There was a horse there, too—stamping with a half-frightened motion, and a low, shivering neigh; and as she sprang forward with a shriek—a terrified question rising unconsciously to her lips—a dog flew at her with an angry howl, tearing at her garments, and making frantic efforts to prevent her touching the motionless form on the back of the horse.
To Jenny's ear the dog's wild yells spoke terribly plain her own cruel "Never—never—never!" but among the men there was a hasty murmur that the beast had gone mad, from running so long without food and water. There was a flash and a sharp report—Tucson's career had come to a close. And Jenny lay fainting in the arms of the sobbing women.
A BIT OF "EARLY CALIFORNIA."
That many strange and wonderful things happened in early times in California, is so trite a saying that I hardly dare repeat it. As my story, however, is neither harrowing nor sentimental, I hope I may venture to bring it before the reader.
Long before the great Overland Railroad was built, there entered one day one of the largest mercantile establishments in San Francisco a handsome, athletic man, whose fresh, kindly face showed a record of barely five-and-twenty years, and whose slender fingers belied the iron strength with which he could hold and tighten the threads forming the net into which malefactors are said, sooner or later, always to run. If he was a detective officer, he had friends, because he had a warm heart; and in spite of all the dark phases of life that were brought to his notice every day, he had not learned to disbelieve in the bright side, or the better instincts of humanity.
The chief clerk of this establishment was Captain Herbert's (the detective officer's) most intimate friend, and he had come to bid him good-bye—perchance to charge him to guard the "fatherless and the widowed," should the trip on which he was about to start out end disastrously to him. "Early Californians" realized, better than any other class of people, the uncertainty of life—particularly with those who had to cope with the desperadoes of that time; and the captain intended to start out as usual—with the determination to do or to die.
"By-the-by," said young Taylor, laughing, to the senior partner of the firm, studying the morning paper in the counting-room, "Mr. McDonald has been silent for so long that I think it would be a good job, and an economical one, to commission the captain to hunt up the junior partner of this firm, at the same time, and bring him in with the absconding cattle-agent."