The jury returned a verdict of “not guilty,” and the man was lynched in the quiet and orderly manner of that time.
VII
A week later forty or fifty people were camped beside the strawberry fields on the hills beyond the army posts and sloping to the ocean. Mr. Randolph and Nina, the McLanes, Miss Hathaway, Miss Shropshire, the “three Macs,” the Earles, and a half-dozen young men were domiciled in a small village of tents on the eminence nearest the city. The encampments were a mile apart; and in the last of them a number of the Californian grandees who had made the land Arcadia under Mexican rule enjoyed the hospitality of Don Tiburcio Castro, a great rancher who was making an attempt to adapt himself to the new city and its enterprising promoters.
Thorpe and Hastings walked over from the Presidio. They found the entire party assembled before the largest tent, which flew the American flag. As the young men approached, all of the ladies formed quickly into line, two and two, and walked forward to meet them. The men, much mystified, paused, raised their caps, and stood expectant. Mrs. McLane stepped from the ranks, and, with much ceremony, unrolled several yards of tissue paper, then shook forth the silken folds of the English flag, and presented it to Thorpe.
“It is made from our sashes, and we all sewed on it,” she announced. “You will sleep better if the Union Jack is flying over your tent.”
“How awfully jolly—what a stunning compliment,” stammered Thorpe, embarrassed and pleased. “It shall decorate some part of my surroundings as long as I live.”
Mr. Randolph himself fixed the flag, and Thorpe exclaimed impulsively to Mrs. McLane, with whom he stood apart: “Upon my word, I believe I am coming under the spell. I wonder if I shall ever want to leave California?”
“Why not stay? Unless you have ambitions, and want to run for Parliament or be a diplomat or something, or are wedded to the English on their native heath, I don’t see why you shouldn’t remain here. It is rather slow for us women: we are obliged to be twice as proper as the women of older civilisations; but a man, I should think, especially a man of resource like you, ought to find twenty different ways of amusing himself. You not only can have all that is exciting in San Francisco, watching a city trying to kick out of its long clothes, but you can saunter about the country and see the grandees in their towns and on their ranchos, to say nothing of the scenery, which is said to be magnificent.”