CONTENTS
| Title | Author | Page |
| A Calaveras Hold-Up. | Roberta Littlehale. | [1] |
| From a Trolley Post. | Margaret Dodge | [9] |
| An Andenken. | Julia Magruder. | [13] |
| The Man from Maine. | J. D. Ellsworth | [25] |
| A Wedding Tombstone. | Clarice Irene Clinghan. | [29] |
| The Other One. | A. H. Gibson. | [34] |
| Stateroom Six. | William Albert Lewis. | [40] |
| Her Eyes, Your Honor! | H. D. Umbstaetter. | [43] |
| Advertisements. | [50] |
A Calaveras Hold-Up.
BY ROBERTA LITTLEHALE.
ONE sunny summer noon of the year 1880, a man lay under a clump of chaparral at the base of a scrub-oak, near a roadside in the Calaveras foothills. He lay on his stomach, with his head on his arms; and the flies crawled over the dirt on his clothes and the pistol at his belt, only suffering disturbance because of the industry of the black ant colony which had discovered meat among the bread crumbs that had fallen from his pocket. He looked asleep, but, to one who might have seen, there were slits in the sombrero that covered his head, and the eyes behind them were not closed. Rather, they scarcely winked in the sober scrutiny of their purpose.
The road here near the crest of the hill took a sharp right angle to the north, and picked its way brokenly to the summit over rocks and through stumps and standing trees. To the southwest below, it could be seen for miles on its upward course, appearing and disappearing among the open stretches and the woodland. The scrub-oak would have to lengthen its fat shadow very perceptibly before the man would find it necessary to get on his feet; so he allowed a portion of his attention to revert to the cause of his being here.
Billy Owen was not analytical. He did not go back any farther than his love for a woman as the representative cause of the present effect. The spirit of his ancestors, trained to conquest and struggle, had suffered a taint in the far gone years, and he had become the son of an uncertain race. There were men of them rude in virtue as well as strength, and men of them branded with a shifting eye and hunted step. Billy had always had his pleasure with a gun in his hand until these wondrous twelve months of his knowledge of Rudy. That that slight person had no acquaintance with the manner of his former life was due to the respect in which Billy held her. For himself, he couldn't get rid of a troublesome pride when he called up the men—the brakemen, and engineers, and inflated conductors—who had backed away from the steel-ringed mouth of his Colt, his Betty. And the brakemen, and engineers, and inflated conductors who hadn't backed away, and whom Betty had spat at, gave him almost more pride than the treasures he had borne off from under their bodies. But a man must be capering to more than one tune if he's to dance in the open all of his life, so Billy had been giving his later days to the panning for gold in secluded spots of the California Sierras; and the first Sunday that he had lent to the village and set apart for the play had been taken by Rudy! He remembered it all very clearly. He had been so careful to shave. Men must remember a moustache of straw color that brought out the steel in his small gray eyes. He had not changed his working dress, for a knife slips down a yawning boot-leg, and a flannel shirt yields best to one's muscles in motion. A hat with a brim was given of the gods, and Billy had drunk of the air and the anticipation, and sauntered with carelessness into the street. Painted beer by the geyserful spouted from pictured mugs at his every footfall, but he delayed that detail of his social duty until he should have been invited, and continued his march. It had seemed to him queer that the street was so empty. Only occasional men swung in and out of saloon doors, and the rival hotel chairs rested wholly idle. But it was not long before he found the cause. A little paint-blistered church sat around the corner, and its open doors had swallowed almost the entire populace. It seemed waiting for more while the thin notes of its rejoicing bell chased each other out on the air. Service must have been about to begin, for there was only a girl standing out on the steps, and the horses in ranks along the fences, who slept, or brushed flies, or hated their neighbors, as their natures gave impulse. Billy sent the place over to a hotter climate, and turned on his heel to shake off its dust just as the restless eyes of a high-headed roan brought him to a halt.