That evening, an hour before sunset, the train was halted for the night at a point whence the travel-worn adventurers could look down for the first time into the Sacramento Valley, and render thanks in their various ways that the end of their tedious pilgrimage was almost reached. As Dora Hanchett and Posey stood together upon a green knoll, following with their eyes the winding trail that their feet were to descend on the morrow, they descried, toiling slowly toward them, one of those returning bands of unsuccessful and discouraged veterans—the reflux of the great wave of immigration constantly pouring into the golden valley—which they had frequently met in the course of their long journey. As the cavalcade drew nearer, Dora's attention fixed itself upon a curious figure that brought up the rear. Mounted upon a loose aggregation of bones and ears that purported to be a mule, this mysterious figure gradually approached, while Dora watched it as if fascinated. On and on it came, and still she gazed, spell-bound. Opposite her it paused. There was no longer any doubt: it was He. Clad in the mangled remains of the original great-coat, the original boot-tops yet towering in the region of his ears, and the upper half of the original beaver crowning his well-developed brain, there He was. Slowly and carefully he descended from the back of his shambling steed, settled himself well in his boots, pulled up the collar of his great-coat—and there was little but collar left of it—tipped the curtailed and weatherbeaten stovepipe to the proper angle, opened his paternal arms and feebly embraced his daughter. He announced himself to all concerned as a broken man—a poor unfortunate going home to die, where his bones might rest with those of his ancestors, and where his humble name and his honorable record in the service of his country would be cherished by his fellow-citizens after he should be gone. Providence had surely, in his extremity, drawn his daughter to his succor. Now he was relieved of all anxiety, and might turn his mind to things above. His daughter would fan the spark of life, and keep it burning, God willing, till the old home should be reached. Then he would release her from her labor of love. Then he would be at peace with all the world, and would cheerfully die in the midst of his weeping friends. He had up to this hour been haunted with the apprehension that his poor old frame might be left to moulder somewhere in the wide, inhospitable desert that stretched between him and his roof-tree. Now that dreadful apprehension was banished. The Lord had remembered his own. Dora would walk beside his beast and protect him, and the knowledge that she had thus been instrumental in prolonging her father's life would be her exceeding great reward.
A most enchanting prospect for Dora, was it not? Even she did not put her neck under the yoke until she had first informed her father of her momentous secret, and invited him to assume his rôle in the programme already mentioned as arranged by her lover and herself. But, as a matter of course, he scorned the suggestion. Posey begged and raved, but without avail. The girl never had a question in her mind as to her duty from the moment she saw her father approaching. She must do as he said—go back with him as his slave. There was no help for it.
And so the lovers held a hurried consultation, pledged eternal fidelity and all that, agreed that Posey should go on and make his fortune, and that when Dora should be released by death from her duty to her father he should either come back for her or she should go to him, and then they would be married. Meantime, he engaged to write to her frequently, and she promised to write to him faithfully once every week. And then farewell!
By this time the doctor's party had left him far behind, and naturally, considering the capabilities of his steed, he was growing impatient to move on. The early stars were already coming out, and he testily reminded Dora, as she lingered over her leavetaking, that there was no more time to lose. And so, without a murmur, the devoted soul turned her back upon all her new-born hope and joy, and dutifully took up the long and dreadful homeward march on foot. And Posey, his heart in his mouth and his tongue charged with unutterable execrations, gazed gloomily down into the darkening valley, that half an hour before had been filled with a radiance "that never shone on land or sea." And as he gazed all the bad in him persistently rose up to curse the despicable author of his woe, while all the good in him—about an even balance—rose up to bless the fast-disappearing idol of his heart.
Slowly and painfully, day after day, the little company of stragglers toiled on toward their distant homes, the redoubtable doctor, with his unwilling beast and his willing bond-woman, ever bringing up the rear. No one but Dora herself could know how grievously she suffered in her chains—how her very heart's blood was gradually consumed by the vampire whom she chose to cherish and obey because it was her misfortune to be his daughter.
The old home was reached at last. On the whole, the doctor had rather enjoyed the journey, and brought to the family board, as of yore, a tremendous appetite. He "resumed practice at the old stand" without delay, publishing a card to that effect in the village newspaper. He seemed scarcely to note the absence of his wife, who for a quarter of a century had been wearing her life out in a vain endeavor to justify his existence on this globe. In short, he speedily settled back into his old habit of life, and appeared to have totally forgotten that he had come home to die. And Dora, too, soon lapsed into her old routine of schoolkeeping, and so once more the pot boiled merrily. Once a week, with scrupulous regularity, she wrote her promised letter to Posey, and she waited long and anxiously for some word from him, but in vain. Weary weeks lost themselves in months, and month after month crept slowly away till almost a year had passed, and still the faithful soul famished for some token that she was not forgotten. Then one evening she went home from her school to find that the heavens had fallen. Her father, whom she had left four hours before apparently in the highest health and spirits, was dead. The village physician attributed his sudden death to apoplexy, which seems illogical. But he was dead, whatever the cause, and his orphaned daughter mourned him with as genuine a grief as ever wrung a human heart.
When in process of time the first transports of grief had subsided there seemed to be nothing left for Dora to do but to concentrate all the overflowing tenderness and devotion of her heart upon her lover, and to brood and pine over his long-continued silence. She never doubted that he had written to her, for the mail-service to and from the gold regions was notoriously unreliable in those days, and she was by no means the only one who looked in vain for letters thence. At last she could bear the suspense no longer. The spring had opened early, and a party in a neighboring town was to start for the diggings by the middle of April. This party, in which were already included two women, Dora resolved to join. Once let her reach that indefinite region denominated "the mines," and she felt the most unquestioning faith in her ability to find her lover.
And so once more the dauntless girl set out upon that long and tedious journey of three thousand miles. Not many weeks passed before the inevitable homeward-bound stragglers began to be encountered, and of these Dora eagerly sought information concerning the object of her quest.
"Bridge? No, marm," was almost uniformly the reply to her first question in that direction.
"He was sometimes called Posey," she would then suggest; and at last she found a man who acknowledged that he knew Posey. "He was at the Buny Visty in Carter's Gulch at last accounts," this individual informed her, but he omitted to commit himself as to the nature of Posey's occupation. "Wife, p'r'aps?" he observed, incidentally.