The continued, enforced intimacy into which their restricted quarters and indoor life threw them could not have been more effectual in fanning the growing flame if designed by a malicious Fate. There was only one sitting-room, and, unable to go out, they sat side by side in it all day. They read together, they talked, they played cards. They were seldom alone, but the presence of Bill Cannon, groaning over the fire with a three-weeks-old newspaper for company, was not one that diverted their attention from each other; and Cora and Willoughby, as opponents in a game of euchre, only helped to accentuate the comradeship which leagued them together in defensive alliance.
The days that were so long to others were to them of a bright, surprising shortness. Playing solitaire against each other on either side of the fireplace was a pastime at which hours slipped by. Quite unexpectedly it would be midday, with Cora putting her head round the door-post and calling them to dinner. In the euchre games of the afternoon the darkness crept upon them with the stealthy swiftness of an enemy. It would gather in the corners of the room while Cora was still heated and flushed from her efforts to instruct Willoughby in the intricacies of the game, and yet preserve that respectful attitude which she felt should be assumed in one’s relations with a lord.
The twilight hour that followed was to Dominick’s mind the most delightful of these days of fleeting enchantment. The curtains were drawn, a new log rolled on the fire, and the lamp lit. Then their fellow prisoners began dropping in—the old judge stowing himself away in one of the horsehair arm-chairs, Willoughby and Buford lounging in from the bar, Mrs. Perley with a basket of the family mending, and the doctor all snowy from his rounds. The audience for Rose’s readings had expanded from the original listener to this choice circle of Antelope’s elect. The book chosen had been Great Expectations, and the spell of that greatest tale of a great romancer fell on the snow-bound group and held them entranced and motionless round the friendly hearth.
The young man’s eyes passed from face to face, avoiding only that of the reader bent over the lamp-illumined page. The old judge, sunk comfortably into the depths of his arm-chair, listened, and cracked the joints of his lean, dry fingers. Willoughby, his dogs crouched about his feet, looked into the fire, his attentive gravity broken now and then by a slow smile. Mrs. Perley, after hearing the chapter which describes Mrs. Gargery’s methods of bringing up Pip “by hand,” attended regularly with the remark that “it was a queer sort of book, but some way or other she liked it.” When Cora was forced to leave to attend to her duties in the dining-room, she tore herself away with murmurous reluctance. The doctor slipped in at the third reading and asked Rose if she would lend him the book in the morning “to read up what he had missed.” Even Perley’s boy, in his worn corduroys, his dirty, chapped hands rubbing his cap against his nose, was wont to sidle noiselessly in and slip into a seat near the door.
The climax of the day was the long evening round the fire. There was no reading then. It was the men’s hour, and the smoke of their pipes and cigars lay thick in the air. Cut off from the world in this cranny of the mountains, with the hotel shaking to the buffets of the wind and the snow blanket pressing on the pane, their memories swept back to the wild days of their youth, to the epic times of frontiersman and pioneer.
The judge told of his crossing of the plains in forty-seven and the first Mormon settlement on the barren shores of Salt Lake. He had had encounters with the Indians, had heard the story of Olive Oatman from one who had known her, and listened to the sinister tale of the Donner party from a survivor. Bill Cannon had “come by the Isthmus” in forty-eight, a half-starved, ragged lad who had run away from uncongenial drudgery on a New York farm. His reminiscences went back to the San Francisco that started up around Portsmouth Square, to the days when the banks of the American River swarmed with miners, and the gold lay yellow in the prospector’s pan. He had worked there shoulder to shoulder with men who afterwards made the history of the state and men who died with their names unknown. He had been an eye witness of that blackest of Californian tragedies, the lynching of a Spanish girl at Downieville, had stood pallid and sick under a pine tree and watched her boldly face her murderers and meet her death.
The younger men, warmed to emulation, contributed their stories. Perley had reminiscences bequeathed to him by his father who had been an alcalde in that transition year, when California was neither state nor territory and stood in unadministered neglect, waiting for Congress to take some notice of her. Buford had stories of the vicissitudes of a strolling player’s life. He had been in the Klondike during the first gold rush and told tales of mining in the North to match those of mining on the “mother lode.” Willoughby, thawed out of his original shyness, added to the nights’ entertainments stories of the Australian bush, grim legends of the days of the penal settlements at Botany Bay. Young Ryan was the only man of the group who contributed nothing to these Sierran Nights’ Entertainments. He sat silent in his chair, apparently listening, and, under the shadow of the hand arched over his eyes, looking at the girl opposite.
But the idyl had to end. Their captivity passed into its third week, and signs that release was at hand cheered them. They could go out. The streets of Antelope were beaten into footpaths, and the prisoners, with the enthusiasm of children liberated from school, rushed into open-air diversions and athletic exercise. The first word from the outside world came by restored telegraphic communication. Consolatory messages poured in from San Francisco. Mrs. Ryan, the elder, sent telegrams as long as letters and showered them with the prodigality of an impassioned gratitude on the camp. Perley had one that he could not speak of without growing husky. Willoughby had one that made him blush. Dominick had several. None, however, had come from his wife and he guessed that none had been sent her, his remark to Rose to “let her alone” having been taken as a wish to spare her anxiety. It was thought that the mail would be in now in a day or two. That would be the end of the fairy tale. They sat about the fire on these last evenings discussing their letters, what they expected, and whom they would be from. No one told any more stories; the thought of news from “outside” was too absorbing.
It came in the early dusk of an afternoon near the end of the third week. Dominick, who was still unable to walk, was standing by the parlor window, when he saw Rose Cannon run past outside. She looked in at him as she ran by, her face full of a joyous excitement, and held up to his gaze a small white packet. A moment later the hall door banged, her foot sounded in the passage, and she entered the room with a rush of cold air and a triumphant cry of:
“The mail’s come!”