Lone Pine: The Story of a Lost Mine

by R. B. Townshend

At the girl's outburst Stephens was completely taken aback. Tears, a woman's tears, were a novelty to him, and he felt the quick leap of his heart in response. But it was ten years since he had heard a woman sob, and his practical sympathy, or at least the power of expressing it, had become blunted. He did not know what to say; half a dozen phrases struggled to be born in his throat; he wanted to explain at once to the pretty creature that it was all right; to tell her that there was nothing to cry about; to say there was no use in getting into a fuss over it; that after all a man had to take his chances; and that anyhow the milk wasn't spilt yet; that it would be time enough to begin to cry when something really happened. But he felt the brutal stupidity of such remarks, and they remained unspoken, while there arose in him at the same instant the urgent desire to do something; to take her by the hand like a frightened child; to smooth her ruffled hair and staunch her tears; to console her, and, by some means or other, stay the sobs that shook the slender body. But he had no right to do any such thing, and he hesitated to intrude himself on her grief, which, moreover, appeared to him, like a child's, a trifle exaggerated. To him who had lived so many years on the frontier, a violent death had come to seem almost the natural end. Few pioneers expected to die in their beds. Along the trails and around the mining-camps were many mounds, each one of which marked a six-by-two claim that was the last that the holder would ever occupy, one that he needed no ever-ready Winchester to defend. Nameless graves they were for the most part, or if there slanted at the head some rude board with a name and date roughly scribbled to say who lay beneath, the brief legend that gave all that would ever be known of how he came there repeated with monotonous regularity the tale of misadventure or of wrong. "Shot, stabbed, stripped and mangled by Thugs," "Killed by Indians," "Murdered by road-agents," "Lynched by Vigilantes," "Blown up by dynamite", "Crushed by a fall of rock," "Died of starvation," "Died of thirst," "Died of cold,"—these and such as they were the forms of death with which his Odyssey of toils had made him familiar. Small wonder, then, if he who had lived so long face to face with the possibility of such an end, taking the chances of it freely himself, and seeing them taken as freely by others, now felt as if the young man Don Andrés was a trifle overpitied. He was sorry for him himself, he was trying to help him all he knew, and he was ready to turn out and fight for him at any minute, but he could not see why anybody should want to cry about it. And yet here was this startlingly agitating, insistent noise of a girl sobbing beside him that gripped his heart with an emotion he hardly knew the meaning of.

"Don't you fret yourself," he repeated; "we'll see him through, señorita, never fear."

Instinctively he had risen to his feet and was standing by her; and presently she recovered herself and began to speak, though brokenly at first.

"It is very foolish of me, I know, but I cannot help it. It makes me think how my two uncles were killed by the Indians eight years ago up in the mountain. My grandfather found them both lying dead in the trail; the cruel Navajos had shot them both with arrows from an ambush. My poor grandfather was alone, so he could not carry them down; he had to leave them there, while he came back to San Gabriel for help. He cried so much that he grew blind and could hardly find his way to San Gabriel. And then their bodies were brought down here; I was only a child like Altagracia, but I remember it so well, and indeed this was a house of mourning; and now if they kill my brother too, I don't know what I shall do."

Again Stephens felt the odd sense of surprise at the strength of her feelings. Don Andrés was a fine young fellow enough in his way, but why all this display of emotion because he was now to run rather more risk than usual? Dimly he became conscious that her trouble was due to family affection, and that he himself had forgotten what it was like. His mind fled back to his boyhood, when he and a brother and sister, from whom he had now been long parted, used to play together; memories of that early fondness came back with a curious vividness. A hard crust had formed over the gentler side of his nature during the years of isolation and severance from those natural ties; it seemed ready now to dissolve in a moment at a few tears shed by a girl for a brother's peril. Habituated as he was to hold himself firmly in hand, he was half angry with himself for minding anything so much as he minded her sobs.

"Why, how fond you must be of him!" he remarked crudely; and without his intending it, his secret surprise showed itself in his tone.

"But he is my brother," she returned, and her wet eyes met his half indignantly; "don't you understand that I must care for him very much indeed?"

"Surely yes," he rejoined. "Of course I understand that"; but in his heart came a denial that he did really understand it, or had any right to understand it. "If I had been clubbed to death for witchcraft in the ditch yesterday by those Santiago idiots," he thought, "not one human soul would have cared like this about me." Yes; it was quite true. There was no one now who cared for him in this way, with this warmth of feeling, and there was no one for whom he cared or could care. Thence came a new sense of something lacking in his life; even supposing that all his hopes deferred were to be realised at last, supposing that to-morrow, for instance, he became master of a mine worth a million, who would rejoice? No one, unless it were Rocky, his old pard, who really wasn't a bad-hearted sort of fellow, though he could play the fool at times to such exasperating effect. But now he felt a sudden vacancy in his heart; the need of a comradeship that should be entire, absolute, and inalienable.

"And have you no family, Don Estevan?" she asked; "no brother or sister?"