Hard-Pan: A Story of Bonanza Fortunes

by Geraldine Bonner

Before Miss Reed had left the city she had given the package to the boy, with the instructions that he should not deliver it till the day set by her, some time after her departure. Of her own volition Mrs. Cassidy stated that she thought Miss Reed did not want any one to know where she went. Mrs. Cassidy had conferred with others of her kind in the locality, and the silent and hasty departure of the Reeds had been matter of comment. The shrewd Irishwoman saw that there was a mysterious romance here, and her glance dwelt with compassionate curiosity upon the gentleman who was sufficiently interested in the pretty girl they had all known by sight to employ detectives to hunt for her.

The finding of the boy and the interview with Mrs. Cassidy broke down the last of Gault’s hopes. He now knew that Viola had intentionally fled from him. At first, when no word came from her, and Mrs. Robson’s description of her as ill was fresh in his mind, he had a terrible fear that she might have died. But a later judgment convinced him that had this been the case he would have heard from the colonel. Viola was living—hiding somewhere from him, restraining her father from communicating with him, which, Gault knew, would be the old man’s wish and intention.

And now, with the blankness of her absence deadening his heart, for the first time he began to understand what she must have thought and felt—began to see the situation with her eyes. He thought of her, loving and believing in him as he knew she had always done, suddenly waking to the knowledge that he had suspected her. He saw her living over again those conversations in which he had half revealed his groundless doubts, had tried to find confirmation of them in the halting admissions of her puzzled ignorance. And with her comprehension of the light in which he had been regarding her came that coup de grâce of all doubts in his favor—the giving of the money.

With a clearness of vision that was like clairvoyance, he seemed to be able to read down into the depths of her consciousness, to see into the hidden places of the nature he had once thought so jealously secretive. In the gnawing bitterness of his remorse he realized that she had believed herself tricked, that the hand she had thought stretched to her in kindly fellowship in reality concealed a trap. Where she had looked for protection, support, and love, she had found what now presented itself to her as a sinister and cruel craftiness. Her best friend had turned out to be her most unrelenting enemy.

In the loneliness of that long summer he came face to face with despair. He had lost her by his own mad folly. Remorse for the wrong he had done her alternated in his thoughts with an unquenchable longing to see her again. His heart craved for her, even if only for a single moment’s glimpse. A younger man would have shaken off the gloom of his first great disappointment, have told himself that there were other eyes as sweet and hearts as true. But with him the elasticity of youth was gone. There was no forming of new ties, no delight in fresh faces. Life had offered him supreme happiness, and he had let it pass by him. Like the base Indian, he had “thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe.”

The summer held the city in its spell of wind and fog. Acquaintances who encountered one another on its wide thoroughfares said town was empty—not a soul left in it. The Mortimer Gaults took themselves away for rest and recuperation to balsamic mountain gorges among the redwoods. Letitia returned to the hotels and the Hacienda del Pinos. John Gault was left alone with his empty heart. If she had died it would have been bearable. The inevitableness of death makes us bow to its blows with broken submission. But she was alive—poor, sick, her love disprized, her pride trampled on, driven away from all that was familiar and friendly to her by fear of him.

The winds beat and tore through the city, buffeting the passers-by and sweeping street and alley. Then, as the color deepened toward evening, their stress and clamor suddenly ceased, a burst of radiance ran from the Golden Gate up the sky, glazing the level floor of the bay and flaring on all the western windows. It stayed for a space, seeming to immerse the town in an atmosphere of beaten gold, as if for one brief half-hour it was transformed into the glistening El Dorado of the early settlers’ dreams. Then the fog stole noiselessly in, and the houses crowding to the summits of the hills, the rose-red clouds, and the clear purple distances were blotted out.

That went on day by day till the autumn came. The winds dropped and the sun shone all day. In the country the air was clear and heavy with sweet, aromatic scents. All the fields were parched and sun-dried like hemp; only the thick-growing, bushy trees defied the drought, remaining green and hardy. The great hills were scorched to a smooth yellow, with a few green tree-tufts slipped down into their valleys where the watercourses were not quite dry.

In town it was all still and golden and hot. The city, queening it on its hills, rose in an atmosphere of crystal clearness from a girdle of sapphire sea. In the evening the smoke lay lightly over it, and the sun glared through like a great, inquisitive eye. Poor people in the old districts were ill from lack of rain and from unclean sewers. Rich people were coming back, looking sunburnt and healthy from their summer in the open air.

The Gaults came up out of their lounging-place in the redwoods, robust and blooming, Mortimer quite restored to health, and Maud two shades darker with her country tan. Letitia, with three trunks of ruined millinery, appeared from the hotels, and the town house was once more alive.