Stories of the Foot-hills

by Margaret Collier Graham

"I don't see what they want of so many hats and shoes," commented Melissa. "I sh'd think they could go barefooted sometimes, to rest their feet; an' I didn't know folks' heads ever got tired." The thought recalled her own disappointment in the matter of millinery. She put her hand up to the broken rim of her hat. "I've a notion to take it off when I ketch up to him," she soliloquized. "I would if my hair wasn't so awful red."

Old Withrow had preceded his daughter, stumbling along the flume path, muttering sullenly. All his groundless elation had suddenly turned to equally groundless wrath. Having allied himself in a stupid, servile way with Forrester, he clung to the alliance and its feeble reflected glory with all the tenacity of ignorance. There were not many connected links of cause and effect in the old man's muddled brain, but the value of water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester.

"They're blastin', be they? Forrester never said nothin' 'bout blastin'. He'll give it to 'em when he knows it. He'll blast 'em!"

He staggered on past the cut-off that led to the camp, keeping well up on the bank along the path beside the ditch that Lysander had dug from Flutterwheel Spring. Once there, the sight of the ruin that had befallen his plans seemed to strike him dumb for a little. The slime still clung to the rocks, and a faint trickle of water oozed into the pool. He sat down a moment, mumbling sullen curses, and then staggered to his feet and wandered aimlessly up the cañon.

Sterling had idled along, crossing and recrossing the restless stream that appeared to be hurrying away from the quiet of the mountains. He was really not a very enthusiastic hunter, as the Chinaman had discovered. He liked the faint, sickening odor of the brakes and the honey-like scent of the wild immortelles that came in little warm gusts from the cliffs above far better than the smell of powder. He stopped where the men had been at work the day before, and looked about with that impartial criticism that always seems easier when nothing is being done.

Some idea must have suggested itself suddenly, for he hurried across to the opening of the tunnel and went in, leaving his rifle beside the entrance. When he turned to come out, he heard a sound of muttered curses, and in another instant he was confronted by the barrel of a gun in the hands of a man he had never seen,—a man with wandering, bloodshot eyes, which the change from the half-light of the tunnel's mouth magnified into those of an angry beast.

"You've been a-blastin', have ye, an' a-dryin' up other folks's springs? Damn ye, I'll blast ye!"

The old man was striving in vain to hold the rifle steadily, and fumbling with the lock. Sterling did not stop to note that the weapon was his own, and might easily be thrust aside. He did what most young men would have done—drew his revolver from his pocket and fired.

The report echoed up and down the cañon. By the time it died away life had changed for the younger man. Old Withrow had fallen forward, still clutching the rifle, and was dead.

Melissa, standing among the sycamores below, had seen it all as a sudden, paralyzing vision. She stood still a brief, terrified instant, and then turned and ran down the cañon, keeping in the bed of the stream, and climbing over the boulders.