Jerry was in a bad temper. For some days he had been disturbed by rumors of Rion Gracey’s attentions to June. In the long twilights of the summer evenings Rion had been constantly seen mounting the steps of the Murchison mansion. The single state of the Gracey boys had long been a matter of comment, and, as their riches grew it was regarded with increasing wonderment. Black Dan’s heart may have been buried in the grave of his child-wife, but Rion had never paid any attention to any woman. Therefore, when it was known of men that he was a frequent visitor at the Allens’, the little world in which he was a marked man began to whisper.
Jerry did not at first hear these rumors. He was not only kept busy from morning till night but he was entirely preoccupied in his own affairs. His feminine love of intrigue for its own sake was overpowered by such respect and honest tenderness as he still possessed for June. After his interview with her he determined not to see her again. June was not like Lupé Newbury and his feeling for her was different. He said to himself with a sense of magnanimity that no unhappiness should ever come to her from him, and in order to be on the safe side he would keep away from her.
As had been the case with Jerry all his life, there was method in his morality. He had gained at least one thing by his marriage and that was his connection with the all-powerful Graceys. Though he disliked both men, who, he knew, regarded him with secret contempt, their patronage was too valuable to be jeopardized. June’s happiness and honor were precious things, but no more so than his own connection with the owners of the Cresta Plata. So he stayed away from her, feeling himself a paladin of virtue, and sentimentally thinking of her alone in the Murchison mansion, dreaming of him.
This agreeable arrangement of the situation was suddenly disrupted by the stories of Rion’s attentions. Jerry’s high thoughts of renunciation were swept away in a flood of jealous indignation. At first he refused to believe it. He was absolutely confident of June’s constant and long-suffering affection for him. That she should marry some one else he had deemed impossible. But one of the Gracey boys—it did not much matter which—the owners of one of the richest mines on the Comstock, was a very different matter. Money loomed the largest thing on Jerry’s horizon. He did not believe it could take a less prominent place on that of other people—of June especially, whose father he knew to be financially embarrassed. The thought of her—his own especial property—triumphantly marrying a millionaire, leaving him, as it were, stranded, having lost everything and been “done” on every side, infuriated him. The jealousy that had possession of him was fierce, the jealousy of the man whose love is of the destructive, demolishing kind.
On the day he had risen up in a bad temper he had heard what amounted to confirmation of the rumor. One of the office clerks in the Cresta Plata had told him that Rion’s infatuation for the young woman was leading him into lovers’ extravagances. A man who had always been indifferent to his dress, he was now getting all his clothes from San Francisco. He had books, flowers, and candies sent up for her all the time. He was with her constantly.
“Rion Gracey’s never looked at a woman before,” was the young man’s final comment, “and that’s the kind that it takes most hold on. He’s got it bad and can’t hide it. It’s out on him for any one to see, like the measles.”
Jerry’s jealousy and alarm boiled past the point of prudence. He made up his mind to get off early that afternoon and go to see June, and, as he expressed it in his own thoughts, “have it out with her.” He had no idea what he intended to say, but he was going to find out what her attitude was to Rion, and, if need be, accuse her of her perfidy.
He had perfected his plan of escape from the office when Black Dan informed him that he was considering the purchase of a new horse and would be obliged if Jerry—a notable judge of horseflesh—would take it for a spin along the grade road and report his opinion of it. Black Dan’s requests in this way were exceedingly like commands. But no one, from Barney Sullivan, the smartest superintendent in Virginia, to the youngest miner working on the ore-breasts, had ever dared to question them. With his face red with rage Jerry bowed his head in acquiescence, and that afternoon at the hour when he had hoped to be confronting June in her own parlor he was flying along the road toward Carson, cursing to himself as he held the reins over the back of Black Dan’s new horse.
The afternoon was magnificent, held in a diamond-like transparence and blazing with sun. The mountain air tempered its heat. As Jerry flew along that remarkable road which curves, like an aërial terrace, round the out-flung buttresses of Mount Davidson, the Sierra, a lingering enameling of snow on its summits, spread before him. Rising high in tumbled majesty, mosaics of snow set in between ravines of swimming shadow, it looked unsubstantially enormous and unreal like scenery in dreams. Between it and Mount Davidson vast, airy gulfs of space fell away that seemed filled, as a glass might be with water, with a crystal stillness. The whole panorama, clarified by thin air, and with clear washes of shade laid upon it, was like a picture in its still, impersonal serenity.
Jerry, in his rage, let the horse have its head and they sped forward, past the outlying cabins that made a scattering along the approach to the town, past the timbered openings of the lone prospector’s tunnels, to where the ledge of road rimmed the barren mountain flank. They were flying forward at an exhilarating pace when he noticed a woman’s figure some distance in front walking on the narrow edge of path and moving forward at a brisk rate of speed. As he overhauled it his glance began to fasten on it with growing eagerness. The woman heard the thud of the flying hoofs behind her, and drew aside, as close to the outer edge as she dared, looking with eyes that blinked in the sunlight at the approaching buggy. Jerry’s face flushed with a sudden realizing of the completely unexpected. It was June.