“She weren’t. She married twict, and she weren’t divorced. There ain’t but two people in the world that knows it. One’s Jake Shackleton’s widow,”—he rose, and, putting an unsteady hand on the table, leaned forward and almost whispered into his interlocutor’s face,—“and the other’s me.”
“Are you trying to tell me,” said Essex quietly, “that Miss Moreau is Jake Shackleton’s daughter?”
“That’s what she is.” The man turned round like a character on the stage and swept the room with an investigating look—“And she’s more’n that. She’s his lawful daughter, born in wedlock.”
The two faces stared at each other. The drunken man was not too far beyond himself to realize the importance of what he was saying. In a second’s retrospect Essex’s mind flew back over the hitherto puzzling interest Shackleton had taken in Mariposa Moreau. Could it be possible the man before him was telling the truth?
“How does she come to be known as Moreau’s daughter? Why didn’t Shackleton acknowledge her if she was his legitimate child? That’s a fairy tale.”
“There was complications. Have you ever heard that Shackleton was once a Mormon?”
Essex had heard the gossip which had persistently followed Shackleton’s ascending course. He nodded his head, gazing at Harney, a presentiment of coming revelations holding him silent.
“Well, that’s true. He was. I seen him when he was. Jake Shackleton crossed the Sierra with two wives. One—the first one—was the lady who died here a month ago, and passed as Mrs. Moreau. The other’s the widow. But she was the second wife. She didn’t have no children then. But the first wife had one, a girl baby, born on the plains in Utah. It weren’t three weeks old when I seen it.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In the Sierra back of Hangtown. Me and Dan Moreau was workin’ a stream bed there. And one day two emigrants, a man and a woman, with a sick woman inside the wagon, came down from the summit. They was Jake Shackleton and his two wives, and they was the worst looking outfit you’ve ever clapped your eyes on. They was pretty near dead. One er their horses did die, in front of our cabin, and the sick woman—she that afterwards was called Mrs. Moreau—was too beat out to move on. Shackleton, who didn’t care who died, so long’s they got into the settlements, calkalated to make her ride a spell, and when the other horse dropped make her walk. She was the orneriest lookin’ scarecrow you ever seen, and she hadn’t no more life’n a mummy. But she was ready to do just what they said. She was just so beat out. And then Moreau—he was just that kind of a fool—”