Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

"Aboard!" exclaimed Thurstane, and he made a step as if to reach the shore or to plunge into the sea.

"I am sorry for you," said Coronado, with a simplicity which seemed like sincerity. "I thought it my duty to warn you."

"I cannot go back," groaned the young fellow. "I must go to San Diego. I am under orders."

"You must avoid her. Go to bed late. Get up early. Keep out of her way."

Turning his back, Thurstane walked away from this cruel and hated counsellor, not thinking at all of him however, but rather of the deep beneath, a refuge from trouble.

We must slip back to his last adventure with Texas Smith, and learn a little of what happened to him then and up to the present time.

It will be remembered how the bushwhacker sat in ambush; how, just as he was about to fire at his proposed victim, his horse whinnied; and how this whinny caused Thurstane's mule to rear suddenly and violently. The rearing saved the rider's life, for the bullet which was meant for the man buried itself in the forehead of the beast, and in the darkness the assassin did not discover his error. But so severe was the fall and so great Thurstane's weakness that he lost his senses and did not come to himself until daybreak.

There he was, once more abandoned to the desert, but rich in a full haversack and a dead mule. Having breakfasted, and thereby given head and hand a little strength, he set to work to provide for the future by cutting slices from the carcass and spreading them out to dry, well knowing that this land of desolation could furnish neither wolf nor bird of prey to rob his larder. This work done, he pushed on at his best speed, found and fed his companions, and led them back to the mule, their storehouse. After a day of rest and feasting came a march to the Cactus Pass, where the three were presently picked up by a caravan bound to Santa Fé, which carried them on for a number of days until they met a train of emigrants going west. Thus it was that Glover reached California, and Thurstane and Sweeny Fort Yuma.

Once in quiet, the young fellow broke down, and for weeks was too sick to write to Clara, or to any one. As soon as he could sit up he sent off letter after letter, but after two months of anxious suspense no answer had come, and he began to fear that she had never reached San Francisco. At last, when he was half sick again with worrying, arrived a horrible epistle in Clara's hand and signed by her name, informing him of her monstrous windfall of wealth and terminating the engagement. The crudest thing in this cruel forgery was the sentence, "Do you not think that in paying courtship to me in the desert you took unfair advantage of my loneliness?"

She had trampled on his heart and flouted his honor; and while he writhed with grief he writhed also with rage. He could not understand it; so different from what she had seemed; so unworthy of what he had believed her to be! Well, her head had been turned by riches; it was just like a woman; they were all thus. Thus said Thurstane, a fellow as ignorant of the female kind as any man in the army, and scarcely less ignorant than the average man of the navy. He declared to himself that he would never have anything more to do with her, nor with any of her false sex. At twenty-three he turned woman-hater, just as Mrs. Stanley at forty-five had turned man-hater, and perhaps for much the same sort of reason.