For Alice his love neither changed nor ceased. He believed her to have been overborne by Allen, carried off her feet by the reckless impetuosity he himself had once thought so dazzling. If Allen had left her alone, if when he felt love rise in him, he had withdrawn from her, Parrish knew that the girl would have remained true to him and now would be his wife, nestled in his arms, asking no better resting place. At times, in the lonely watches of the night, he thought that, but for the false friend, she would have been beside him, her head against his shoulder, her light breath touching his cheek as she slept. It goaded him up and out into the darkness torn by the rage that drives men to murder.
Then, his first fury spent, he tried to rearrange his life—to begin again. He gave the cottage at Hangtown to his partner and moved his mining operations to Sonora. Soon after he began to meet with his first small successes. Now that he had no need for money it came to him. By the time the Civil War broke out he was a man of means and mark.
Once or twice in these years he heard of John Beauregard Allen and his wife. They had prospered for a time, then bad luck had fallen upon them. Allen’s father, reputed a rich man, died insolvent, leaving nothing but debts. Allen’s own business in San Francisco had failed and they had left there in the fifties. Once, just before the war, stopping for a day or two at Downieville, Parrish had accidentally heard that they had been living there and that Mrs. Allen had lost a little boy, her only son. He had left by the first stage, his heart gripped by the thought of Alice, a mother, mourning for her dead child.
In sixty he had returned to the East to fight for the Union. Five years later he came back as Colonel Parrish, a title earned by distinguished services to his country. It was said by his friends that Jim Parrish would have been a millionaire if he had stayed by his mines and his investments as other men had. But Parrish had cared more for the Union than for money. And, after all, what good was money to him! Often in the four years of battle and bloodshed he had wondered if he ever would meet Beauregard Allen face to face in the smoke, and whether, if he did, the thought of a woman and children would hold his hand. But he never did. He learned afterward that Allen had remained in California.
After his return from the war he heard of them only once. This was in a club in San Francisco, where a mining superintendent, recently back from Virginia City, casually mentioned the fact that Beauregard Allen, a prominent figure in early San Francisco, was holding a small position in the assay office there. In the succeeding four or five years they dropped completely out of sight. It seemed to him that what had long been an open wound was now a scar. Peace, the gray peace of a heart that neither hopes nor desires, was his.
And suddenly without warning or expectation, his old enemy was standing in his path. Allen the squatter, the man who was claiming his land, the man whose children had been improving it, was John Beauregard Allen! It was Alice’s daughter who had been sitting on the bench in her poor dress with her coarsened hands. It was Alice who was the “mother” that was sick.
He rose from his seat with a groan, and going to the window pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The lamp behind him sputtered and, sending a rank smell into the air, went out. The day was dawning. A pale gray light mounted the sky behind the locust trees quivering each moment into a warmer brightness.
By its searching clearness the Colonel’s face looked old and worn. It was a face of a leathern brownness of skin, against which the white hair and gray mustache stood out in curious contrast. The brows were bushy, the eyes they shadowed clear gray, deep-set and steady, with an under-look of melancholy always showing through their twinkle of humor. There was no humor in them now. They were old and sad, the lines round them deep as were those that marked the forehead under its rough white hair.
Through the branches of the trees he could see the slopes of his own land, the thick dark growth of chaparral muffling the hillside, and on its crest the glow of the east barred by the trunks of pines. As he remembered, the cottage was somewhere below them, on the edge of the cleared stretch which ran along the road. They were there—Alice and her children, beggars on the land Beauregard Allen was trying to steal from him.