THE PIONEER

June

THE PIONEER

A TALE OF TWO STATES

By
GERALDINE BONNER
Author of Tomorrow’s Tangle

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HARRISON FISHER

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1905
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
March
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PIONEER

BOOK I
THE COUNTRY

THE PIONEER

CHAPTER I
THE SQUATTER

It had been five o’clock in the clear, still freshness of a May morning when the Colonel had started from Sacramento. Now, drawing rein where the shadow of a live-oak lay like a black pool across the road, he looked at his watch—almost five. The sun had nearly wheeled from horizon to horizon.

During the burning noon hour he had rested at Murderer’s Bar. Except for that he had been in the saddle all day, slackening speed where the road passed over the burnt shoulder of the foot-hills, descending into sheltered cañons by cool river-beds, pacing along stretches of deserted highway where his mounted figure was the only living thing in sight.

Stationary in the shade of the live-oak he looked about him. The rich foot-hill country of California stretched away beneath his gaze in lazy undulations, dotted with the forms of the oaks. The grass on unprotected hilltops was already drying to an ocher yellow, the road was deep in dust. Far away, hanging on the horizon like a faded mirage, was the high Sierra, thin, snow-touched, a faint, aërial vision.

The sleepy sounds of midday had died down and the strange, dream-like silence so peculiar to California held the scene. It was like looking at a picture, the Colonel thought, as he turned in his saddle and surveyed the misty line of hill after hill, bare and wooded, dwindling down to where—a vast, sea-like expanse swimming in opalescent tints—stretched one of the fruitful valleys of the world.

Kit Carson, the finest horse procurable in the Sacramento livery stable the Colonel patronized, stamped and flicked off a fly with his long tail. His rider muttered a word of endearment and bent to pat the silky neck, while his eyes continued to move over the great panorama. He had traversed it many times. The first time of all rose in his mind, when in the flush of his splendid manhood, he had sought fortune on the bars and river-beds in forty-nine. Forty-nine! That was twenty-one years ago.

Something in the thought clouded his brow and called a sigh to his lips. He made a gesture as though shaking off a painful memory and gathered up the hanging rein.

“Come, Kit,” he said aloud, “we’ve got to be moving. There’s fifteen miles yet between us and supper.”

The road before them mounted a spur at the top of which it branched, one fork winding up and on to the mining towns hidden in the mountain crevices. The other turned to the right, and rising and falling over the buttresses that the foot-hills thrust into the plain, wandered down “the mother lode,” the great mineral belt of California.

As they rose to the summit of the spur, the brilliancy of the air was tarnished by a cloud of dust, and the silence disrupted by sounds. The crack of whips cut into the tranquillity of the evening hour; the jangling of bells and voices of men mingled in strident dissonance. Both Kit and the Colonel rose above the curve of the hilltop with the pricked ears and alert eyes of curiosity.

The left-hand road was blocked as far as could be seen with a long mule train, one of the trains that a few years before had crossed the Sierra to Virginia City, and still plied a trade with the California mountain towns. The dust rose from it and covered it as though to shut out from Heaven the vision of the straining animals, and deaden the blasphemies of the men. Looking along its struggling length, the end of which was lost round a turn of the road, the Colonel could see the pointed ears, the stretched necks, and the arched collars of the mules, the canvas tops of the wagons and over all, darting back and forth, the leaping flash of the whips.

A forward wagon was stuck, and, groaning and creaking from an unsuccessful effort to start it, the train subsided into panting relaxation. From the dust the near-by drivers emerged, caught sight of the rider, and slouched toward him. They were powerful men—great men in their day, the California mule drivers.

They passed the time of day, told him their destination and asked his. Going on to Foleys, was he? Mining? Supposed not. Not much mining done round Foleys now. Like Virginia, pretty well petered.

“Virginia!” said one of them, “you’d oughter see Virginia! I’ve taken my sixteen-mule team over the Strawberry Creek route and made my ten dollars a day in Virginia, but it’s as dead now as forty-nine.”

Then they slouched back to their work. Through the churned-up dust, red with the brightness of the declining sun, men came swinging down from the forward end of the train, driving mules to attach to the stalled wagon. About it there was a concentrating of movement and then an outburst of furious energy. A storm of profanity arose, the dust ascended like a pillar of red smoke, and in it the forms of men struggled, and the lashes of the whips came and went like the writhing tentacles of an octopus. The watcher had a glimpse of the mules almost sitting in the violence of their endeavor, and with a howl of triumph the wagon lurched forward. The next moment the entire train was in motion, seeming to advance with a single movement, like a gigantic serpent, each wagon-top a section of its vertebrate length, the whole undulating slowly to the rhythmic jangling of the bells.

The Colonel took the turning to the right and was soon traversing a road which looped in gradual descent along the wall of a ravine. The air was chilled by a river that tumbled over stones below. Greenery of tree and chaparral ran up the walls. A white root gripping a rock like knotty fingers, a spattering of dogwood here and there amid the foliage, caught his eye.

Yes, Virginia had unquestionably “petered.” It had had a short life for its promise. Even in sixty-eight they still had had hopes of it. This was May, the May of seventy, and their hopes had not been realized. Fortunately he had invested little there. California the Colonel had found a good enough field for his investments.

He rode on out of the ravine, once again into the dry rolling land, his mind turning over that question of investments. He had not much else to think of. He was a lonely man, unmarried, childless, and rich. What else was there for a man, who had passed his fifty-fifth year, who did not care for women or pleasure, to concern himself about? It was not satisfying; it brought him no happiness, but he had had no expectation of that.

Twenty-one years ago the Colonel had waked to the realization that he had missed happiness. She had been his, in his very arms then, and he had thought to keep her there for ever. Then suddenly she had gone, without warning, tearing herself from his grasp, and he had known that she would never return. So he had tried to fill the blankness she had left, with business—a sorry substitute! He had spent a good deal of time and thought over this matter of investing, and had seen his fortune accumulating in a safe, gradual way. It would have been much larger than it was if he could have cured himself of a tendency to give portions of it away. But the Colonel was a pioneer, and there were many pioneers who had succeeded better than he in finding happiness, if not so well in gaining riches. As they had been successful in the one way, he had tried to remedy a deficit in the other, and his fortune remained at about the same comfortable level, despite his preoccupation in investments.

This very trip was to see about a new one in which there were great possibilities. He had a strip of land at Foleys, back of the town, purchased fifteen years ago when people thought the little camp was to be the mining center of the region. Now, after he had been regularly paying his taxes, and hearing that the place annually grew smaller and deader, a mineral spring had been discovered on his land. It was a good thing that something had been discovered there. The hopes of Foleys had vanished soon after he had come into possession of the tract. His efforts to sell it had been unsuccessful. Some years ago—the last time he was up there—you couldn’t get people to take land near Foleys, short of giving it to them. But a mineral spring was a very different matter.

As Kit Carson bore him swiftly onward he reviewed the idea of his new investment with increasing enthusiasm. If the spring was all they said it was, he would build a hotel near it, and transform the beautiful, unknown locality into a summer resort. There was an ideal situation for a hotel, where the land swept upward into a sort of natural terrace crested with enormous pines. Here the house would be built, and from its front piazza guests rocking in shaker chairs could look over miles of hills and wooded cañons, and far away on clear days could see the mother-of-pearl expanse of the Sacramento Valley.

A few years ago the plan would have been impossible. But now, with the railroad climbing over the Sierra, it would be quite feasible to run a line of stages from Sacramento; or, possibly, Auburn would be shorter. There was even a hope in the back of the Colonel’s mind that the railway might be induced to fling forth a spur as far as Placerville. The Colonel had friendships in high places. Things that ordinary mortals who were not rich, unattached pioneers, could not aspire to, were entirely possible for Colonel James Parrish.

But—here came in the “but” which upsets the best laid plans. At this point the squatter had loomed up.

The Colonel had hardly believed in the squatter at first. His claims were so preposterous. He had come shortly after Parrish’s last visit, nearly four years ago, and had taken up his residence in the half-ruined cottage which had been built on the land in those days when people had thought Foleys was going to be a great mining center. When Cusack, the drowsy lawyer who “attended to Colonel Parrish’s business interests in Foleys,” as he expressed it, let his client know there was a squatter—a married man with two children—on the land, the Colonel’s reply had been “let him squat.” And so the matter had rested.

Now, when the Colonel wanted to take possession of his own, build his hotel and develop his mineral spring, he had received the intelligence that the squatter refused to go—that in fact he claimed the land on a three and a half years’ tenancy undisturbed by notice to leave, and on various and sundry “improvements” he had made.

It took the Colonel’s breath away. That little clause in the lawyer’s letter about the wife and children had induced him to give his permission for the squatter to occupy his cottage. Having no wife or child of his own, he had a secret feeling of friendliness to all men, who, even in poverty and unsuccess, had tasted of this supreme happiness. And he had let the man remain there, undisturbed, throughout the three and a half years, had forgotten him—in fact, did not even know his name.

And then to be suddenly faced by the amazing insolence of the claim! He with his flawless title, his record of scrupulously paid taxes! He wrote to the Foleys lawyer, as to what “the improvements” were, and received the reply that they consisted in “a garden planted out and tended by the squatter’s daughters, and a bit of vineyard land that the girls had pruned and cultivated into bearing condition. There were repairs on the house, mending the roof and the porch which was falling down. Allen had made these himself.”

Allen! It was the first time Colonel Parrish had heard the squatter’s name. It sent a gush of painful memories out from his heart, and for a space he sat silent with drooped head. Why was not the world wide enough for him, and all who bore this name, to pass one another without encounter!

Now, as he rode on the last stage of his journey, and over the hilltops saw the smoke of the Foleys chimneys, his mind had once again fallen on the squatter’s name. Strange coincidence that after twenty-one years this name—a common one—should rise up uncomfortably in his path. He smiled bitterly to himself. Fate played strange tricks, and he felt, with a sense of shamed meanness, that he would have regarded the squatter with more leniency if he had borne any other name than Allen.

CHAPTER II
THE GRACEY BOYS

The smell of wood smoke and supper was in the air as the Colonel rode down the main street of Foleys. Under the projecting roof that jutted from the second-story windows and made a species of rude arcade, men were sitting in the negligée of shirt sleeves, smoking and spitting in the cool of the evening. They hailed the new-comer with a word of greeting or a hand raised in salute to the side of a head where a hat brim should have been.

The Colonel returned the salutations, and as Kit Carson paced through the red dust to where the drooping fringe of locust trees hid the façade of the hotel, looked curiously about him, noticing a slight stir of life, an appearance of reviving vitality in the once moribund camp. Foleys was not as dead as it had been four years ago. Fewer of the shop doors were boarded up; there were even new stores open.

He was speculating on this when he threw himself off his horse in front of the hotel. The loungers on the piazza, dustered and shirt-sleeved men, let their tilted chairs drop to the front legs, and rose to greet him to a man. Anybody was an acquisition at Foleys, but Colonel Jim Parrish, with the rumor of bringing a lawsuit into their midst, was welcomed as the harbinger of a new era.

They were all around him shaking hands when Forsythe, the proprietor, armed with a large feather duster, emerged from the front door. He cut the new arrival out from their midst and drew him into the hall. Here, dusting him vigorously, he shouted to Mrs. Forsythe to prepare a room, and between sweeps of the duster, inquired of him on the burning question of the squatter.

“Come to fire old man Allen, eh?” he queried. “Got your work cut out for you with him.”

“He’ll find he’s barked up the wrong tree this time,” said the Colonel grimly, “bringing me up from San Francisco on such a fool’s errand.”

“It’s about the galliest proposition I’ve ever heard. But he’s that kind, drunk a lot of the time, and the rest of it tellin’ the boys round here what a great man he used to be. He was glad enough to get twenty-five dollars a month holdin’ down a small job in the assay office.”

At this moment a door to the right opened, yielding a glimpse of a large bare dining-room set forth with neatly laid tables and decorated with hanging strands of colored paper.

“Say,” said a female voice, “ain’t that Colonel Jim Parrish that just come down the street?”

“That’s just who it is,” answered the Colonel, “and isn’t that Mitty Bruce’s voice?”

This question called to the doorway a female vision in brilliant pink calico. It was a buxom, high-colored country girl of some twenty-one years, coarse featured but not uncomely, her face almost as pink as her dress, her figure of the mature proportions of the early-ripening Californian.

“Well, well, is this Mitty?” said the new-comer, holding out his hand. “You have to come up to the foot-hills to see a handsome girl. I’d never have known you, you’ve grown up so and got so good-looking.”

Mitty sidled up giggling and placed a big, red paw in his.

“Oh, get out!” she said, “ain’t you just awful!”

“I won’t get out and I’m not a bit awful. You’ve got to take care of me at supper and tell me everything that’s happened in Foleys since I was here last.”

“Let her alone to do that,” said Forsythe. “There ain’t anything that goes on in Eldorado and Amador Counties that Mitty don’t know. She’s the best newspaper we got round here.”

Mrs. Forsythe here put her head over the stair-rail and informed the Colonel that his room was ready. He ran up stairs to “wash up” while the other two repaired to the dining-room.

A few minutes later he reappeared and entered the low-ceilinged room that smelled of fresh paint and cooking. It was past the supper hour at Foleys and only a few men lingered over the end of their meal. By a table at the window, cleanly spread and set, Mitty was standing. When she saw him she pulled out a chair and, with its back resting against her waist, pointed to the seat.

“Set right down here,” she said, “everything’s ready for you.”

Then as he obeyed she pushed him in, saying over his shoulder:

“It’s real nice to see you again, Colonel. It seems awful long since you was here last.”

The Colonel looked up at her with an eye of twinkling friendliness. She was gazing at him with childish pleasure and affection. He had known Mitty since her tenth year when Forsythe and his wife had adopted her, the only child of a dying woman whose husband had been killed in a mine.

“Good girl, Mitt,” he said. “Have you got all the gossip of the last four years saved up for me?”

“I guess I can tell you as much as most,” she answered, not without pride, and then flourished off to the hole in the dining-room which communicated with the kitchen.

When she had set his supper before him she sat down opposite, her elbows on the table, comfortably settled for the gossip the traveler had requested.

“Foleys seems to be livening up,” he said. “I noticed several new stores. What’s happening?”

“Foleys!” exclaimed Mitty, with the Californian’s loyalty to his native burg, “Foleys is the liveliest town along the mother lode. There ain’t nothing the matter with Foleys! It’s the Gracey boys’ strike up at the Buckeye Belle mine that’s whooping things up.”

“Oh, that’s it, of course,” said the Colonel. “They say the Gracey boys have really struck it this time. I heard some talk of it before I came up. The report down below was that it was a pretty good thing.”

“You bet,” said the young woman with a knowing air. “Nearly a year ago one of the gentlemen connected with it said to me, ‘We’ve got a mine there; bed-rock’s pitchin’ and there’s two bits to the pan.’ So I wasn’t surprised when I heard they’d struck it. They’re goin’ to build a twenty-stamp mill next thing you know.”

“Good for them!” said the Colonel. “The Gracey boys have been mining for years all over this country and in Mexico and Nevada, and this is the first good thing they’ve got. How far is it from here?”

“About twelve miles up in that direction—” she gave a jerk of her hand to the right—“up on the other side of the South Fork. They have to come here for everything. Barney Sullivan, the superintendent, does most of their buying.”

She looked at the Colonel with a wide-eyed, stolid gaze as she gave this insignificant piece of information. The look suggested to her vis-à-vis that the information was not insignificant to her.

“Barney Sullivan,” he said, “I remember him. He’s been with them for some years, was in Virginia City when they were there. He’s a good-looking fellow with red hair.”

“Good-lookin’, did you say?” exclaimed Mitty, in a high key of scornful disbelief. “Well, that’s more’n I can see. Just a red-headed Irish tarrier, with the freckles on him as big as dimes. It’s a good thing all the world don’t like the same kind of face.”

Her scorn was tinctured with the complacence of one who knows herself exempt from similar charges. Mitty, secure in the knowledge that her own patronymic was Bruce, affected a high disdain of the Irish. She also possessed a natural pride on the score of her Christian name, which in its unique unabbreviated completeness, was Summit, in commemoration of the fact that upon that lofty elevation of the Sierra she had first seen the light.

“You’ll be able to see all the Buckeye Belle crowd to-night,” she continued; “they’ll be in now any time. There’s going to be a party here.”

The Colonel looked up from his plate with the thrust-out lips and raised brows of inquiring astonishment.

“The devil you say!” he ejaculated. “I arrived just at the right moment, didn’t I? I suppose I’ll have to stand round looking at the men knifing each other for a chance to dance with Miss Mitty Bruce.”

Mitty wriggled with delight and grew as pink as her dress.

“Well, not quite’s bad as that,” she said with bridling modesty, “but I can have my pick.”

Her friend had finished the first part of his supper, and placing his knife and fork together, leaned back, looking at her and smiling to himself. She saw the empty plate, and rising, bent across the table and swept it and the other dishes on to her tray with an air of professional expertness. As she came back with the dessert the last diner thumped across the wooden floor in noisy exit.

The plate that she set before the Colonel displayed a large slab of pie. A breakfast cup of coffee went with it. He looked at them with an undismayed eye, remarking:

“Who’s coming to the party? I’ll bet a new hat Barney Sullivan will be here—the first man on deck, and the last to quit the pumps. But I don’t suppose the Gracey boys will show up.”

“Yes, they will—both of ’em.”

“What, Black Dan? Black Dan Gracey doesn’t go to parties.”

“Well, he don’t generally. But he’s goin’ to this one. His daughter, Mercedes, is here, that sort er spidery Spanish girl, and he’s goin’ for her.”

Mitty, having seen that her guest had all that in Foleys made up the last course of a complete and satisfactory supper, went round and took her seat at the opposite side of the table. As she spoke he noticed a change in her voice. Now, as he saw her face, he noticed a change in it, too. There was a withdrawal of joy and sparkle. She looked sullen, almost mournful.

“Black Dan Gracey’s daughter here?” he queried. “What’s she doing so far afield? The last I heard of her she was in school in San Francisco.”

“So she was until two days ago. Then some kind er sickness broke out in the school, and her paw went down to bring her up here. She was so precious she couldn’t come up from San Francisco alone. She had to be brung all the way like she was made of gold and people was tryin’ to steal her. They stopped here for dinner on their way up. I seen her.”

“She promises to be very pretty,” said the Colonel absently. “They say Gracey worships her.”

“Pretty!” echoed Mitty in a very flat voice. “I don’t see what makes her so dreadful pretty. Little black thing! And anybody’d be pretty all togged up that way. She’d diamond ear-rings on, real ones, big diamonds like that.”

She held out the tip of her little finger, nipped between her third and thumb.

“I guess that makes a difference,” she said emphatically, looking at him with a pair of eyes which tried to be defiant, but were really full of forlorn appeal.

“Of course it makes a difference,” said the Colonel cheeringly, without knowing in the least what he meant, “a great difference.”

“They was all staring at her here at dinner. There was four men in the kitchen trying to get a squint through the door, until the Chinaman threw ’em out. And she knew jest as well as any one, and liked it. But you oughter have seen her pretend she didn’t notice it. Jest eat her dinner sort er slow and careless as if they was no one round more important than a yaller dog. Only now and then she’d throw back her head so’s her curls ’ud fall back and the diamond ear-rings ’ud show. I said to paw flat-footed, ‘Go and wait on her yourself, since you think she’s so dreadful handsome. I don’t do no waiting on that stuck-up thing.’”

Mitty turned away to the window. Her recital of the sensation created by the proud Miss Gracey seemed to affect her. There was a tremulous undernote in her voice; her bosom, under its tight-drawn pink calico covering, heaved as if she were about to weep.

The Colonel noted with surprise these signs of storm, and was wondering what would be best to say to divert the conversation into less disturbing channels, when Mitty, looking out of the window, craned her neck and evidently followed with her eyes a passing figure.

“There goes June Allen,” she said; “don’t she look shabby?”

The name caused the Colonel to stop eating. He raised his eyes to his companion. She was looking at him with reviving animation in her glance.

“That’s the daughter of old man Allen what’s squatted on your land,” she explained. “You ain’t ever seen the girls, have you?”

The Colonel, who had finished, laid his napkin on the table.

“No,” he answered, “are they children?”

“Children!” echoed Mitty, “I guess not. June’s twenty and Rosamund’s nineteen. I know ’em real well. They’re friends of mine.”

He raised his eyebrows, surprised and relieved at the information. It would be less hard to oust the squatter if his children were of this age than if they were helpless infants.

“What sort of girls are they?” he asked.

“Oh they’re real lovely girls. And they’ve got a wonderful education. They know lots. They’re learned. Their mother learned it to them—”

Mitty stopped, a sound outside striking her ear. The Colonel was looking at her with quizzical inquiry. The picture of the squatter’s children, as educated, much less “learned,” filled him with amused astonishment. He was just about to ask his informant for a fuller explanation, when she rose to her feet, her face suffused with color, her eyes fastened in a sudden concentration of attention on something outside the window.

“Here they are,” she said in a low, hurried voice. “Get up and look at them.”

He obeyed, not knowing whom she meant. In the bright light of the after-glow he saw four figures on horseback—three men and a girl—approaching down the deserted street. Behind them a pack burro, his back laden with bags and valises, plodded meekly through the dust. The Colonel recognized the men as the Gracey brothers and their superintendent, Barney Sullivan. The girl he had not seen for a year or two, and she was at the age when a year or two makes vast changes. He knew, however, that she was Black Dan Gracey’s daughter, Mercedes, who was expected at the dance.

The cavalcade came to a stop outside the window. From the piazza the front legs of the loungers’ chairs striking the floor produced a series of thuds, and the thuds were followed by a series of hails such as had greeted the Colonel. But the loungers made no attempt to go forward, as they had done in his case. An access of bashfulness in the presence of beauty held them sheepishly spellbound. It remained for Forsythe to dash out with his duster and welcome the new arrivals with the effusion of a mining camp Boniface.

The Colonel, unseen, looked at them with perhaps not as avid a curiosity as Mitty, but with undisguised interest. He had long known the Gracey boys, as they were called, though Dan was forty-three and Rion twelve years younger. He had often heard of their mining vicissitudes, not only from men similarly engaged, but from themselves on their occasional visits to San Francisco. The society of that city had not yet expanded to the size when it fell apart into separate sets. Its members not only had a bowing acquaintance, but were, for the most part, intimate. The Gracey boys had, as the newspapers say, “the entrée everywhere,” though they did not, it is true, profit by it to the extent that San Francisco would have liked.

They were not only educated men, who had come from Michigan in their boyhood, but Black Dan Gracey was a figure distinguished—at any rate, to the feminine imagination—by an unusual flavor of romance. Seventeen years before the present date he had met, while mining in Mexico, a young Spanish girl of fourteen, had fallen madly in love with her, and when her parents placed her in a convent to remove her for ever from the hated Gringo, with six of his men, had broken into the convent and carried her off.

It was part of the romance that a year later his child-wife, as passionately loving as he, should have died, leaving him a baby. It was said that Black Dan Gracey had never recovered this sudden severing of the dearest tie of his life. He certainly was proof against the wiles that many sirens in San Francisco and elsewhere had displayed for his subjugation. It was after this, anyway, that the adjective Black had been prefixed to his name. Most people said it had arisen because of his swarthy coloring—he was of an almost Indian darkness of tint—but there were those who declared it was a tribute to his moody taciturnity, for Black Dan Gracey was a man of few words and rare smiles.

Now, standing in the brilliant evening light, the watcher could not but be impressed by the appearance of the two brothers. A fine pair of men, the Gracey boys, muscular, broad-shouldered, and tall; out-door men whose eyes were far-seeing and quiet, who felt cramped in cities, and returned from them with a freshened zest to the stream-bed and the cañon. Rion was obviously many years his brother’s junior. He was a more normal-looking person, not so darkly bearded and heavily browed, more full of the joys and interests of life.

As he slid from his saddle to the ground he was laughing, while his elder, the lower part of his face clothed in a piratical growth of black hair, lowered somberly from under a gray sombrero. In their rough and dust-grimed clothes, they still showed the indefinable air of the well-born and educated man, which curiously distinguished them from Barney Sullivan, their companion. Barney was as tall and well set up as either of them, but beyond a doubt he was what Mitty had called a “tarrier,” in other words an Irish laborer. He, too, was laughing, a laugh that showed strong white teeth under a short red mustache. His hat, pushed back from his forehead, revealed the same colored hair, thick and wiry. He had a broad, turned-up nose, plenteously freckled as were his hands, raised now to assist Miss Gracey from her horse.

Upon the one feminine member of the party the Colonel’s eyes had been fixed, as were those of every man in the vicinity. He calculated that she was nearly sixteen. For a girl with Spanish blood that would mean a young woman, full-grown and marriageable. She still, however, retained a look of childhood that was extremely charming, and in some vague, indistinct way, pathetic, he thought. Perhaps the pathos lay in the fact that she had never had a mother, and that the best care an adoring father could lavish upon her was to hire expensive nurses in her childhood, and send her to still more expensive boarding-schools when she grew older.

She was undoubtedly fulfilling the promise she had always given of being pretty. She sat sidewise on her saddle, looking down at Barney’s raised hands. Her hair, which was as black as her father’s, was arranged in loosely flowing curls that fell over her shoulders and brushed her chest. In this position, her chin down, her eyelashes on her cheeks, her lips curved in a slow, coquettish smile, she presented a truly bewitching appearance. Under her childish demeanor, the woman, conscious of unusual charms, was already awake. The Colonel felt as Mitty had, that though her entire attention seemed concentrated on Barney, she was acutely aware of the staring men on the piazza, and was rejoicing in their bashful admiration. He could not help smiling, her indifference was so coolly complete. His smile died when he felt Mitty give him a vicious dig in the back.

“Did you see the ear-rings?” she said in a hissing undertone.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“Do you suppose they’re real diamonds?”

“Why, of course. Black Dan wouldn’t give his daughter anything else.”

Mitty gave forth a sound that seemed a cross between a snort and a groan.

“And a pack burro!” she exclaimed with fuming scorn. “Did you get on to the pack burro, all loaded up with bags? She has to have her party rig brought along on a pack burro!”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” he said soothingly. “She couldn’t go to the party in her riding habit all grimed up with dust. Nobody ever saw a girl at a party in a riding habit.”

“Well, the Phillips girl can go all right in a pink flannel skirt and miners’ boots,” declared his companion with combative heat, overlooking the fact that the festal array of the Phillips girl had been a subject of her special derision. “I guess she don’t have to have a pack burro to carry her duds.”

The Colonel realized that the moment for gentle reasoning was over. Only the girl’s burning curiosity kept down the wrathful tears evoked by a newly stirred jealousy. When she saw Black Dan’s daughter slide from her saddle into Barney Sullivan’s arms, an ejaculation of mingled pain and rage escaped her that had a note of suffering in it.

The Colonel, in his time, had known such pangs, a thousand times deeper and more terrible than Mitty had ever experienced. He turned to her smiling, not teasingly, but almost tenderly, and saw her face blighted like a rose dashed by rain, pitiful and a little ludicrous. The pitiful side of it was all that struck him.

“Did you see how mighty easy Barney is with her?” she stammered, making a desperate feminine attempt to speak lightly.

“A gentleman has to help a lady off her horse; he can’t let her climb down all by herself. Barney’s not that kind of a chump. You run along now and get ready. You haven’t got such a lot of time, for you’ve got to help set the tables for supper. And don’t you fret. I just feel that you’re going to look as nice as any girl in the place. That dress of yours is going to be just about right. Hurry up! Here they are.”

Mitty heard the advancing footfalls in the passage and the sound of approaching voices. As the tail of her pink calico skirt disappeared through the kitchen door, the Gracey party entered through the one that led to the office. There were greetings with the Colonel, and he sat down at their table to exchange the latest San Francisco gossip with the mining news of the district, and especially to hear the details of the strike in the Buckeye Belle.

CHAPTER III
THE NAME OF ALLEN

An hour later as the Colonel was leaving his room, the voices of Forsythe and a new-comer ascending the stairs struck on his ear. He leaned over the baluster and looked down at the tops of their approaching heads. Forsythe’s bald pate was followed by another, evidently a younger one, by the curly brown hair that covered it. A pair of shoulders in a dusty coat was beneath the head, and, as they mounted, the Colonel heard a voice of that cultured intonation which the far West scornfully regards as an outgrowth of effete civilizations. In short, the owner of the voice spoke like an Easterner who has had a college education.

The Colonel, if he was doubtful about the top of the head, knew the voice directly.

“Jerry Barclay, by thunder!” he exclaimed over the railing. “What the devil are you doing up here?”

The new-comer started and lifted a handsome face, which, in clean-cut distinction of feature, seemed to match the voice. He cleared the last steps at a bound and stretched out a sinewy brown hand to the older man. There was something delightfully frank and boyish in his manner.

“Well, old son,” he said, “that comes well from you! About the last person in California I expected to see at Foleys. What’s up?”

In the light of the kerosene lamps which illumined the hallway he was shown to be some thirty years of age, tall, slender, upright, with upon him and about him that indescribable air of the man of clubs and cities. His loose sack-coat and flannel shirt set upon his frame with a suggestion of conscious masquerade. He did not belong to the present rough setting, albeit he was so easy of manner and movement that it could not be said of him he was awkwardly out of place anywhere. The genial frankness of his address was the western touch about him, which made him acceptable in a society where his manner of speech might have been resented as a personal reflection. It even outweighed the impression produced by the seal ring he wore. That it was not the outward and visible expression of a mellow friendliness of nature did not matter. What did matter was that it made life much simpler and more agreeable for Jerry Barclay.

“What am I doing up here?” he said in answer to the older man’s question. “Looking after my interests. What else would bring a man into these trails? There’s an old claim of my father’s out Thompson’s Flat way, that they’ve been getting up a fairy tale about. Ever since the Buckeye Belle’s panned out so well they keep inventing yarns down below that sound like forty-nine. But the Buckeye Belle has made a strike, Forsythe tells me.”

“The Gracey boys are here to-night. They’ll tell you all about it. Black Dan won’t have anything else to do.”

The younger man pursed his lips for a whistle of surprise.

“That’s luck,” he said. “What’s Black Dan Gracey doing in a center of civilization like this?”

“Bringing his daughter in for a dance. We’ve got a party on here to-night. Go into your room and primp up the best you know how. Dancing men are short.”

The young man laughed, a deep, jolly laugh.

“Timed it just right, didn’t I? Do you suppose the belles of Foleys will take me this way, travel-stained and weary? I’d like to see Black Dan’s daughter. They say she promises to be a beauty.”

“Promises!” echoed the Colonel; “she kept that promise some time ago. She’s sixteen years old, my boy, and she can take your pelt and nail it to the barn door whenever she’s a mind to.”

The other turned away to the open door of the room Forsythe had lit up for him.

“Sixteen!” he said. “Oh, that’s too young! No, Colonel, I’ve not got to the age when sixteen attracts. But you ought to be just about there. So long! You’ll see me later looking on at your gambols with the sixteen-year-older.”

His boyish laugh issued from the room, and as the Colonel went down stairs he could hear it above the swishing of water and the sound of smitten crockery.

From below the first tentative whinings of the violins rose, and as he reached the lower hall he heard the rattling of vehicles and the sound of voices as the earlier guests began to arrive. To the right of the hall he discovered Black Dan, secluded in a small room reserved by Forsythe for honored patrons, smoking tranquilly as he tilted back in a wooden arm-chair. The Colonel joined him, and for an hour the smoke of their cigars mingled amicably as they talked over the mining prospects of the district, and the Colonel’s scheme for the development of his mineral spring.

It was near nine and the dance had passed its initial stage of bashful gaiety, when they strolled down the balcony to where the windows of the dining-room cast elongated squares of light into the darkness. This room, built on the angle of the house, had a door in the front, flanked by two windows, and down the long side a line of four more windows. Before each aperture there was a gathering of shadowy shapes, the light gilding staring faces.

At the first window the two men stopped and looked in. The dining-room, with its wooden walls, low ceiling and board floor, framed like an echoing shell the simple revel. Its bareness had been decorated with long strands of colored paper, depending from points in the ceiling and caught up in the corners. At intervals along the walls kerosene lamps, backed by large tin reflectors, diffused a raw, bright light, each concave tin throwing a shadow like a stream of ink down the boards below it. In a corner the three musicians worked with furious energy, one blowing a cornet and two scraping violins. A square dance was in progress, and at intervals the man who played the larger violin, his chin dug pertinaciously into the end of his instrument, yelled in strident tones:

“Swing your pardners! Ladies to the right. Shassay all.”

Black Dan, satisfied by the first glance that his daughter was provided with a partner, retraced his steps and took a seat at the deserted end of the balcony, whence the red tip of his cigar came and went against a screen of darkness. The Colonel, much interested, remained looking in.

It was an innocently spirited scene, every participant seeming bent on exacting his full share of enjoyment from the fleeting hour. There were girls who had driven in fifteen and twenty miles from the camps and ranches scattered through the district, and who, flushed and excited, were bounding through the measure with an energy which made the floor vibrate. Their partners, also drawn from a radius of twenty miles about Foleys, were of many varieties, from the few mining superintendents of the neighborhood to some of the underground workers on the Buckeye Belle.

Mitty, clad in maidenly white muslin confined by a blue sash, was evidently much in demand. Her dancing, which was marked by a romping vigor, had loosened her hair, and a half-looped brown braid sent a scattering of hair-pins along the floor. Her partner, the proprietor of the local livery stable, was conducting her through the mazes of the dance with many fancy steps. An occasional haughty glance, a loudly defiant quality in her laugh, and the pert air with which she flounced through the figures, indicated to the watcher that she was acutely conscious of Barney Sullivan, leaning against the wall opposite and eying her with jealous, hang-dog adoration.

In this assemblage of rustic beauty, red, over-heated, and somewhat blowsy, Mercedes Gracey looked smaller, finer and more delicately finished than she had in the afternoon glow, with nature for a background. That she should be participating with obvious pleasure in such an humble entertainment did not surprise the Colonel, used to the democratic leveling of ranks that obtained in foot-hill California. It did not strike him as any more remarkable than that she should be enjoying the society of Joe Mosely, who kept the Sunset Saloon at Thompson’s Flat, and twenty years before, in the days of his own and the state’s uncontrolled youth, had “killed his man” and narrowly escaped lynching in Hangtown.

The watcher’s eye left her with reluctance, for a man at any age, even with a heart cold to the appeal of woman, will linger on the spectacle of youthful beauty. Then his glance swept the wall behind her, where the opened windows were filled with men’s heads, and along the upper end of which a bench ran. On this bench sat a young woman, alone, her head, in profile toward him, thrown out like a painting against the wooden background.

The Colonel’s gaze stopped with a suddenness which suggested the snapping of an internal spring. A fixed, rigid gravity of observation swept all humor from his face, leaving it staring, absorbed, marked with lines. There was nothing about the girl to warrant this access of motionless interest. No better proof could be given of the fact that she was not in any way beautiful or pretty than that, at the very height of the dance, she was evidently partnerless.

Dejection marked her attitude and the youthful profile which she presented to the watcher. Her body had settled back against the wall in a pose of apathetic acquiescence, her hands in her lap, her small feet, which her short skirt revealed, limply crossed. Her dress, of a soft yellowish material, spotted at intervals with a crimson flower, set with some degree of grace and accuracy over the lines of her slightly developed, childish figure. Her feet and hands, the latter showing red against the white forearm that her half-sleeve left bare, were in keeping with the air of fragile smallness which seemed to add a touch of extra pathos to her neglected condition. She did not look like the country girls about her. The Colonel noticed that her hair was cut short as a boy’s. Round the ear and temple that he could see, longer hairs curled slightly.

His immovable scrutiny lasted for some minutes. Then he threw his cigar into the darkness, and, pushing by the loungers at the door, entered the room and threaded his way through the dancers to where she sat. In the noise about her she did not hear his approach or know that any one was near, till he sat down on the bench beside her and said,

“You don’t seem to be dancing?”

She started and turned a face upon him, the surprise of which was partly dispersed by hope of cheer. It was a charming face, if not a pretty one; the skin of a soft, warm pallor, the chin pointed, the mouth small, the middle of the upper lip drooping in a slight point on the lower. Her eyes of a clear, greenish-brown, showed an unusually straight line of under lid. A smile born of relief and the desire to be ingratiating hovered on her lips, and brought into being a dimple in one cheek.

In the first moment of encounter the Colonel saw all these details. The profile had struck him into a trance-like fixity of observation. Now at the full face, the smile with which he had accompanied his words died away. He stared at her for a moment speechless and motionless. And then, with a muttered ejaculation, he half turned from her and looked at the dancers.

The girl was amazed, for she had never seen him before. Her hopes of a partner were forgotten in her alarmed surprise at the demeanor of the person she thought had come to succor her in a dreary hour. She sat looking at him, wondering what to say and nervously rolling the wad of handkerchief she held from hand to hand.

The next moment he had turned back to her, commanding his features into the conventional smile of young acquaintance.

“I must beg your pardon,” he said, “for speaking to you without an introduction, but I thought you’d let an old fellow like me come over here and have a few moments’ talk. I don’t dance, you see, and so I was having a pretty lonely time out there on the piazza.”

His eyes roamed over her face, their eagerness of inspection curiously at variance with his careless words. Her surprise vanished instantly; she turned herself a little that she might more directly face him. She was evidently delighted to have any companion. Looking at him, she smiled with pleased relief and said in a singularly sweet voice,

“Oh, I’m so glad you came! I’ve been sitting here just this way for ever so long. I haven’t danced for three dances. Joe Mosely asked me and then nobody has since. I thought I’d go home, it was so lonesome.”

At the sound of her voice, marked not only by a natural sweetness of tone, but by a refinement of pronunciation very rare among the inhabitants of the country districts, the Colonel was again thrown into numbed, staring silence. He felt that he should have liked to rise and walk back and forth for a moment and shake himself, in order to awake from the strange and poignant memories this girl’s face and voice brought up. He was recalled to himself by seeing the smile slowly freezing on her lips, and the confidence of her eyes becoming clouded with alarm.

“The child will think I’m mad,” he thought, and said aloud: “You’ve startled me and I guess I’ve done the same to you. But you look very like—extraordinarily like—some one, some one, I once knew.”

She was immediately at her ease again.

“I look like my mother,” she said. “Every one says that.”

“Where is your mother?” he asked absently, surveying her with a renewed, wary intentness.

“Here,” she answered.

“Here?” he queried, looking round the room—“where?”

“Oh, not here to-night”—she looked away from him and gave a quick, short sigh—“home, I mean. Mother’s quite sick. Sometimes I think she’s very sick.”

Her face, which was one of the most flexible mobility, lost all its brightness. Her eyes looked mournfully at him, pleading for a contradiction.

“Perhaps,” he said with the rush of pity that he felt for all small feeble things, especially feminine feeble things, “she’s not as sick as you think. When you live with a person who is sick you’re apt to think them worse than outsiders do.”

“Well, perhaps so,” she acquiesced, immediately showing symptoms of brightening. “It probably seems queer to you that I should be here to-night when mother’s sick. But she and father and Rosamund insisted on my coming. They wanted me to go to a party for once anyway, and have a good time. But I haven’t had a good time at all. Just before you came I thought I’d go home, I felt so miserable sitting here alone. Only two people have asked me to dance.”

“You’ve not been in Foleys very long?” the Colonel suggested, in order to account for this strange lack of gallantry on the part of the country swains.

“Three years; nearly four now,” she said, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Of course, I don’t know as many people as Mitty Bruce does. And then there are some of the men round here mother never liked us to know. They——”

She paused, evidently considering that she had better not reveal the reasons why she had been cautioned against certain of the local beaux. But her spirit was weak, and her companion not making any comment, she moved a little nearer to him on the bench and said in a lowered key,

“Some of them occasionally get drunk!”

“Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly.

“So I don’t know so very many. But I thought I’d know enough to have partners. But you never can tell. And then my hair makes me look such a fright. I might have had more partners if it had been longer.”

She passed a small hand, which he noticed was rough and red, over her cropped crown, ruffling the short locks on her forehead.

“How—how did it come to be so?” he asked, looking at it with admiration tinged with curiosity.

“I’ve been sick. I was very sick last winter with a fever, and so in April when I was getting better they cut it all off. We had a bad winter up here, it was so terribly wet. I never saw anything worse; our house leaked all over.”

“It was a wet winter,” he assented. “And I heard it was a good deal worse up here than it was down below.”

“It was dreadful. The rains were so heavy even in March that a big piece of land near where we live slid down. Where it used to be just a slope it’s now like a precipice. And with mother sick and all the trouble to keep things warm and dry, I got the fever. That’s why they made me come to-night—just to have a little amusement, mother said, because I’d had such a hard winter. And we made this dress—” she touched the skirt with a hand that betrayed a conscious feminine satisfaction in her apparel—“it’s some stuff mother had, very good stuff. We couldn’t have afforded to buy anything like it, and I don’t think you could here at Foleys. But we did spend something. These flowers—” she indicated two bunches of artificial red roses at her neck and belt—“we bought them. They were a dollar; fifty cents each bunch.”

She touched the bunch at her waist with a light, arranging hand, saw something which made her brows contract and her fingers seize on the flowers and drag them hurriedly away from their resting place. Where they had been a red stain—dye from the cheap leaves—disfigured her dress.

She stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at the Colonel in blank, heart-stricken dismay.

“Why, look what they’ve done,” she faltered.

The Colonel for a moment was nonplussed. He had no consolation for such a catastrophe. The girl seized her handkerchief and rubbed the mark with dainty energy. The red dye was imparted to the handkerchief but the stain was only enlarged.

“Mother’s dress!” she moaned, rubbing distractedly. “Why, she kept it for years in the trunk, waiting for some such time as this to come. And now look at it!”

She raised tragic eyes to the Colonel’s face. He would have delighted in offering her another dress—anything she had chosen to buy. But she was a lady and this he could not do. So he sat looking sympathetically at her, inwardly swearing at the social conventions which made it impossible for him to repair the damage. He felt a man’s pity for the meanness of the disaster that had such a power to darken and blight one poor little girl’s horizon.

“Don’t rub any more,” was all he could say, “I’m afraid it’s only making it worse. Maybe your mother will know of some way of cleaning it.”

The girl made no reply for the moment. He could see that the mishap had completely dashed her spirits. She unpinned the other bunch, which had left an even uglier mark at her throat, and laid them down beside her on the bench.

“What an unlucky evening!” she exclaimed, looking down at them with an air of utter dejection. “Only two people ask me to dance, and the flowers we paid a dollar for spoil my dress, my first party dress. And they all wanted me to come because I was going to have such a good time!”

She looked from her flowers to her stained dress, shaking her head slowly as though words were inadequate to express the direness of the catastrophe. The Colonel was afraid she was going to cry, but she showed no symptom of tears. She seemed a strayed member of the class which is taught to control its lachrymal glands in public and keep its violent emotions out of sight. But her face showed a distress that was to him extremely pitiful.

“Cheer up,” he said. “As far as the dancing goes the evening’s only half over. And partners—you don’t want to dance with these country bumpkins.”

He lowered his voice at the words, which were indeed rank heresy in the democratic purlieus of Foleys, and made a surreptitious gesture which swept the room.

“Who else is there?” said the girl, who did not show any tendency to combat his low opinion of Foleys’ jeunesse dorée. “And when you come to a party you expect to dance.”

“I’ll get something better for you than that,” said the Colonel, rising. “Wait here for a minute or two. I won’t be gone long and I’ll bring you back somebody worth having for a partner.”

She smiled faintly at him, and he turned, passed through the circling whirl of dancers, and stepped out on the balcony again.

She Smiled Faintly at Him

By an adjacent window he saw two masculine figures and smelt the pungent odor of the superior tobacco with which they were beguiling the passing hour. Rion Gracey’s face, gilded by the light of the window, was toward him. The well-shaped back which the other presented to his gaze he recognized as that of Jerry Barclay. He bore down upon them, clapping one hand upon Barclay’s shoulder, with the words,

“Look here, you fellows, I want partners for a girl in there.”

Gracey frowned and said demurringly,

“Now, Jim, what’s the use of coming down on me? Don’t you know I’m no dancing man?”

The other answered,

“Let’s see the girl first. Where is she?”—looking in through the window—“the one over there in pink? Oh, we don’t deserve that. What’s the matter with your being the Good Samaritan and dancing with her yourself?”

“It’s not the one in pink, and you’ve got to come. The poor little thing hasn’t had but two partners this evening and it’s most broken her heart. Here, come along! I’m going to see that she has some fun before this metropolitan orgy ends.”

Gracey threw away his cigar with a suppressed groan of acquiescence. The other man, shaking his coat into shape, said,

“Lead on. Beauty in distress always appeals to me. Having rounded us up you may as well lose no time in taking us to the sacrifice.”

The Colonel with his prizes at his heels reëntered the room. The two men looked very different in the light of the kerosene lamps. Gracey having resolved to do what he had been asked, hid his unwillingness under a demeanor of stiff gravity. Barclay was evidently amused and not averse to following out the adventure. His look of a different world was more marked than ever by contrast with the clumsy country-men about him, but his capacity to adjust himself to all environments made him cross the room with an easy grace, when his companion was obviously out of his element.

The Colonel, flanked by his reinforcements, came to a stand before the young girl. She looked up, smiling, her eye lighting on one man and then on the other. She was surprised, delighted, a trifle embarrassed, as the men could see by a sudden access of color in her cheeks.

“Here,” said the Colonel, “are two gentlemen who have been outside watching us and dying to come in and have a dance. Will you take pity on them, Miss—Miss—” he paused, suddenly realizing that he did not know her name.

“Miss,” he stammered for the third time, and then bent down toward her and said in a lowered voice,

“My dear young lady, forgive me, but you know I don’t know what your name is.”

“My name?” she said, smiling. “Why, how funny! My name is Allen, June Allen. My father is Beauregard Allen and we live on the Parrish tract.”

The Colonel straightened himself suddenly, almost flinching. The two men were looking at the girl and the girl at them, so that none of the trio noticed his expression. He cleared his throat before he spoke.

“Allen,” he said, “Miss Allen, let me introduce Mr. Rion Gracey and Mr. Barclay.”

The introductions were acknowledged and as the men sat down on either side of the no longer lonely young woman the Colonel, with a short “Good night,” turned and left them.

He passed quickly through the dancing-room on to the balcony, his body erect, his eyes staring straight before him. The name of Allen was loud in his ears. It had struck like a dagger thrust through the trained indifference of years and torn open an old wound.

CHAPTER IV
O, MINE ENEMY!

In his room he lit the lamp and flung the window wide. It opened on the upper balcony, and through the foliage of the locusts he could see the lights of the town, and farther up, between the interstices of the branches, pieces of the night sky sown with stars. The scent of the drooping blossoms was heavy on the air. From below the music came softened, and the house vibrated with the rhythmic swing of the dance. He stood for a moment staring upward and absently listening, then went back into his room, and sat down by the table, his head propped on his hand.

The old wound, so suddenly torn open, was bleeding. The lonely man seemed to feel the slow drops falling from it. Passion and despair, dulled by time, were suddenly endowed with the force they had had twenty-one years ago. They had the vitality of a deathless tragedy.

The time of his courtship and engagement to Alice Joyce had been that period when he had held happiness in his arms and thought that she would stay for ever. Alice had been a school-teacher in Sacramento, an orphan girl sent out from Boston in forty-nine to join relatives already settled in California. Her parents had been people of means and she had been highly educated. But her father had lost his money and then died, and Alice had been forced to earn her living. She was young, gentle-mannered and very pretty. Her daughter—that girl down stairs—was surprisingly, appallingly like her, only Alice had been prettier. Her face in its soft youth rose before him. It was the face of the girl down stairs touched with a clearer bloom, the lips redder, the cheeks more delicately rounded. But the eyes with the straight lower lid and the greenish-brown iris were the same, and so was the pointed chin and the one dimple.

He had been a miner, doing his work with the others in the great days on the American River, when he met her on a trip to Sacramento. He was thirty-four and had cared little for women till then, but he loved her from the first without hesitation or uncertainty. She was his mate, the other half of him who would round out and perfect his life. That he had nothing was of no matter. There was always a living for the man who worked in those uncrowded days, and Jim Parrish was a worker, a mighty man with the pick, who could stand knee deep in the water all day, and at night sleep the sleep of the just on the dry grass under the stars.

Those had been Jim Parrish’s great days, “the butt and sea-mark of his sail.” Life had unrolled before him like a map, all pleasant rivers and smiling plains. At intervals he went to Sacramento to see Alice. She had other suitors, but she was his from the first, and nestled inside the protection of this strong man’s love with the tender trust of her soft and dependent nature.

Parrish had one friend and confidant, John Beauregard Allen. They had crossed the Isthmus together in forty-eight, had roomed together in the sprawling town scattered about the curve of San Francisco Bay, had rushed to the foot-hills when the mill race at Sutter’s Creek startled the world with its sediment of yellow dust. Once in a gambling-house in Sonora, Parrish had struck up the revolver which threatened his friend’s life, the bullet ripping its way across his own shoulder in a red furrow he would carry to his death.

Allen was a Southerner, a South Carolinian of birth and education, a man of daring and adventurous character, possessed of unusual good looks and personal charm. To Parrish, a simpler nature, born and reared in poverty in a small town in western New York, the brilliant Southerner was all that was generous, brave and chivalrous. The friendship between the two men was of a strength that neither thought could ever be broken. The one subject of friction between them was slavery, already beginning to burn in the thoughts and speech of men. Allen’s father was a wealthy slave-owner, and the son was in California to satisfy his spirit of adventure and to conquer fortune on his own account. He was one of that large colony of Southerners, in some cases blatant and pretentious, in others brilliant and large-hearted, which in later years gave tone to the city, formed its manners, established its code of morals, and tried to direct its political life.

The rude environment of the mines was distasteful to him, and he returned to San Francisco where, backed by his father, he started in business. Letters passed between the friends, and as Parrish’s courtship progressed he poured out his heart to Allen in pages that, in after years, he remembered with impotent fury. All the hopes and aspirations of his new life, when a woman should be beside him and a woman’s hand should be clasped in his, were told to his absent friend. At length, after an engagement of some weeks, the date for the marriage was set. Before this took place Alice wished to visit her relatives, who lived in San Francisco, and there buy the trousseau for which she had been saving her salary. Parrish reluctantly consented to her departure. While she was gone he would build for his bride a cottage in Hangtown where his mining operations were then conducted. Before she left he wrote a letter to Beauregard Allen giving him her address and asking him to call on her.

Alice’s visit of a month lengthened to two. Her letters, which at first had been full of Allen’s name, toward the middle of the second month contained little or no mention of him. Her excuse for the postponing of her return was that the work of dressmakers had been slower than she had expected. Also her relatives had urged upon her to prolong her stay, as they did not know when they might see her again.

A less blind lover might have seen matter for uneasiness in the more reserved tone, the growing brevity of these letters. A suspicious lover might have wondered why Allen had not only ceased to praise the charm and beauty of his friend’s betrothed, but had almost entirely stopped writing. Jim Parrish was disturbed by neither uneasiness nor suspicion. That sweetheart and friend could combine to deal him the deadly blow in store for him was beyond his power of imagination.

Finally a date was set for Alice’s return. Her clothes were all bought, packed and paid for. Her last letter, the tone of which for the first time struck him as constrained and cold, told him the steamer on which she would arrive and the hour it was due. Before this Parrish had written to Allen, urging his attendance at his wedding and suggesting that he act as Alice’s escort on the trip to Sacramento. To this his friend had replied that he would do so if possible, but the demands of his business were engrossing. The cottage at Hangtown was finished and furnished as well as the bridegroom’s scanty means would permit. In a dream of joy he left it, went down to Sacramento, bought the few clothes that went to the making of his wedding outfit, and then waited for the steamer with the high, exalted happiness of the man who is about to be united to the woman he honestly loves.

When the steamer arrived neither Allen nor Alice was on board. He was stunned at first, not having had the least anticipation of such a catastrophe. Then a fear that she might be sick seized upon him and he sought the captain for any information he might have. Contrary to his expectation, the captain was full of information. The lady and gentleman had boarded the steamer at San Francisco, holding through tickets for Sacramento. After they had passed Contra Costa, however, the gentleman had come to him, telling him of a sudden change in their plans and urging him to put them ashore at the first stopping place. This he had done at Benecia. He had heard one of them say something about going to San José. The lady, however, would explain it more satisfactorily in the letter she had left, and he handed Parrish a letter addressed in Alice’s writing.

The listener had been dazed during the first part of the captain’s recital. He could not understand what had happened, only an icy premonition of evil clutched his heart. Alice’s letter cleared up all uncertainty.

In a few blotted, incoherent lines she told him of her intention to leave the steamer with Allen, cross to San José, and there marry him. Her love for her fiancé had been shriveled to ashes before the flame of the Southerner’s fiery wooing. But she averred that she had in the beginning repulsed his attentions, fully intending to return to Sacramento and fulfill her engagement with Parrish. She had not known Allen intended accompanying her on the trip to Sacramento. Had she known, she never would have permitted it. It was on the steamer that he had finally prevailed over her conscience and beaten down her scruples, till she had agreed to elope with him.

Jim Parrish never knew how he reached his hotel room that evening. He sat there a long time—a day and a night he thought—staring at his wedding clothes spread on the bed. What roused him from his benumbed condition was a newspaper from San José bearing a marked announcement of the marriage. A letter from Allen followed this. It was short but characteristically grandiloquent. In it he stated that he had broken the sacred obligations of friendship, but that his passion for the woman had overborne every other sentiment. He was from henceforward an outcast from honest men, a fitting punishment for one who had held his honor as his dearest possession, and who had brought a blot upon a heretofore stainless name.

The letter roused Parrish like a hand on his neck. It was so like the writer, with its theatrical pose and its high talk of his honor and his name. A flood of fury rose in the betrayed man, and he walked the streets of the city with murder in his heart. Had he met his one-time friend he would have rushed upon him and stamped and beaten his life out. Feelings of hatred he had never known he could harbor burned in him. At night he walked for miles, his hands clenched as he struggled with these unfamiliar demons that seemed tearing the ligaments of his life apart.

For Alice his love neither changed nor ceased. He believed her to have been overborne by Allen, carried off her feet by the reckless impetuosity he himself had once thought so dazzling. If Allen had left her alone, if when he felt love rise in him, he had withdrawn from her, Parrish knew that the girl would have remained true to him and now would be his wife, nestled in his arms, asking no better resting place. At times, in the lonely watches of the night, he thought that, but for the false friend, she would have been beside him, her head against his shoulder, her light breath touching his cheek as she slept. It goaded him up and out into the darkness torn by the rage that drives men to murder.

Then, his first fury spent, he tried to rearrange his life—to begin again. He gave the cottage at Hangtown to his partner and moved his mining operations to Sonora. Soon after he began to meet with his first small successes. Now that he had no need for money it came to him. By the time the Civil War broke out he was a man of means and mark.

Once or twice in these years he heard of John Beauregard Allen and his wife. They had prospered for a time, then bad luck had fallen upon them. Allen’s father, reputed a rich man, died insolvent, leaving nothing but debts. Allen’s own business in San Francisco had failed and they had left there in the fifties. Once, just before the war, stopping for a day or two at Downieville, Parrish had accidentally heard that they had been living there and that Mrs. Allen had lost a little boy, her only son. He had left by the first stage, his heart gripped by the thought of Alice, a mother, mourning for her dead child.

In sixty he had returned to the East to fight for the Union. Five years later he came back as Colonel Parrish, a title earned by distinguished services to his country. It was said by his friends that Jim Parrish would have been a millionaire if he had stayed by his mines and his investments as other men had. But Parrish had cared more for the Union than for money. And, after all, what good was money to him! Often in the four years of battle and bloodshed he had wondered if he ever would meet Beauregard Allen face to face in the smoke, and whether, if he did, the thought of a woman and children would hold his hand. But he never did. He learned afterward that Allen had remained in California.

After his return from the war he heard of them only once. This was in a club in San Francisco, where a mining superintendent, recently back from Virginia City, casually mentioned the fact that Beauregard Allen, a prominent figure in early San Francisco, was holding a small position in the assay office there. In the succeeding four or five years they dropped completely out of sight. It seemed to him that what had long been an open wound was now a scar. Peace, the gray peace of a heart that neither hopes nor desires, was his.

And suddenly without warning or expectation, his old enemy was standing in his path. Allen the squatter, the man who was claiming his land, the man whose children had been improving it, was John Beauregard Allen! It was Alice’s daughter who had been sitting on the bench in her poor dress with her coarsened hands. It was Alice who was the “mother” that was sick.

He rose from his seat with a groan, and going to the window pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The lamp behind him sputtered and, sending a rank smell into the air, went out. The day was dawning. A pale gray light mounted the sky behind the locust trees quivering each moment into a warmer brightness.

By its searching clearness the Colonel’s face looked old and worn. It was a face of a leathern brownness of skin, against which the white hair and gray mustache stood out in curious contrast. The brows were bushy, the eyes they shadowed clear gray, deep-set and steady, with an under-look of melancholy always showing through their twinkle of humor. There was no humor in them now. They were old and sad, the lines round them deep as were those that marked the forehead under its rough white hair.

Through the branches of the trees he could see the slopes of his own land, the thick dark growth of chaparral muffling the hillside, and on its crest the glow of the east barred by the trunks of pines. As he remembered, the cottage was somewhere below them, on the edge of the cleared stretch which ran along the road. They were there—Alice and her children, beggars on the land Beauregard Allen was trying to steal from him.

CHAPTER V
THE SUMMONS

Later on in the morning the Colonel waked from a few hours of uneasy slumber. He had thrown himself dressed on his bed and dropped into a sleep from which he had been roused by the morning sounds of Foleys. The lethargy and depression of the night of memories clung heavily to him, and as he dressed he decided that he would leave the camp that morning, sending word to Cusack the lawyer that he would let the matter of the squatter rest for a few days.

As he left the dining-room after breakfast, he was accosted by a stable-man, who informed him that Kit Carson was inclined to “go tender” on one of his front feet. The man did not know when the Colonel intended leaving, but if it was that day he would advise him to “wait over a spell” and let Kit “rest up.” Nearly a hundred and forty miles in thirty-six hours—especially with the sun so hot at midday, was a pretty serious proposition even for Kit Carson.

The Colonel stood silent for a moment looking at the man from under frowning brows. It would be possible for him to take one of Forsythe’s horses, ride to Milton, and there get the Stockton stage. Forsythe’s boy could ride Kit back to Sacramento when his front foot ceased to be tender. But after all, what was the use of running from the situation? There it was, to be thought out and dealt with. It was Fate that had lamed the never tired or disabled Kit just at this juncture.

With a word to the man that he would stay over till the horse was in proper condition, he passed through the hall and along the balcony to the side which flanked the dining-room. Its boarded length was deserted, with, before each window, a social gathering of chairs as they had been arranged by on-lookers during last night’s revel. A long line of locust trees, their foliage motionless in the warm air, grew between the hotel fence and the road, throwing the balcony in a scented shade.

Between their trunks the Colonel could survey the main street of Foleys, already wrapped in its morning state of somnolence, its unstirred dust beaten upon by a relentless blaze of sun. Under the covered sidewalk a shirt-sleeved figure now and then passed with loitering step, or a sun-bonneted woman picked her way through the dust. The male population of the camp was, for the most part, gathered in detached groups which marked the doorways of saloons. Each member of a group occupied a wooden arm-chair, had his heels raised high on a hitching bar, his hat well down on his nose, while a spiral of smoke issued from beneath the brim. Now and then some one spoke and the Colonel could see the heads under the tilted hats slowly turning to survey the speaker. At intervals, however, a word was passed of sudden, energizing import. It roused the group which rose as a man and filed into the saloon. When they emerged, they seated themselves, the silence resettled, and all appeared to drowse. The one being who defied the soporific effect of the hour was an unseen player on the French horn who beguiled the morning stillness with variations of the melody, When this Cruel War is Over.

The Colonel, smoking his morning cigar, surveyed the outlook with the unseeing eyes of extreme preoccupation. He did not even notice the presence of the saddled horse which a stable-man had led up to the gate just below where he sat. Some louder admonition of the man’s to the fretting animal finally caught his ear and his fixed eyes fell on it.

It was a stately creature, satin-flanked and slender-legged, stamping and shaking its long mane in its impatience. The neat pack of the traveler was tied behind the saddle.

“Whose horse is that, Tom?” said the Colonel, knowing its type strange to Foleys. “Didn’t the Gracey boys go back last night?”

“Yes. The whole Buckeye Belle outfit rode back at three. This is Jerry Barclay’s horse. He’s goin’ on this morning to Thompson’s Flat. Barclay rid him up from Stockton—won’t take no livery horse. Has this one sent up on the boat.”

As the man spoke the Colonel heard a quick step on the balcony behind him, and the owner of the horse came around the corner, smiling, handsome, debonair in his loose-fitting clothes, long riding boots and wide-brimmed hat.

“Morning, Colonel,” he said; “I see the tropical calm of Foleys is affecting you. Take example by me—off for twenty miles across country to Thompson’s Flat.”

He ran down the steps and out into the road. There, standing in the dust putting on his gloves, he let a quick, investigating eye run over his horse.

“I intended starting at sun-up,” he said, “and then they went and forgot to wake me. Now I have to ride twenty miles over roads a foot deep in dust and under a sun as hot as a smelting furnace.”

“Shouldn’t have been so dissipated last night,” said the Colonel. “What time did you get to bed?”

The young man, who was adjusting his stirrup, turned round.

“Oh, that was the dearest little girl last night. Where’d you find her? And how did a girl like that ever grow up in a God-forsaken spot like Foleys?”

He vaulted into the saddle not waiting for an answer. Then as his horse, curvetting and backing in a last ecstasy of impatience, churned up a cloud of dust, he called,

“I’m quite fascinated. Going to stop over on my way back. Give May or April or June or whatever her name is, my love. Hasta mañana, old man!”

The horse, at length liberated, plunged forward and dashed up the road, the soft diminishing thud of its hoofs for a moment filling the silence. The stable-man slouched lazily off, and the Colonel was once more left to his cigar and his meditations.

These were soon as deeply engrossing as ever. With his eyes looking down the sun-steeped street he was not aware of a blue-clothed feminine figure which came into view along the highway upon which the balcony fronted. At first she walked quickly in a blaze of sun, then crossed the road, charily holding up her skirt, and approached in the shadow of the locusts. She wore a blue-and-white cotton dress, a sun-burnt straw hat, trimmed with a blue ribbon, and as she drew near was revealed to be a young girl in the end of her teens, large, finely-shaped, and erect.

Walking on the outside of the fence she eyed the Colonel for a scrutinizing moment, then stopping at the gate, opened it with a slight click, and stood hesitating. He heard the sound, looked up, and met her eyes—blue and inquiring—fixed gravely on him. She had a firmly-modeled, handsome face, full of rich, youthful tints and mellow curves. Her straw hat sent a clean wash of shade to just below her nose. Under this, in the blinding steadiness of the sunlight, her mouth and chin, the former large and with strongly curved lips, looked as smooth and fresh as portions of a ripe fruit. There was hesitation but no embarrassment in her attitude. Even at this first glance one might guess that this was a young woman devoid of self-consciousness and not readily embarrassed.

“Are you Colonel Parrish?” she said in a rather loud, clear voice.

He rose, throwing away his cigar, and replied with an affirmative that he tried not to make astonished.

She ascended the steps, again hesitated, and then held out a sun-burnt hand.

“I’m glad I found you,” she said, as he released it. “I thought perhaps you might have gone on to the Buckeye Belle. Everybody goes there now. My name is Allen, Rosamund Allen. You met my sister June last night.”

“Oh,” murmured the Colonel, and then he gave a weak, “Of course. Sit down.”

He was glad of the moment’s respite that getting her a chair and placing it gave him. She was the second daughter. In that first glance of startled investigation he had seen no particular likeness to either parent. This girl would not tear his heart by looking at him with her mother’s eyes.

“I—I—enjoyed meeting your sister last night,” he said as they found themselves seated facing each other. “She—she—” He did not know what to say. He wondered why the girl had come. Had some one sent her?

She looked at him with her clear, calm eyes, cool and interested. She was unquestionably handsomer than her sister. A year or two younger he guessed, though much larger, a typical Californian in her downy bloom of skin and fullness of contour. Her simple dress had been designed with taste and set with a grace that was imparted more by the beautiful lines of the body it covered than any particular skill in its fashioning. There was the same neatness and care of detail in her humble adornments that he had noticed in her sister’s—the ineradicable daintiness of the woman whose forebears have lived delicately.

“June had such a good time last night,” she said with an air of volubility. “At first she said it was dreadful. Hardly any one asked her to dance, and she didn’t see how she could wait for father, who was going to call for her at twelve. And then you came and introduced those gentlemen to her. After that she had the loveliest time. She didn’t want to go at all when father came. She made him wait till two!”

“I’m glad she enjoyed it. It was pretty dull for her at first. She didn’t want to dance with the kind of men that were there. I was glad to introduce Rion Gracey to her. He’s more or less of a neighbor of yours, according to foot-hill distances.”

The Colonel was fencing, watching the girl and wondering why she had come. She had the air of settling down to a leisurely, enjoyable gossip.

“Yes. We never met him before. It’s funny, because they’ve been here over a year; up at the Buckeye Belle, of course. But then, they ride in here all the time. I’ve often seen both the Graceys riding past our place. The road in from there goes by our land. You know where that is?—the long strip back there—” waving her hand in the direction of the Colonel’s disputed acres—“where the tall pines are, and—”

She stopped, crimsoning to her hair. She had evidently suddenly realized to whom she was so glibly talking. There was no question but that she was embarrassed now. She bent her burning face down and began to make little pleats in her dress with her sun-burnt fingers.

“I know, I know,” said the Colonel, exceedingly embarrassed himself, “right back there. Yes, of course. On the road that goes to Thompson’s Flat. By the way, I hope your sister’s dress wasn’t seriously damaged last night. The dye coming off the flowers, I mean.”

The girl heaved a breath of relief and tilted her head to one side regarding the pleats she had made from a different view point. For her age and environment her aplomb was remarkable.

“Yes, I’m afraid it’s very badly marked. They were such cheap flowers. Mother thinks we can arrange something with rosettes.”

She ceased her pleating, raised her head fully, and looked at him.

“Mother was so pleased and so astonished when she heard from June about meeting you. She used to know you well, she said—a long time ago, before she was married.”

Her eyes looked innocently and gravely into his. There was no concealment in them. She was speaking frankly and honestly. Now the Colonel knew she had been sent. He braced himself for her coming words.

“Yes, I knew your mother,” he said, hearing his voice sound husky. “But, as you say, it was a long time ago.”

“Mother got quite excited when she heard it was you. You know she’s not well and the least thing upsets her. She couldn’t believe it at first. Then she wondered if you wouldn’t come up and see her and sent me down to ask you.”

Alice had sent her. After twenty-one years Alice had sent this message for him! And it was all so natural and simple—a moment that sometimes, in hours of melancholy brooding, he had thought of, and always seen fraught with tragic passion. He bent to pick up a locust blossom that a wandering zephyr had wafted along the balcony floor. For a moment he made no answer. He could not trust his voice. The girl continued, not noticing his silence.

“She doesn’t see many people. She’s sick, you know; June said she told you. And then there’s not many people round here for her to see. I suppose you’ll find her changed if you haven’t seen her since she was married. She’s changed a good deal lately, poor mother!”

She gave a sigh and looked away from him. The Colonel answered quickly:

“Oh, yes, I’ll come, I’ll come.”

His visitor did not seem to notice anything unusual in his manner of accepting the invitation of an old friend. The trouble of her mother’s changed condition was uppermost in her mind.

“I dare say you won’t know it’s the same person. But don’t let her see that. We want her to be bright and cheerful, and if people look surprised when they see her it makes her think she’s worse—” She looked anxiously at him, but his face was averted. There was a slight pause and then she said in a low voice:

“Mother has consumption, Colonel Parrish.”

This time he turned and stared straight at her. Her eyes, full of sad meaning, were fixed on him. The other daughter’s remarks had led him to suppose that Alice was suffering from some temporary illness. Now he knew that she was dying.

“It was Virginia City that did it,” the girl continued. “She wasn’t strong for years. A long time ago in Downieville our brother, younger than we were, died, and father always thought she never got over that. But in Virginia there were such hard winters and those awful winds blew so! We were there for two years before we came here; and she had pneumonia and after that she didn’t get well. But we stayed on there, for father had some work in the assay office, and though everything cost a terrible price, it was better than what he got in the mines over here.”

The Colonel was half turned from her in his chair. She could see his profile with the shaggy brows drawn over his eyes.

“She doctored there for a long time, and everything cost so much money! Then one day, one of the doctors told father she’d never get well if she stayed in that climate. ‘Take her to California, to the foot-hills where the air’s hot and dry,’ he said, ‘that’s the only chance you’ve got.’ So we sold everything and left Virginia and came over here. We tried several places, but some of them didn’t seem to suit her, and in others they asked too high rents. We had hardly anything left. And then we just came here and settled on that—on our—on your—” She came to a stammering stop and then ended desperately—“in that empty cottage over there.”

The Colonel rose and walked to the balcony rail. He stood for a moment with his back toward her, then slowly wheeled and approached her. She had risen and was looking at him with a perplexed expression.

“That’s all right,” he said, taking her hand. “I’ll be up this afternoon. Will between four and five do?”

She considered as a town lady might whose day was full of engagements. She was, in fact, speculating as to whether she and her sister would be free from the domestic tasks which filled their waking hours.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “that’ll be a very good time. Mother rests and we—we are busy in the early part of the afternoon.”

She held out her hand to him, and as he walked down the steps beside her to the gate, again expressed her pleasure at having found him.

“June told me what you looked like,” she said over the gate, eying him thoughtfully as if she intended giving June her opinion of the stranger’s appearance. “So I knew if you were anywhere round I’d find you.”

She smiled a last good-by and turned away to the walk under the locusts. The Colonel went back to his seat on the balcony. He lit a fresh cigar and sat there smoking till Mitty came to summon him to the midday dinner.

CHAPTER VI
THE OLD LOVE

At half-past four he was walking through the dust toward the cottage. The main feeling in his heart was dread. But he could not disregard Alice’s summons—Alice’s dying summons, he felt them to be. He tried to prepare himself by thinking that nearly a quarter of a century had passed, and what havoc it must have wrought. But he saw only the face of the girl he had loved, fresh and sweet, as it had been when he had bidden her good-by on the steamer on a morning full of sun and hope, twenty-one years ago.

He had left the town’s main street behind and was now walking on a narrow footpath beside the road which, on one side, skirted his own land. A still, scorching warmth had possession of the hour. The landscape, glazed with heat, seemed to faint under the unwinking glare of sun. From the parched grassland and the thickets of chaparral, pungent scents arose—the ardent odors that the woods of foot-hill California exhale in the hot, breathless quiescence of summer afternoons.

His unseeing eye passed over the rise and fall of the rich tract he had held so negligently. The broken fence beside him divided an ocher-colored expanse of uncultivated land from the road. The air came over it in glassy waves, carrying its dry, aromatic perfume to his nostrils. On its burnt expanse a few huge live-oaks rose dark and dome-like, their shadows, black and irregular, staining the ground beneath them. Beyond the chaparral swept up the hillside, a close growing wall of variegated green where the manzanita glittered amid duller foliage. A splintered edge of rock broke slantingly through the thicket, rose and passed like a bristling crest over the top of the hill, where the pines lifted their plumy heads. It was the “outcrop” of the ledge—that inconsistent and ill-regulated ledge, the promises of which had made a town of Foleys and then, being unfulfilled, had left the town to ruin.

But the Colonel saw none of these things. His eyes were fixed on the turn of the road just beyond. As he remembered, you could see the cottage from there. And as he gained and passed it, the low bulk of the little house broke upon his sight. It was shrouded in vines, carefully trained over the projecting roof of its balcony so that they hung from its edge in a fringe of waving tendrils. Around and beyond it, the juicy, violent green of a vineyard ran into the dryness of the untilled land, and the even emerald rows and dark, loamy stripes of a garden lay like a piece of carpeting between the vineyard and the house. Its look of thrifty habitation came like a shock upon his memory of its ruinous neglect when he had last seen it. Even the gate, that he remembered hung dejected from one hinge, had been mended; the rose bushes that had thrown long festoons across the path had been clipped and tied to restraining poles. These were “the improvements” upon which the squatter based part of his claim.

The Colonel’s hand, trembling, raised the gate latch with a click. As he did so he heard a sound from the balcony, and the younger girl, who had introduced herself to him as Rosamund Allen, ran down the steps that led from it and advanced along the path to meet him. Her hat was off and he saw that she had thick, fair hair, its ashen blondness streaked with strands of a coarse, bright gold.

“Here you are,” she cried with her easy, friendly manner. “We had just begun to expect you. Isn’t it hot?”

She fell into step beside him and they walked slowly up the little path. The cottage at first presented to his gaze only one end cut into by a single window. As they drew nearer he saw the length of its balcony, and that the vine he had noticed was a grape, its thick-twisted stalk running up to the roof like a pillar, its leafage engarlanding the balustrade. A few steps led to the balcony from the walk. He saw the black square of an open doorway and near this, sitting close to the leaf-trimmed balustrade, a shawled female figure in a lounging chair.

His eye fell on it and he involuntarily stopped. The girl beside him suddenly jerked his sleeve.

“That’s mother,” she said in a hurried whisper. “Take care. She can see us. Now don’t look surprised—” then raising her voice a little she said:

“Mother dear, here’s Colonel Parrish.”

The Colonel, as he mounted the stairs, took off his hat and held it. The woman in the chair was facing him. From the descending folds of the many loose wrappings that hung about her emaciated figure, her head rose, the face looking at him with still, eager interest. She gave a little smile and a waxen hand of skeleton thinness emerged from the folds of her shawls.

“Jim Parrish!” she said in a sweet, husky voice, then looking into his face with eyes of mild, unconscious friendliness, she said softly, “Jim.”

He would never have known her till he heard the voice and saw the smile. They were the same. The old dimple had disappeared and a wrinkle had taken its place. The eyes, the clear, greenish-brown eyes, were sunken into dark caverns, the satiny skin grown loose and sallow. Yet it was Alice, Alice old before her time, Alice sick, Alice dying.

He turned round and found a chair, for the moment not daring to speak. He was conscious of the figure of Rosamund walking toward the garden dragging a serpent-like length of hose behind her. Then he placed the chair close to the sick woman and sat down. To him it was a moment that he had thought of in dark reveries, and even in thought found too painful. Now he was conscious that there was a tranquillity about it, an absence of tension, which was due to Alice. Her manner suggested nothing but a peaceful recollection of old friendship. Was it that the near approach of death was wiping out all the disturbing and cruel emotions, all the biting memories, that belonged to life?

She looked at him with her little affectionate smile as a sick sister might.

“It’s so queer it being you,” she said. “When June told me I couldn’t believe it. After—after—how long is it, Jim?”

“Twenty-one years,” he said.

“Yes, twenty-one years,” she repeated. “How time flies! And what a lot has happened in those twenty-one years. You’re rich, they say. And your hair’s quite white, but I’d have known you anywhere. You’re not much changed.”

She continued to look at him with the same gentle, softly exploring air. He had had an idea that even in death he would see shame and remorse in her eyes, but they were as devoid of either as though he had never been other than a girlhood friend.

“It was so odd your just happening on June that way. She says you were so kind to her, she felt immediately you were her friend. Poor little June! It was such an amusement for her that evening. She’s not had much pleasure of that kind. And she’s twenty now, just the age when a girl longs for a little of the good times of life.”

“She’s very like you,” he answered, “it—it—” he was going to say “shocked me,” but he had a feeling she would not understand him. “It surprised me,” he said instead.

“Oh, she’s very like me. Every one sees it. Her father says she is just a replica of what I was when he first knew me. And she’s such a sweet, loving little thing. You don’t know how they work here—and with me to take care of. God has blessed me in my children, Jim.”

She turned her large, sunken eyes on him, their somberness lit by the fire of her maternal passion.

“They are the best girls in the world,” she said.

“Then you’ve been happy, Alice?” he suddenly asked.

“Happy!” she echoed. “Oh, yes, always happy except when our boy died. That was our sorrow. I don’t know whether you ever heard of it. He was just a baby, but he was our only son. A beautiful boy. He was John Beauregard Allen, too.”

The Colonel made no comment, but she did not notice it, engrossed in her own recital.

“Of course we’ve not been very successful, especially of late years. But poverty’s not so bad when you’ve got those you love around you. And we’ve been like a little company, close together, always marching shoulder to shoulder—‘a close corporation,’ Beau calls it. We’ve had bad luck of all kinds, but you can bear bad luck when you’re all together.”

The past, the bitter, terrible past was dead to her. She had probably never understood what it had been to him. Now twenty years of love and struggle had almost obliterated it from her memory, and the coming of death had wiped away its last faint traces.

“You have been blessed, Alice,” he said in a low voice. “Life has fulfilled all your expectations.”

“Not all,” she answered. “What doesn’t matter for yourself matters for your children. It’s hard for me to see them living here, and this way—” she made a gesture which swept the garden and the vineyard. “That’s hard for a mother, a mother who was bred differently and bred them for something different. I educated them myself, Jim. They’re not like the country girls around us. They’re—” she paused a moment and then said with an air of sad solemnity—“the children of a lady and a gentleman.”

“Any one can see that,” he murmured, “and they’re happy too.”

He did not know what else to say. He could not condole with her. In her poverty and sickness she had fulfilled the purposes of her life, lived it with a passionate completeness as he had never done. The fullness of it, compared to the barren emptiness of his, augmented the sense of bleak loneliness that lay heavy at his heart.

“They’re young,” she continued, “they’ve not known much better. Our bad times began when they were still little. But I—well, before I was sick it was different. I helped them and I was a companion, not a care. Virginia City, too, was a place where, as they grew older there would have been more amusement for them. They’d have had a better chance.”

She paused, her lids drooping, an air of musing melancholy on her face. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.

“Who is there for them to marry here?” she asked.

“Marry!”—the Colonel had not thought of that. “They’re very young for that yet, aren’t they?” he stammered.

“Young? Yes, perhaps. But June is twenty now.”

She let her head drop back on the cushions behind it, and turned it slightly away from him so that he could see her in profile. Her hair was dressed in the fashion of her youth, parted and drawn down sleekly over the tips of her ears. Seen thus, the emaciation of her cheeks partly concealed, her face caught him with its sudden look of familiarity. For a moment the veil of years was jerked back and he saw his old sweetheart. He gave a murmured exclamation and leaned nearer to her, a word of tenderness trembling on his lips. Simultaneously she turned toward him, absorbed in her own thoughts.

“I was twenty-four when I married,” she said. “People then thought that was quite old.”

He turned away his head, unable to reply, and she went on in her unconscious egotism.

“I want them to marry. It’s the only life for a woman. And I have been so happy in my married life, always, from the first till now.”

A slight smile touched her lips as her eyes, softened with memories, looked back over a life that love had ennobled.

Suddenly she turned to him. For the first time in the conversation she seemed to transfer her interest from her own affairs to his.

“You never married?” she said. “That was a pity. Life’s only half lived without those ties.”

“Oh, Alice!” he answered with a groan, and rising he moved to the top of the steps.

“I was mean to you that time, long ago,” she said behind him. “But that was all in the past. That’s all forgotten now—forgotten and forgiven, isn’t it?”

For the moment he made no reply and she repeated in what seemed an absent tone,

“Forgotten and forgiven. It’s all so far away now; such years ago. So much has happened in between. It’s like another life, looking back on it.”

“Yes, all forgiven,” he said, “there’s no anger with real love.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, “and time smooths away everything. Isn’t it pretty now, with the shadows lengthening out that way?”

They looked over the expanse where the low sun’s rays were painting the already brilliant-hued landscape with a wild flare of color. The darkness of the oaks was overlaid with a golden gilding, the dry grass looked orange.

“Have you seen the girls’ garden?” she asked. “They did it all themselves and they raise enough vegetables for us and some to sell. They sell the grapes, too. Last summer they made fifty dollars with their grapes.”

So “the improvements” were of some practical good. The Colonel saw the word dancing in the air before him.

“But it’s hard to see them working so. In summer they’re up and out at six. It doesn’t seem right to me—their father’s daughters. Their grandmother—Beau’s mother—had six house-slaves for her own private use, and I, before my father’s death, had a French governess.”

A step on the path prevented him from replying. Rosamund came around the corner of the house, her face flushed, a hoe in her hand, which he now saw to be earthy. She had an anxious air.

“Mother, are you tired, dear?” she said, mounting the steps. Then turning to the visitor:

“Mother goes in before the sun sets. It gets cool so suddenly. Just the moment the edge of the sun gets down behind the hill, the night comes up, and it’s bad for her to breathe that air.”

The Colonel assured her he was just about to take his leave. The invalid made no demand for him to stay. Sitting huddled among her shawls she looked wan and shrunken. He felt that the calm interest of her attitude toward him had now, from fatigue, turned suddenly into indifference. He faltered some words of farewell to her, his hand out. Hers, feeling in his warm, strong grasp like a bundle of twigs, was extended and then limply withdrawn.

“Good-by,” she said, turning to follow her daughter’s movements with a waiting, dependent eye, “won’t you come again before you go?”

He murmured an assent from the top steps, but he would leave in a day or two at the longest.

“The girls like seeing you so much;” now she looked at him with some animation. “And they have so little pleasure.”

“Why, mother,” said Rosamund in half-laughing protest, “that sounds as if Colonel Parrish was a sort of circus, just here to amuse us.”

The Colonel was nearly at the bottom of the steps. With some last conventional sentences of farewell, he raised his hat and turned toward mother and daughter for a final glance. They were smiling at Rosamund’s words, both looking at him to return his bow with perfunctory politeness. When he turned from them he could hear their voices, low and full of a close and different form of interest, speaking of the adjustment of the invalid’s shawls, the window by which her chair should be placed.

He was half-way down the path to the gate when a sound of suppressed singing caught his ear. Turning in its direction he saw coming down through a narrow path in the chaparral a fine red and white cow, and following it, June Allen. She was singing in a crooning, absent-minded way, at intervals flicking the flanks of the cow with a long alder branch she carried, stripped of all its leaves save two at the top. As she approached him she stopped singing, struck the cow with the branch, and began in a thoughtful way to talk to herself.

The attraction she had exercised over him fell on him again the moment he saw her. The very way she appeared to be conversing to herself seemed to him to be imbued with a quaint, unconscious charm, such as a child possesses. With his mind full of the gloom and pain of his interview with Alice, he yet paused, eying the approaching figure. As he stood watching her, she looked up and saw him.

She gave a loud exclamation and her face became illumined with pleasure. Administering to the cow a smart stroke with her switch, she crowded by it and ran forward over the dry grass into which the verdure of the garden intruded.

“Oh, how lovely for me to meet you!” she cried as she came up to him with an extended hand. “I never thought I’d have such luck.”

Her hand nestled into his; her face smiling at him was charged with an almost fond delight.

“I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, young woman,” he said, again noting the astonishing likeness that had so shaken him the evening before. “I don’t think you’re really glad to see me, or why should you, when you knew I was coming, go off with the cow?”

“That was a bargain,” she said, “I wanted to stay and see you just as much as Rosamund did. But as I had the party last night we agreed that it was only fair I should go after Bloss this evening, and Rosamund should stay and take care of mother and see you.”

If any commentary was needed on the deadly monotony of their existence, the Colonel felt that it was now given. That two young and attractive girls should regard him as a matter of such deep interest was proof to him of the unrelieved dreariness of their lives.

“So you went for Bloss,” he said, looking at the cow which had now passed them and was moving forward with a lurching swing toward a shed in the background.

“Yes, we go for her alternate nights. She wanders all over the tract by day and in the evening we’ve sometimes a hunt before we can get her.”

They were both looking at Bloss, who suddenly stopped, stepped heavily on the garden border, and began to bite a hole in a row of neat, green leaves.

“Bloss!” his companion almost shrieked, “you impudent, desperate cow! Did you ever see such an impertinent thing?”

And she ran toward Bloss, who, feeling the switch suddenly on her flanks gave up the happy dream of an evening feast of young lettuce and directed her course once more toward the shed. June followed her, calling imploringly over her shoulder,

“Please don’t go yet, oh, please don’t! I do want to see you for a moment, but I’ve got to put this miserable animal in her stable, or she’ll spoil the garden. Please wait.”

To which he called back:

“All right. Don’t hurry. I’ll stroll down to the gate.”

And he moved slowly down the path between the pinioned rose bushes, looking through the barring of the old gate at the dusty road.

He had not to wait long. He was standing there gazing down the road when he heard her light step and hurried breathing as she ran toward him.

“It was too bad,” she said as she came to a panting stand beside him, her alder switch still in her hand, “but I couldn’t let her eat those lettuces. We’ve had a lot of trouble with them and when they’re good we can sell them as far as Sonora.”

She said this with an air of pride, as one who vaunts an admired accomplishment.

“Do you like gardening?” he asked, and then stopped. From the house came a sudden sound of coughing, a heavy, racking paroxysm. The girl’s eyes slanted sidewise as she stood motionless, listening. She remained thus, in a trance-like quietude of attention till the sound grew fitful and then ceased.

“How did mother strike you?” she asked in a low voice.

“I—she—” he blundered, and then said desperately: “Well, she’s changed, of course, but after a long period of illness—”

He stopped. Unfinished sentences save more occasions than the world wots of.

“Yes, of course,” she said eagerly, seizing on even such feeble encouragement. “And she’s been sick for such a dreadfully long time, ever since Virginia, more than four years now. She’s thin, though, isn’t she?”

She looked anxiously at him.

“Long illnesses are apt to make people thin,” he said, turning away his head.

“Yes, I suppose so, especially—” She too left her sentence unfinished. For a moment she stood looking down, flicking at an adjacent rose-tree with her switch.

“Tell me about the gardening,” he said, seizing on the subject as the one uppermost in his mind. “How do you get your things as far afield as Sonora?”

“I’ll tell you about that later;” she suddenly seemed to shake off her anxieties as a child might. Her clouded face turned on him sparkling with new animation, “I’ll tell you all about that another time. Now—”

He interrupted her:

“But there may not be another time. You know I’ll be leaving soon.”

She looked amazed, quite aghast.

“Leaving?” she exclaimed—“leaving Foleys?”

“Yes, I must be back in San Francisco in a few days. And it takes a day to ride from here to Sacramento.”

“But—” she stopped, looking thoroughly dashed. The Colonel wondered what was in her mind.

“But not to-morrow?” she asked, drawing near to him and speaking urgently, “you’ll be here to-morrow?”

“Yes, I’ll be here to-morrow. My horse won’t be able to take the ride till the day after. He’s gone tender on his forefoot.”

She was silent, looking down on the path and absently trailing the leaf-decked tip of her switch in the dust. He regarded her with tender amusement.

“You haven’t seen the spring yet,” she said abruptly without raising her eyes.

The remark was startling. It was the discovery of this spring which had led to the unpleasantness with the squatter. The Colonel would probably have gone on paying the taxes and letting the squatter live on his premises till the end of things, if the spring had not waked him to the possibilities of ownership. He colored a little. For the first time it seemed to him the young girl had shown bad taste.

“No,” he answered, “I haven’t seen it. I didn’t see that it was necessary. I’ve had the water analyzed. That was enough.”

“But you ought to see it,” she continued, still looking at the end of the switch. “It’s a wonderful spring. Everybody says so. I discovered it.”

Her face, as she began speaking, flushed faintly and then deeper. When she had finished the color was spread over it in a clear transparent blush.

“I doubt whether I’ll be able to get there,” he replied with just a trace of stiffness in his manner. “It’s quite a walk, I understand, and it’s so hot—”

She suddenly raised her eyes and moved toward him, her look one of flushed embarrassment, but her manner urgent and determined.

“I’ll take you there,” she said hurriedly. “I know a way that’s quite shady, a path hardly anybody knows of. I found it, the spring and the path both, and I would so like to show it to you.”

Her voice fell to the key of coaxing, which was belied by her countenance, full of a keen, waiting anxiousness. She seemed to the man to be tremulously hanging on his word of consent.

“I guess I’ll have to go,” he said, looking down at her with eyes from which all disapproval had gone. “I’ll come up here for you—let’s see! The late afternoon’s the best time because it’s cooler. Say five. How’s that?”

“Here?” she said, looking away uneasily. “No, don’t come here. You know—” she drew closer to him, and resting her finger-tips on the lapel of his coat pressed them gently against his chest, half whispering—“this is to be a secret expedition. No one must know about it but us two.”

The Colonel backed away, eying her with tragical gravity from under his down-drawn brows.

“Look here, young woman,” he said, “what are you up to? Are you trying to kidnap the Colonel?”

Her dimple came, but no further indication of amusement disturbed the fluttered uneasiness of her countenance.

“No, no,” she said quickly; then tilting her head to one side and looking at him cajolingly, “but how I would like to!”

“I don’t think it’s safe for me to go,” he answered. “I’ve a suspicion you’re some kind of wood nymph or fairy who steals good-looking young men like me and keeps them in the woods for playmates. Can you give me any guaranty that I’ll reappear?”

“I’ll lead you back myself. And you will go? That’s settled. Well, listen:—down the road before you come to the turn there’s a break in the fence. It’s near the large oak that throws a limb over the road. I’ll be there waiting for you at half-past four. Five’s too late. And the path I spoke of goes up right behind the oak and is ever so much shorter than the one everybody takes. That’s this way, back of the cow-shed and the garden.”

She indicated it, and both turned to follow the direction of her pointing finger. As they stood with their backs to the road they heard a heavy, regular footfall padding through the dust. The girl turned first, and her quick, half-frightened ejaculation, “It’s father!” made the Colonel swerve round like a weathercock. It was too late for him to escape. Beauregard Allen was close to the gate and was looking at him with a somber, unmoving gaze.

He would have known his old enemy in a minute. But yet there was a change, subtile and demolishing as that which had made Alice a stranger to him. The debonair arrogance that he had once taken for a proud self-respect was gone. A destruction of the upholding sense of position and responsibility had bowed the upright shoulders and made the haughty hawk-eye heavy and evasive. John Beauregard Allen had failed in life, gone down step by step; not in one cataclysmic rush, but gradually, with a woman and children striving desperately to hold him back.

His drinking had been a habit of recent years, a weakness grown of ill-luck and despondency. It showed in a coarsened heaviness of feature, a reddened weight of eyelid. He wore a pair of loose, dusty trousers, thick, unbrushed boots, the blue-and-white cotton shirt of the country-man, and an unbuttoned sack-coat that sagged from his bent shoulders. A grizzled brown beard straggled over his breast, and the hat pushed back from his forehead showed hair of the same color. Yet there still lingered about him the suggestion of the man of breeding and education, and once again upright with the hope of life restored to him, he would have been a fine looking man.

He knew who the Colonel was before he turned, but he too realized there was no possibility of escape. In that one moment before his eye challenged that of his old adversary, he had recognized the situation and decided on his course. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and tried to square his shoulders into their old proud poise. As his glance met the Colonel’s he withdrew one of his hands from his pocket and raised his hat.

“How d’ye do,” he said in a deep, easy voice; “how d’ye do, Parrish? I heard you were here.”

The savoir faire of his address was remarkable. His eyes, however, conscious and ashamed, showed his discomfort in the meeting. The Colonel returned the salute and the two men stood facing each other, the gate between them.

“Colonel Parrish,” said June in an embarrassed voice, “came to see mother. She had such a nice talk with him. He says he doesn’t think she’s so much changed.”

“I have to thank you,” said the father with a faint reminiscence of his old grand manner, “for your kindness to my little girl last evening. June tells me you introduced Rion Gracey and young Barclay to her. That’s the son of Simeon Barclay, I suppose?”

The Colonel said that it was. He was extremely uncomfortable, and after the manner of his sex, wanted to escape from this unpleasant position with the utmost speed. He opened the gate and stepped into the road. The squatter slowly passed through the aperture into the disputed domain.

“It was very kind of you, Parrish,” he said. “We appreciated it. June would have had a pretty dull time if it hadn’t been for you.”

The Colonel deprecated all thanks. He was now in the road, his hat raised in farewell. He had noticed that Allen made no allusion to his wife and thanked Heaven that the man who had shown himself so dead to other decencies had enough left in him for that. A backward glance of final adieu showed him the father and daughter side by side by the gateway. The girl was smiling at him. The man stood with his ragged hat ceremoniously lifted over his heavy, hang-dog face.

CHAPTER VII
UNCLE JIM

An hour before the time set by June Allen to go to the spring the Colonel was sitting in his room before a table littered with papers. They were the title deeds and the tax certificates of the Parrish tract. They represented an unmarred record of purchase and possession from the date of acquisition to the present time. As he looked them over he wondered again at the astounding boldness of Allen. Had he relied upon the rightful owner’s leniency when he should discover that the claimant’s wife had once been Alice Joyce? The thought called forth an angry sentence of pain and disgust. Perhaps so. It was of a piece with Allen’s behavior. But—

The Colonel rose to his feet. He had made up his mind what he intended to do. Allen’s baseness had no bearing on the matter. Alice and her children were all that concerned him. He threw the papers into the table drawer, looked at his watch, and picking up his hat, left the room.

There were many breaks in the fence—lengths of it were entirely down—but the one June had selected as the place of rendezvous was easy of discovery because of the live-oak that grew near it. The great tree cast a heavy, twisted limb across the road, making an arch of foliage almost as impervious to sunbeams as a roof. A narrow path made a pale, meandering line through the grass beyond it, and then came and went, red as a scar, through the shrubbery of the hillside. As the Colonel drew near he saw June sitting on the ground under the tree. Her figure, clothed in a dress of dull blue, made a harmonious note of color in the gold, bronze, and olive of the landscape.

She caught a glimpse of his head over the fence and jumped up with a gesture of welcome. Then as he stepped through the gap she met him with extended hand.

Viewed at close range, her appearance was an illuminating commentary on a poverty which could never be degraded or ignoble. Nothing could have been cheaper or poorer than her scanty cotton gown or her straw hat. But she had taken pains that the ribbon on her hat should match the tint of her dress, and the old-fashioned turn-over collar of lace which encircled her throat was arranged with a dainty preciseness. She had even put on her one and only pair of corsets—a treasured article of dress reserved for parties and the Sabbath—so unusual was the occasion. The Colonel did not notice these delicacies of detail. He only saw, as any other man would have seen, that a rare distinguishing fineness marked her despite her poor apparel and coarsened hands. It would have taken a woman’s deeper insight to see that this was a girl in whom a taste for all that was luxurious, costly and elegant was innate and ready to wake at the first call.

They followed the path across the open land and then began ascending through the chaparral, the girl leading. The shrubs, which were low-growing, offered no shade, and the sun, though slanting to the west, followed them with scorching beams. It was by no means a gentle climb and they spoke little. At intervals a lizard flicked across the path, and an occasional stirring of the underbrush told of the stealthy passage of a snake. From the whole hillside aromatic odors, that seemed to be ascending in swimming undulations, rose into the heat, not sweet and delicate as is the breath of gardens, but coarse, pungent, almost rank, in their triumphant, wild vitality.

In an opening under the pines they paused for a rest. The Colonel noticed that his companion was not as talkative as she had been on the two former occasions. There was an air of troubled abstraction about her. She indicated notable points in the landscape like a dutiful cicerone, but the intensity of interest she had displayed in arranging the trip seemed gone. He wondered if she had revealed to some member of her family her design of showing him the spring and had been reproved for it.

The last portion of the walk was again through thickets, up a hill where the poison oak grew close and high, and then among larger growths of bay and alder, with the Digger pines raising their dim bluish shapes among the more juicy greens. Here they began to follow a faint rill, a tiny thread that broke into a shower of drops over roots and splinters of stone. Finally, pushing aside intruding boughs, she led him into an opening ringed by tall pine trunks, and cried triumphantly:

“Here it is! Do you wonder no one ever found it?”

There was a hollowing out of the bank under the eaves of a large pine root, and here the spring had been bubbling unnoticed for centuries. A delicate fringing of fern hung from the moist earth motionless over its reflection in the small, quivering mirror. Near by there was an outcropping of rock, and broken bits had been used to pave the edge where the crystal lip of water trembled, and to make a little channel for it to slip down. A rusty tin cup hung on a dead bough, and the girl rinsed it, and dipping it in the clear depths, handed it to him.

“Try it,” she said. “It tastes quite different here among the pine roots with the smell of the woods all round.”

He drank it, marveling at the sharp, acrid tang. She hung the cup back on the twig, and taking off her hat, sat down on a bent root that the pine above it seemed to have thrown out in a kindly desire to be hospitable. The Colonel subsided on to a flat shoulder of rock, rusted with lichen.

“Hasn’t it hidden itself in a pretty spot?” she said. “And didn’t it hide itself well? Coming on it from the other side you never would have suspected a spring was here among the roots of the trees.”

“And you discovered it?”

She nodded, looking down into the tiny basin.

“Here it is! Do You Wonder no one Ever Found it?”

“I traced it up from the little stream that runs away from it. I found it in March, one day when I was prowling.”

“Prowling! What’s prowling?”

“Prowling?” she smiled, but pensively, her eyes on the water. “It’s just wandering about, generally alone, and not going to any particular place. I’ve prowled all over here. I can lead you straight to the two old shafts and show you the dumps and the remains of the old windlass. They’re almost entirely hidden by wild grapes and things. People who don’t know could easily fall in the shafts; one of them’s quite deep.”

It was now her companion’s turn to look pensive. He had sunk the two shafts, and in them, as in the property, how many thousands of dollars he did not like to think.

“Those shafts were made,” he said, “fifteen years ago when we all thought you had only to turn over a few shovelfuls of earth and find your fortune.” He struck the rock with his hand and said laughingly: “What an old fraud you’ve been!”

She looked at him without returning his smile.

“Colonel Parrish,” she said anxiously, “did you sink those two shafts?”

He nodded, once more surprised at her indirect reference to his ownership of the land. She made no reply, but, plucking a fern growing out of the earth near her, began slowly to shred its leaves from its stalk and sprinkle them on the surface of the water.

“And,” she said suddenly, “you intend now, quite soon, to build a hotel back here, under the pines, at the top of the hill, don’t you?”

That she should disappoint him with these persistent and almost indecent inquiries, considering the situation, hurt and irritated him. It was so out of keeping with her general suggestion of something sensitive and girlishly naïve.

“I had intended building a hotel; came here with that intention. But—” He rose to his feet and said coldly, “Don’t you think we’d better be going back again? It’s quite a long walk.”

“But?”—she echoed, unheeding his last sentences—“but what?”

She made no movement save to clasp her hands on the broken fern. Her face, raised to him, suddenly was pale and set in a curious tenseness of inquiry. It moved the Colonel strangely.

“But what?” she repeated insistently. “You were going to say something else.”

“My dear little girl,” he answered, “don’t trouble your head about these things. It’s—it’s—a man’s dispute and for men to settle. But rest assured of one thing, you’ll not suffer by it.”

“I!” she exclaimed; “it’s not I that matters. But, Colonel Parrish, our mother.”

She stopped, her voice quivering like a taut string.

“Your mother?” said the Colonel, with a rising inflection.

“You see how it is with her. Let us stay. Let us stay a little while longer.”

“Did you bring me up here to ask me this?” he said, looking steadily at her.

“Yes. I wanted to see you somewhere away from the house, and I thought the spring would be a good excuse. Talking of these things makes me”—the tears rose to her eyes and stood thick in them—“makes me do like this.”

They ran over and she brushed them away with her hand.

“You can see; you understand about mother,” she went on, struggling to speak clearly. “It’s only a question of time. It’s nearly the end of everything. And I brought you up here to-day to ask you to let us stay—right or wrong—let us stay till then.”

Her voice broke and she held her head down, trying to suppress her sobs. The Colonel turned away, walked to where the tin cup hung, took it off its twig, and looked into it.

“Don’t do that,” he said, his voice rough; “for Heaven’s sake, stop. I’d be angry with you for asking me such a thing if you weren’t so—so—I don’t know what. Of course you’re going to stay.”

“What?” he was not looking at her, but was conscious that she had stiffened both in mental and physical fiber at the word—“you’re going to let us stay?”

“Of course. As long as you want, always. Don’t talk any more about it.”

A quick sound came from her, and he heard the rustle of her dress as she rose, her footsteps on the stone near him, and then felt her beside him. She seized the hand hanging at his side, pressed it against the softness of her bosom and against her cheek, then dropped it with a murmur of broken words.

He turned on her bruskly. Her face was shining with tears, but she was smiling. She tried to speak to him, but he laid a finger on her lips and looked at her, shaking his head.

“Don’t say any more about it,” he said after a moment’s pause. “I can’t stand this sort of thing. I’m not used to it.”

She gently laid her hand on his and drawing it away unsealed her lips. She was smiling radiantly, her dimple deep. And for a moment she enveloped him in a beaming look of affection and gratitude.

“There’s lots I want to say, but I suppose I must be obedient,” she murmured.

“Of course you must. Come, we ought to be going. Put your hat on or you’ll get all freckled.”

She went back to the spring and picked up her hat. As she pulled the elastic down over her cropped locks she said gaily:

“I feel so different from what I did when I came up—at least twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter.”

“You’d better not forget how to accomplish that miracle,” said her companion. “Thirty years from now you’ll probably find it a great deal more to the point than you do to-day.”

They started down the path, laughing. The red eye of the sun, a flaming ball, stared at them between the trunks of the pines, and shot long pencils of flushed light into the rustling depths of the thickets. June led the way as before, but she was a different guide. She seemed as light-hearted going down as she had been oppressed coming up. The Colonel was to realize later how ready her optimism was to respond to the first glimmer of cheer, how quick and far was the swing of the pendulum.

Coming to a grassed plateau under the pines they paused for a moment’s rest. From the high crest of ground they could see the cottage with the cultivation of its garden cutting into the unfilled land, like an island of green floating in a yellow sea. It looked meaner and more insignificant than ever in the midst of the lazily out-flung landscape now swimming in a bath of colored light.

The Colonel saw in imagination a house he owned in San Francisco on Folsom Street. He had bought it as a favor from a pioneer friend whose fortunes were declining. It was the stateliest house of what was then a street of stately houses, with wide windows, vine-draped balconies, and scrolled iron gates shutting out the turmoil of the street. The thought had been in his mind when it came into his possession that it was the sort of house he would have given Alice, and the still more sacred thought had followed, that his children’s laughter might have echoed through its halls. Now he looked down on a hovel, also his property, where Alice had been glad to find a shelter, and in which her daughter had prayed that she might be left to die! Life and its mysteries! How inscrutable, how awful, it all was!

The voice of June at his side roused him.

“Mother’s gone in,” she said, evidently making these small domestic comments more to herself than to him, “and Rosamund’s getting supper.”

“How do you know that?” he asked, glad to be shaken from his thoughts. “Have you got second sight? You’re such a little witch I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if you had.”

“You don’t have to be a witch to see the smoke coming out of the chimney.”

A faint reek of smoke curled up from the cottage roof into the evening air. The Colonel looked at her with a sheepish side-glance. She returned it, smiling in mischievous triumph.

“I’m afraid we’re not both witches,” she said saucily.

The rest over, they continued their descent by a wider path in parts of which they walked side by side, talking together sometimes, or June talking, for she was very loquacious now, while her companion listened. At the end of a description of their life in Virginia City he said,

“How long is it since you’ve been in San Francisco? Years, isn’t it?”

“Oh, years and years. I was born there, but we left when I was a child.”

“It must have been a prodigious length of time ago—in the glacial period, you might say. Sometime you and Rosamund must come down there and visit me. I’ll find a place for you to stay, and take good care of you. Would you like it?”

“Oh, Colonel Parrish!” Words failed her. The path was wide and she was walking beside him. He saw her eyes shine.

“I’d see to it that you’d have a good time. Lots of parties and first-rate partners. You’d never sit along the wall there. The fellows would be just breaking their necks to dance with you. And theaters—you like theaters, don’t you?”

“Theaters!” she fairly gasped. “I saw Mazeppa in Virginia, and it was—oh, I haven’t got the words! It was something wonderful.”

“Well, we’ll see ’em all. Better forty times than you saw in Virginia, and every night if you want. It’ll be just as good a time as San Francisco and the Colonel can give two girls like you and Rosamund.”

He looked down at her, smiling. She returned the look and said:

“Why are you so good to us? I don’t understand it!”

“Don’t try to. Never exert your brain in needless ways. That’s a fundamental law for the preservation of health. In this particular case I’d be good to myself. You don’t know what it would be for me to have two nice girls to take around. I’m a lonely old devil, you know.”

“Are you?” she said with a note of somewhat pensive incredulity. “You’ve never been married, have you?”

“Nup,” said the Colonel.

“You’ll have to look upon us as your daughters,” she continued, “or perhaps your nieces.” The path was narrow and she looked into his face with the glance of demure coquetry he was beginning to know and watch for. “Which would you prefer?”

“Daughters,” he said gruffly, looking into the bushes.

“But we’re already provided with a father,” she replied. “And it would be such a pity to waste you. Wouldn’t you care to take the position of uncle? That’s vacant.”

“All right, uncle—Uncle Jim.”

“Uncle Jim,” she repeated thoughtfully. “It seems funny to come into possession of your first uncle when you’re twenty years old.”

There was a bend in the path and the bushes grew almost across it. She suddenly quickened her speed, passed him, and ran on before.

“Come on,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m just hitting the trail again.”

He followed her, turned the bend, and pushing the branches aside, saw her a few feet ahead of him, standing on a flat stone about a foot high, which directly intercepted the path.

“What are you mounted on that for?” he said, laughing. “You look as if you were going to make a speech.”

“That’s what I’d like to do,” she answered, “but I was told not to, and I’m very obedient. Come nearer—quite close.”

He approached, a little puzzled, for he saw that she was suddenly grave. The stone raised her a few inches above him, and as he drew near she leaned down, took him by the lapels of his coat, and drawing him close, bent and kissed him softly on the forehead. Then she drew back, and still holding him, looked with tender eyes into his.

“Uncle Jim,” she said, “that’s your christening.”

The next moment she was down and flitting on ahead of him.

“The path’s very narrow,” she called. “You must be content to follow the oldest living inhabitant.”

At the gap in the fence he bade her good-by. To his great delight she caught at his hesitating suggestion that she should occasionally write to him and tell him of their life and her mother’s health. He told her he would be up again, he thought, some time during the summer. The date was uncertain. Then, with her hand in his, she said with a wilful shake of her head:

“No, not á Dios. It’s hasta mañana, Uncle Jim. I won’t have it anything but hasta mañana.”

“Well, then, hasta mañana,” he answered. “And God bless you, little girl!”

That evening Colonel Parrish went to see Cusack. He brought with him the title deeds and tax certificates of the Parrish tract. They lay scattered on the office table on which the Colonel as he talked leaned a supporting elbow. The interview was short, and there were moments when it was heated, till Cusack realized, as he afterwards expressed it to a friend, “there are certain kinds of fools there’s no good bucking up against.” The Colonel had determined to recognize the squatter’s claim, and to end all further litigation by making a legal transfer of the property to Allen by means of a quit-claim deed. He talked down argument and protest.

“Why the devil should I keep the place?” he vociferated. “I’m sick of paying taxes on it and never getting a cent. I’ve sunk thousands in it and not got a dollar back. It’s been a white elephant from the first. Allen’s welcome to it. I’m glad to get it off my hands.”

“But the spring,” Cusack almost wailed in the acuteness of his disappointment, “the spring and the hotel! They were going to raise Foleys from the dead.”

“Spring!” said the Colonel, rising and taking from his pocket a fresh cigar—“damned little picayune tea-cup! That spring hasn’t power to raise a mosquito from the dead.”

“Did you expect to find a geyser?” the irritated lawyer retorted.

“I didn’t expect to find what I did find, you can bet on that,” said his client, as he bent forward to apply the tip of his cigar to the lamp chimney.

CHAPTER VIII
PRIZES OF ACCIDENT

It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the hour on his face the Colonel passed along the hushed street and then out into the red road between its clumps of dusty foliage.

As he skirted what yesterday had been his own land he looked on it with a new eye. It could be made to support them well. No matter how low Allen might sink they need never want again. The hilly part, where the spring was, could be sold or leased to some of the enterprising city hotel men. Or, if they objected to that, they could increase their market gardening to the dimensions of a large agricultural enterprise. They could rent to a rancher a portion of the rich, uncultivated land now lying idle, and thus gain an income sufficient for them to develop their own particular domain. To people of thrift and energy the possibilities of the tract were large. Alice could die in peace. Her girls were provided for.

As the cottage came into view the rider reined up and gazed at it. No smoke issued from the chimney. They all still slept. In the crystal stillness of the morning it looked peacefully picturesque, half veiled in its greenery of shrubs and vines. The air about it was impregnated with the delicate breath of the roses that lined the path from the gate to the balcony.

He gave a slight shake to his rein, and Kit Carson, who had been impatiently pawing with a proud forefoot, moved forward. The rider’s glance wandered to a window under the sloping roof, veiled by a blue curtain. Was that the girls’ room? The girls! The two faces rose before his mental vision and he turned his eyes from the window and let them pierce, far-seeing and steady—into the distance, into the future. Before he came to Foleys he had not cared, he had not dared, to look into the future. He had cowered before its emptiness. Now the faces of the sisters rose softly bright in its melancholy obscurity, the faces of Alice’s daughters—daughters that should have been his.

A week after he reached San Francisco he had a letter from June, a childish, incoherent letter, full of impassioned terms of gratitude, broken into by distressed comments on her mother’s health. Then, in more sprightly vein, she told him of how Mr. Barclay was stopping over at Foleys for a few days and came nearly every day and helped them in the garden, and Mr. Rion Gracey, riding back from Foleys to the Buckeye Belle one evening, had dropped in for a visit, and stayed to supper.

The Colonel seemed to see her as she wrote, laughing at one moment and then stopping to dash the tears off her cheek as she had done at the spring. He heard from no one else. Beauregard Allen had accepted the transfer of the property as a business transaction, the manner in which his adversary had desired him to accept it. To his friends in San Francisco the Colonel explained his speedy return and the dropping of the case as he had done to Cusack. It was not worth the time and trouble. The land was remote, the spring a disappointment; he was glad to be rid of it all.

Three weeks after this, sitting alone in his office, he received by the afternoon mail a newspaper. It was the Daily Clarion, an organ which molded public opinion and supported a precarious existence in Foleys. Unfolding the flimsy sheet he found a marked paragraph, and turning to it he saw it to be Alice’s death notice. She had died three days before “at the residence of her husband, John Beauregard Allen.” The paper slipped from his hand to the floor and his head sank. He sat thus till the twilight fell, alone in the dim office where the golden letters that spelled his name—the name of the successful man—shone faintly on the window.

That same afternoon the dead woman’s husband and children returned to the cottage after having committed all that remained of her to the grave. Rosamund had succumbed to the strain and sorrow of the last few days, and gone to bed prostrated with a headache. Allen, morose and speechless, had flung himself in a chair in the living-room and there sat, a heavy, inert figure. He had drunk heavily during the last few days of his wife’s illness, for he had always loved her, and in his weakness of heart had fled from the sight of her suffering, and tried to find surcease for his own.

It was left to June to prepare their supper and accomplish the toilsome domestic tasks that Rosamund shared with her. With a dead heart she set out the meal, watered the garden, and finally set forth in a flare of sunset to find Bloss and drive her home.

The cow had evidently strayed far. June’s search led her to the spots which Bloss was known to frequent, but she could find no trace of her. Sometimes the girl’s voice, broken and hoarse with weeping, rose on the rich stillness of the hour, calling to the truant. She became irritable, exasperated against the animal, who, on such a night as this, while her heart was bursting with sorrow, ended the bitterness of the day with so wearisome a hunt. Finally, exhausted by long hours of watching and the fatigue of grief, she burst into unrestrained sobs. With her face shining with tears, her breast convulsed, she tore her way through thickets and scrambled over rocky spurs, every now and then sending up a quavering cry for the strayed cow. At length, brushing through a copse of bay and alder, she came on the torn face of the hill where the landslide had taken place. The ground was covered with a debris of stones and dead trees. Nature, to repair the damage, was already hiding the rawness of the lacerated expanse under a veil of small sprouting vegetation. Here, through a screen of leaves, she at last caught sight of Bloss’ red and white side.

She cried to the cow, who gave a lazy flip of her tail but no other sign of movement. June’s irritated misery gave way to a spasm of rage, and stooping, she picked up a handful of the loose pieces of stone strewn about her, and threw one at the runaway. It struck with a thud. Bloss gave a surprised snort, and, wheeling, brushed through the thicket. June followed her, the stones pressed in a clutching hand against her breast, one now and then launched in the direction of the cow. These missiles, combined with the thought of home, appeared to animate Bloss’ leisurely movements, and she hastened forward through brush and over rock at a lolloping, uncouth trot.

The dusk was settling into night when they reached the shed. June’s tears had ceased, but the abstraction of grief held her. She fastened the shed door on the cow, and still absently clasping three or four pieces of stone, entered the house. The door from the balcony gave directly into the living-room. Here, just as she had left him, she found her father.

The daughters of Beauregard Allen did not love him with the same fond blindness to his faults that had marked his wife. In the grinding poverty of their later years they could not but see his apathy, the selfishness of his heavy discouragement, the weakness of his tendency to drink. Though the filial sense was strong in them and the example of their mother’s uncomplaining devotion one that they obediently followed, they realized that their father was more a tottering pillar to support than a staff upon which to lean.

Now, a vague, dark bulk in the deserted room, so filled with memories of the dead woman, he was a figure of heart-piercing desolation. His daughter moved to the table and said gently:

“Why, father dear, are you still sitting in the dark? Why didn’t you light the lamp?”

He answered with an inarticulate sound and did not move. Setting the stones on the table June drew the lamp toward her and lit it. The sudden flood of light seemed to rouse him. The chair creaked under his weight as he turned. His haggard eyes absently traveled over the lamp and the table near it and finally rested on the scattered fragments of rock. June had bent down to look at the wick which she was carefully adjusting, when she heard him give a suppressed exclamation, and his long brown hand entered the circle of lamplight and gathered up the stones. The wick satisfactorily arranged, she settled the shade and turned away. Her father drew his chair closer to the slanting torrent of light, and holding the stones directly under it, leaned forward, scrutinizing them as he turned them about.

“Where did you get these?” he said without looking up.

She told him, turning again toward the table, absently watching him.

“Near the hillside? Just there where the piece of the hill came down?” he queried.

“Yes, along the ground there. It’s all strewed with stones and earth and roots. There’s quite a wall of rock left bare and these bits of it are all over. New weeds are sprouting everywhere. I suppose that’s what took Bloss there.”

He rose and going to a book-case took out a hand magnifying glass, and returning to the light, studied the fragments through it. Something in his face as he bent over them, struck through the lethargy of her dejection.

“Father,” she said, drawing near, “what are they? What’s odd about them?”

He lifted a face transfigured with excitement, and leaning forward, laid a trembling hand on hers.

“It’s float,” he said, “undeniable float! If I’m not mistaken we’ve got the ledge at last.”

END OF BOOK I

BOOK II
THE TOWN

CHAPTER I
DOWN IN THE CITY

In the darkness of the early November night Colonel Parrish rattled across town in a hired carriage. It was half-past eight when he left his rooms (they were a fine suite on a sunny corner of Kearney Street), and now as he turned into Folsom Street he calculated that if the girls were ready they could be en route by nine o’clock. In the autumn of 1870 the hours for evening entertainments were still early, and the particular entertainment to which the Colonel intended taking June and Rosamund Allen was one of the regular receptions which united the aristocracy of San Francisco at the house of Mrs. Ira Davenport.

The great detached bulks of the buildings that the carriage passed gleamed with lights, for Folsom Street was still the home of the elect. From the arch of lofty porches hall lamps cast a faint gleam into the outer darkness of shrubberies and lawns. Through the scroll-work of high iron gates the imbedded flags of the marble paths shone white between darkly grassed borders. Here and there a black façade was cut into by rows of long, lighted windows, uncurtained and unshuttered. The street suggested seclusion, wealth and dignity. The fortunes, which were later to erect huge piles on San Francisco’s wind-swept hill-crests, had not yet arisen to blight the picturesqueness of the gray, sea-girdled city.

His own house was one of the largest in the street. Now, in the darkness, it loomed an irregular black mass, cut into with squares and slits of light. Just a month before the lease of his tenants had expired, and he was able to see one, at least, of his dreams realized—Alice’s daughters quartered under his roof.

The revolution of Fortune’s wheel had been, where the Allens were concerned, sudden and dizzying. The ledge, that man for years had fruitlessly sought, in one night had been laid bare. Even for the time and the country it was a startling reversal of conditions. In the spring Beauregard Allen had been a beggar. In the summer he saw himself a man of wealth. Experts pronounced the discovery one of moment. The mine, called the Barranca, was regarded as richer in promise than the Buckeye Belle. Distant portions of the tract, which had come into his possession in so unlooked for a manner, were sold for large sums. The whole region was shaken into astonished animation and Foleys was more effectually wakened from the dead than it would have been by the Colonel’s original scheme.

Allen’s sloth and despondency fell from him like a garment. With the ready money from the land sales he at once began the development of the prospect hole. In July a square tunnel mouth and a board shed intruded on the sylvan landscape near the landslide. In September a fair-sized hoisting works housed the throb of engines and the roll of cars. The noise of Beauregard Allen’s strike went abroad through foot-hill California and its echo rolled to San Francisco, where men who had known him in the early days suddenly remembered him as “Beau” Allen, the handsome Southerner, who had come to grief and dropped out of sight in the fifties.

In September he came down to San Francisco and saw the Colonel. The meeting at first was constrained, but as Allen spoke of his daughters and the plans for their happiness and welfare that he had in view the constraint wore away and the two men talked as beings united by a mutual interest. The Colonel had recognized the fact that the breach must be healed. He had had to struggle against his old repugnance, but there was nothing else for it. No wrong, however deep, should stand between him and Alice’s daughters, and he could not know the daughters without accepting the father. And how he did want to know them! They had already brought brightness and purpose into his life. In an effort to treat the matter lightly he told himself that the harboring of old resentments, when they blocked the way to the forming of new ties, was too much like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Deep in his heart lay the feeling that, apart from his affection for them, they might need him. He knew Allen of old, and Alice was dead.

It was their father’s intention to have them make San Francisco their home. In the larger city they would have the advantages of society and chances to marry well. One of the objects of his visit was to look about for a house whence they could be launched into the little world in which he once had played his part. It was thus that the Colonel, the lease of his old tenant having just expired, was able to offer them his own house for as long a period of years as they might wish.

But Allen, swollen with the pride of his new fortunes, would rent no house. He would buy one, a fitting home for two such girls as his. When it came to that, the Colonel was as willing to sell as to rent. The price of thirty thousand dollars was put upon the Folsom Street mansion, and Allen, being much impressed by its size and old-fashioned splendor, purchased it, paying down the sum of ten thousand dollars, while the Colonel held a mortgage maturing in three years for the other twenty thousand. Allen, despite his sudden accession to wealth, claimed that his expenses just now were of the heaviest. In October he contemplated the building of a twenty-stamp mill at the mine, and the shaft house was to be enlarged. The winter outfits for his daughters would be costly. It was his intention that June and Rosamund should be as richly and modishly clad as any of the young women who cast a glamour over the society of the city.

To-night they were to make their entrance into that society. Mrs. Davenport was an old friend of the Colonel’s and he had asked for the invitations, assuring her that she would find his protégées two of the prettiest and sweetest girls in the world. Now as he sprang from the carriage and pushed open the tall gate of scrolled iron-work he smiled to himself, cheerfully confident that he had not overstated the charms of the Misses Allen.

His ring brought one of the new Chinese servants to the door, a quiet man, soft-footed as a cat, and clothed in freshly-laundered white. Standing in the hall under the light he watched this spectral figure flit noiselessly up the stairway. The hall, papered in a deep reddish-purple on which here and there the gleam of gold arabesques was faintly visible, was wide and dim. It would require a galaxy of lamps thoroughly to dispel the gloom that lurked in its dusky corners. A stately staircase, thickly carpeted and with a darkly-polished hand-rail, ran up in front of him. There was a light again at the top of this throwing faint glimmerings on receding stretches of wall, also somberly papered.

Through the wide arch on his right he could look into a half-lighted parlor, where a globe or two in the chandelier shone a translucent yellow. To his left the doors into the reception-room were open, and here by a table, a reading lamp at his elbow, sat Beauregard Allen smoking a cigar. He was in evening dress, but a button or two of unloosened waist-coat, and the air of sprawling ease that marked his attitude, did not suggest the trim alertness of one garbed and tuned for festival.

“Good evening, Parrish,” he said. “The girls will be down in a minute. I’m going to beg off. Can’t drag me away from a good cigar and comfortable chair on such a damned cold night.”

His face was flushed; he had evidently been drinking more than was consistent with a strictly temperate standard, a condition which often marked him after dinner. But the old tendency toward an open and unabashed inebriety had been conquered. Well-dressed, his beard trimmed, the sense of degradation and failure lifted from him, he looked a stalwart, personable man, in whom the joy of life was still buoyantly and coarsely alive.

The Colonel, leaning against the door frame, was about to launch into the desultory conversation that fills gaps, when the rustle of skirts on the stairs caught his ear. June and Rosamund were descending, their cloaks on their arms that they might show themselves in their new finery. Their mourning for their mother took the form of transparent black gauze, through which the delicate whiteness of their youthful arms and shoulders gleamed. They laughed as they met the Colonel’s eye, both slightly abashed by the unwonted splendor of their attire.

Their sudden rise from poverty, their translation to the city, and their short stay in its sophisticated atmosphere, had already worked a marked change in them. Their air of naïvely blushing rusticity was gone. They looked finer, more mondaine, than they had only six weeks before. Rosamund, who was of an ample, gracious build, had already, by the aid of the admirable dressmaker who had fashioned her gown, achieved a figure of small-waisted, full-busted elegance, which, combined with her naturally fine carriage, gave her an appearance of metropolitan poise and distinction. She had that bounteous and blooming type of looks which is peculiar to the women of California, and which (as is the case with the character that accompanies it) is curiously lacking in feminine subtility and romantic suggestion. By far the handsomer of the two sisters she was not destined to cast the spell over the hearts of men which was the prerogative of June.

She too had improved, but neither skilful dressmakers nor luxurious surroundings would ever make her a radiantly good-looking or particularly noticeable person. Her hair, which had been so unsightly six months before, was now her one beauty. It hung round her head in a drooping mass of brown curls, the longest just brushing the nape of her neck. Through them was wound a ribbon of black velvet in the manner of adornment sometimes seen in eighteenth century miniatures.

The girls grumbled a little at their father’s defection, but the truth was that they were so excited by the evening’s prospect that their regrets had a perfunctory tone. In the carriage they plied the Colonel with questions as to the nature of the entertainment and the people they were likely to meet. It amused and somewhat puzzled him to see that the anticipation of what he had supposed would be a beguiling and cheerful amusement was throwing them into nervous tremors. As the large outline of the Davenport house rose before them, all attempt at conversation died, and they sat, stiff and speechless, on the seat opposite him.

The Davenport house, as all old Californians know, was at that time and had been for ten years, the focus of the city’s social life. Mrs. Davenport was a Southerner and had been a beauty, facts which had weighed with the San Franciscans since the days when “the water came up to Montgomery Street.” The Southern tradition still retained much of its original power. The war had not broken it, and the overwhelming eruption of money, which the Comstock was to disgorge, had not yet submerged the once dominant “set.” At its head Mrs. Davenport ruled with tact and determination. She appeared to the Allens as a graciously cordial lady of more than middle age, whose sweeping robe of gray satin matched the hair she wore parted on her forehead and drawn primly down over the tips of her ears.

To the sisters it was the entrance into a new world, the world their parents had strayed from and often described to them. Seated in arm-chairs of yellow brocade they surveyed the length of the parlor, a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment, of a prevailing paleness of tint and overhung by crystal chandeliers. The black shoulders of men were thrown out against the white walls delicately touched with a design in gilding. Long mirrors reproduced the figures of women rising from the curving sweep of bright-colored, beruffled trains. A Chinaman, carrying a wide tray of plates and glasses, moved from group to group.

Soon several of the black coats had gathered round the chairs of June and Rosamund. The Colonel had to give up his seat, and June could see him talking to men in the doorways or dropping into vacant places beside older women. He kept his eye on them, however. It delighted him to see that their charm was so quickly recognized. Round about him their name buzzed from a knot in a corner, or a group on a sofa. Many of those present had known Beauregard Allen in his short heyday. Almost everybody in the room had heard of his strike near Foleys and sudden translation from poverty to riches.

When at length the Colonel saw the chair beside June vacant he crossed the room and dropped into it. He was anxious to hear from her how she was enjoying herself.

“Well,” he said, “the old man’s been frozen out for nearly an hour. Didn’t it make you feel conscience-stricken to see me hanging round the doorway looking hungrily at this chair?”

“I was dying for that man to go,” she answered. “I did everything but ask him.”

“Oh, you sinner!” he said, looking into her dancing eyes. “Where will you go to when you die?”

“Where do you think you will?” she asked, grave, but with her dimple faintly suggested. “I’d like to know, because then I can arrange to have just about the same sort of record, and we could go together.”

He could not restrain his laughter, and she added in her most caressing tone,

“It would be so dreary for you to go to one place and me to be in another.”

Before he could answer she had raised her eyes, glanced at the door, and then suddenly flushed, her face disclosing a sort of sudden quick snap into focused attention.

“Mr. Barclay,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t expect to see him to-night.”

The Colonel turned his head and saw Jerry Barclay entering the room in the company of a lady and gentleman. Many other people looked at them as they moved to where Mrs. Davenport stood, for they were unquestionably a noticeable trio.

The woman was in the middle, and between the proud and distinguished figure of Barclay and the small, insignificant one of her other escort, she presented a striking appearance. She was of a large, full build, verging on embonpoint, but still showing a restrained luxuriance of outline. A dress of white lace clothed her tightly and swept in creamy billows over the carpet behind her. It was cut in a square at her neck, and the sleeves ended at her elbows, revealing a throat and forearms of milky whiteness. This ivory purity of skin was noticeable in her face, which was firmly modeled, rather heavy in feature, and crowned with a coronet of lusterless black hair. She was hardly handsome, but there was something sensational, arresting, slightly repelling, in the sleepy and yet vivid vitality that seemed to emanate from her.

“Who is it?” said June in a low voice. “What a curious looking woman!”

The Colonel, who had been surveying the new-comers, looked at his companion with eyes in which there was a slight veiled coldness. The same quality was noticeable in his voice:

“Her name’s Newbury, Mrs. William Newbury. Her husband’s a banker here.”

“Is that her husband with her, that little man?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s so old! He looks like her father. What did she marry him for?”

“I don’t know. I’m not her father-confessor. He’s got a good deal of money, I believe.”

The Colonel did not seem interested in the subject. He picked up June’s fan and said,

“How did you like the young fellow who had this chair just now, Stanley Davenport? He’s the last unmarried child my old friend has left.”

The girl’s eyes, however, had followed the new-comers with avid, staring curiosity, and she said,

“Very much. Are Mrs. Newbury and her husband great friends of Mr. Barclay’s?”

“I believe they are. I don’t know much about her. I know her husband in business. He’s a little dried up, but he’s a first-rate fellow in the main.”

“Is she an American? She looks so queer and foreign.”

“Spanish, Spanish-Californian. She and her sister were two celebrated beauties here about twelve years ago. Their name was Romero—Carmen and Guadalupé Romero—and they were very poor. Their grandfather had been a sort of a Shepherd King, owned a Spanish grant about as big as a European principality, and when the Gringo came traded off big chunks of it for lengths of calico and old firearms and books he couldn’t read. The girls were friends of Mrs. Davenport’s only daughter Annie, and she gave them a start. Carmen—she was the elder of the two—married an Englishman, a man of position and means that she met in this house. She lives over in England. This one—Lupé—married Newbury about ten years ago.”

“Do you think she’s pretty?” asked June, anxious to have her uncertainty on this point settled by what she regarded as expert opinion.

“No. I don’t admire her at all. She was handsome when she married. Those Spanish women all get too fat. You saw something of Barclay at Foleys after I left, didn’t you?”

She dropped her eyes to the hands folded in her lap and said with a nonchalant air,

“Yes, he was at Foleys for over a week. He came back from Thompson’s Flat just after you left, and he used to come and see us every afternoon. We had lots of fun. He helped us with the garden, and he didn’t know how to do anything, and we had to teach him.”

“You saw a lot of Rion Gracey too, I suppose,” said her companion, with a sidelong eye on her.

It pleased him to note that at this remark she looked suddenly conscious.

The Colonel had for some time cherished a secret hope. It was one of the subjects of mutual agreement which had made it easier for him and Allen to bury the hatchet. The latter had told him of Rion Gracey’s continued visits to the cottage throughout the summer, and both men had agreed that no woman could find a better husband than the younger of the Gracey boys.

June’s conscious air was encouraging, but her words were aggravatingly non-committal.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “we saw Mr. Gracey often. He was always coming into Foleys to buy supplies for the Buckeye Belle.”

At that moment Barclay, who had turned away from his companions, saw her, and with a start of recognition followed by a smile of undisguised pleasure, hurried toward her. The Colonel rose with some reluctance. He was surprised and not entirely pleased at the open delight of the young man’s countenance, the confident friendliness of his greeting. He gave up his chair, however, and as he crossed the room to one of his elderly cronies, he saw that Mrs. Newbury was watching Jerry Barclay and June with a slight, lazy smile and attentive eyes.

“I came here to-night solely to see you,” said the young man, as soon as the Colonel was out of earshot.

“But how did you know I was here?” asked the innocent June. “I never told you.”

“No, you naughty girl, you never did. But I heard it.”

“Little birds?” she queried, tilting up her chin and looking at him out of the ends of her eyes.

“Little birds,” he acquiesced. “And why didn’t you let me know? Don’t I remember your making me a solemn promise at Foleys to tell me the first thing if you ever came to San Francisco? You were doubtful then if you ever would.”

“Yes, I think you do,” she agreed. “That is, if you’ve got a good memory.”

“You evidently haven’t.”

“I remembered it perfectly and was waiting until we got settled in our new house before I wrote you. I was going to give you a surprise.”

“Well, you’ve surprised me enough already.” He leaned a little nearer to her, and looking at her with eyes that were at once soft and bold said: “You’ve changed so; you’ve changed immensely since I saw you last.”

She dropped her eyes and said demurely,

“I hope it’s for the better,” then looked up at him and their laughter broke out in happy duet.

The Colonel heard it across the room, and glancing at them felt annoyed that June should look so suddenly flushed and radiant. Evidently she and Jerry Barclay, in the ten days he had spent at Foleys, had become very good friends.

An hour later the Misses Allen were standing at the top of the steps that led from the porch to the street. Guests were departing in all directions, and the lanterns of carriages were sending tubes of opaque, yellow light through the fog. The Colonel had gone in quest of theirs, cautioning his charges to wait in the shelter of the porch for him. Here they stood, close-wrapped against the damp, and peering into the churning white currents. Just below them two men, the collars of their coats up, paused to light their cigars. One accomplished the feat without difficulty; the other stood with his hand curved round the match, which many times flamed and went out.

Suddenly June heard his companion say between puffs,

“Queer, Mrs. Newbury being here!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the other, drawing a new match from his pocket, “Mrs. Davenport knew the Romero girls long before they were married. They were friends of Annie Davenport’s. Nobody’d ever breathed a word against either of them then. She wouldn’t throw Lupé down on a rumored scandal. I don’t see how she could.”

“Lots of people have. And you call it a ‘rumored scandal’ all you want; everybody believes it. She owns him body and soul.”

The other man had at last induced the tip of his cigar to catch. He threw back his head and drew a few quick inspirations.

“That’s the story. But a woman like Mrs. Davenport is not going to damn her daughter’s friend on hearsay. Women have got a creed of their own; they believe what they want to and they disbelieve what they want to. She wants to believe that the affair’s purely platonic, and she does it.”

“But Barclay! To hang round her that way in public—what a fool!”

“Oh, Barclay!”—a shrug went with the words—“he does what he’s told!”

The man turned as he spoke and saw the two girls above him on the step. He threw a low-toned phrase at his companion, and without more words they started out and were absorbed in the darkness. Almost simultaneously a carriage rattled up and the Colonel’s voice bade June and Rosamund descend.

A half-hour later, as they were mounting the stairs to their rooms, June said suddenly,

“Did you hear what those men were saying on the steps as we stood there waiting?”

They had both heard the entire conversation, and though they did not understand the true purport of the ambiguous phrases, they realized that they contained a veiled censure of Mrs. Newbury and Jerry Barclay. Their secluded bringing up in an impoverished home where the coarseness of the world never entered had kept them ignorant of the winked-at sins of society. Yet the crude frankness of mining camps had paraded before their eyes many things that girls brought up in the respectable areas of large cities never see.

“Yes, I heard them,” said Rosamund.

“What did they mean? I didn’t understand them. They seemed to think there was something wrong about Mrs. Newbury.”

“I don’t know what they meant. But I didn’t like her looks at all. I wouldn’t want her for a friend.”

“They said something of Mr. Barclay too, didn’t they?”

“Yes; they said he was a fool and did as he was told.”

“Well,” said June, bristling, “those are just the two particular things about him I should think were not true. But there was some one that they said she—I suppose that meant Mrs. Newbury—owned body and soul. Whom do you suppose they meant?”

“Her husband,” said Rosamund promptly. “Whom else could they mean?”

June had felt depressed on the way home. At these words her depression suddenly vanished and she became wreathed in smiles. Thrusting her hand through Rosamund’s arm she gave it an affectionate squeeze, exclaiming with a sudden sputter of laughter,

“Well, if his soul isn’t a better specimen than his body I don’t think it’s much to own.”

Rosamund was shocked; she refused even to smile, as June, drooping against her shoulder, filled the silence of the sleeping house with the sound of her laughter.

CHAPTER II
FEMININE LOGIC

Social life in San Francisco at this period had a distinction, a half-foreign, bizarre picturesqueness, which it soon after lost and has never regained. Separated from the rest of the country by a sweep of unconquered desert, ringed on its farther side by a girdle of sea, the pioneer city developed, undisturbed by outside influences, along its own lines.

The adventures of forty-nine had infused into it some of the breadth and breeziness of their wild spirit. The bonanza period of the Comstock lode had not yet arisen to place huge fortunes in the hands of the coarsely ambitious and frankly illiterate, and to infect the populace with a lust of money that has never been conquered. There were few millionaires, and the passionate desire to become one had not yet been planted in the bosom of every simple male, who, under ordinary conditions, would have been content to wield a pick or sweep down the office stairs. The volcano of silver that was to belch forth precious streams over the far West, and from thence over the world, was beginning to stir and mutter, but its muttering was still too low to be caught by any but the sharpest ears.

The society which welcomed June and Rosamund was probably the best the city ever had to offer. After the manner of all flourishing communities it aspired to renew itself by the infusion of new blood, and the young girls were graciously greeted. Carriages rolled up to the high iron gates, and ladies whose names were of weight trailed their silk skirts over the flagged walk. Coming in late in the wintry dusk it was very exciting always to find cards on the hall table.

There were often men’s cards among them. A good many moths had begun to flutter round the flames of youth and beauty and wealth that burnt in the Colonel’s house on Folsom Street. In his constant visits he had formed a habit of looking over these cards as he stood in the hall taking off his overcoat. The frequency with which the card of Mr. Jerome Barclay lay freshly and conspicuously on top of the pile struck him unpleasantly and caused him to remark upon the fact to June.

“Yes, Mr. Barclay comes quite often,” she said, “but so does Mr. Davenport and Mr. Brooks and Mr. Pierce, and several others.”

She had changed color and looked embarrassed at the mention of his name, and the Colonel had spoken to Rosamund about it. The Colonel had begun to rely upon Rosamund, as everybody did, and, like everybody, he had come to regard her as much the elder of the two sisters, the one to be consulted and to seek advice of. Rosamund admitted that Mr. Barclay did come rather often, but not indeed, as June had said, oftener than several others.

“Does he come to see June, or you, or both of you?” the Colonel had asked bluntly, looking at the last slip of pasteboard left by the young man.

“Oh, June, of course,” said Rosamund, with a little quickness of impatience. “They nearly all come to see June.”

“I don’t see what the devil business he has doing that,” said the Colonel, throwing down the card with angry contempt. “What’s he come round here for, anyway?”

“Why shouldn’t he?” asked Rosamund, surprised at his sudden annoyance.

“Well, he shouldn’t,” said the Colonel shortly. “That’s one sure thing. He shouldn’t.”

And so that conversation ended, but the memory of it lingered uneasily in Rosamund’s mind, and she found herself counting Jerry Barclay’s calls and watching June while he was there and after he had gone.

The visits of the young man were not indeed sufficiently frequent to warrant uneasiness on sentimental scores. He sometimes dropped in on Sunday afternoon, and now and then on week-day evenings. What neither Rosamund nor the Colonel knew was that he had formed a habit of meeting June on walks she took along the fine new promenade of Van Ness Avenue, and on several occasions had spent a friendly hour with her, sitting on one of the benches in the little plaza on Turk Street.

The first and second times this had happened June had mentioned the fact to her sister, and that a gentleman should accidentally meet a lady in an afternoon stroll had seemed a matter of so little importance that Rosamund had quickly forgotten it. The subsequent meetings, also apparently accidental, June, for some reason known to herself, had not mentioned to any one. Now it was hard for her to persuade herself that she met Jerry Barclay by anything but prearranged design; and June did not like to think that she met him, or any other man, by prearrangement. So she let him elicit from her by skilful questioning, her itinerary for her afternoon walks when she had no engagements, and took some trouble to make herself believe that the meetings still had at least an air of the accidental.

But why did she not tell her sister of these walks? Why, in fact, had she once or twice lately almost misled Rosamund in her efforts to evade her queries as to how she had passed the afternoon?

If June happened to be looking in the mirror when she asked herself these questions she noticed that she reddened and looked guilty. There was nothing wrong in meeting Mr. Barclay and walking with him or sitting on one of the benches in the quiet little plaza. Their conversation had never contained a word with which the strictest duenna could have found fault. Why, then, did June not tell? She hardly knew herself. Some delicate fiber of feminine instinct told her that what was becoming a secretly tremulous pleasure would be questioned, interfered with, probably stopped. She knew she was not one who could fight and defy. They would overwhelm her, and she would submit, baffled and miserable.

If Jerry Barclay liked to talk to her that way in the open air, or on the park bench better than in the gloomy grandeur of the parlor in Folsom Street, why should he not? And yet she felt that if she had said this to Rosamund with all the defiant confidence with which she said it to herself, Rosamund would in some unexpected way sweep aside her argument, show it worthless, and make her feel that if Jerry did not want to see her in her own house he ought not to see her at all. So June used the weapons of the weak, one of the most valuable of which is the maintaining of silence on matters of dispute.

It was in February that their father suggested that they should return the numerous hospitalities offered them by giving a dance. It would not be a ball. They were still too inexperienced in the art of entertainment, and their mourning was yet too deep to permit of their venturing on so ambitious a beginning. “Just a house-warming,” Allen said when he saw that they were rather alarmed by the magnitude of the undertaking. There was much talking and consulting of the Colonel. Every night after dinner the girls sat long over the coffee and fruit, discussing such vital points as to whether there should be two salads at the supper and would they have four musicians or five. Allen called them “little misers,” and told them they “never would be tracked through life by the quarters they dropped.” It was interesting to the Colonel to notice that Rosamund’s habits of economy clung to her, while June had assimilated the tastes and extravagances of the women about her with a sudden, transforming completeness.

It was at one of these after-dinner consultations that he was presented with the list of guests written out neatly in Rosamund’s clear hand. Was it all right, or did Uncle Jim think they had left out anybody?

As he ran his eye over it Allen said suddenly:

“They’ve got Mrs. Newbury down there. What do you think about her?”

The Colonel, who was reading through his glasses, looked up with a sharp glance of surprise and again down at the list, where his eyes stopped at the questioned name.

“Oh, strike her off,” he said. “What do you want her for?”

“She’s been here to see us,” Rosamund demurred, “and she asked us once to her house to hear somebody sing.”

“Why shouldn’t she come?” said June. “What is there about her you don’t like?”

“I didn’t say there was anything,” he answered in a tone of irritated impatience. “But she’s a good deal older than you, and—and—well, I guess it wouldn’t amuse her. She doesn’t dance. You don’t want to waste any invitations on people who may not come.”

Apparently this piece of masculine logic was to him conclusive, for he took his pencil and made a mark through the name.

The evening of the dance arrived, and long before midnight its success was assured. It was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant affairs of the winter. It seemed the last touch on the ascending fortunes of June and Rosamund. They had never looked so well. In her dress of shimmering white, which showed her polished shoulders, Rosamund was beautiful, and June, similarly garbed, looked, as some of the women guests remarked, “actually pretty.” As a hostess she danced little. Three times, however, Rosamund noticed her floating about the room encircled by the arm of Jerry Barclay. Other people noticed it too. But June, carried away by the excitement of the evening, was indifferent to the comment she might create. So was Barclay. He had drunk much champagne and felt defiant of the world. She felt defiant too, because she was so confidently happy.

By three the last guests had gone. Allen, hardly waiting for the door to slam on them, stumbled sleepily to bed, and June followed, a wearied sprite, bits of torn gauze trailing from her skirt, the wreath of jasmine blossoms she wore faded and broken, the starry flowers caught in her curls.

“Rosie, I’m too tired to stay up a minute longer,” she called from the stairs, catching a glimpse of the dismantled parlor with Rosamund, followed by a yawning Chinaman, turning out lights and locking windows.

“Go up, dear,” answered Rosamund in her most maternal tone. “I’ll be up in a minute. Sing’s so sleepy I know he’ll go to bed and leave everything open if I don’t stay till he’s done.”

The sisters occupied two large rooms, broad-windowed and spacious, in the front of the house. The door of connection was never shut. They talked together as they dressed, walking from room to room. The tie between them, that had never been broken by a week’s separation, was unusually close even for sisters so near of an age, so united by mutual cares and past sorrows.

June’s room shone bright in the lights from the two ground-glass globes which protruded on gilded supports from either side of the bureau mirror. It was furnished in the heavily gorgeous manner of the period and place. Long curtains of coarse lace fell over the windows, which above were garnished with pale blue satin lambrequins elaborately draped. The deeply tufted and upholstered furniture was covered with a blue-and-white cretonne festooned with woolen tassels and fringes. Over the foot of the huge bed lay a satin eiderdown quilt of the same shade as the lambrequins.

June, completely exhausted, was soon in bed, and lying peacefully curled on her side waited for her sister’s footsteps. As she heard the creak of Rosamund’s opening door she called softly:

“Come in here. I want to talk. I’ve millions of things to say to you.”

Rosamund swept rustling into the room and sat down on the side of the bed. Her dress was neither crushed nor torn and the bloom of her countenance was unimpaired by fatigue.

“Dear Rosie, you look so lovely,” said June, curling her little body under the clothes comfortably round her sister. “There was nobody here to-night half as good-looking as you were.”

She lightly touched. Rosamund’s arm with the tips of her fingers, murmuring to herself,

“Lovely, marbly arms like a statue!”

Her sister, indifferent to these compliments, which she did not appear to hear, sat looking at the toe of her slipper.

“I think it was a great success,” she said. “Everybody seemed to enjoy it.”

“Of course they did. I know I did. I never had such a beautiful, galumptious time in my life.”

Rosamund gave her a gravely inspecting side-glance.

“You tore your dress round the bottom, I saw. There was quite a large piece trailing on the floor.”

“Yes, it was dreadful,” said June, nestling closer about the sitting figure and smiling in dreamy delight. “Somebody trod on it while I was dancing, and then they danced away with it round them, and it tore off me in yards, as if I was a top and it was my string.”

“Were you dancing with Jerry Barclay?” asked Rosamund.

“I don’t think so.” She turned her head in profile on the pillow and looked at her sister out of the corner of her eye. Meeting Rosamund’s sober glance she broke into suppressed laughter.

“What’s the matter with you, Rosie?” she said, giving her a little kick through the bed-clothes; “you look as solemn as an undertaker.”

“I don’t think you ought to have danced so often with Jerry Barclay. It—it—doesn’t look well. It—” she stopped.

“‘It’—well, go on. Tell me all about it. A child could play with me to-night. You couldn’t make me angry if you tried.”

“June,” said Rosamund, turning toward her with annoyed seriousness, “I don’t think you ought to be friends with Jerry Barclay.”

“What do you say that for?”

Despite her previous remark as to the difficulty of making her angry, there was a distinct, cold edge on June’s voice as she spoke.

“I found out to-night. Ever since we heard those men talk that evening at Mrs. Davenport’s I had a feeling that something wasn’t right. And then Uncle Jim being so positive about not asking Mrs. Newbury here this evening.”

“What’s Mrs. Newbury got to do with it?”

“Everything. It’s all Mrs. Newbury. To-night in the dressing-room some girls were talking about her and Mr. Barclay; I asked them what they meant, and I heard it all. It’s a horrid story. I don’t like to tell it to you.”

“What is it?” said June. She had turned her head on the pillow and stared full face at her sister. She was tensely, frowningly grave.

“Well, they say—every one says—they’re lovers.”

“Lovers!” exclaimed June. “What do you mean by that? She’s married.”

“That’s just the dreadful part of it. They’re that kind of lovers—the wrong kind. They’ve been for years, and she loves him desperately and won’t let him have anything to do with anybody else. And Mr. Newbury loves her, and doesn’t know, and thinks Jerry Barclay is his friend.”

There was a silence in the room. Rosamund had found it difficult to tell this base and ignoble piece of scandal to her sister. Now she did not look at June because she loved her too much to witness the shame and pain that she knew would be hers.

“It’s too horrible,” she continued, June uttering no sound. “I wouldn’t have told you, but—well, we don’t want him coming here if he’s that sort of man. And Mrs. Newbury—” she made a gesture of angry disgust—“what right had she to come here and call on us?”

June still said nothing. Her hand was lying on the counterpane and Rosamund, placing hers on it, felt that it trembled and was cold. This, with the continued silence, alarmed her and she said, trying to palliate the blow,

“It seems so hard to believe it. He was so kind and natural and jolly up at Foleys, as if he was our brother.”

“Believe it!” exclaimed June loudly. “You don’t suppose I believe it?”

Her tone was high, almost violent. She jerked away her hand and drew herself up in the bed in a sitting posture.

“You don’t suppose I’d believe a shameful, wicked story like that, Rosamund Allen?”

“But they all said so,” stammered Rosamund, taken aback, almost converted by the conviction opposing her.

“Well, then, they say what’s not true, that’s all! They’re liars. Don’t lots of people tell lies? Haven’t you found out that down here in the city most of the things you hear aren’t true? They just like to spread stories like that so that people will listen to them. Everybody wants to talk here and nobody wants to listen. It’s a lie—just a mean, cowardly lie.”

Her face was burning and bore an expression of quivering intensity. Rosamund, astonished by her vehemence, stared at her disquieted.

“But—but—everybody thinks so,” was all she could repeat.

“Then they think what’s not so. Do you think so?” with eager challenge.

The other looked down, her brows drawn together in worried indecision.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “When he comes up in my mind, especially as he was at Foleys, it seems as if I couldn’t believe it either.”

“There!” exclaimed June triumphantly. “Of course you can’t. Nobody who has any sense could. It’s just degraded, low-minded people who have nothing better to do than spread scandals that could believe such a story about such a man.”

“But Mrs. Newbury,” demurred her sister. “Why did Uncle Jim not want us to ask her to-night?”

“What’s Mrs. Newbury got to do with it? I don’t know. I don’t care anything about her. I don’t like her. She looks like a large white seal, walking on the tip of its tail. I think she’s common and fat and ugly. But what does she matter? If Mr. Newbury loves her he’s got very bad taste, that’s all I’ve got to say. And as to Jerry Barclay loving her? Why, Rosamund—” she suddenly dropped to her most persuasive softness of tone and expression—“you know he couldn’t.”

“I don’t know,” said Rosamund. “I don’t feel as if I knew anything about men, or what they like, or what they don’t like. You might think Mrs. Newbury ugly and they might think her beautiful. You never can tell. And then those men on the steps that night at Mrs. Davenport’s”—she shot an uneasy glance at her sister—“that was what they meant.”

“Rosie,” said June, leaning toward her and speaking with pleading emphasis, “you don’t believe it?”

“I don’t want to, that’s certain.”

“Well, then, say you don’t.”

“I can’t say that positively. I wish I could.”

She rose from her seat and moved away, absently drawing the hair-pins from her coiled hair. June fell back on the pillow.

“Well, I can,” she said. “I never felt more positive about anything in my life.”

Her sister turned back to the bedside and stood there looking frowningly down.

“I hope you’re right,” she said. “I’d hate to think any man like that had ever come here to see us or been a friend of yours.”

“So would I,” said June promptly. “So would any girl.”

“Well, good night. You’re tired to death. I’ll put the gas out.”

June saw the tall white figure move to the bureau and then darkness fell, and she heard its rustling withdrawal.

She lay still for a time staring at the square of light that fell from her sister’s room through the open door. Presently this disappeared and she moved her eyes to the faint luminous line which showed the separation of the window curtains. She was still staring at it wide-eyed and motionless when it grew paler, whiter and then warmer with the new day.

She had spoken the truth when she said she did not believe the ugly story. There are many women who have the faculty of quietly shutting a door on obvious facts and refusing them admittance into the prim sanctuary of their acceptance. How much more might a young girl, loving, inexperienced and tender, refuse to believe a blasting rumor that had touched a figure already shrined in her heart!

But the shock she suffered was severe. That such a story should be coupled with his name was revolting to her. And far down in the inner places of her being, where nature has placed in women a chord that thrills to danger, a creeping sense of dread and fear stirred. But she smothered its warning vibration and, with her eyes fixed on the crack of light, repeated over and over:

“Lies! lies! Miserable, cowardly lies!”

CHAPTER III
ONE OF EVE’S FAMILY

It was a few weeks after the ball that the Colonel heard of the expected arrival in town of Rion Gracey and Barney Sullivan en route to Virginia City.

From the great camp across the mountain wall in the Nevada desert, an electric current had begun to thrill and extend its vibrations wherever men congregated. The autumn rumors that Virginia was not dead persisted. The mutterings of the silver volcano had grown louder and caught the ear of the hurrying throng. The reports of a strike in Crown Point rose and fell like an uneasy tide. The price of the stock that in the spring of seventy had sold for seventy-five cents had risen to two, and then to three, dollars. Men watched it disquieted, loath to be credulous where they had so often been the dupes of manager and manipulator, yet tempted by the oft-repeated prophecy that the great bonanzas of Virginia were yet to be discovered. Throughout California and Nevada the miners that three years before had left the dying camp as rats leave a sinking ship, began to bind up their packs and turn their faces that way. It was like the first concentrating movement of a stealthily gathering army. The call of money had gone thrilling along the lines of secret communication which connect man with man.

The Graceys had large holdings in Virginia. The group of unprofitable claims consolidated under the name of the Cresta Plata was theirs, and Rion and his superintendent were going up “to take a look around.” This was what the Colonel heard down town. It was a piece of intelligence that was reported as of weight. Mining men watched the movements of the Gracey boys as those about great rulers follow their actions in an effort to read their unexpressed intentions. When the Graceys moved into camps or out of camps, operators, managers and financiers noted the fact. That Rion and Sullivan should take a detour to San Francisco instead of going straight up from Sacramento argued that their need was not pressing.

The Colonel thought he knew why Rion had taken such a roundabout route. He and Allen had had many conversations on the subject of the match they wished to promote and had not the least idea of how to set about promoting. The Colonel had also tried to have talks with June about it. It seemed to him that a good way to further the matter and elicit some illuminating remark from her was to tell her at intervals that Rion Gracey was a man of sterling worth in whose love any woman would find happiness. To all of which June invariably agreed with an air of polite acquiescence which the Colonel found very baffling. His pet was to him the sweetest of living women, but he had to admit it was not always easy for him to understand or manage her.

On the afternoon of the day he had heard of Rion’s expected arrival he had gone to see the new house a friend had just completed on Van Ness Avenue. The visit over he stood at the top of the flight of stone steps, looking up and down the great street, and wondering, as he tapped on his shoe with his cane, whether he would go across to Folsom Street for dinner or down to his club.

Suddenly his idle glance fell on a pair of figures on the block above, walking with the loitering step which betokens engrossing conversation. Their backs were toward him, but one at least he thought he recognized. He ran down the steps and in a few minutes had gained on them and was drawing quickly nearer. He had not been mistaken. The black silk skirt, held up to reveal a pair of small feet in high-heeled shoes, the sealskin jacket, the close-fitting black turban hat, below which hung an uneven shock of short, brown curls, were too familiar to him to permit of any uncertainty. The man he was not sure of, but as he drew closer he saw his face in profile, and with a start of surprised annoyance recognized Jerome Barclay.

At the corner they turned up the cross street. A short distance farther, on the angle of a small plaza, intruded into the gray city vista a green stretch of grass and shrubbery. The Colonel wondered if it was the objective point of their walk, and this thought added to the disquietude he already felt at the sight of Barclay, for when people went into parks they sat on benches and talked, sometimes for hours.

He was close at their heels before they heard his hail and turned. A momentary expression of annoyance, gone almost as soon as it came, passed over Barclay’s face. June looked confused and, for the first instant, the Colonel saw, did not know what to say.

“Well,” he said, trying to speak with genial unconsciousness, “what are you doing up here so far from your native haunts?”

“I met Miss Allen on the avenue just below there,” said Jerry quickly, “walking up this way to make a call on some friends of hers.”

He spoke with glib ease, but his eye, which lighted for an instant on June’s, was imperious with a command. June was taken aback by his smooth readiness. She did not like what he said, but she obeyed the commanding eye and answered with stammering reluctance:

“Yes, the Nesbits. I was going there this afternoon. They’re just a block beyond here.”

It was not exactly a lie, June thought, for had Barclay not appeared she would doubtless have gone to the Nesbits, wondering all the time what had happened to him. But Barclay had appeared, as he always did now at the time and place he so carelessly yet so scrupulously designated, and June would not have seen the Nesbits that afternoon.

“Suppose you take a little pasear with me instead of going to the Nesbits,” said the Colonel. “I’m not conceited, but I think I’m just as interesting as they are.”

“And what are you doing up here?” she said, her presence of mind, and with it her natural gaiety of manner, returning. “You’re as far from your native haunts as I am.”

“I was calling, too,” he answered, “on the Barkers. But I didn’t meet any one sufficiently interesting to keep me from fulfilling my duties, and I have seen the new house from the skylight to the coal-bin.”

“Never mind,” she said consolingly, “you’ve met me. That’s your reward for good conduct.”

They had arrived at the upper corner of the plaza where only the breadth of a street divided them from the green, tree-dotted sward, cut with walks and set forth in benches. Barclay, raising his hat and murmuring some conventional words of farewell, turned and left them, and the Colonel and his companion strolled across the road and over the grass toward a bench, behind which a clump of laurels grew shelteringly, a screen against the wind and fog.

“This is the most comfortable of all the benches,” said June artlessly as they sat down. “The laurels keep the wind off like a wall. Even on cold days, when the fog comes in, it’s a warm little corner.”

“You’ve been here before,” said the Colonel, looking at her out of the sides of his eyes.

A telltale color came into her cheeks, but the city and its ways were training her, and she managed to exclude confusion and consciousness from her face.

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “several times. I sometimes rest here after I’ve been taking a long walk.”

“That must be dull,” said her companion. “I can’t see anything cheerful in sitting on a park bench by yourself.”

He looked at her again. But his bungling masculine line of procedure was not of the kind to entrap even so untried a beginner. It made her smile a little, and then she looked down to hide the smile.

“Wasn’t it jolly that we met?” she said, stroking the satiny surface of her new jacket and presenting to his glance a non-committal profile. The Colonel knew her well enough by this time to realize that she intended neither to confess nor to be trapped into revelations of past occupancy of the bench. He returned to less intricate lines of converse.

“Who do you think’s to be here to-morrow?”

“A friend?”

“A friend from Foleys,—Rion Gracey, and Barney Sullivan with him.”

“Rion Gracey!” She looked pleased and slightly embarrassed. “Really—really!” She paused, her face full of smiles, that in some way or other showed disquietude beneath them.

“They’re down from Foleys and going on to Virginia in a day or two. Queer they came around this way, wasn’t it?”

Again the Colonel could not keep from attempts to plumb hidden depths. Again his inspecting eye noticed a fluctuation of color. June was unquestionably surprised by the news, but he could not be sure whether she was pleased.

“You’ll have to have them up to dinner,” he continued. “You saw so much of them last summer before you left that you’ll have to offer them some kind of hospitality.”

“Of course,” she said hastily, flashing an almost indignant look at him. “They’ll take dinner with us, or breakfast, or lunch, or anything they like. I’d love to see them and hear about everything up there. I want to hear how Barney Sullivan’s getting on with Mitty. I thought they’d be engaged by this time.”

“Perhaps they are”—it must be confessed that the Colonel’s interest in the love affairs of his friend Mitty sounded perfunctory—“I wish Rion was, too.”

“Yes,” in a small, precise voice, “wouldn’t it be nice?”

“It would make me very happy,” said the Colonel gravely, “very happy, June. You know that.”

“Would it?” with a bright air of innocent surprise. “Why?”

The Colonel turned and looked at her squarely, almost sternly.

“You know why, June Allen,” he said.

She had taken off her gloves and now suddenly slipped her hand into his and nestled nearer to him.

“Don’t talk solemnly,” she said, in a coaxing voice. “Don’t make me feel as if I was in church.”

He cast a side-glance at her, caught her twinkling eye, and they both laughed.

“You aggravating girl!” he said. “It’s all for your own good that I’m talking solemnly. I want you to be happy.”

“Well, I am happy, very happy. Don’t you think I look like a person who’s happy?”

He did not look at her, and she raised herself, and taking him by the two ears gently turned his face toward her.

“Excuse me,” she said politely, “but as you wouldn’t look at me I had to make you. Don’t I look happy?”

“Happy enough now,” he answered. “I was thinking of the future.”

“Oh, the future!”—she made a sweeping gesture of scorn—“the future’s so far away no one knows anything about it. It’s all secrets. Let’s not bother with it. The present’s enough.”

Her hand, as she held it up in front of her, suddenly caught her eye and fixed her attention.

“Look at my hands,” she said. “They’re getting quite white and ladylike. They’re losing their look of honest toil, aren’t they? How I’ve hated it!”

He held out his big palm and she placed her left hand, which was nearest him, in it. Her hands were small, the skin beautifully fine and delicate, but they showed the hard labor of the past in a blunting and broadening of the finger-tips. The Colonel looked at the little one lying in his.

“I don’t see that there’s anything the matter with them,” he said. “This one only wants one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“A ring.”

This time June was caught.

“A ring?” she said. “Well, I have several, but they’re not very pretty, and I thought I’d wait till father gave me a really handsome one.”

“I don’t mean a handsome one. I mean a plain, little gold one; just a band and worn on this finger.”

He designated the third finger. June understood.

“Oh, Uncle Jim!” she said, trying to pull her hand away, blushing and rebellious.

The Colonel held it tight, feeling the opportunity too valuable to be trifled with.

“And Rion Gracey to put it on,” he added.

Her answer came almost angrily as she turned away her face.

“Not for a moment.”

“No, for a lifetime.”

There was no reply and the Colonel loosed her hand. She pushed it back into her glove saying nothing. As she began to fasten the buttons he said:

“Do you often meet Barclay when you are out walking, as you did this afternoon?”

Women, who are timid by nature, and who, combined with that weakness, have an overmastering desire to be loved and approved of, are of the stuff of which the most proficient liars can be made. Had June, in childhood, been intimidated or roughly treated she would have grown up a fluent and facile perverter of the truth. The tender influences of a home where love and confidence dwelt had never made it necessary for her to wish to conceal her actions or protect herself, and she had grown to womanhood frank, candid and truthful. Now, however, she found herself drawn into a situation where, if she were to continue in the course that gave her the happiness she had spoken of, she must certainly cease to be open, even begin to indulge in small duplicities. It was with a sensation of shamed guilt that she answered carelessly:

“No, not often. Now and then I have.”

“Rosamund says he doesn’t come to the house as much as he used.”

This was in the form of a question, too.

“Doesn’t he? I haven’t noticed much.”

Her heart accelerated its beats and she felt suddenly unhappy, as she realized that she was misleading a person especially dear to her.

“I’m glad of that, Junie dear. I don’t like him to be hanging round you. He’s not the man to be your friend.”

June began to experience a sense of misery.

“What are you down on him for?” she said. “I like him. I like him a great deal.”

It seemed to her that by thus openly voicing her predilection for Barclay she, in some way or other, atoned for her previous prevarications.

“Like him a great deal?” repeated the Colonel, staring somberly at her. “What does that mean?”

She was instantly alarmed and sought to obliterate the effect of her words.

“Oh, I like him very much. I think he’s interesting and handsome, and—and—and—very nice. Just that way.”

Nothing could have sounded more innocently tame. The simple man beside her, who had loved but one woman and known the honest friendship of others as uncomplex as himself, was relieved.

“Barclay’s not the man for a good girl to be friends with,” he continued with more assurance of tone. “He’s all that you say, handsome, and well educated, and a smooth talker and all that. But his record is not the kind a man likes. He’s done things that are not what a decent man does. I can’t tell you. I can’t talk to you about it. But rely on me. I’m right.”

“I know all about it,” she answered, turning round and looking calmly at him.

“All about it!—about what?”—he stammered, completely taken aback.

“About that hateful story of Mrs. Newbury.”

The Colonel’s face reddened slightly. He had the traditional masculine idea of the young girl as a being of transparent ignorance, off which the wickedness of the world glanced as bird-shot off the surface of a crystal ball. Now he was pained and shocked, not only that June should have heard the story but that she should thus coolly allude to it.

“Then if you’ve heard it,” he said almost coldly, “you should know without my telling you that Jerry Barclay’s no man for you to know, or walk with, or have any acquaintance with.”

“You don’t suppose I believe it, do you?” she said with the same almost hard composure.

This indeed was a new view of the situation. For six years the Colonel had heard the affair between young Barclay and Mrs. Newbury talked of and speculated upon. It had now passed to the stage of shelved acceptance. People no longer speculated. Their condemnation savored even of the indifference of familiarity. The only thing that nobody did was to doubt. And here was a girl, looking him in the face and calmly assuring him of her disbelief. Had he known more of women he would have realized how dangerous a portent it was.

“But—but—why don’t you believe it?” he asked, still in the stage of stammering surprise.

“Because I know Mr. Barclay,” she answered triumphantly, fixing him with a kindling eye.

“Well, that may be a reason,” said the Colonel, then stopped and drew himself to an upright position on the bench. He did not know what to say. Her belief in the man he knew to be guilty had in it a trustfulness of youth that was to him exceedingly pathetic.

“You can believe just what you like, dear,” he said after a moment’s pause, “it’s the privilege of your sex. But this time you’d better quit believing and be guided by me.”

“Why, Uncle Jim,” she said leaning eagerly toward him, “I’m not a fool or a child any more. Can’t I come to conclusions about people that may be right? I know Mr. Barclay well, not for as long as you have, but I shouldn’t be surprised if I knew him a great deal better. We saw him so often and so intimately up at Foleys, and he couldn’t be the kind of a man he is and be mixed up in such horrible scandals. It’s impossible. He’s a gentleman, he’s a man of honor.”

“Yes,” nodded the Colonel, looking at the shrubs in front of him, “that’s just what he’d say he was if you asked him.”

“And it would be right. He’s not capable of doing dishonorable things. He’s above it. Rosamund thinks so, too.”

“Oh, does she?” said the Colonel.

If he had not been so suddenly stricken with worry and foreboding he could not have forborne a smile at this citing of Rosamund as a court of last resort.

“Yes, Rosamund said she couldn’t believe it either. If you knew him as we do you’d understand better. It’s all lies. People are always talking scandal in this place—I’ve heard more since I came here than I heard in the whole of my life before. It’s a dreadful thing, I think, to take away a man’s character just for the fun of talking.”

She had spoken rapidly and now paused with an air of suspended interest, which was intensified by her expression of eager questioning. The Colonel looked at her. In a dim way she was struck, as she had been before, by the intense melancholy of his eyes—sad old eyes—that told of a life unfulfilled, devastated, at its highest point of promise.

“June, dear,” he said in a low voice, “you’re not in love with this man?”

The color ran over her face to the hair on her forehead. The directness of the question had shocked her young girl’s delicacy and pride. She tried to laugh, and then with her eyes down-drooped, said in a voice of hurried embarrassment:

“No, of course not.”

He smiled in a sudden expansion of relief. All was well again. In his simplicity of heart it did not occur to him to doubt her.

CHAPTER IV
DANGER SIGNALS

Jerome Barclay lived with his mother in a new house on Taylor Street, near Jackson. They had only been there a short time. Before that South Park had been their home. But within the last year or two the fortunes of South Park had shown symptoms of decline, and when this happened Mrs. Simeon Barclay had felt that she must move.

Since her arrival in San Francisco in the early fifties, Mrs. Barclay had made many moves. These were not undertaken because her habitats had been uncomfortable, but because the fashionable element of the city had shown from the first a migratory tendency which was exceedingly inconvenient for those who followed it. Mrs. Barclay had followed it assiduously from the day she had landed from the steamer, and had in consequence lived in many localities, ranging from what was now Chinatown and in the fifties had been the most perfectly genteel and exclusive region, to the quietly dignified purlieus of Taylor Street.

Simeon Barclay had crossed the plains in an emigrant train in forty-nine, and between that and sixty-four, when he died, had made a fair fortune, first as a contractor and afterward as a speculator in real estate. In St. Louis, his native place, he had begun life as a carpenter, seen but little prosperity, and married a pretty servant girl, whose mind was full of distinctly formed ambitions. When he went to California in the first gold rush he left his wife and son behind him, and when, from the carpentering that he did with his own hands in forty-nine, he passed to the affluent stage of being a contractor in a large way of business, he sent for her to join him. This she did, found him with what to their small experience were flourishing fortunes, and immediately started out on that career of ambulating fashion which she had followed ever since.

Barclay senior’s fifteen years of California life were full to the brim. He made fortunes and lost them, lived hard, had his loves and his hates openly and unblushingly, as men did in those wild days, and became a prominent man in the San Francisco of the early sixties. He had but the one child, and in him the ambitions of both parents centered. The Missouri carpenter had never been educated. He was always, even at the end of his life, uncertain in his grammar, and his wife had found it difficult to teach him what she called “table manners.”

Father and mother had early resolved that their son should be handicapped by no such deficiencies. They sent him to the best schools there were in San Francisco and later to Harvard. There he was well supplied with money, developed the tastes for luxurious living that were natural to him, forgathered with the richest and fastest men of his class, and left a record of which collegians talked for years. After his graduation he traveled in Europe for a twelve-month, as a coping stone to the education his parents had resolved should be as complete as money could compass.

Shortly after his son’s return Simeon Barclay died in the South Park house. When it came to settling up the estate it was found that he had left much less than had been expected. The house and the income of a prudently invested eighty thousand dollars was all the widow and son had to their credit when the outlying debts were paid. It was not a mean fortune for the place and the time, but both were querulous and felt themselves aggrieved by this sudden lightening of what had been for fifteen years a well-filled purse.

Jerry, to whom a pecuniary stringency was one of the greatest of trials, attempted to relieve the situation by speculating in “feet on the lode” in Virginia City, and quickly lost the major part of his inheritance. Even then there was no need for worry, as the son had been taken into the business the father had built up, which still flourished. But Jerry showed none of the devotion to commercial life that had distinguished the elder man. In his hands the fortunes of Barclay and Son, Real Estate Brokers, rapidly declined. He neglected the office, as he did his home, his mother, his friends. A devotion, more urgently engrossing and intoxicating than business could ever be, had monopolized his thoughts, his interests and his time.

He was twenty-four when he returned from Europe, handsome, warm-blooded, soft-tongued, a youth framed for the love of women. It speedily found him. He had not been home six months when his infatuation for the wife of William Newbury was common talk.

She was three years his senior, mismated to a man nearly double her age, dry, hard, and precise. She was a woman of tragedy and passion, suffering in her downfall. She had at first struggled fiercely against it, sunk to her fall in anguish, and after it, known contending conflicts of flesh and spirit, when she had tried to break from its bondage and ever sunk again with bowed head and sickened heart. People had wondered to see the figure of Lupé Newbury bent in prayer before the altars of her church. In her girlhood she had not been noted for her piety. Waking at night, her husband often heard her soft padding footfall as she paced back and forth through the suite of rooms she occupied. He had never understood her, but he loved her in a sober, admiring way, showered money on her, believed in her implicitly. This fond and unquestioning belief was the salt that her conscience rubbed oftenest and most deeply into the wound.

In those first years Jerry had given her his promise never to marry. He told her repeatedly that he regarded her as his wife; if she were ever free it would be his first care to make her so before the eyes of the world. But six years had passed since then, years during which the man’s love had slowly cooled, while the woman’s burned deeper with an ever-increasing fervid glow. The promise which had been given in the heat of a passion that sought extravagant terms in which to express itself, was now her chief hold upon him. In the scenes of recrimination that constantly took place between them she beat it about his ears and flourished it in his eyes. As she had no cunning to deceive him in the beginning, she had no subtilities to reawake old tenderness, rekindle old fires. She was as tempestuously dark in her despair as she was furious in her upbraidings, melting in her love. He was sorry for her and he was also afraid of her. He tried to please her, to keep her in a good temper, and he refrained from looking into the future where his promise and his fear of her, were writ large across his life.

It was for his protection from scenes of jealousy and tears that he had conducted his friendship with June in a surreptitious manner. He had the caution of selfish natures, and the underhand course that his intrigue necessitated had further developed it. He wanted to please himself always and to hurt no one, because people, when they are hurt, disturb the joyous tenor of life. Now, where June was concerned, he was not doing any harm. He saw the girl in a perfectly open manner except that he did not see her in her own house. He had a right to spare himself the railings to which he knew Lupé would subject him, and which he dreaded as only a man can who hears them from the lips of a woman he has ruined and no longer loves.

That it was unfair to June he would not permit himself to think. He liked seeing her too much to give it up, so he assured himself that it was a harmless pleasure for both of them. Of course he could not marry her. Even if he were free to do so he had no such feeling for her. They were only friends. Their conversation had never passed the nicely designated limits of friendship. He had never touched her hand save in the perfunctory pressure of greeting and farewell. His respect for June was genuine, only it was not as strong as his regard for his own pleasure and amusement.

Yet, despite the assurances of the platonic coolness of his sentiments, his desire for her society grew with what it fed on. When by some engagement, impossible to be evaded, they could not take their accustomed walk together, he was filled with an unreasonable disappointment, and was almost angry with her till she should appear again.

On the last occasion the Colonel had interrupted them only a few minutes after they had met. Jerry, cheated of the hour he had intended spending on the park bench with her, left them in a rage. And so imperative was his wish to see her that the next evening, indifferent to the fact that he would probably find the Colonel there, he made up his mind to go to the house on Folsom Street and pay one of his rare calls.

Rion Gracey and Barney Sullivan were dining with the Allens that night. There was much to talk about and the party sat long over the end of dinner, the smoke of the men’s cigars lying in light layers across the glittering expanse of the table. There were champagne glasses beside each plate, the bubbles rising in the slender stems to cluster along the rim. These had appeared midway in the dinner, when, with much stumbling and after repeated promptings and urgings from Rion, Barney Sullivan had announced his engagement to Summit Bruce.

With glasses held aloft the party pledged Mitty and her lover. The encomiums of his fiancée which followed made Barney even redder than the champagne did.

“Oh, there’s nothin’ the matter with Mitt,” he said with a lover’s modesty, “I ain’t gone it blind choosin’ her.”

“Mitty Bruce!” the Colonel exclaimed. “Mitty Bruce is the finest girl in the California foot-hills!”

“I guess Barney thinks just about that way,” Rion answered, forbearing to stare at the blushing face of his superintendent.

“Oh, Mitt’s all there!” Barney repeated, allowing himself a slight access of enthusiasm. “She’s just about on top of the heap.”

Greatly to his relief the conversation soon left his immediate affairs and branched out to the other members of the little Foleys group. Black Dan was still at the Buckeye Belle. His daughter was at school in New York where she had been sent in the autumn at her own request. The girls asked anxiously after her. The few glimpses they had had of the spoiled beauty had inflamed their imaginations. It seemed part of the elegant unusualness which appertained to her that she should be sent to New York to finish her education, with beyond that a polishing year or two of European travel.

“How wonderful she’ll be when she comes back,” Rosamund had said with an unenvious sigh. “Perfectly beautiful and knowing everything like the heroine of a novel.”

A slight trace of bitterness was noticeable in Rion’s answer.

“I think she’d have been a good deal more wonderful if she’d stayed here. She’s just the apple of her father’s eye, the thing he lives for. And now, unless he goes East, and that’s almost impossible with things waking up this way in Virginia, he may not see her for a year or two.”

The mention of Virginia broke the spell of gossip and small talk and the conversation settled down to the discussion of the business, which, in different degrees, absorbed the four men. It was curious to notice the change wrought in them by this congenial theme. Sullivan’s uncouthness and embarrassment fell from him with the first words. His whole bearing was transformed; it became infused with alertness and gained in poise and weight. The heaviness of his visage gave place to a look of sharpened concentration. His very voice took on different tones, quick, sure and decisive.

But it was to Rion Gracey that the others deferred. June, sitting silent in her chair, noticed that when he spoke they listened, Sullivan with foxlike keenness of face, the Colonel with narrowed eyes, ponderingly attentive over his cigar, her father with a motionless interest showing in knit brows and debating glance. Leaning back in an attitude of careless ease, Rion spoke simply but with a natural dominance, for here he was master. A thrill of surprised admiration passed through the girl. He was a man among men, a leader by weight of authority, to whom the others unconsciously yielded the foremost place.

The room was dim with smoke when they finally rose from the table. The mining discussion was still in progress, but Rion dropped out of it to turn to his hostess and draw back her chair. As he did so he leaned over her shoulder and said in a lowered voice:

“It’s too bad I’ve got to go on to-morrow. I wanted to see you again. I wanted to talk to you.”

The words were simple enough. The young girl, however, looking uneasy, turned to glance at him. She met his eyes, keen, deep-set, quiet, the eyes of the out-door man accustomed to range over airy distances. In them she saw a look which caused her to drop her own. Murmuring a word or two of reply she turned and passed through the doorway into the sitting-room just behind Rosamund. That young woman suddenly felt her arm pressed by a small, cold hand, and in her ear heard a whisper:

“Don’t leave me alone this evening with Rion Gracey. Please don’t.”

Rosamund turned and shot an inquiring side-glance at her sister’s perturbed face. She strolled toward the sitting-room bay-window and began to arrange the curtains, June at her heels.

“Why not?” she said in a whisper, pulling the heavy folds together.

“I’m afraid of what he’s going to say. Oh, please”—with as much urgency as the low tone employed permitted—“if he suggests that we go into the drawing-room to look at photographs or albums or anything, you come along, too.”

“But why?”

“Rosie, don’t be such a fool!” in an angry whisper.

Rosamund was about to retort with some spirit when the click of the iron gate caught her ear. She drew back the curtains and peeped out. A step sounded on the flagged walk and a tall, masculine figure took shape through the density of the fog-thickened atmosphere. She closed the curtains and looked at June with an unsmiling eye.

“You needn’t be afraid of being left alone with anybody,” she said. “Here’s Jerry Barclay.”

June drew back, her eyebrows raised into exclamatory semi-circles, an irrepressible smile on her lips.

“Rosamund,” called Allen from the table, “where’s the ash receiver? Gracey’s got nothing to put his ashes in but the blue satin candy box one of June’s young men gave her for Christmas.”

The entrance of Jerry Barclay a moment later had a marked effect upon the company. He was known to the four men and not especially liked by any one of them. The Colonel had begun to feel for him a sharp, disquieted repugnance. The one person in the room to whom his entrance afforded pleasure was June, and this she made an effort to hide under a manner of cold politeness.

An immediate constraint fell on the party which the passage of the evening did not dispel. Gracey was angry that the advent of this man whom he mentally characterized as “a damned European dandy” had deprived him of a tête-à-tête with June. He had not intended, as the young girl feared, to ask her to marry him. He had the humility of a true lover and he felt that he dared not broach that subject yet. But he had hoped for an hour’s converse with her to take with him on his journey as a sweet, comforting memory. Sullivan detested Jerry, whose manner he found condescending, turned from him, and began talking with an aggressive indifference to his host. But the Colonel was the most disturbed of all. What worried him was the difference between June’s manner to Jerry to-day, when others were present, and June’s manner to Jerry yesterday, when they had been walking alone on Van Ness Avenue.

By eleven o’clock they had gone and Allen having stolen to bed, the sisters were left together in the sitting-room. They were silent for a space, Rosamund moving about to put out lights, give depressed cushions a restoring pat, and sweep the ashes of the fire into a careful heap beneath the grate, while June idly watched her from the depths of an arm-chair.

“Aren’t people funny?” said the younger sister suddenly, turning from her kneeling position on the rug, the hearth-brush in her hand. “They seem to be so different in different places.”

“How do you mean?” said June absently. “Who’s different in a different place?”

“Well, Barney is. He’s all right and looks just as good as anybody up at the mines. And down here he’s entirely different, he looks so red, and his feet are so big, and his hands never seem to know where to go unless he’s talking about mining things. His clothes never looked so queer up at Foleys, did they? They seemed just like everybody else’s clothes up there.”

“Oh, Barney’s all right,” returned the other, evidently taking scant interest in the problem. “I’m glad he and Mitty are going to be married.”

“But Rion Gracey’s not like that,” continued Rosamund, pursuing her own line of thought. “He’s just the same everywhere. I think he looks better down here. He looks as if he were somebody, somebody of importance. He even makes other people, that look all right when he’s not by, seem sort of small and insignificant.”

“Whom did he make look small and insignificant?” said June suddenly in a key of pugnacious interest.

“Jerry Barclay. I thought Jerry Barclay looked quite ordinary and as if he didn’t amount to much beside Rion. The things he said seemed snappish and sometimes silly, like what a girl says when she’s cross and is trying to pretend she isn’t.”

“I don’t think it very polite, Rosamund,” said June in a coldly superior tone, “to criticize people and talk them over when they’ve hardly got out of the house.”

“Well, perhaps it isn’t,” said Rosamund contritely, returning to her hearth-brushing, “but like lots of other things that aren’t just right it’s awfully hard not to do it sometimes.”

The girls went up stairs and June was silent. Rosamund thought she was still annoyed by the criticism of her friend, and so she was. For deep in her own heart the thought that Rosamund had given voice to had entered, paining and shocking her by its disloyalty, and making her feel a sense of resentment against Rion Gracey.

CHAPTER V
THE GREAT GOD PAN

In the spring in San Francisco the trade winds come and all wise Californians move inland. In the early seventies the exodus to the country was not noticeably large. Rural hotels were still small and primitive. To be able to evade the fog-laden breath of the trades was the luxury of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do evaded them by retiring to country houses which dotted the teeming reaches of the Santa Clara Valley, or sought the shelter of the live-oaks where the golden floor of the valley slopes up into the undulations of the hills.

The Allens moved down early in April. Their father, after an afternoon’s excursion in a buggy with a real estate agent, came back one evening and told them he had rented the De Soto house, back of San Mateo, for three years, and they must be ready to move into it in a week.

He was full of business and hurry in these days, and said he could not help them much. Neither would he be with them a great deal, as he would spend most of his summer in town with occasional trips to Virginia City. Crown Point was steadily rising and the rumors of a new bonanza were on every tongue. Rion Gracey had not returned, and Black Dan had ridden over the mountains into the Nevada camp on his own horse, a dislike for modern modes of locomotion being one of his peculiarities. Allen had bought heavily of the rising stock and seen himself on the road to even more dazzling fortune. He had rented the De Soto place for the highest price any real estate agent had yet dared to ask. People who knew of the rate of his expenditure talked of a beggar on horseback. But the Barranca was paying well and the twenty-stamp mill was up and going.

The De Soto estate was part of the princely grant that the Señorita Esperanza de Soto brought as a marriage portion to her husband, Peter Kelley, a sailor from a New England clipper which touched at Yerba Buena in thirty-eight. At the time the Allens rented it, part of the great tract had been parceled out and sold to householders. The central portion, where Peter and the Señora Kelley had built a stately home, was practically as it had been when the Yankee seaman first ranged over it and realized the riches of his bride. Now both sailor and señora were dead, and their only son, Tiburtio Kelley, preferred a life in Paris on the large fortune accumulated by his thrifty father, to the dolce far niente of empty, golden days in the Santa Clara Valley.

This central strip of the tract, which ran from the valley up into the first spurs of the hills, was still a virgin wilderness. Huge live-oaks, silvered with a hoar of lichen, stretched their boughs in fantastic frenzies. Gray fringes of moss hung from them, and tangled screens of clematis and wild grape caught the sunlight in their flickering meshes or lay over mounds of foliage like a torn green veil. The silence of an undesecrated nature dreamed over all. Woodland life seldom stirred the dry undergrowth, the rustle of nesting birds was rare in the secret leafy depths of the oaks. Here and there the murmurous dome of the stone pine soared aloft, the clouded dusk of its foliage almost black against the sky.

For nearly two miles the carriage drive wound upward through this sylvan solitude. As it approached the house a background of emerald lawns shone through the interlacing of branches, and brilliant bits of flower beds were set like pieces of mosaic between gray trunks. The drive took a sweep around a circular parterre planted in geraniums—a billowing bank of color under a tent of oak boughs—and ended in a wide, graveled space at the balcony steps.

The house was a spreading, two-story building of wood, each floor surrounded by a deep balcony upon which lines of French windows opened. Flowering vines overhung, climbed and clung about the balcony pillars and balustrades. Roses drooped in heavy-headed cascades from second-story railings; the wide purple flowers of the clematis climbed aloft. On one wall a heliotrope broke in lavender foam and the creamy froth of the bankshur rose dabbled railings and pillars and dripped over on to the ground. It was a big, cool, friendly looking house with a front door that in summer was always open, giving the approaching visitor a hospitable glimpse of an airy, unencumbered hall.

The move completed, June and Rosamund began to taste the charm of the Californian’s summer life. There were no hotels near them. No country club had yet risen to bring the atmosphere of the city into the suave silence of the hills. It was a purely rural existence: driving and riding in the morning, reading in the hammock under the trees, receiving callers on the balcony in the warm, scented end of the afternoon, going out to dinner through the dry, dewless twilight and coming home under the light of large, pale stars in a night which looked as transparently dark as the heart of a black diamond.

They were sometimes alone, but, as a rule, the house contained guests. The Colonel at first came down constantly, always from Saturday to Monday and now and then for a week-day evening. But in May the sudden leap of Crown Point to one hundred and eighty upset the tranquillity of even cooler natures than Jim Parrish’s, and the stock exchange became the center of men’s lives. The long expected bonanza had been struck. The San Franciscans, once more restored to confidence in the great lode, were seized with their old zest of speculation, and all the world bought Crown Point. Allen saw himself on the road to a second fortune, and threw his money about in Virginia with an additional gusto, as it had been the scene of some of his poorest days.

Even the Colonel was attacked by the fever and invested. His financial condition had given him grounds for uneasiness lately, and here was the chance to repair it. A mine in Shasta, in which he had been a large owner, shut down. He owned property in South Park, and the real estate agents were beginning to shake their heads at the mention of South Park property. It surprised him to realize that for the first time in years he was short of ready money. He sold two buildings far out among the sand dunes on upper Market Street, and with the rest of his kind bought Virginia mining stock with Crown Point and Belcher at the head.

Under the live-oaks back of San Mateo the girls only faintly heard the rising rush of the excitement. The current circled away from their peaceful corner, lapped now and then by a belated ripple. The country life they both loved filled them with contentment and health. Rosamund took to gardening again. Her face shaded by a large Mexican hat, she might be seen of a morning in confab with the Irish gardener, astonishing him by her practical knowledge. In the evening she surreptitiously “hosed” the borders, wishing that her visitors would go back to town and leave her to the peaceful pursuit of the work she delighted in and understood.

June was not so energetic. She did not garden or do much of anything, save now and then go for a walk in the wild parts of the grounds.

As might be expected, Mrs. Barclay always moved down to San Mateo in April. She was not rich enough to own a large country place, but she did the best that was in her and rented a pretty cottage outside the village. Here Jerry came from town every Saturday and stayed till Monday morning, and to her surprise not infrequently appeared unannounced on week-day afternoons, saying that business was dull, and there was no necessity waiting about in town. The year before she had complained greatly that her son’s visits to San Mateo were rare. This summer she had no such grievance. He kept a horse in her small stable, and as soon as he arrived had it saddled and went out for a ride. Sometimes on Sunday he rode over and called on the Allens, but there were other people to visit in the neighborhood and he did not go to the Allens’—so he told his mother—as often as he would have liked.

The direction he took on the week-day afternoons was always the same. No rain falls during the California summer, there are no dark hours of thunder and cloud; it is a long procession of blue and gold days, steeped in ardent sunshine, cooled by vagrant airs, drowsy with aromatic scents—a summer made for lovers’ trysts.

Half-way up the winding drive to the De Soto house Jerry had learned there was a path through the underbrush which led to an opening, deep in the sylvan wilderness, under the thick-leaved roof of an oak. It had been a favorite spot of the late Señora Kelley’s, and all the poison oak had been uprooted. With the canopy of the tree above—a ceiling of green mosaic in which the twisted limbs were imbedded—and the screen of lightly hung, flickering leafage encircling it, it was like a woodland room, the bower of some belated dryad.

Sometimes Jerry had to wait for her, and lying prone on the ground, his horse tethered to a tree trunk near by, lay looking up, his senses on the alert to catch her step. Sometimes she was there first, and as he brushed through the covert, he saw her dress gleaming between the leaves in a spattering of white. His heart was beginning to beat hard at the sound of her advancing footfall. While he waited for her he thought of nothing, his whole being held in a hush of expectancy. When she came he found it difficult for the first moment to speak easily.

On an afternoon early in June he sat thus waiting. All the morning the thought of this meeting had filled his mind, coming between him and his business. On the train coming down the anticipation of it held him in a trance-like quietude. He talked little to his mother at lunch. He kept seeing June as she came into sight between the small, delicately leaved branches, dots of sun dancing along her dress, her eyes, shy and full of delight, peeping through the leaves for him. He answered his mother’s questions at random and ate but little. The picture of the white-clad girl grew in intensity, striking him into motionless reverie, so that, his eyes fixed, he seemed scarcely to breathe.

It was very warm. Lying on his back on the dried grass, his hands clasped under his head, he gazed straight before him at the long fringes of moss that hung from a gnarled bough. His senses were focused in an effort to disentangle her footstep from the drowsy noises of the afternoon. All scruples, apprehensions of danger, were swept away by the hunger for her presence. His mind had room for no other thought. Every nerve was taut, every sense quiveringly alert, as he lay, still as a statue, waiting for her.

Suddenly he rose on his elbow staring sidewise in the concentration of his attention. The subdued, regular brush of her dress against the leaves came softly through the murmurous quietness. He sprang to his feet, strangely grave, his glance on the path she came by. In a moment her figure speckled the green with white, and she came into view, hurrying, sending sharp, exploring looks before her. She saw him, instantly fell to a slower pace, and tried to suppress the gladness of her expression. But he saw it all, and the quick breath that lifted her breast. Her hand hardly touched his, and moving a little away from him, she sank down on the ground, her white skirts billowing round her. She pressed them into folds with arranging pats, avoiding his eyes, and repeating some commonplaces of greeting.

Jerry returned to his reclining posture, lying on his side, his elbow in the grass, his hand supporting his head. He, at first, made no pretense of moving his eyes from her, and answered her remarks shortly and absently.

Against the background of variegated greens she presented a harmony of clear, thin tints like a water color. Her dress of sheer, white muslin was cut away from the throat in a point, and smoothly covering her arms and neck, let them be seen beneath its crisp transparency, warmly white under the cold white of the material. The heat of the afternoon and the excitement of the meeting had called up a faint pink to her cheeks. In her belt she had thrust a branch of wistaria and the trail of blossoms hung down along her skirt. She wore a wide leghorn hat, and in this she had fastened another bunch, the flowers lying scattered across the broad rim, and one spray hanging over its edge and mingling with the curls that touched her neck.

Jerry had never seen her look as she did this afternoon. Love, that she felt assured was returned, had lent her the fleeting beauty of an hour. She did not seek to penetrate the future. The happiness of the present sufficed her. She said little, plucking at a tuft of small wild flowers that grew beside her, conscious to her inmost fiber of her lover’s eyes.

“Why don’t you take off your hat?” he said. “There’s no sun here.”

She obediently took it off and threw it on the ground. The black velvet she wore around her head had become disarranged and she raised her hands to draw it into place and tuck a loosened curl under its restraint. He watched her fixedly.

“Now,” he said, reaching out to draw the hat to him and taking one of the wistaria blossoms from it, “put this in.”

“I have no glass,” she demurred, stretching a hand for the flower.

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be your glass. I’ll tell you if it isn’t all right.”

She tucked the stem of the blossom into the velvet band, so that its trail of delicate lavender bells fell downward behind her ear.

“How is that?” she said, facing him, her eyes downcast. Her coquetries of manner had deserted her. With the flush on her face a glowing pink and her lashes on her cheeks, she was a picture of uneasy embarrassment.

“Perfect,” he answered. He continued to stare at her for a moment and then said suddenly in a low voice,

“Good heavens, how you’ve changed! It’s a little over a year now that I’ve known you and you’re an entirely different person from the girl with the short hair I met up at Foleys. What have you done to yourself? What is it that has changed you?”

“I think it’s because I’m happy,” she said, beginning again to pick the wild flowers.

“Why are you happy?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I—” she paused and began to arrange her flowers in a careful bunch.

He suddenly dropped his eyes to the ground and there was a silence. The sleepy murmur of insects rose upon it. The sun, in an effort to penetrate the inclosure, scattered itself in intermittent flickerings of brilliant light that shifted in golden spots along the tree trunks or came diluted through the webbing of twigs and vine tendrils. It was still very hot and the balsamic odors of bay-tree and pine seemed to grow more intense with the passing of the hour.

“You were such a quiet little thing up there,” Jerry went on, “working like a man in that garden of yours and never wanting to go anywhere. Things down here may have made you happy, but I sometimes wonder if they haven’t made you frivolous, too.”

When Jerry ceased staring at her and began to talk in this familiar, half-bantering strain, she felt more at ease, less uncomfortable and conscious. She seized the opening with eagerness and said, smiling down at her little bouquet:

“But you know I am frivolous. I love parties and pretty clothes and lots of money to spend, and all the good times going. I was that way at Foleys, only I didn’t have any of those things. I can be serious, too, if it’s necessary. When I haven’t got the things to be frivolous with, I can do without.”

He stretched out his hand and plucked a long stalk of feather-headed grass.

“Can you?” he said indolently. “Are you sure you’re not telling a little story?”

“No, no, quite sure. I have two sides to my character, a frivolous one and a serious one. You ought to know that by now.”

“Which have you shown to me oftenest?” He was peeling the stalk of its shielding blade of grass.

“I don’t know. That’s for you to say. Perhaps it’s been an even division.”

He looked up. She was smiling slightly, her dimple faintly in evidence.

“And I suppose the dimple,” he said, “belongs to the frivolous side.”

“Yes. Even my face has two sides; the frivolous one with the dimple and the serious one without.”

“Let me see them,” he said. “Let me judge which of the two is the more attractive.”

He leaned forward and with the tip of the long spear of grass, touched her lightly on the cheek.

“Turn,” he commanded, “turn, till I get a good profile view.”

She turned, presenting her face in profile, pure as a cameo against the leafy background.

With the Tip of the Long Spear of Grass, He Touched Her Lightly on the Cheek

“That’s the serious side,” she said, raising her chin slightly, so that her curls slipped back, disclosing her ear.

“And now for the frivolous,” he answered. “I don’t seem to know the serious side so well.”

She turned her head in the other direction, her eyes down-drooped. He drew himself nearer to her over the ground, the grass spear in his hand.

“And so this is the frivolous. Shouldn’t the dimple be here?”

He touched her cheek again with the tip of the grass, and as he did so the dimple trembled into being. She looked at him slantwise, laughing, with something breathless in the laughter.

As she met his glance her laughter died away. His face had changed to something unfamiliar and hard. He was pale, his eyes fierce and unloving. For a moment she looked at him, some phrase of inquiry dying on her lips, then she made an attempt to rise, but he drew close to her and caught her hands. She turned her head away, suddenly white and frightened.

“June,” he whispered, “do you know how much I love you?”

It was a whisper unlike anything she had ever heard before. A whisper within herself responded to it. She sat still, trembling and dizzy, and felt his arms close about her, and her consciousness grow blurred as his lips were pressed on hers.

The instant after he had loosed her and they had shrunk from each other in guilty terror, the girl quivering with a rush of half comprehended alarm, the man struggling with contending passions. His face seemed to her full of anger, almost of hatred, as he cried to her,

“Go home. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you. We can’t come here again this way. I’m not free to love you. Go home.”

He made an imperious gesture for her to go, almost as though driving her from his presence. White as death and dazed by the terrifying strangeness of it all, she scrambled to her feet, and turning from him, set out at a run. She brushed through the bushes, her eyes staring before her, her breast straining with dry sobs. In one hand she still held her little bunch of wild flowers, and with the other she made futile snatches at her skirt, which she had trodden upon and torn.

Gaining the end of the wood, she came into the open garden, glaring with sun, deserted and brilliant. Back of it stood the house, shuttered to the afternoon heat and drowsing among its vines. She was about to continue her course over the grass to the open front door, when a footstep behind her, rapid as her own, fell on her ear. For an instant of alert, lightly poised terror, she paused listening, then shot forward across the grass and on to the drive. But her pursuer was fleeter than she. Close at her shoulder she heard him, his voice full of commanding urgency.

“Stop, I must speak to you.”

She obeyed as she must always obey that voice, and wheeled around on him, pallid and panting.

“June, dearest, forgive me. I forgot myself and I’ve frightened you. But we mustn’t meet—that way—any more.”

She looked at him without answering. He was as pale as she. The lower part of his face seemed to tremble. He had difficulty in controlling it and speaking quietly.

“It’s true what I said,” he went on. “I love you. I’ve done so for months. I was to blame, horribly to blame. You’re so young—such a child. I was the one to blame for it all.”

“For what?” she said. “What’s there to blame anybody for? What has happened all of a sudden?”

He came closer to her and looked her steadily in the eye.

“I am not free,” he said in the lowest audible voice. “I can’t marry you. I am not free.”

She repeated with trembling lips,

“Not free! Why not?”

“No. If I were—oh, June, if I were!” He turned away as if to go, then turned back, and said,

“Oh, June, if I were, we would be so happy! If I could undo the past and take you—!”

His voice broke and he looked down, biting his underlip. She understood everything now, and for the moment speech was impossible. There was a slight pause, and then he said,

“I wouldn’t let myself see the way it was going. I lied to myself. I loved you better every day, and I persuaded myself I didn’t, and that it was nothing but a friendship to both of us. We mustn’t meet this way any more. But we will see each other sometimes at people’s houses? We’re not to be strangers.”

She turned dazedly away from him to go to the house. For a step or two he let her go. Then he followed her, caught her hand with its bunch of limp flowers, and said with urgent desperation: