Tomorrow's tangle

by Geraldine Bonner

PROLOGUE

TOMORROW’S TANGLE

CHAPTER I
THE DESERT

“To every man a damsel or two.”

—Judges.

The vast, gray expanse of the desert lay still as a picture in the heat of the early afternoon. The silence of waste places held it. It was gaunt and sterile, clad with a drab growth of sage, flat as a table, and with the white scurf of the alkali breaking through its parched skin. It was the earth, lean, sapless, and marked with disease. A chain of purple hills looked down on its dead level, over which a wagon road passed like a scar across a haggard face. From the brazen arch of the sky heat poured down and was thrown back from the scorched surface of the land. It was August in the Utah Desert in the early fifties.

In the silence and deadness of the scene there was one point of life. The canvas top of an emigrant wagon made a white spot on the monotone of gray. At noon there had been but one shadow in the desert and this was that beneath the wagon which was stationary in the road. Now the sun was declining from the zenith and the shadow was broadening; first a mere edge, then a substantial margin of shade.

In it two women were crouched watching a child that lay gasping. Some distance away beside his two horses, a man sat on the ground, his hat over his eyes.

One of the thousand tragedies the desert had seen was being enacted. Crushed between that dead indifference of earth and sky, its participators seemed to feel the hopelessness of movement or plaint and sat dumb, all but the child, who was dying with that solemn aloofness to surroundings, of which only those who are passing know the secret. His loud breathing sounded like a defiance in the silence of that savagely unsympathizing nature. The man, the women, the horses, were like part of the picture in their mute immobility, only the dying child dared defy it.

He was a pretty boy of three, and had succumbed to one of the slight, juvenile ailments that during the rigors of the overland march developed tragic powers of death. His mother sat beside him staring at him. She was nineteen years of age and had been married four years before to the man who sat in the shadow of the horses. She looked forty, tanned, haggard, half clad. Dazed by hardship and the blow that had just fallen, she had the air of a stupefied animal. She said nothing and made no attempt to alleviate the sufferings of her first-born.

The other woman was some ten years older, and was a buxom, handsome creature, large-framed, capable, stalwart—a woman built for struggles and endurance—the mate of the pioneer. She, too, was the wife of the man who sat by the horses. He was of the Mormon faith, which he had joined a year before for the purpose of marrying her.

The sun sloped its burning course across the pale sky. The edges of the desert shimmered through veils of heat. Far on the horizon the mirage of a blue lake, with little waves creeping up a crescent of sand, painted itself on the quivering air. The shadow of the wagon stealthily advanced. Suddenly the child moved, drew a fluttering breath or two, and died. The two women leaned forward, the mother helplessly; the other, with a certain prompt decision that marked all her movements, felt of the pulse and heart.

“It’s all over, Lucy,” she said bruskly, but not unkindly; “I guess you’d better get into the wagon; Jake and I’ll do everything.”

The girl rose slowly like a person accustomed to obey, moved to the back of the wagon, and climbed in.

The man, who had seen this sudden flutter of activity, pushed back his hat and looked at his wives, but did not move or speak. The second wife covered the dead child with her apron, and approached him.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Oh!” he answered.

“We must bury him,” was her next remark.

“Well, all right,” he assented.

He went to the wagon and detached from beneath it a spade. Then he walked a few rods away and, clearing a space in the sage, began to dig. The woman prepared the child for burial. The silence that had been disturbed resettled, broken at intervals by the thud of the spade. The heat began to lessen and a still serenity to possess the barren landscape. The desert had received its tribute and was appeased.

The rites of the burial were nearly completed, when a sound from the wagon attracted the attention of the man and the woman. They stopped, listened and exchanged a glance of alarmed intelligence. The woman walked to the wagon rapidly, and exchanged a few remarks with the other wife. Her voice came to the man low and broken. He did not hear what she said, but he thought he knew the purport of her words. As he shoveled the earth into the grave his brow was contracted. He looked angrily harassed. The second wife came toward him, her sunburnt face set in an expression of frowning anxiety.

“Yes,” she said, in answer to his look, “she feels very bad. We got to stop here. We can’t go on now.”

He made no answer, but went on building up the mound over the grave. He was younger by a year or two than the woman with whom he spoke, but it was easy to be seen that of her, as of all pertaining to him, he was absolute master. She watched him for a moment as if waiting for an order, then, receiving none, said:

“I’d better go back to her. I wish a train’d come by with a doctor. She ain’t got much strength.”

He vouchsafed no answer, and she returned to the wagon, and this time climbed in.

He continued to build up and shape the mound with sedulous and evidently absent-minded care. The sweat poured off his forehead and his bare, brown throat and breast. He was a lean but powerful man, worn away by the journey to bone and muscle, but of an iron fiber. He had no patience with those who hampered his forward march by sickness or feebleness.

When he had finished the mound the sun was declining toward the tops of the distant mountains. The first color of its setting was inflaming the sky and painting the desert in tones of strange, hot brilliancy. The vast, grim expanse took on a tropical aspect. Against the lurid background the chain of hills turned a transparent amethyst, and the livid earth, with its leprous eruption, was transformed into a pale lilac-blue. Presently the thin, clear red of the sunset was pricked by a white star-point. And in the midst of this vivid blending of limpid primary colors, the fire the man had kindled sent a fine line of smoke straight up into the air.

The second wife came out of the wagon to help him get the supper and to eat hers. They talked a little in low voices as they ate, drawn away from the heat of the fire. The man showed symptoms of fatigue; but the powerful woman was unconquered in her stubborn, splendid vigor. When she had left him, he lay down on the sand with his face on his arm and was soon asleep. The sounds of dole that came from the wagon did not wake him, nor disturb the deep dreamlessness of his exhausted rest. The night was half spent, when he was wakened by the woman shaking his shoulder. He looked up at her stupidly for a minute, seeing her head against the deep blue sky with its large white stars.

“It’s over. It’s a little girl. But Lucy’s pretty bad.”

He sat up, fully awake now, and in the stillness of the night heard the cat-like mew of the new-born. The canvas arch of the wagon glowed with a fiery effect from the lighted lanterns within.

“Is she dying?” he said hurriedly.

“No—not’s bad as that. But she’s terribly low. We’ll have to stay here with her till she pulls up some. We can’t move on with her this way.”

He rose and, going to the wagon, looked in through the opened flap. His wife was lying with her eyes closed, waxen pale in the smoky lantern-light. The sight of her shocked him into a sudden spasm of feeling. She had been a fresh and pretty girl of fifteen when he had married her, four years before at St. Louis. He wondered if her father, who had given her to him then, would have known her now. In an excess of careless pity he laid his hand on her and said:

“Well, Lucy, how d’ye feel?”

She shrank from his touch and tried to draw a corner of the blanket, on which her head rested, over her face.

He turned away and walked back to the fire, saying to the second wife:

“I guess she’ll be able to go on to-morrow. She can stay in the wagon all the time. I don’t want to run no risks ’er gittin’ caught in the snows on the Sierra. I guess she’ll pull herself together all right in a few days. I’ve seen her worse ’n that.”

CHAPTER II
STRIKING A BARGAIN

“How the world is made for each of us!

How all we perceive and know in it

Tends to some moments’ product thus,

When a soul declares itself—to wit:

By its fruit, the thing it does!”

—Browning.

Where the foothills fold back upon one another in cool, blue shadows, and the tops of the Sierra, brushed with snow, look down on a rugged rampart of mountains falling away to a smiling plain, Dan Moreau and his partner had been working a stream bed since June. Placerville—still Hangtown—though already past the feverish days of its first youth, was some twenty-five miles to the southwest. A few miles to the south the emigrant trail from Carson crawled over the shoulder of the Sierra. Small trails broke from the parent one and trickled down from the summit, by “the line of least resistance,” to the outposts of civilization that were planted here and there on foothill and valley.

The cañon where Moreau and his “pard” were at work was California, virgin and unconquered. The forty-niners had passed it by in their eager rush for fortune. Yet the narrow gulch, that steamed at midday with heated airs and was steeped in the pungent fragrance which California exhales beneath the ardors of the sun, was yielding the two miners a good supply of gold. Their pits had honeycombed the stream’s banks far up and down. Now, in September, the water had dwindled to a silver thread, and they had dammed it near the rocker into a miniature lake, into which Fletcher—Moreau’s partner—plunged his dipper with untiring regularity, at the same time moving the rocker which filled the hot silence of the cañon with its lazy monotonous rattle.

They had been working with little cessation since early June. The richness of their claim and the prospect that the first snows would put an end to labors and profits had spurred them to unremitting exertion. In a box under Moreau’s bunk there were six small buckskin sacks of dust, joint profits of the summer’s toil.

Moreau, a muscular, fair-haired giant of a man, was that familiar figure of the early days—the gentleman miner. He was a New Englander of birth and education, who had come to California in the first rush, with a little fortune wherewith to make a great one. Luck had not been with him. This was his first taste of success. Five months before he had picked up a “pard” in Sacramento, and after the careless fashion of the time, when no one sought to inquire too closely into another’s antecedents, joined forces with him and spent a wandering spring, prospecting from bar to bar and camp to camp. The casual words of an Indian had directed them to the cañon where now the creak of their rocker filled the hot, drowsy days.

Of Harney Fletcher, Moreau knew nothing. He had met him in a lodging-house in Sacramento, and the partnership proved to be a successful one. What the New Englander furnished in money, the other made up in practical experience and general handiness. It was Fletcher who had constructed the rocker on an improved model of his own. His had been the directing brain as well as the assisting hand which had built the cabin of logs that surveyed the stream bed from a knoll above. The last remnants of Moreau’s fortune had stocked it well, and there were two good horses in the brush shed behind it.

It was now September, and the leaves of the aspens that grew along the stream bed were yellowing. But the air was warm and golden with sunshine. Above, in the high places of the Sierra, where the emigrant trail crept along the edges of ravines and crawled up the mighty flank of the wall that shuts the garden of California from the desert beyond, the snow was already deep. Fletcher, who had gone into Hangtown the week before for provisions, had come back full of stories of the swarms of emigrants pouring down the main road and its branching trails, higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell, hungry, gaunt, half clad, in their wild rush to enter the land of promise.

There was no suggestion of winter here. The hot air was steeped in the aromatic scents that the sun draws from the mighty pines which clothe the foothills. At midday the little gulley where the men worked was heavy with them. All about them was strangely silent. The pines rising rank on rank stirred to no passing breezes. There was no bird note, and the stream had shrunk so that its spring-time song had become a whisper. Heat and silence held the long days, when the red dust lay motionless on the trail above, and the noise made by the rocker sounded strangely intrusive and loud in the enchanted stillness that held the landscape.

On an afternoon like this the men were working in the stream bed—Moreau in the pit, Fletcher at his place by the rocker. There was no conversation between them. The picture-like dumbness of their surroundings seemed to have communicated itself to them. Far above, glittering against the blue, the white peaks of the Sierra looked down on them from remote, aërial heights. The tiny thread of water gleamed in its wide, unoccupied bed. Save the men, the only moving thing in sight was a hawk that hung poised in the sky above, its winged shadow floating forward and pausing on the slopes of the gulch.

Into this spellbound silence a sound suddenly broke—a sound unexpected and unwished for—that of a human voice. It was a man’s, harsh and loud, evidently addressing cattle. With it came the creak of wheels. The two partners listened, amazed and irresolute. The trail that passed their cabin was an almost unknown offshoot from the main highway. Then, the sounds growing clearer, they scrambled up the bank. Coming down the road they saw the curved top of a prairie schooner that formed a background for the forms of two skeleton horses, beside which walked a man who urged them on with shouts and blows. Wagon and horses were enveloped in a cloud of red dust.

At the moment that the miners saw this unwelcome sight, one of the wretched beasts stumbled, and pitching forward, fell with what sounded like a human groan. The man, with an oath, went to it and gave it a kick. But it was too far spent to rally, and settling on its side, lay gasping. A woman, stout and sunburned, ran round from the back of the cart, with a face of angry consternation. As Moreau approached, he heard her say to the man who, with oaths and blows, was attempting to drag the horse to its feet:

“Oh, it ain’t no use doing that. Don’t you see it’s dying?”

Moreau saw that she was right. The animal was in its death throes. As he came up he said, without preliminaries:

“Take off its harness, the poor brute’s done for,” and began to unbuckle the rags of harness which held it to the wagon.

The man and woman turned, startled, and saw him. Looking back they saw Fletcher, who was coming slowly, and evidently not very willingly, forward. The sight of the exhausted pioneers was a too familiar one to interest him. The dying horse claimed a lazy cast of his indifferent eye. Moreau and the man loosed the harness, lifted the pole, and let the creature lie free from encumbrance. The other horse, freed, too, stood drooping, too spent to move from where it had stopped. If other testimony were needed of the terrible journey they were ending, one saw it in the gaunt face of the man, scorched by sun, seamed with lines, with a fringe of ragged beard, and long locks of unkempt hair hanging from beneath his miserable hat.

This stoppage of his journey with the promised land in sight seemed to exasperate him to a point where he evidently feared to speak. With eyes full of savage despair he stood looking at the horse. Both he and the woman seemed so overpowered by the calamity that they had no attention to give to the two strangers, but stood side by side, staring morosely at the animal.

“What’ll we do?” she said hopelessly. “Spotty,” indicating the other horse, “ain’t no use alone.”

Moreau spoke up encouragingly.

“Why don’t you leave the wagon and the other horse here? You can walk into Hangtown by easy stages. The Porter ranch is only twelve miles from here and you can stay there all night. The poor beast can’t do much more, and we’ll feed it and take care of your other things while you’re gone.”

“Oh, damn it, we can’t!” said the man furiously.

As if in explanation of this remark, a woman suddenly appeared at the open front of the wagon. She had evidently been lying within it, and had not risen until now.

When Moreau looked at her he experienced a violent thrill of pity, that the evident sufferings of the others had not evoked. He was a man of a deeply tender and sympathetic nature toward all that was helpless and weak. As his glance met the face of this woman, he thought she was the most piteous object he had ever seen.

“You’d better come into the cabin,” he said, “and see what you can do. You can’t go on now, and you look pretty well used up.”

The man gave a grunt of assent, and taking the other horse by the head began to lead it toward the cabin, being noticeably careful to steer it out of the way of all stumbling-blocks. The woman in the sunbonnet called to her companion in the wagon:

“Come, Lucy, get a move on! We’re going to stop and rest.”

Thus addressed, the woman moved to the back of the cart, drew the flap aside and slipped out. She came behind the others, and Moreau, looking back, saw that she walked slowly, as if feeble, or in pain.

Advancing to the sunbonneted figure in front of him he said, with a backward jerk of his head: “What’s the matter with her? Is she sick?”

The woman gave an indifferent glance backward. Like the man, she seemed completely preoccupied by their disaster.

“Not now,” she answered, “but she has been. But good Lord!”—with a sudden burst of angry bitterness—“women like her ain’t meant to take them sort of journeys. If it weren’t for her, Jake and I could go on all right.”

She relapsed into silence as the cabin revealed itself through the trees. It appeared to interest her, and she went to the door and looked in.

It was the typical miner’s cabin of the period, consisting of a single room with two bunks. Opposite the doorway was the wide-mouthed chimney, a slab of rock before it doing duty as hearthstone. There was an armchair formed of a barrel, cushioned with red flannel and mounted on rockers. Moreau’s bunk was covered with a miner’s blanket, and the ineradicable habits of the gentleman spoke in the very simple but sufficient toilet accessories that stood on a shelf under a tiny square of looking-glass. Over the roof a great pine spread its boughs, and in passing through these the slightest breaths of air made soft eolian murmurings. To the pioneers, the wild, rough place looked the ideal of comfort and luxury.

A small spring bubbled up near the roots of the pine and trickled across the space in front of the cabin. To this, by common consent, the party made its way. The exhausted horse plunged its nose in the cool current and drank and snorted and drank again. The elder woman knelt down and laved her face and neck and even the top of her head in the water. The man stood looking with a moody eye at his broken animal, and joined by Fletcher, they talked over its condition. The miner, versed in this as in all practical matters, deemed the beast incapacitated for journeys of any length for some time to come. Both animals had been driven to the limit of their strength.

The pioneer asserted:

“I had to get acrost before the snows blocked us, and they’re heavy up there now,” with a nod of his head toward the mountains above; “then I wanted to get down into the settlements as soon’s I could. I knew there weren’t two more days work in ’em, but I calk’lated they’d get me in. After that it didn’t matter.”

“The only thing for you to do is to walk into Hangtown, buy a mule there, and come back.”

The man made a despairing gesture.

“How the hell can I, with her?” he said, indicating the younger woman.

Fletcher turned round and surveyed her with a cold, exploring eye where she had sunk down on the roots of the pine, with her back against its trunk.

“She looks pretty well tuckered out,” he said. “Your wife?”

“Yes.”

“And the other one’s your sister?” he continued with glib curiosity.

“She’s my wife, too.”

The inquirer, who was used to such plurality on the part of the Utah emigrants, gave a whistle and said:

“Mormons, eh?”

The man nodded.

Meantime Moreau had entered the cabin to get some food and drink to offer the sick woman. In a few moments he reappeared carrying a tin cup containing whisky diluted with water from the spring, and approached the woman sitting by the tree trunk. Her eyes were closed and she presented a deathlike appearance. The shawl she had worn round her shoulders had fallen back and disclosed a small bundle that she held with a loose carefulness. The man noticed the way her arms were disposed about it and wondered. Coming to a standstill before her, he said:

“I’ve brought you something that’ll brace you up. Would you like to try it?”

She raised her lids and looked at him, and then at the cup. As he met her glance he noticed that her eyes were a clear brown like a dog’s, and for the first time he realized that she might be young. She stretched out her hand obediently and taking the cup drank a little, then silently gave it back.

“You’ve had a pretty rough time I guess,” he said, holding the cup which he intended to give her again in a minute.

She nodded. Then suddenly the tears began to well out of her eyes, quantities of tears that ran in a flood over her cheeks. She did not sob or attempt to hide her face, but leaning her head against the tree, let the tears flow as though lost to everything but her sense of misery.

“Oh, poor thing! poor thing!” he exclaimed in a burst of sympathy, “you’re half dead. Here take some more of this,” and he pressed the cup into her hand, not knowing what else to do for her.

She took it, and then, through the tears, he saw her cast a look of furtive alarm toward her husband. She was within his line of vision and tried to shift herself behind Moreau.

With a sensation of angry disgust he understood that she feared this unkempt and haggard creature to whom she belonged. He moved so that he sheltered her and watched her try to drink again. But her tears blinded her and she handed the cup back with a shaking hand.

“It’s been too much,” she gasped. “If I could only have died! My boy did. Out there on them awful plains where there ain’t a tree and it’s hot like a furnace. And they buried him there—Bessie and he.”

“Bessie and he?” he repeated vaguely, his pity entirely preoccupying his mind for the moment.

“Yes, Bessie,—the second wife. I’m the first.”

“Oh,” he said, comprehending, “you’re from Utah?”

“Not me,” she answered quickly, “I’m from Indiana. I’m no Mormon. He wasn’t neither till he married Bessie. He wanted her and he did it.”

Here she was suddenly interrupted by a weak whining cry from the bundle that one arm still curved about. She bent her head and drew back the covering, and Moreau saw a strange wizened face and a tiny, claw-like hand feeling feebly about. He had never seen a very young infant before and it seemed to him a weirdly hideous thing.

“Is it yours?” he said, amazed.

“Yes,” she answered, “it was born in the desert three weeks ago.”

Her tears were dry, and she bent over the feeble thing that squirmed weakly and made small, cat-like noises, with something in her attitude that changed her and made her still a woman who had a life above her miseries.

“Wouldn’t you like to go into the cabin?” said the man, feeling suddenly abashed by his ignorance of all pertaining to this infinitesimal bit of life. “You might want to wash it or put it to sleep or give it something to eat. There’s a basin and soap and—er—some flour and bacon in there.”

The woman responded to the invitation with a slight show of alacrity. She stumbled as she rose, and he took her arm and guided her. At the cabin door he left her and as he passed to the back where the rest of the party had gone, the baby’s feeble cry, weak, but insistent, followed him.

The emigrant, Bessie and Fletcher, had repaired to the brush shed where Moreau’s horses were stabled and had put the half-dead Spotty under its shelter. Here the exhausted beast had lain down. The trio had then betaken themselves to a bare spot on the shaded slope of the knoll and were eating ship’s biscuits and drinking whisky and water from a tin cup, that circulated from hand to hand. As Moreau approached he could hear his partner volubly expatiating on the barrenness of the stream-beds in the vicinity. The stranger was listening to him with a cogitating eye, his seamed, weather-worn face set in an expression of frowning attention. Her hunger appeased, Bessie had curled up on her side, and with her sunbonnet still on, had fallen into a deep, healthy sleep.

Moreau joined them, and listened with mingled surprise and amusement to Fletcher’s glib lies. Then, when his partner’s fluency was exhausted, he questioned the emigrant on his trip. The man’s answers were short and non-committal. He seemed in a morose, savage state at his ill luck, his mind still engrossed by the question of moving on.

“If I’d money,” he said, “I’d give you anything you’d ask for them two horses ’er your’n in the shed. But I ain’t a thing to give—not a red.”

“Your wife, your other wife,” said Moreau, “doesn’t seem to me fit to go on. She’s dead beat.”

The man gave an angry snort.

“She’s been like that pretty near the whole way,” he said. “Everything’s been put back because of her.”

He relapsed into moody silence and then said suddenly: “We’re goin’ if she’s got to walk.”

Moreau went back to the cabin. They had half killed the woman already; now if they insisted on her walking the wretched creature might collapse altogether. Would they leave her on the mountain roads, he wondered?

He reached the cabin door, knocked and heard her answering “come in.” She was sitting on an upturned box beside the bunk on which the baby slept. Her sunbonnet was off, and he noticed that she had bright hair, rippled and thick, and of the same reddish-brown color as her eyes. She had washed away the traces of her tears, but her clothes, hardly sufficient covering for her lean, toil-worn body, were dirty and ragged. No beggar he had ever seen in the distant New England town where he had spent his boyhood, had presented a more miserable appearance. She looked timidly at him and rose from the box, pushing it toward him.

“I put the baby on the bunk,” she said apologetically, “but I can hold her.”

“Oh, don’t disturb her,” he said quickly. “It’s the only place you could have put her.” Then, seeing her standing, he said, “Why don’t you sit down?”

She sat charily and evidently ill at ease.

“They’ve been eating out there,” he said, “and I thought you might like something, too. There’s some stuff over there in the corner if you’ll wait a moment.”

He went to the corner where the supplies were stored and rifled them for more ship’s biscuit and a wedge of cheese, a delicacy which Fletcher had brought from Hangtown on his last visit, and which he carefully refrained from offering to the hungry emigrants. Coming back with these he drew out another box and spread them on it before her. She looked on in heavy, silent surprise. When he had finished he said:

“Now—fall to. You want food as much as anything.”

She made no effort to eat, and he said, disappointed: “Don’t you want it? Oh, make a try.”

She “made a try,” and bit off a piece of cracker, while he again retired to the supply corner for the tin cup and the whisky. He tried to step softly so as not to wake the child, and there was something ludicrous in the sight of this vast, bearded man, with his mighty, half-bared arms and muscular throat, trying to be noiseless, with as much success as one might expect of a bear.

Suddenly, in the midst of her repast, the woman broke down completely; and, with bowed head, she was shaken by a tempest of some violent emotion. It was not like her tears of an hour before, which seemed merely an indication of physical exhaustion. This was an expression of spiritual tumult. Sobs rent her and she rocked back and forth struggling with some fierce paroxysm.

Moreau, cup in hand, gazed at her in distracted helplessness.

“Come now, eat a little,” he said coaxingly, not knowing what else to suggest, and then getting no response: “Suppose you lie down on the bunk? Rest is what you want.”

“Oh, I can’t go on,” she groaned. “I can’t. How can I? Oh, it’s too much! I can’t go on.”

He was silent before this ill for which he had no remedy, and she wailed again in the agony of her spirit:

“I can’t, I can’t. If I could only die! But now there’s the baby, and I can’t even die.”

He got up feeling sick at heart at sight of this hopeless despair. What could he suggest to the unfortunate creature? He felt that anything he could say would be an insult in the face of such a position.

“Oh God, why can’t we die?” she groaned—“why can’t we die?”

As she said the words the sound of approaching voices came through the open door. Her husband’s struck through her agony and froze it. She stiffened and lifted her face full of an animal look of listening. Moreau noticed her blunt and knotted hands, pitiful in their record of toil, as she held them up in the transfixed attitude of strained attention.

“What now?” she said to herself.

The pioneer, Fletcher and Bessie came slowly round the corner of the cabin. Bessie looked sleepily anxious, Fletcher lazily amused. As Moreau stepped out of the doorway toward them he realized that they had come to some decision.

“Well,” said the man, “we got to travel.”

“You’re going on?” said Moreau. “How about the wagon?”

“We’re goin’ to leave the wagon, and I’ll come back for it from Hangtown. It’s the only thing to do.”

“And the horse?”

“He calk’lates,” said Fletcher, “to mount his wife—the peaked one—on the horse and take her along till one or other of ’em drops.”

“Take your wife on that horse?” exclaimed Moreau. “Why, it can’t go two miles.”

“Well, maybe it can’t,” returned the man with an immovable face.

There was a pause. Moreau was conscious that the woman was standing behind him in the doorway. He could hear her breathing.

“Come on, Lucy,” said the husband. “We got to move on sometime.”

Here the second wife spoke up:

“I don’t see how the horse is goin’ to get Lucy twelve miles, and this man says the first place we can stop is twelve miles farther along.”

“Don’t you begin with your everlasting objections,” said the husband, furiously. “Get the horse.”

The woman evidently knew the time had passed for trifling and turned away toward the brush shed. Fletcher followed her with a grin. The situation appealed to his sense of humor, and he was curious as to the outcome.

Moreau and the emigrant were left facing each other, with the first wife in the doorway.

“Your wife’s not able to go on,” said the miner—his manner becoming suddenly authoritative; “no more than your horse is.”

“Maybe not,” said the other, “but they’re both goin’ to try.”

“But can’t you see the horse can’t carry her? She certainly can’t walk into Hangtown, or even to Porter’s Ranch.”

“No, I can’t see. And how’s it come to be your business—what they can do or what they can’t?”

“YOUR WIFE’S NOT ABLE TO GO ON, NO MORE THAN YOUR
HORSE IS”

“It’s any one’s business to prevent a woman from being half killed.”

“Since you seem to think so much about her, why don’t you keep her here yourself?”

The man spoke with a savage sneer, his eyes full of steely defiance.

Before he had realized the full import of his words, burning with rage against the brutal tyrant to whom the wife was of no more moment than the horse, Moreau answered:

“I will—let her stay!”

There was a moment’s pause. The emigrant’s face, dark with rage, was suddenly lightened by a curiously alert expression of intelligence. He looked at the woman in the background and then at the miner.

“I’m not giving anything away just now,” he answered. “When she’s well she’s of use. But I’ll swap her for your two horses.”

In the heat of his indignation and disgust Moreau turned and looked at the woman. She was leaning against the door frame, chalk-white, and staring at him. She made no sound, but her dog-like eyes seemed to speak for his mercy more eloquently than her tongue ever could.

“All right,” he said quietly. “It’s a bargain.”

“Done,” said the emigrant. “You’ll find her a good worker when she pulls herself together. You stay on here, Lucy. Bessie,” he sang out, “bring around them horses.”

Under the phlegm of his manner there was a sudden expanding heat of shame that he strove to hide. The woman neither stirred nor spoke, and Moreau stood with his back to her, struggling with his passion against the man who had been her owner. The impulse under which he had spoken had full possession of him, and his main feeling was his desire to rid himself of the emigrant and his other wife.

“Here,” he said, “go on and tell them that you’ll take the horses. Hurry up!”

The man needed no second bidding and made off rapidly round the corner of the cabin.

Moreau and the woman were silent. For the moment he had forgotten her presence, engrossed by the rage that filled his warmly generous nature. Instinctively he followed the man to the angle of the cabin whence he could command the brush shed. The trio were standing there, Fletcher and the woman listening amazed to the emigrant’s explanation. Moreau turned back to the cabin and his eye fell on the woman in the doorway.

“Well,” he said—trying to speak easily—“you don’t mind staying on here for a while, do you? I guess we can make you comfortable.”

She made no answer, and after waiting a moment he said:

“When you get stronger I’ll be able to find you something to do in Hangtown. You know you couldn’t go on, feeling so bad. And this air round here”—with a wave of his hand to the surrounding pines—“will brace you up finely.”

She gave a murmured sound of assent, but more than this made no reply. Only her dog-like eyes again seemed to speak. Their miserable look of gratitude made Moreau uncomfortable and he could think of nothing more to say.

The sound of the trio advancing from the shed came as a welcome interruption. They appeared round the corner of the cabin, leading the miner’s two powerful and well-fed horses. Evidently the situation had been explained. Fletcher’s face was enigmatical. The humorousness of the novel exchange had come a little too close to his own comfort to be quite as full of zest as it had been earlier in the afternoon. He had insisted that the emigrant leave his horse, which the man had no objection to doing. Bessie looked flushed and excited. Moreau thought he detected shame and disapproval under her agitated demeanor. But to her work was a matter of second nature. She put the horses to the tongue of the wagon and buckled the rags of harness together before she turned for a last word to her companion. This was characteristically brief:

“So long, Lucy,” she said, “let’s see the baby again.”

It was shown her and she kissed it on the forehead with some tenderness. Then she climbed on the wheel of the wagon and took from the interior a bundle tied up in printed calico and laid it on the ground. It contained all the personal belongings and wardrobe of the first wife. There were a few murmured sentences between them and then she turned to ascend to her seat. But before she had fairly mounted a sudden impulse seized her and whirled her back to give Lucy a good-by kiss.

There was more feeling in this action than in anything that had passed between the trio during the afternoon. The two wives had been women who had mutually suffered. There were tears in Bessie’s eyes as she climbed to her place. The husband never turned his head in the direction of his first wife. But as he took the reins and prepared to start the team, he called:

“Good by, Lucy.”

He clucked at the horses, and the wagon moved forward amid a stir of red dust. The woman on the front seat drew her sunbonnet over her face. The man beside her looked neither to the right nor the left, but stared out over his newly-acquired team with an impassively set visage. His long whip curled out with a hiss, the spirited animals gave a forward bound, and the wagon went clattering and jolting down the trail.

Moreau stood watching its canvas arch go swinging downward under the dark boughs of the pines and the flickering foliage of the aspens. He watched until a bend in the road hid it. Then he turned toward the cabin. Fletcher was standing behind him, surveying him with a cold and sardonic eye:

“Well, you’ve done it!”

“I guess I have.”

“What the devil are you going to do with her?”

“Don’t know.”

“And the horses gone; nothin’ but that busted cayuse left!”

They stood looking at each other, Fletcher angrily incredulous, Moreau smilingly deprecating and apologetic.

As they stood thus, neither knowing what to say, the emigrant’s wife appeared at the doorway of the cabin.

“I’ll get your supper now if it’s the right time,” she said timidly.

CHAPTER III
HE RIDES AWAY

“Alas, my Lord, my life is not a thing

Worthy your noble thoughts! ’Tis not a life,

’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”

—Beaumont and Fletcher.

That night the two miners rolled themselves in their blankets and lay down on the expanse of slippery grass under the pine. Moreau did not sleep soon. The day’s incidents were the first interruption to the monotony of their uneventful summer.

Now, the strong man, lying on his back, looking at the large white stars between the pine boughs, thought of what he had done with perplexity, but without regret. In the still peacefulness of the night he turned over in his mind what he should do when the woman grew stronger. Women were rare in the mining districts, and he knew that the emigrant wife could earn high wages as a servant either in Hangtown or the growing metropolis of Sacramento. The child might hamper her, but he could help her to take care of the child until she got fairly on her feet. He had nothing much to do with his “dust.” Strong and young and in California, that always meant money enough.

So he thought, pushing uneasiness from his mind. Turning on his hard bed he could see the dark bulk of the cabin with a glint of starlight on its window. Above, the black boughs of the pine made a network against the sky sown with stars of an extraordinary size and luster. He could hear the river sleepily murmuring to itself. Once, far off, in the higher mountains, the shrill, weird cry of a California lion tore the silence. He rose on his elbow, looking toward the cabin. The sound was a terrifying one, and he was prepared to see the woman come out, frightened, and had the words of reassurance ready to call to her. But there was no movement from the little hut. She was evidently wrapped in the sleep of utter fatigue.

In the morning he was down at a basin scooped in the stream bed making a hasty toilet, when Fletcher, sleepy-eyed and yawning, came slipping over the bank.

“What are we goin’ to do for breakfast?” he said. “Is that purchase o’ your’n goin’ to git it? She’d oughter do something to show she’s worth the two best horses this side er Hangtown.”

Moreau, with his hair and beard bedewed with his ducking, was about to answer when a sound from above attracted them.

Lucy was standing on the bank. In the clear morning light she looked white and pinched. Her wretched clothes of yesterday, a calico sack and skirt, were augmented by a clean apron of blue check. Her skirt was short and showed her feet in a pair of rusty shoes that were so large they might have been her husband’s.

“Are you comin’ to breakfast?” she said; “it’s ready.” Then she disappeared. The men looked at each other and Moreau shook the drops from his beard and began to try to pat his hair into order. The civilizing influence of woman—even such an unlovely woman as the emigrant’s wife—was beginning its work.

Lucy had evidently been busy. The litter that had disfigured the ground in front of the cabin was cleared away. Through the open door and window a current of resinous mountain air passed which counteracted the effect of the fire. Nevertheless she had evidently feared its heat would be oppressive, and had brought two of the boxes to the rude bench outside the doorway, and on these the breakfast was laid. It was of the simplest—fried bacon, coffee and hot biscuits—but the scent of these, hot and appetizing, was sweet in the nostrils of the hungry men.

Sitting on the bench, they fell to and were not disappointed. The emigrant’s wife had evidently great skill in the preparation of the simple food of the pioneer. With the scanty means at her hand she had concocted a meal that to the men, used to their own primitive cooking, seemed the most toothsome they had eaten since they left San Francisco.

As she retired into the cabin, Fletcher—his mouth full of biscuit—said:

“Well, she can cook anyway. I wonder how she gets her biscuits so all-fired light? They ain’t all saleratus, neither.”

Here she reappeared, carrying the coffee-pot, and, leaning over Fletcher’s shoulder, prepared to refill his tin cup.

“Put it down on the table. He can do it himself,” commanded Moreau suddenly.

She set it down instantly, with her invariable frightened obedience.

“We’re not used to being waited on,” he continued. “Now you sit down here,”—he rose from his end of the bench and pointed to it,—“and next thing we want I’ll go in and get it. You’ve had your own breakfast, of course?”

“No—I ain’t had mine yet,” she answered meekly.

“Well, why ain’t you?” he almost shouted. “What d’ye mean by giving us ours first?”

She looked terrified and shrank a little on the bench. Moreau had a dreadful idea that for a moment she was afraid of being struck.

“Here, take this cup,” he said, giving her his,—“and this bacon,” picking from the pan, which stood in the middle of the table, the choicest pieces, and a biscuit. “There—now eat. I’m done.”

She tried to eat, but it was evidently difficult. Her hands, bent and disfigured with work, shook. At intervals she cast a furtive, questioning look at him where he sat on an overturned box, eying her with good-humored interest. As he met the frightened dog-eyes he smiled encouragingly, but she was grave and returned to her breakfast with nervous haste.

As the men descended the bank to the stream bed, Fletcher said:

“Well, she’s some use in the world. That’s the first decent meal we’ve had since we left Sacramento.”

“She didn’t eat much of it herself,” returned his pard as he began the morning’s work.

“She is the gol-darnedest lookin’ woman I ever seen. Looks as if she’d been fed on shavings. I’ll lay ten to one that emigrant cuss she b’longs to has ’most beat the life out er her.”

Ascending to the cabin an hour later, Moreau came upon the woman, washing the breakfast dishes in the stream that trickled from the spring. She did not hear him approach, and, watching her, he saw that she was slow and feeble in her movements. The sun spattered down through the pine boughs on her thick, brilliant-colored hair, and on the nape of her neck, where the skin was tanned to a coarse, russet brown.

“What are you doing that for?” he said, coming to a standstill in front of her. “You needn’t bother about the pans.”

“They’d oughter be cleaned,” she answered.

“You don’t want to feel,” he said, “that you’ve got to work all the time. I wanted you to rest up a bit. It’s a good place to rest here.”

She made no answer, drying the tin cups on a piece of flour sack.

“I ain’t so awful tired,” she said presently in a low voice.

“Well, don’t you worry about having everything so clean; they’ll do anyway. And the cabin’s pretty clean,—isn’t it?” he asked, somewhat anxiously.

“Yes—awful clean,” she said. Then, after a moment, she continued: “I hadn’t oughter have stayed in the cabin. It’s your’n. Me and the baby’ll be all right in the brush shed with Spotty.”

“What nonsense!” retorted Moreau. “Do you suppose I’d let you and that baby stay in the brush shed, the place where the horses have been kept all summer? You’re going to keep the cabin, and if there’s anything you want—anything that’s short, or that you might need for the baby—why, Fletcher’ll go to Hangtown and get it. Just say what you want. Not having women around, we’re probably short of all sorts of little fixings.”

“I don’t want nothing,” she said with her head down—“I ain’t never been so comfortable sence I was married.”

“Have you been married long?” he asked, less from curiosity than from the desire to make her talk.

“Four years,” she replied; “I was married in St. Louis, just before dad and I was startin’ to cross the plains. Dad was taken sick. He was consumpted, and some one tol’ him to go to California, so we was goin’ to start along with a heap of other folks. We was all waitin’ ’round St. Louis for the weather to settle and that’s how I met Jake.”

“Jake?” said Moreau, interrogatively; “who was Jake?”

“My husband—Jake Shackleton. He was one o’ the drivers of the train. He drove McGinnes’ teams. He was there in camp with us, and up and asked me, and dad was glad to get any one to take care of me, bein’ as he was so consumpted. We was married a week afore the train started. I didn’t favor it much, but dad thought it was a good thing. My father was a Methodist preacher, and knowin’ as how he couldn’t last long, he was powerful glad to get some one to look after me. I was pretty young to be left—just fifteen.”

“Fifteen!” echoed Moreau—then piecing together her scant bits of biography—“Then you’re only nineteen now?”

“That’s my age,” she said with her laconic dryness.

He looked at her in incredulous amaze. Nineteen! A girl, almost a child! A gush of pity and horror welled up in him, and for the moment he could find no words. She went on, evidently desirous of telling him of herself as in duty bound to her new master.

“Dad died before we got to Salt Lake. Then Jake and I settled there and Willie was born, and for two years it wern’t so bad. Jake liked me and was good to me. But he got to know the Mormons and kep’ sayin’ all the time it weren’t no good doin’ anything not bein’ a Mormon. He said they had no use for him, bein’ a Gentile. And then he seen Bessie,—she was a waitress in the Sunset Hotel,—and got powerful set on her. She was a big, strong woman, and could work. Not like me. I couldn’t never work except in the house. I was no good for outdoor work. I was always a sort er drag, he said. So he turned Mormon and married Bessie, and she came to live with us.” She stopped and began rubbing a pan with a piece of flour sack.

“Don’t tell any more if you don’t want to,” said the man, hearing his voice slightly husky.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she answered with her colorless, unemotional intonation; “I couldn’t ever come to feel she was his wife, too. I hadn’t them notions. My father was a preacher. I hated it all, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do. I had to stay. There was no one to go to. Dad was dead and he didn’t have no relations. Then we started to come here, and on the way my little boy died. That was all I had, and I didn’t care then what happened. And only for the other baby I’d er crep’ out er the wagon some night and run away and got lost on them plains. But—”

She stopped and made a gesture of extending her hands outward and then letting them fall at her sides. It was tragic in its complete hopelessness. Of gratitude to Moreau she seemed to have little. She had been so beaten down by misfortune that nothing was left in her but acquiescence. Her very service to him seemed an instinctive thing, the result of rigorous training.

“Well,” he said after a pause, “you’ve had a hard time. But it’s over now. Don’t you think about it any more. You’re going to rest up here, and when you’re strong and well again we’ll think about something for you to do. Time enough for that then. But you can always get work and high pay in Hangtown or Sacramento. Or if you don’t fancy it at any of those places I’ll see to it that you go down to San Francisco. Don’t bother any more anyhow. You’d about got to the bottom of things and now you’re coming up.”

She gathered up her pans and said dully: “Thank you, sir.”

The cry of the baby struck on her ear and she scrambled to her feet, and without more words turned and walked to the cabin.

At dinner she again made her appearance on the bank and called the two men. Again they were greeted by a meal that was singularly appetizing, considering the limited resources. Obeying Moreau’s order, she sat down with them, but ate nothing, at intervals starting to her feet to return to the cabin, then restraining the impulse and sitting rigid and uncomfortable on the upturned box. To wait on the men seemed the only thing she knew how to do, or that gave her ease in the doing.

The child cried once or twice during dinner, and, in the afternoon, working in the pit which was in the stream bed just below the cabin window, Moreau heard it crying again. It seemed a louder and more imperious cry than it had given previously. The miner, whose knowledge of infancy and its ills was of the most limited, wondered if it could be sick.

At sunset, the day’s work over, both men mounted the bank, their takings of dust in two tin cups, from which it was transferred to the buckskin sacks in the box under the bunk. Moreau entered the cabin to get the sacks and found Lucy there curled on the end of the bunk where the baby slept. As his great bulk darkened the door she started up, with her invariable frightened look of apology.

“Don’t move—don’t move,” he said, kneeling by her; “I want to get the box under the bunk.”

She started up, and being nearer the box than he, thrust her hand under and tried to pull it out. It was heavy with the sacks of dust and required a wrench. She rose from the effort, gave a gasp, and, reeling, fell against him. He caught her in his arms, and as her head fell back against his shoulder saw that she was death-white and unconscious.

With terrified care he laid her on Fletcher’s bunk, and, seizing a pan of water, sprinkled her face and hands, then tore one of the tin cups off its nail, and, pouring whisky into it, tried to force it between her lips. A little entered her mouth, though most of it ran down her chin. As he stood staring at her, Fletcher appeared in the doorway.

“Hullo!” he said; “what’s the matter with her? By gum, but she looks bad!” And then, with a quick and practised hand, he pulled her up to a sitting posture, and, prying her mouth open with a fork, poured some of the whisky down. It revived her quickly. She sat up, felt for her sunbonnet, and then said:

“I hadn’t oughter have done that, but it came so quick.”

She tried to get up, but Moreau pushed her back.

“Oh, I ain’t sick,” she said, trying to speak bravely; “I’ve been took like that before. It’s just tiredness. I’m all right now.”

She again tried to rise, stood on her feet for a moment, then reeled back on the bunk, with white lips.

“It’s such a weakness,” she whispered; “such a weakness!”

At this moment the baby woke up, and, lifting up its voice, began a loud, violent wail. The woman looked in terror from one man to the other.

“Oh, my poor baby!” she cried; “what’ll I do? Is that one goin’ to go, too?”

“The baby’s all right,” said Moreau. “Don’t begin to worry about that. All babies cry, don’t they?”

“Oh, my poor baby!” she wailed, unheeding, and suddenly beginning to wring her hands. “It’ll die like Willie. It’ll die, too.”

“Why should it die? What’s the matter with it? It was all right this morning, wasn’t it?” he answered, feeling that there were mysteries here he did not grasp.

“It’ll die because it don’t get nothing to eat,” she cried desperately. “I’ve nothing for it. I’m too sick! I’m too sick! And it’ll starve. Oh, my poor baby!”

She burst into the wild, weak tears of exhaustion, her sobs mingling with the now strident yells of the hungry baby.

The two men looked at each other, sheepishly, beginning to understand the situation. The enfeebled condition of the mother made it impossible for her to nourish the child. It was a predicament for which even the resourceful mind of Fletcher had no remedy. He pushed back his cap, and, scratching slowly at the front of his head, looked at his mate with solemn perplexity, while the cabin echoed to sounds of misery unlike any that had ever before resounded within its peaceful walls.

“Can—can—we get anything?” said Moreau at length—“any—any—sort of food, meat, eggs—er—er any sort of stuff for it to eat?”

“Eat?” exclaimed Fletcher scornfully; “how can it eat? It hasn’t a tooth.”

“How would it do if Fletcher went into Hangtown and brought the doctor?” suggested Moreau, soothingly. “It’ll take twenty-four hours, but he’s a good doctor.”

The woman shook her head.

“A goat,” she sobbed, the menace to her offspring having given her a fictitious courage. “If you could get a goat.”

“A goat!”

The two men looked at each other, horror-stricken at the magnitude of the suggestion.

“She might as well ask us to get an elephant,” muttered Fletcher morosely. “There’s not a goat nearer than San Francisco.”

“And it would take us two weeks anyway to get one up from there and across the mountains from Sacramento,” said Moreau.

“By the time you got it here it’d be the most expensive goat you ever bucked up against,” said his partner disdainfully.

“A cow!” exclaimed Moreau. “Say, Lucy, would a cow do?”

“A cow!” came the muffled answer; “oh, it don’t need a whole cow.”

“But a cow would do? If I could get a cow the baby could be fed on the milk, couldn’t it?”

“Oh, yes; it ’ud do first-rate.”

“Very well, I’ll get a cow. Don’t you bother any more; I’ll have a cow here by to-morrow noon. The baby’ll have to hold out till then, for, not having a decent horse, I can’t get it here any sooner.”

“And where do you calk’late to get a cow?” demanded Fletcher; “cows ain’t much more common than goats round these parts.”

“On the Porter ranch. It’s twelve miles off. I can go in to-night, rest there a bit, and by noon be here with the cow.”

“And is that baby goin’ to yell like this from now till to-morrow noon? You might’s well have a mountain lion tied up in the bunk.”

The difficulty was indeed only half solved. The infant’s lusty cries were unabated. The miserable mother, with tear-drenched face and quivering chin, sat up in the bunk and tried to rise and go to it, but was restrained by Moreau’s hand on her shoulder.

“You stay here and I’ll get it,” he said, then crossed to the other bunk, and gingerly lifted with his huge, hairy hands the shrieking bundle, from which protruded two tiny, red fists, jerking and clawing about, and carried it to its mother. Her practised hand hushed it for a moment, but its pangs were beyond temporary alleviation, and its cries soon broke forth.

“If I could git up and mix it some flour and water,” she said, feebly attempting to rise.

“What’s the matter with us doing that?” queried Moreau. “How do you do it? Just give us the proportions and we’ll dish it up as if we were born to it.”

Under her direction he put flour in one of the dippers, and handed Fletcher a tin cup with the order to fill it with water at the spring. Both men were deeply interested, and Fletcher rushed back from the spring with a dripping cup, as if fearful that the infant would die unless the work of feeding was promptly begun.

“Now go on,” said Moreau, armed with the dipper and a tin teaspoon; “what’s next?”

“Sugar,” she said; “if you put a touch of sugar in it tastes better to them.”

“Here, sugar. Hand it over quick. Now, there we are. How do you mix ’em, Lucy?”

She gave the directions, which the men carefully followed, compounding a white, milky-looking liquid. The crucial moment came when they had to feed this to the crimson and convulsively screaming baby.

To forward matters better they moved two boxes to the doorway, where the glow of sunset streamed in, and seated themselves, Fletcher with the dipper and spoon, Moreau with the baby. Both heads were lowered, both faces eagerly earnest when the first spoonful was administered. It was a tense moment till the tip of the spoon was inserted between the infant’s lips. Her puckered face took on a look of rather annoyed surprise; she caught at it, and then, with an audible smack, slowly drew in the counterfeit. The men looked at each other with heated triumph.

“Takes it like a little man, doesn’t she?” said Moreau proudly.

“She wasn’t hungry,” said Fletcher. “Oh-h, no! Listen to her smack.”

“Here, hold up the dipper. Don’t keep her waiting when she’s so blamed hungry.”

“You’re spilling half of it. You’re getting it on her clothes.”

“Well, she don’t want to eat any faster. That’s the way she likes to eat—just slowly suck it out of the spoon. Take your time, old girl, even if you don’t swallow it all.”

“My! don’t she take it down nice! Look alive there, it’s running outer the corner of her mouth.”

“Give us that bit of flour sack behind you. We ought to have put something round her neck.”

The baby, its round eyes intent, one small red fist still fanning the air, sucked noisily at the tip of the spoon. The mother, sitting up on the bunk in the background, watched it with craned neck and jealous eye.

Finally, when the meal was over, it was triumphantly handed back to her, sticky from end to end, but sleepy and satisfied.

A few hours later, in the star-sown darkness of the early night, Moreau started on his twelve-mile walk to the Porter ranch. The next morning, some time before midday, he reappeared, red and perspiring, but proudly leading by a rope a lean and dejected-looking cow.

The problem of the baby’s nutriment was now satisfactorily solved. The cow proved eminently fitted for the purpose of its purchase, and though the two miners had several unsuccessful bouts in learning to milk it, the handy Fletcher soon overcame this difficulty, and the stock of the cabin was augmented by fresh milk.

The baby throve upon this nourishment. Its cries no longer disturbed the serenity of the cañon. It slept and ate most of the time, but kindly consented to keep awake in the late afternoon and be gentle and patient when the men charily passed it from hand to hand during the rest before supper. Fletcher regarded it tolerantly as an object of amusement. But Moreau, especially since the feeding episode, had developed a deep, delighted affection for it. Its helplessness appealed to all that was tender in him, and the first faint indications of a tiny formed character were miraculous to his fascinated and wondering observation. He was secretly ashamed of letting the sneeringly indifferent Fletcher guess his sudden attachment, and made foolish excuses to account for the trips to the cabin which frequently interrupted his morning’s work in the stream bed.

Lucy’s recovery was slow. The collapse from which she suffered was as much mental as physical. The anguish of the last two years had preyed on the bruised spirit as the hardships of the journey had broken the feeble body. No particular form of ailment developed in her, but she lay for days silent and almost motionless on the bunk, too feeble to move or to speak beyond short sentences. The men watched and tended her, Moreau with clumsy solicitude, Fletcher dutifully, but more through fear of his powerful mate than especial interest in Lucy as a woman or a human being.

In his heart he still violently resented Moreau’s action in acquiring her and parting with the valuable horses. Had she possessed any of the attractions of the human female, he could have understood and probably condoned. But as she now was, plain, helpless, sick, unable even to cook for them, demanding care which took from their work and lessened their profits, his resentment grew instead of diminishing. Moreau saw nothing of this, for Fletcher had long ago read the simple secrets of that generous but impractical nature, and knew too much to bring down on himself wrath which, once aroused, he felt would be implacable.

At the end of two weeks Lucy began to show signs of improvement. The fragrant air that blew through the cabin, the soothing silence of the foothills, broken only by the drowsy prattle of the river or the sad murmuring of the great pine, began its work of healing. The autumn was late that year. The days were still warm and dreamily brilliant, especially in the little cañon, where the sun drew the aromatic odors from the pines till at midday they exhaled a heavy, pungent fragrance like incense rising to the worship of some sylvan god.

Sometimes now, on warm afternoons, Lucy crept out and sat at the root of the pine where she had found her first place of refuge. There her dulled eyes began to note the beauties that surrounded her, the pines mounting in dark rows on the slopes, the blue distances where the cañon folded on itself, the glimpses of chaste, white summits far above against the blue. Her lungs breathed deep of the revivifying air, clean and untainted as the water in the little spring at her feet. The peace of it all entered her soul. Something in her forbade her to look back on the terrible past. A new life was here, and her youth rose up and whispered that it was not yet dead.

During the period of her illness Moreau had begun to see both himself and the cabin through feminine eyes. Discrepancies revealed themselves. He wanted many things heretofore regarded as luxuries. From the tin cups of the table service to the towels made of ripped flour sacks, his domestic arrangements seemed mean and inadequate. They were all right for two prospectors, but not fitting for a woman and child. Lucy’s illness also revealed wants in her equipment that struck him as piteous. Her only boots were the ones he had seen her in on the morning after her arrival. She had no shawl or covering for cold weather. The baby’s clothes were a few torn pieces of calico and flannel. Moreau had washed these many times himself, doing them up in an old flour sack, which was attached to an aspen on the stream’s bank, and then placed in one of the deepest parts of the current. Here it remained for two days, the percolating water cleansing its contents as no washboard could.

One evening, smoking under the pine, he acquainted Fletcher with a design he had been some days formulating. This was that Fletcher should ride into Hangtown the next day and not only replenish the commissariat, but buy all things needful for Lucy and the baby. Spotty was now also recovered, and, though hardly a mettlesome steed, was at least a useful pack horse. But the numerous list of articles suggested by Moreau would have weighted Spotty to the ground. So Fletcher was commissioned to buy a pack burro, and upon it to bring all needful food stuffs for the cabin and the habiliments for Lucy and the baby.

“She’s got no shoes. You want to buy her some shoes, one useful pair and one fancy pair with heels.”

“What size do I git? I ain’t never bought shoes for a woman before.”

This was a poser, and both men cogitated till Moreau suggested leaving it to the shoe dealer, who should be told that Lucy was a woman of average size.

“But her feet ain’t,” said Fletcher spitefully, never having been able to forgive Lucy her lack of beauty.

“Never mind; you’ll have to make a bluff at it. Get the best you can. Then I want a shawl for her. It’ll be cold soon, and she’s got nothing to keep her warm.”

“What kind of a shawl? I don’t know no more about shawls than I do about shoes.”

“A pink crochet shawl,” said Moreau slowly, and with evident sheepish reluctance at having to make this exhibition of unexpected knowledge.

“And what’s that? I dunno what crochet is.”

“I don’t, either”—and then, with desperate courage—“well, anyway, that’s what she said she’d like. I asked her yesterday and she said that. You go into the store and ask for it. That’ll be enough.”

Fletcher grunted.

“And then I want some toys for the kid. Anything you can get that seems the right kind. She’s a girl, so you don’t want a drum, or soldiers, or guns, or things of that kind. Get a doll if you can, and a musical box, or anything tasty and that’s likely to catch a baby’s eye.”

“Why, she can’t hardly see yet. She’s like a blind kitten. Lucy told me herself yesterday she were only six weeks old.”

“Never you mind. She’s a smart kid; knows more now than most babies at six months. You might get a rattle—a nice one with bells; she might fancy that.”

“Silver or gold?” sneered Fletcher, whom this conversation was making meditative.

“The best you can get. Don’t stint yourself for money; everything of the best. Then clothes for her; she is going to be as well dressed as any baby in California. I take it you’d better go to Mrs. Wingate, at the Eldorado Hotel, and get her to make you out a list; then go to the store and buy the list right down.”

“Seems to me you’ll want a pack train, not a burro, to carry it all.”

“Well, if you can’t get everything on Spotty and one burro, buy two. I’ll give you a sack of dust and you can spend it all.”

Fletcher was silent after this, and as he lay rolled in his blanket that night he looked at the stars for many hours, thinking.

Early in the morning he departed on the now brisk and rejuvenated Spotty. Besides his instructions he carried one of Moreau’s buckskin sacks, roughly estimated to contain twelve hundred dollars’ worth of dust, and, he told Moreau, one of his own. He was due to return the next morning. With a short word of farewell, he touched Spotty with the single Mexican spur he wore, and darted away down the rough trail. Moreau watched him out of sight.

The day passed as quietly as its predecessors. The main events that marked their course had been the men’s clean-up, Lucy’s gain in strength and the evidences of increasing intelligence in the child.

To-day Lucy had walked to a point a little distance up the cañon, rested there, and in the afternoon came creeping back with the flush of returning health on her face. It was still there when Moreau ascended from the stream bed with his cup. He had had a good day’s work and was joyful, showing the fine yellow grains in the bottom of the rusty tin. Then he noticed her improved appearance and cried:

“Why, you look blooming. A fellow’d think you’d panned a good day’s work, too.”

To himself he said with a sudden inward wonder:

“She looks almost pretty. And she is only nineteen, I believe.”

The next morning he awaited the coming of Fletcher with impatience. He had wanted to surprise Lucy, having only told her Fletcher had gone to buy a burro and some supplies. But the morning passed away and he had not returned. Then the afternoon slipped by, and Lucy and Moreau took their supper without him, the latter rather taciturn. The delay wore on his patience. His knowledge of Fletcher was limited. He had seen him drunk once in Sacramento, and he wondered if he had gone on a spree and was now lying senseless somewhere, the contents of the sacks squandered.

When the next morning had passed and Fletcher had still not come, his suspicions strengthened and he began to think uneasily of his dust. One sack full was a good deal to lose, now that he had a woman and child on his hands. Lucy, he could see, was also uneasy. Twice he surprised her standing by the trail, evidently listening. When evening drew in and there were still no signs of him, both were frankly anxious and oppressed. Suddenly, as they sat by the box that answered as dinner table, she said:

“Did he have much dust?”

“Yes—one sack of mine and one of his own. They’re equal to about twelve hundred dollars each.”

She gave a startled look at him and sat with her mouth a little open, fear and amaze on her face.

“Where’s the rest?” she asked.

Moreau indicated the box under the bunk. At the same moment her suspicion seized him and he pulled it out and threw up the lid. It was empty of all save a few clothes. Every sack was gone.

Moreau shut down the lid quietly, a little pale. He was not a man of quick mind, and he hardly could realize what had happened. It was Lucy’s voice that explained it as she said:

“He did it while I was out in the morning. I went up the stream to that pool to wash some things at sun-up. He took it then.”

CHAPTER IV
THE ENCHANTED WINTER

“I choose to be yours for my proper part,

Yours, leave me or take, or mar or make;

If I acquiesce, why should you be teased

With the conscience prick and the memory smart?”

—Browning.

Fletcher had gone silently and without leaving a trace, and with him the money. It was a startling situation for Moreau. From comparative affluence he suddenly found himself without a cent or an ounce of dust. This, had he had only himself to look after, would not have affected his free and jovial spirit, but now the woman and the child he had so carelessly come into possession of loomed before him in their true light of a heavy responsibility. Lucy, as far as supporting herself went, was still a long way off from the state of health where that would be possible. And at the thought of sending her forth, even though she were cured of her infirmities, Moreau experienced a sensation of depression. He felt that the cabin would be unbearably lonely when she and the baby were gone.

That night under the pine he turned over the situation in his mind. The conclusion he arrived at was that there was nothing better to be done than stay by the stream bed and work it for all it was worth. Lucy would continue to improve in the fine air and the child was thriving. If the snows would hold off till late, as they had done in the open winter of ’50, he could amass a fair share of dust before it would be necessary to move Lucy and the baby to the superior accommodations of Hangtown or Sacramento. It was now October. In November one might expect the first snows.

He must do a good deal in the next six weeks. This he started to do. The next day he spent in raising a brush shed against the back of the cabin where the chimney would offer warmth on cold nights. Into this he moved such few belongings as he had retained after Lucy and the baby had taken possession of the cabin. Then the working of the stream bed went on with renewed vigor. The water was low, hardly more than a thread, rendering the washing of the dirt harder labor than during the earlier summer when the watercourses were still full. But he toiled mightily, rejoicing in the splendor of his man’s work, not with the same knightly freedom that he felt when he had been that king of men, the miner with his pick on his shoulder and all the world before him, but with the soberer joy of the man into whose life others have entered to lay hold upon it with light, clinging hands.

Against the complete and perfect loneliness of his life the woman and child, who had started up from nowhere, stood out as figures of vital significance. They had grown closer to him in that one month’s isolation than they would have done in a year of city life. The child became the object of his secret but deep devotion. He had been ashamed to let Fletcher see it. Now that Fletcher was gone, Moreau often stole up from his work in the creek to look at it as it slept in a box by the open door. It was as fresh as a rosebud, its skin clean and satiny, its tiny hands, crumpled, white and pink, like the petals of flowers. The big man leaned on his shovel to watch it adoringly. The miracle of its growth in beauty never lost its wonder for him.

Lucy, too, grew and bloomed in these quiet autumn days. Never talkative, she became less laconic after the departure of Fletcher. She seemed relieved by his absence. Moreau began to understand, as he saw her daily increase in freshness and youthful charm, that she was as young in nature as she was in years. Points of character that were touchingly childish appeared in her. Her casting of all responsibility on him was as absolute as if she had been ten years of age. She obeyed him with trustful obedience and waited on him silently, her eyes always on him to try to read his unexpressed wish. Sometimes he caught these watching eyes and read in them something that vaguely disturbed him.

One day, coming up from the creek for one of his surreptitious views of the baby, he found its cradle empty, and was about to return to his work, when he heard a laugh rising from a small knoll among the aspens. It was a laugh of the most infectious, fresh sweetness, and made Moreau’s own lips part. He stole in its direction, and as he advanced it sounded again, rippling deliciously on the crystal air. He brushed through the aspens and came on Lucy and her baby. She was holding it in her lap, one hand on the back of its head. Something had touched its unknown sense of the ludicrous, and its lips were parting in a slow but intensely amused smile over its toothless gums. Each smile was answered by its mother with a run of the laughter Moreau had heard.

He looked at them for a moment, and then, advancing, his foot cracked a dry branch, and Lucy turned. Her face was flushed, her eyes still full of their past merriment, her smiling lips looked a coral red against the whiteness of her small, even teeth. Her sunbonnet was off and her rich hair glowed like copper in the sun. He had never seen her look like this, and stopped, regarding her with a curious, sudden gravity. The thought was in his heart:

“She’s only a girl, and—and—almost beautiful.”

Lucy looked confused.

“Oh, I was just laughing at the baby,” she said apologetically; “she looked so sorter cute smiling that way.”

“I never heard you laugh like that before. Why don’t you do it oftener?”

She seemed embarrassed and murmured:

“I didn’t think you’d like to hear me.”

“I think you’re sometimes afraid of me,” he said; “is that true?”

She bent her face over the baby and said very low:

“I’m afraid as how you might get mad at me. I don’t know much and—I’m different, and you’ve been more good to me than—”

She stopped, her face hidden over the child. Moreau felt a sudden sense of embarrassed discomfort.

“Oh, don’t talk that way,” he said, hastily, “or I may get mad. That’s the sort of talk that annoys me. Laugh and be happy—that’s the way I want you to be. Enjoy yourself; that’s the way to please me.”

He swung himself down from the knoll into the creek bed and went back to his rocker. He found it hard to collect his thoughts. The music of Lucy’s laugh haunted him.

A week, and then two, passed away. The golden days slipped by, still warm, still scented with the healing pine balsam. The nights were white with great stars, which Moreau could see between the pine boughs, for it was still warm enough to sleep on the knoll. His nights’ rests were now often disturbed. A change had come over the situation in the cabin. The peace and serenity of the first days after Fletcher’s departure had gone, leaving a sense of constraint and uneasiness in their stead. Moreau now looked up at the stars not with the calm content of the days when Lucy had first come, but with the trouble of a man who begins to realize menace in what he thought were harmless things.

Nearly a month had passed since Fletcher’s departure when one day, walking down the stream with an idea of trying diggings farther down, he came upon Lucy washing in a pool of water enlarged by a rough dam she herself had constructed. She was kneeling on a flat stone on the bank, her sunbonnet off, her sleeves rolled up, laving in the water the few articles of dress that made up the baby’s wardrobe. Her arms above the sunburned wrists shone snow-white, her roughened hair lay low on her forehead in damp, curly strands. The sight of her engaged in this menial toil irritated Moreau and he called:

“What are you doing there, Lucy? Get up.”

She started with one of her old nervous movements and sat back on the stone. Then, seeing who it was, smiled confidently, and brushed the hair back from her forehead with one wet hand.

“I was washing the baby’s things. That’s the dam I made.”

Moreau stood looking, not at the dam, but at the woman, flushed, breathless and smiling, a blooming girl.

“No one would ever think you were the same woman who came here two months ago,” he said, more to himself than to her.

“I don’t feel like the same,” she answered, beginning to wring her clothes. “I don’t feel now as if that was me.”

“I thought you were quite an old woman then. Do you know that? I’d no idea you were young.”

“I felt old. Oh, God—!” she said, suddenly dropping her hands and looking across the pool with darkly reminiscent eyes—“how awful I felt!”

“But you’re quite well now? You’re really well, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, returning to her tone of gaiety. “I ain’t never been like this before. Not sence I was married, anyway.”

The allusion to her marriage made Moreau wince. Of late the subject had become hateful to him. Standing, leaning on his shovel, he said:

“You know it’ll be winter here soon, so it’s a good thing we’ve got you well and nicely rested up.”

“Yes, I guess ’twill be winter soon,” she said, looking vaguely round; “does it snow?”

“Sometimes tons of it, if it’s a hard winter. But we’ve got to get out before that. Or you have, anyhow. Can’t run any risks with the baby. Got to get her out and into some decent shelter before the snow falls.”

For a moment Lucy made no answer. She had stopped wringing the clothes and was kneeling on the stone, her eyes on the water, a faint line drawn between her brows.

“Where to—? What sort o’ place?” she said slowly.

Moreau shifted his eyes from her face to the earth in which the point of his shovel had imbedded itself.

“I told you as soon as you got well I’d take you to Hangtown or Sacramento, or even ’Frisco if they didn’t suit. Now I haven’t got dust enough to do that. Fletcher put that spoke in my wheel. But I’ll take you and the baby into Hangtown.”

“Hangtown?” she repeated faintly.

“Yes; it’s quite a ways off. I’ll have to go in myself and get a horse first, and then I’ll take you both in on that. I thought I’d go to Mrs. Wingate. Her husband runs the Eldorado Hotel, and she isn’t strong, and told me last time I was there she’d give a fancy salary if she could get a housekeeper. How’d you like to try that? It would be a first-class home for you and the baby.”

Lucy had bent her face over the wet clothes.

“Ain’t it all right here?” she said in a scarcely audible voice.

“No,” said Moreau irritably; “I just told you there was danger of being snowed in after the first of November. You don’t want to be snowed in here with the baby, do you?”

“I don’t care,” said Lucy.

“If you don’t feel strong enough to do work like that,” he continued, “you can stay on in the hotel. I can make the dust for that easily. Then in the spring, when the streams are full, I’ll have enough to send you to Sacramento or San Francisco, and you can look about you and see how you’d like it there.”

“Why can’t I stay here?” she said suddenly, her voice quavering, but full of protest.

Its note thrilled Moreau.

“I’ve just told you why,” he said quietly.

“Well, I’m not afraid. I don’t mind snow. You can get things to eat from Hangtown. Oh, let me stay.”

She turned toward him, still kneeling on the stone. Her face was quivering with the most violent emotions he had ever seen on it. The dead apathy was gone forever, at least as far as he was concerned.

“Oh, let me stay,” she implored; “don’t send me away from you.”

“Oh, Lucy,” he almost groaned, “don’t you see that won’t do?”

“Let me stay,” she reiterated, and stretched out her hands toward him. The tears began to pour down her cheeks, and suddenly with the outstretched hands she seized him, and burst forth into a stream of impassioned words:

“Let me stay. Let me be with you. Don’t send me away. There ain’t no use in anything if I’m not with you. Let me work for you. Let me be where I can see you—that’s all I want. I don’t want no money nor clothes. If you’ll just let me be near by! And I kin always work and cook, and you know you like things clean, and I kin keep ’em clean. Oh, you can’t mean to send me off. I ain’t never been happy before. I ain’t never had no one treat me so kind before. I ain’t never known what it was like to be treated decent. I can’t leave you—I can’t—I can’t—”

She sank down at his feet in a quivering heap.

Moreau raised her and held her in his arms, pressed against his breast, his cheek against her hair. He had no thought for the moment but an ecstasy of pity and joy. Clinging close to him, she reiterated between broken breaths:

“I kin stay? Oh! I kin stay?”

“Lucy,” he said, “how can you? Do you know what you’re asking?”

“But I kin stay?” she repeated.

She slid one arm round his neck, and he felt her wet cheek against his.

“Let me just stay and work,” she whispered, “just where I can see you.”

“Do you forget that you’re married?” he said huskily.

“I’ll not be in your way. I’ll not ask for anything or be any trouble,” was her whispered answer, “so long’s you let me be near you.”

They walked back to the cabin silently. Lucy knew that she had gained her point and would stay. Her childish nature invaded and possessed by a great passion built on gratitude and reverence, asked no more than to be allowed to work for and worship the man who was to her a god. She did not look into the future, nor demand its secrets. The perfect joy of the present filled her. In the days that followed she grew in beauty, and in some subtile way acquired a new girlishness. Her past seemed wiped out. The blighting effects of the four previous years fell away from her and she seemed to revert to the sweet and simple youthfulness that had been hers when Jake Shackleton had married her at St. Louis. Silent and gentle as ever, it was plain to be seen that whatever Moreau asked for—service, friendship, love—she would unquestioningly give.

Early in November a cold evening came with a red sunset and a sharpening of every outline. For the first time they were driven into the cabin for supper. A fire of boughs and dried cones burned in the chimney and before this, supper being over, they sat, Lucy in the rocker made of a barrel, Moreau on the end of an upturned box, staring at the flames.

Finally the man broke the silence by telling her that he was going to take his dust and walk into Hangtown the next day, remaining there over night and returning in the morning with fresh supplies and a burro.

“Lucy,” he said, drawing his box nearer to her, “I want to talk to you of something.”

She looked up, saw that the moment both had been dreading had come, and paled.

“Lucy, the winter’s coming. The snow may be here now at any moment. Have you thought of what we’re to do?”

She shook her head and began to tremble. His words called up the specter of separation—what she feared most in the world.

“You know we can’t live on this way. Will you, if I go into Hangtown and bring back a mule, ride there with me the day after to-morrow and marry me? There are two or three preachers there who will do it.”

She looked at him with surprised eyes.

“I’m married already to Jake,” she said. “How kin I get married again?”

“I know it, and it’s no good trying to break that marriage. But in your eyes and mine that was none. You and your baby are mine to take care of and support and love for the rest of our lives. Though you can’t be my lawful wife, I can protect you from scandal and insult by making you what all the world will think is my lawful wife. Only you, and I and Jake and his second wife will know that there has been a previous marriage and not one of that four will ever tell.”

She put her rough hand out and felt his great fist close over it, like a symbol of the protection he was offering her.

“We can be married in Hangtown by your maiden name. If any one asks I can say I am marrying a young widow whose husband died on the Sierra. Your husband did die there when he sold you to me for a pair of horses.”

She nodded, not quite understanding his meaning.

“Kin Jake ever come and claim me?” she asked in a frightened voice.

“How could he? How could he dare tell the world how he left you and his child sick, almost dying, in the hut of an unknown miner in the foothills? This is California, where men don’t forgive that sort of thing.”

She was silent, and then said: “Yes, let’s go to Hangtown and be married.”

“Was your first marriage perfectly legal? Have you got the marriage certificate?”

She rose, dragged out the bundle she had brought with her, and from it drew a long dirty envelope which she handed to him.

He opened it and found the certificate. It was accurate in every detail. His eye ran over the ages and names of the contracting parties—Lucy Fraser, fifteen, to Jacob Shackleton, twenty-four, at St. Louis.

Twisting the paper in his hands he sat moodily eying the fire. The second marriage was the only way he could think of by which he could lend a semblance of right to the impossible position in which his generous action had placed him. Divorce, in that remote locality and at that early day of laws, half administered and chaotic, was impossible, and even had it been easily obtained he shrank from dragging into publicity the piteous story of how the woman he loved had been sold to him.

That a marriage with Jake Shackleton’s wife was a legal offense he knew, but with one of those strange whimsies of character which mark mankind, he felt that the reading of the marriage service over Lucy and himself would in some way sanctify what could never be a lawful tie.

In a spasm of rage and disgust he held out the paper to the flames, when Lucy, with a smothered cry sprang forward and seized it. It was the first violent action into which he had ever seen her betrayed. He looked in surprise into her flushed and alarmed face.

“Why not? Why not destroy everything that could connect you with such a past?” he said, almost angrily.

She hesitated, smoothing out the paper with trembling hands. Then she said falteringly:

“I don’t know—but—but—he was her father,” indicating the sleeping baby. “I was married to him all right.”

He understood the instinct that made her wish to keep the paper as a record of her child’s legitimacy, and made no further comment.

The next morning at dawn he started for his long walk into Hangtown, taking with him all the dust he had accumulated since Fletcher’s departure. He was absent till the afternoon of the following day, when he reappeared leading a small pack-mule, laden with supplies, among which were several articles of dress for Lucy and the baby, so that they might make a fitting appearance when they rode into camp for the wedding. Lucy was overjoyed at her finery, and arrayed in it looked so pretty and so girlish that Moreau, for the first time since the scene by the creek, took her in his arms and kissed her. It was the kiss of the bridegroom and the master.

The next morning when she woke the cabin was curiously dark. Going to the door to open it, she found it resisted, and went to the window. The world was wrapped in a blinding fall of snow. When Moreau came in for breakfast, he reported a blizzard outside. The cold was intense, the wind high, and the snow so fine and so torn by the gale that it was like a mist of whiteness enveloping the cabin. Already it was piled high about the walls and had to be shoveled from the door to permit of its opening. Fortunately they had collected a large amount of fire wood which was piled in the brush shed in which the man lived. During the morning Moreau took the animals from their shelter and stabled them in his. There was fodder for them and a bed of leaves, and the heat of the chimney warmed the fragile hut.

All day the storm raged, and in the evening, as he and Lucy sat before the fire, they could hear the turmoil of the tempest outside, moaning through the ranks of the sentinel pines. They were silent, listening to this shouting of the unloosed elements, and feeling an indescribably sweet sense of home and shelter in their rugged cabin and each other’s society.

The storm was one of those unexpected blizzards which sometimes visit the Sierras in the early winter. With brief intervals of sunshine, the snow fell off and on for nearly a month. Moreau had to exercise almost superhuman effort to keep the cabin from being buried, and, as it was, the drifts nearly covered the window. It was impossible to travel any distance, as the snow was of a fine, feathery texture which did not pack tight, and into which the wanderer sank to the arm-pits. Fortunately the last trip into Hangtown had stocked the cabin well with provisions. No cares menaced its inmates, who, warm and happy in the vast snow-buried solitudes of the mountains, led an enchanted existence, forgetting and forgotten by the world.

When the storm ended the miner attempted to get into the settlements with the mule. But the beast, exhausted by the insufficient food, as the best part of the fodder had to be given to the cow, fell by the way, dying in one of the drifts. This seemed to sever their last link with the world. Nature had drawn an unbroken circle of loneliness around them. Under its spell they were drawn closer together till their lives merged—the primitive man and woman living for and by love in the primitive wilderness.

So the enchanted winter passed. The man, at intervals, making his way into the settlements for food and the few articles of clothing that they needed. It was a terrible winter, nearly as fierce as that of ’46, but between the storms Moreau fitfully worked the stream, obtaining enough dust to pay for their provisions. The outside world seemed to fade from their lives, which were bounded by the walls of the cabin. Here, in the long fire-lit evenings, Moreau read to Lucy, taught her from his few books, strove to develop the mind that misfortune had almost crushed. She responded to his teachings with the quickness of love. Without much mental ability she improved because she lived only for what he desired. She smoothed the roughness of her speech and studied to correct her grammatical errors. She made him set her little tasks such as a child studies, and in the evenings he watched her with surreptitious amusement, as she conned over her spelling, or traced letters in her copy-book. She was passionately desirous of being worthy of him, and of leaving her old chrysalis behind her when she issued from the cabin.

This was not to be until the early spring. It was nearly six months from the time the emigrant wagon had stopped at his door, that Moreau, having accumulated enough dust to buy another mule and another outfit—took Lucy and the child into Hangtown for the marriage. This ceremony, about which in the beginning she had been somewhat apathetic, she now earnestly desired. It was accomplished without publicity or difficulty, Lucy assuming her maiden name of Fraser, and passing as a young widow. In the afternoon they started back for the cabin, Moreau on foot, with his wife and baby on the mule. They had decided to stay by their claim during the spring and early summer when the streams were high.

Thus the spring passed and the summer came. During this season Lucy, for the first time, saw that most lovely of Californian wild-flowers, the mariposa lily, and called her baby after it. As time went on and no other child was born, Moreau came to regard the little Mariposa as more and more his own. His affection for her became a paternal passion. It was decided between himself and Lucy that she should never know the secret of her parentage, but be called by his name and be brought up as his child. As the happiness of the union grew in depth and strength both the man and woman desired more ardently to forget beyond all recall the terrible past from which she had entered his life. It grew to be a subject to which Moreau could bear no allusion, and their life was purposely quiet and secluded, for fear of a chance encounter with some disturbing reminder.

So the time passed. In the course of the next few years Moreau moved from the smaller camps into Sacramento. Though a man of little commercial ability, he was always able, in those halcyon days, to make a good living for the woman and child to whom he had given his life. Years of prosperity made it possible to give to Mariposa every educational advantage the period and town offered. The child showed musical talent, and for the development of this he was keenly ambitious.

Across their tranquil life, now and then, came a lurid gleam from the career of the man who was Lucy Moreau’s lawful husband. Jake Shackleton was soon a marked figure in the new state. But his rise to sensational fortune began with the booming days of the Comstock. Then his star rose blazing above the horizon. He was one of the original exploiters of the great lode and was one of those who owned that solid cone of silver which has gone down to history as the Reydel Monte. Ten years from his entrance into the state he was a rich man. In twenty, he was one of that group of millionaires, whose names were sounded from end to end of an astonished country.

A quarter of a century from the time when he had crossed the desert in an emigrant wagon, with his two wives, he read in the paper he had recently bought as an occupation and investment, a notice of the death of Daniel Moreau in Santa Barbara. It was brief, as befitted a pioneer who had sunk so completely out of sight and memory, leaving neither vast wealth nor picturesque record. The paragraph stated that “the pioneer’s devoted wife and daughter attended his last hours, which were tranquil and free from pain. It is understood that the deceased leaves but little fortune, having during the last two or three years been incapacitated for work by enfeebled health.”