“I didn’t expect to find what I did find, you can bet on that,” said his client, as he bent forward to apply the tip of his cigar to the lamp chimney.
CHAPTER VIII
PRIZES OF ACCIDENT
It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the hour on his face the Colonel passed along the hushed street and then out into the red road between its clumps of dusty foliage.
As he skirted what yesterday had been his own land he looked on it with a new eye. It could be made to support them well. No matter how low Allen might sink they need never want again. The hilly part, where the spring was, could be sold or leased to some of the enterprising city hotel men. Or, if they objected to that, they could increase their market gardening to the dimensions of a large agricultural enterprise. They could rent to a rancher a portion of the rich, uncultivated land now lying idle, and thus gain an income sufficient for them to develop their own particular domain. To people of thrift and energy the possibilities of the tract were large. Alice could die in peace. Her girls were provided for.
As the cottage came into view the rider reined up and gazed at it. No smoke issued from the chimney. They all still slept. In the crystal stillness of the morning it looked peacefully picturesque, half veiled in its greenery of shrubs and vines. The air about it was impregnated with the delicate breath of the roses that lined the path from the gate to the balcony.
He gave a slight shake to his rein, and Kit Carson, who had been impatiently pawing with a proud forefoot, moved forward. The rider’s glance wandered to a window under the sloping roof, veiled by a blue curtain. Was that the girls’ room? The girls! The two faces rose before his mental vision and he turned his eyes from the window and let them pierce, far-seeing and steady—into the distance, into the future. Before he came to Foleys he had not cared, he had not dared, to look into the future. He had cowered before its emptiness. Now the faces of the sisters rose softly bright in its melancholy obscurity, the faces of Alice’s daughters—daughters that should have been his.
A week after he reached San Francisco he had a letter from June, a childish, incoherent letter, full of impassioned terms of gratitude, broken into by distressed comments on her mother’s health. Then, in more sprightly vein, she told him of how Mr. Barclay was stopping over at Foleys for a few days and came nearly every day and helped them in the garden, and Mr. Rion Gracey, riding back from Foleys to the Buckeye Belle one evening, had dropped in for a visit, and stayed to supper.
The Colonel seemed to see her as she wrote, laughing at one moment and then stopping to dash the tears off her cheek as she had done at the spring. He heard from no one else. Beauregard Allen had accepted the transfer of the property as a business transaction, the manner in which his adversary had desired him to accept it. To his friends in San Francisco the Colonel explained his speedy return and the dropping of the case as he had done to Cusack. It was not worth the time and trouble. The land was remote, the spring a disappointment; he was glad to be rid of it all.
Three weeks after this, sitting alone in his office, he received by the afternoon mail a newspaper. It was the Daily Clarion, an organ which molded public opinion and supported a precarious existence in Foleys. Unfolding the flimsy sheet he found a marked paragraph, and turning to it he saw it to be Alice’s death notice. She had died three days before “at the residence of her husband, John Beauregard Allen.” The paper slipped from his hand to the floor and his head sank. He sat thus till the twilight fell, alone in the dim office where the golden letters that spelled his name—the name of the successful man—shone faintly on the window.
That same afternoon the dead woman’s husband and children returned to the cottage after having committed all that remained of her to the grave. Rosamund had succumbed to the strain and sorrow of the last few days, and gone to bed prostrated with a headache. Allen, morose and speechless, had flung himself in a chair in the living-room and there sat, a heavy, inert figure. He had drunk heavily during the last few days of his wife’s illness, for he had always loved her, and in his weakness of heart had fled from the sight of her suffering, and tried to find surcease for his own.