that night.
"I never saw Mrs. Conroy before," returned Arthur, with legal precision. "I met a lady in St. Louis years ago under another name, who, I dare say, is now your brother's wife. But—I think, Grace—the less we see of her—the better."
"Why?"
"By the way, darling, what was that paper that Gabriel gave you?" asked Arthur, lightly, avoiding the previous question.
Grace drew the paper from her pocket, blushed slightly, kissed her husband, and then putting her arms around his neck, laid her face in his breast, while he read aloud, in Spanish, the following:—
"This is to give trustworthy statement that on the 18th of May 1848, a young girl, calling herself Grace Conroy, sought shelter and aid at the Presidio of San Geronimo. Being friendless—but of the B. V. M. and the Saints—I adopted her as my daughter, with the name of Dolores Salvatierra. Six months after her arrival, on the 12th of November 1848, she was delivered of a dead child, the son of her affianced husband, one Philip Ashley. Wishing to keep her secret from the world and to prevent recognition by the members of her own race and family, by the assistance and advice of an Indian peon, Manuela, she consented that her face and hands should be daily washed by the juice of the Yokoto—whose effect is to change the skin to the colour of bronze. With this metamorphosis she became known, by my advice and consent, as the daughter of the Indian Princess Nicata and myself. And as such I have recognised in due form her legal right in the appointment of my estate.
"Given at the Presidio of San Geronimo, this 1st day of December 1848.
"Juan Hermenizildo Salvatierra."
"But how did Gabriel get this?" asked Arthur.
"I—don't—know!" said Grace.
"To whom did you give it?"
"To—Padre Felipe."
"Oh, I see!" said Arthur. "Then you are Mr. Dumphy's long-lost wife?"
"I don't know what Father Felipe did," said Grace, tossing her head slightly. "I put the matter in his hands."
"The whole story?"
"I said nothing about you—you great goose!"
Arthur kissed her by way of acknowledging the justice of the epithet.
"But I ought to have told Mrs. Sepulvida the whole story when she said you proposed to her. You're sure you didn't?" continued Grace, looking into her husband's eyes.
"Never," said the admirable young man, promptly.
CHAPTER XII.
FRAGMENT OF A LETTER FROM OLYMPIA CONROY TO GRACE POINSETT.
"——the baby is doing well. And only think—Gabe has struck it again! And you was the cause, dear—and he says it all belongs to you—like the old mule that he is. Don't you remember when you was telling me about Doctor Divergers giving you that rock and how you rubed it until the silver shone, well, you took up a rock from our old chimbly and rubed it, while you was telling it. And thet rock Gabe came across next morning, all shining where you had rubed it. And shure enuff it was sollid silver. And then Gabe says, says he, 'We've struck it agin, fur the chimbly rock was taken from the first hole I dug on the hill only a hundred feet from here.' And shure enuff, yesterday he purspected the hole and found the leed agin. And we are all very ritch agin and comin' to see you next yeer, only that Gabe is such a fool! Your loving Sister,
"Olympia Conroy."