HE story I am about to narrate happened this way, Thomas Burke and I were old schoolmates. But his course and mine had been widely divergent for a score of years, so that by the time he had brought his family back to New York, and our acquaintance could be renewed, many untold things had happened to each.
I knew Tom had won his fortune by mining in the Rocky Mountains. It was rumored that his accomplished wife also had wealth in her own right, but Tom never had much to say in regard to his financial matters, and I did not like to question him notwithstanding our intimacy. I had dined with him two Christmases in succession, and now for the third time had eaten my Christmas dinner at his table.
On each of these occasions Mrs. Burke had worn at her throat a magificient brooch which I had never seen at any other time, though I had met her often when such an ornament would have been suitable enough. This brooch was a bear's face, holding in its teeth a tiny steel key. It was a marvel of delicacy in the goldsmith's art, and evidently very costly; for the eyes were each a ruby, and the head was encircled with large diamonds, half hidden by hairs of gold, as though they represented a collar round bruin's hirsute neck.
“Tom,” I said, when Mrs. Burke had left us to ourselves after dinner, “I am very curious about that bear's head brooch your wife wears. Why do I never see it except at Christmas? I am sure it has a history, and if there is no secret about it I wish you would enlighten me.”
“Well,” said my old friend, “that is rather a lengthy story. There is no secret about it—at least none to keep from an old chum like you. As for the brooch, that's only an ornament I had made some years ago; but the design and the little key—which is a real key—remind Marion and myself of what we call our Christmas story, because it culminated on that day.
“When you and I left the old university in 1870, and you came here, and I went West——”
But if I were to tell the story as he did, it would hardly be as plain to you as it was to me. I must write it out.
When Tom Burke left the university after his graduation he took the few hundred dollars which were the measure of his capital and went to the Rocky Mountains to seek his fortune. In the autumn of 1871 he became the superintendent of the Crimson Canyon Mining Company in Southern Colorado, where he found as assayer, and scientific assistant generally, a queer, learned and proud old Scotchman named Corbitt. This man had been one of the “Forty-niners” and had made a fortune which he had greatly enjoyed while it lasted, and the loss of which, in some wrong-headed speculation, he never ceased to deplore.
Now, a few weeks before Tom's arrival at the camp, Corbitt's home had been brightened by the coming of his daughter Marion, on what he told his envious acquaintances was a “veesit,” implying that she could not be expected to make her home there.
And truly this remote mountain settlement, inclement in climate, uncouth, dusty, filled with rough men, and bountiful only in pure air and divine pictures of crag and glen, icy-blue peaks and chromatic patches of stained cliff above or flower meadow below—all this was anything but the sort of place for a girl like her to spend her maiden days in.