The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

Fanny had seen a big dog around the hotel and had patted his head, for she was fond of dogs, but she was more interested now in what Inez said of a robbery.

“Do you mean stage robberies, and are they of frequent occurrence?” she asked.

“Sometimes, and sometimes not,” was Inez’s answer. “There was a dreadful one just before mother died, and I think the fright killed her. She had heart trouble and was here to-day, gone to-morrow. We were alone, and when the stage passed in the afternoon a neighbor who was on it came and told us how dreadful it was, with two ladies fainting and children crying and the highwaymen taking the watch of the woman who lay like one dead. He sent it back to her at the hotel, and the money to the others. Wasn’t that queer?”

Fanny was thinking of what Roy had written her and exclaimed, “I have heard of that.”

“You have!” Inez rejoined. “Well, the papers were full of it, and people were determined to catch the men, if possible. Mother was very nervous over it, but I never thought of her dying. We always said our prayers together, and that night she prayed that the men might be caught and the wicked work stopped. She seemed the same when she kissed me good night, but when I went into her room in the morning she could not speak. Father had come home late and was caring for her, rubbing her hands and arms, which had in them no power to move. ‘Was it the fright of the robbery?’ I said to father, who nodded, while she tried to speak and her eyes followed him in such a beseeching way. ‘Do you want to tell us something?’ I said. She nodded and made a motion to write. I brought her pencil and paper, but her nerveless hands could not hold the pencil and she died looking up at father so pitifully. He was so tender and kind to her, and cried over her like a baby, and himself put her in the coffin. It was such a little coffin I didn’t realize till I saw it how small she was. We buried her on the hill back of our house where the light from our windows can shine upon her grave when we are there in the summer. In the winter it must be awful with the snow piled so high and all of us gone. Father was almost crazy for a while and walked the floor and sat by her grave and wouldn’t eat. He staid home the rest of the season and Tom staid, too, most of the time. There were no more stages robbed that summer, and not many last summer; three or four at the most, and it so happens that I am always alone with Nero. Of course no harm can come to me but I feel nervous just the same.”

Inez was talking very earnestly and rapidly, and her language was so good that Fanny felt sure she must have had better advantages than were to be had among the mountains and asked her at last where she was educated.

“I am not educated as you are,” Inez replied. “I was at school in Stockton two years and have been to school winters in Santa Barbara and here. The rest I learned from father and mother. She had been in a convent and taught me Spanish;—that was her language. She spoke English brokenly, but so prettily. Tom brings me books to read and I know all about the east where father is to take me some day when we are able to stop at first-class hotels as guests. I am afraid, though, it will be a long time before we go. Father’s business is not always very good.”

“What did you say it was?” Fanny asked, and Inez replied, “Exchange of property. I don’t know what that means, exactly, and when I asked Tom he said I hadn’t brain enough to understand it, if he explained. He likes to tease me.”

There was beginning to dawn upon Fanny a suspicion of the relation in which Tom stood to Inez, but she made no comment, and Inez continued: “I wish you knew father, he is so handsome for a man nearly fifty, and so kind to everybody. They worship him in the Yosemite and depend upon him a great deal. When a stage has been robbed he always gives his services to find the robbers. They have caught one or two who are in prison now, but they can get no clew to the men who have been such a terror to the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” Fanny gasped, “you frighten me so. Mother and I are going to the Yosemite in June and I should die if the stage I was in was stopped.”