IT was nearly two o'clock in the morning.
The lights were out in Robinson's Hall,
where there had been dancing and revelry; and
the moon, riding high, painted the black windows
with silver. The cavalcade, that an hour
ago had shocked the sedate pines with song and
laughter, were all dispersed. One enamoured
swain had ridden east, another west, another
north, another south; and the object of their
adoration, left within her bower at Chemisal
Ridge, was calmly going to bed.

I regret that I am not able to indicate the
exact stage of that process. Two chairs were
already filled with delicate inwrappings and
white confusion; and the young lady herself,
half-hidden in the silky threads of her yellow
hair, had at one time borne a faint resemblance
to a partly-husked ear of Indian corn. But she
was now clothed in that one long, formless garment
that makes all women equal; and the
round shoulders and neat waist, that an hour

[figure description] Page 002.[end figure description]

ago had been so fatal to the peace of mind of
Four Forks, had utterly disappeared. The face
above it was very pretty: the foot below, albeit
shapely, was not small. “The flowers, as a
general thing, don't raise their heads much to
look after me,” she had said with superb frankness
to one of her lovers.

The expression of the “Rose” to-night was
contentedly placid. She walked slowly to the
window, and, making the smallest possible peep-hole
through the curtain, looked out. The
motionless figure of a horseman still lingered on
the road, with an excess of devotion that only a
coquette, or a woman very much in love, could
tolerate. The “Rose,” at that moment, was
neither, and, after a reasonable pause, turned
away, saying quite audibly that it was “too
ridiculous for any thing.” As she came back to
her dressing-table, it was noticeable that she
walked steadily and erect, without that slight
affectation of lameness common to people with
whom bare feet are only an episode. Indeed, it
was only four years ago, that without shoes or
stockings, a long-limbed, colty girl, in a waistless
calico gown, she had leaped from the tail-board
of her father's emigrant-wagon when it
first drew up at Chemisal Ridge. Certain wild
habits of the “Rose” had outlived transplanting
and cultivation.

[figure description] Page 003.[end figure description]

A knock at the door surprised her. In
another moment she had leaped into bed, and
with darkly-frowning eyes, from its secure
recesses demanded “Who's there?”

An apologetic murmur on the other side of
the door was the response.

“Why, father! — is that you?”

There were further murmurs, affirmative,
deprecatory, and persistent.

“Wait,” said the “Rose.” She got up, unlocked
the door, leaped nimbly into bed again,
and said, “Come.”

The door opened timidly. The broad, stooping
shoulders, and grizzled head, of a man past
the middle age, appeared: after a moment's
hesitation, a pair of large, diffident feet, shod
with canvas slippers, concluded to follow. When
the apparition was complete, it closed the door
softly, and stood there, — a very shy ghost indeed, —
with apparently more than the usual
spiritual indisposition to begin a conversation.
The “Rose” resented this impatiently, though,
I fear, not altogether intelligibly.

“Do, father, I declare!”

“You was abed, Jinny,” said Mr. McClosky
slowly, glancing, with a singular mixture of
masculine awe and paternal pride, upon the two
chairs and their contents, — “you was abed and
ondressed.”

[figure description] Page 004.[end figure description]

“I was.”

“Surely,” said Mr. McClosky, seating himself
on the extreme edge of the bed, and painfully
tucking his feet away under it, — “surely.”
After a pause, he rubbed a short, thick, stumpy
beard, that bore a general resemblance to a
badly-worn blacking-brush, with the palm of
his hand, and went on, “You had a good time,
Jinny?”

“Yes, father.”

“They was all there?”

“Yes, Rance and York and Ryder and
Jack.”

“And Jack!” Mr. McClosky endeavored to
throw an expression of arch inquiry into his
small, tremulous eyes; but meeting the unabashed,
widely-opened lid of his daughter, he
winked rapidly, and blushed to the roots of his
hair.

“Yes, Jack was there,” said Jenny, without
change of color, or the least self-consciousness
in her great gray eyes; “and he came home
with me.” She paused a moment, locking her
two hands under her head, and assuming a more
comfortable position on the pillow. “He asked
me that same question again, father, and I said,
`Yes.' It's to be — soon. We're going to live
at Four Forks, in his own house; and next
winter we're going to Sacramento. I suppose

[figure description] Page 005.[end figure description]

it's all right, father, eh?” She emphasized the
question with a slight kick through the bed-clothes,
as the parental McClosky had fallen
into an abstract revery.

“Yes, surely,” said Mr. McClosky, recovering
himself with some confusion. After a pause,
he looked down at the bed-clothes, and, patting
them tenderly, continued, “You couldn't have
done better, Jinny. They isn't a girl in Tuolumne
ez could strike it ez rich as you hev —
even if they got the chance.” He paused
again, and then said, “Jinny?”

“Yes, father.”

“You'se in bed, and ondressed?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn't,” said Mr. McClosky, glancing
hopelessly at the two chairs, and slowly rubbing
his chin, — “you couldn't dress yourself again
could yer?”

“Why, father!”

“Kinder get yourself into them things
again?” he added hastily. “Not all of 'em,
you know, but some of 'em. Not if I helped
you' — sorter stood by, and lent a hand now
and then with a strap, or a buckle, or a necktie,
or a shoestring?” he continued, still looking at
the chairs, and evidently trying to boldly familiarize
himself with their contents.

“Are you crazy, father?” demanded Jenny,

[figure description] Page 006.[end figure description]

suddenly sitting up with a portentous switch
of her yellow mane. Mr. McClosky rubbed
one side of his beard, which already had the
appearance of having been quite worn away by
that process, and faintly dodged the question.

“Jinny,” he said, tenderly stroking the bed-clothes
as he spoke, “this yer's what's the
matter. Thar is a stranger down stairs, — a
stranger to you, lovey, but a man ez I've
knowed a long time. He's been here about an
hour; and he'll be here ontil fower o'clock,
when the up-stage passes. Now I wants ye,
Jinny dear, to get up and come down stairs, and
kinder help me pass the time with him. It's
no use, Jinny,” he went on, gently raising his
hand to deprecate any interruption, “it's no
use! He won't go to bed; he won't play
keerds; whiskey don't take no effect on him.
Ever since I knowed him, he was the most onsatisfactory
critter to hev round” —

“What do you have him round for, then?”
interrupted Miss Jinny sharply.

Mr. McClosky's eyes fell. “Ef he hedn't kem
out of his way to-night to do me a good turn, I
wouldn't ask ye, Jinny. I wouldn't, so help me!
But I thought, ez I couldn't do any thing with
him, you might come down, and sorter fetch
him, Jinny, as you did the others.”

Miss Jenny shrugged her pretty shoulders.

[figure description] Page 007.[end figure description]

“Is he old, or young?”

“He's young enough, Jinny; but he knows a
power of things.”

“What does he do?”

“Not much, I reckon. He's got money in the
mill at Four Forks. He travels round a good
deal. I've heard, Jinny that he's a poet —
writes them rhymes, you know.” Mr. McClosky
here appealed submissively but directly
to his daughter. He remembered that she had
frequently been in receipt of printed elegaic
couplets known as “mottoes,” containing enclosures
equally saccharine.

Miss Jenny slightly curled her pretty lip.
She had that fine contempt for the illusions of
fancy which belongs to the perfectly healthy
young animal.

“Not,” continued Mr. McClosky, rubbing his
head reflectively, “not ez I'd advise ye, Jinny,
to say any thing to him about poetry. It ain't
twenty minutes ago ez I did. I set the
whiskey afore him in the parlor. I wound up
the music-box, and set it goin'. Then I sez to
him, sociable-like and free, `Jest consider yourself
in your own house, and repeat what you
allow to be your finest production,' and he
raged. That man, Jinny, jest raged! Thar's
no end of the names he called me. You see,
Jinny,” continued Mr. McClosky apologetically,
“he's known me a long time.”

[figure description] Page 008.[end figure description]

But his daughter had already dismissed the
question with her usual directness. “I'll be
down in a few moments, father,” she said after
a pause, “but don't say any thing to him about
it — don't say I was abed.”

Mr. McClosky's face beamed. “You was
allers a good girl, Jinny,” he said, dropping on
one knee the better to imprint a respectful kiss
on her forehead. But Jenny caught him by
the wrists, and for a moment held him captive.
“Father,” said she, trying to fix his shy eyes
with the clear, steady glance of her own, “all
the girls that were there to-night had some one
with them. Mame Robinson had her aunt;
Lucy Rance had her mother; Kate Pierson had
her sister — all, except me, had some other
woman. Father dear,” her lip trembled just a
little, “I wish mother hand't died when I was
so small. I wish there was some other woman
in the family besides me. I ain't lonely with
you, father dear; but if there was only some
one, you know, when the time comes for John
and me” —

Her voice here suddenly gave out, but not
her brave eyes, that were still fixed earnestly
upon his face. Mr. McClosky, apparently
tracing out a pattern on the bedquilt, essayed
words of comfort.

“Thar ain't one of them gals ez you've

[figure description] Page 009.[end figure description]

named, Jinny, ez could do what you've done
with a whole Noah's ark of relations at their
backs! Thar ain't one ez wouldn't sacrifice
her nearest relation to make the strike that
you hev. Ez to mothers, maybe, my dear
you're doin' better without one.” He rose
suddenly, and walked toward the door. When
he reached it, he turned, and, in his old deprecating
manner, said, “Don't be long, Jinny,”
smiled, and vanished from the head downward,
his canvas slippers asserting themselves resolutely
to the last.

When Mr. McClosky reached his parlor
again, his troublesome guest was not there.
The decanter stood on the table untouched;
three or four books lay upon the floor; a
number of photographic views of the Sierras
were scattered over the sofa; two sofa-pillows,
a newspaper, and a Mexican blanket, lay on the
carpet, as if the late occupant of the room had
tried to read in a recumbent position. A
French window opening upon a veranda, which
never before in the history of the house had
been unfastened, now betrayed by its waving
lace curtain the way that the fugitive had
escaped. Mr. McClosky heaved a sigh of
despair. He looked at the gorgeous carpet
purchased in Sacramento at a fabulous price, at
the crimson satin and rosewood furniture

[figure description] Page 010.[end figure description]

unparalleled in the history of Tuolumne, at the
massively-framed pictures on the walls, and
looked beyond it, through the open window, to
the reckless man, who, fleeing these sybaritic
allurements, was smoking a cigar upon the
moonlit road. This room, which had so often
awed the youth of Tuolumne into filial respect,
was evidently a failure. It remained to be seen
if the “Rose” herself had lost her fragrance.
“I reckon Jinny will fetch him yet,” said Mr.
McClosky with parental faith.

He stepped from the window upon the
veranda; but he had scarcely done this, before
his figure was detected by the stranger, who at
once crossed the road. When within a few
feet of McClosky, he stopped. “You persistent
old plantigrade!” he said in a low voice, audible
only to the person addressed, and a face full of
affected anxiety, “why don't you go to bed?
Didn't I tell you to go and leave me here
alone? In the name of all that's idiotic and
imbecile, why do you contiuue to shuffle about
here? Or are you trying to drive me crazy
with your presence, as you have with that
wretched music-box that I've just dropped
under yonder tree? It's an hour and a half yet
before the stage passes: do you think, do you
imagine for a single moment, that I can tolerate
you until then, eh? Why don't you speak?

[figure description] Page 011.[end figure description]

Are you asleep? You don't mean to say that
you have the audacity to add somnambulism to
your other weaknesses? you're not low enough
to repeat yourself under any such weak pretext
as that, eh?”

A fit of nervous coughing ended this extraordinary
exordium; and half sitting, half leaning
against the veranda, Mr. McClosky's guest
turned his face, and part of a slight elegant
figure, toward his host. The lower portion of
this upturned face wore an habitual expression
of fastidious discontent, with an occasional line
of physical suffering. But the brow above was
frank and critical; and a pair of dark, mirthful
eyes, sat in playful judgment over the supersensitive
mouth and its suggestion.

“I allowed to go to bed, Ridgeway,” said Mr.
McClosky meekly; “but my girl Jinny's jist
got back from a little tear up at Robinson's, and
ain't inclined to turn in yet. You know what
girls is. So I thought we three would jist have
a social chat together to pass away the time.”

“You mendacious old hypocrite! She got
back an hour ago,” said Ridgeway, “as that savage-looking
escort of hers, who has been haunting
the house ever since, can testify. My belief
is, that, like an enterprising idiot as you are,
you've dragged that girl out of her bed, that we
might mutually bore each other.”

[figure description] Page 012.[end figure description]

Mr. McClosky was too much stunned by this
evidence of Ridgeway's apparently superhuman
penetration to reply. After enjoying his host's
confusion for a moment with his eyes, Ridgeway's
mouth asked grimly, —

“And who is this girl, anyway?”

“Nancy's.”

“Your wife's?”

“Yes. But look yar, Ridgeway,” said
McClosky, laying one hand imploringly on
Ridgeway's sleeve, “not a word about her to
Jinny. She thinks her mother's dead — died in
Missouri. Eh!”

Ridgeway nearly rolled from the veranda in
an excess of rage. “Good God! Do you
mean to say that you have been concealing
from her a fact that any day, any moment, may
come to her ears? That you've been letting
her grow up in ignorance of something that by
this time she might have outgrown and forgotten?
That you have been, like a besotted
old ass, all these years slowly forging a thunderbolt
that any one may crush her with? That”—
but here Ridgeway's cough took possession
of his voice, and even put a moisture into his
dark eyes, as he looked at McClosky's aimless
hand feebly employed upon his beard.

“But,” said McClosky, “look how she's
done! She's held her head as high as any of

[figure description] Page 013.[end figure description]

'em. She's to be married in a month to the
richest man in the county; and,” he added
cunningly, “Jack Ashe ain't the kind o' man to
sit by and hear any thing said of his wife or
her relations, you bet! But hush — that's her
foot on the stairs. She's cummin'.”

She came. I don't think the French window
ever held a finer view than when she put aside
the curtains, and stepped out. She had dressed
herself simply and hurriedly, but with a
woman's knowledge of her best points; so that
you got the long curves of her shapely limbs,
the shorter curves of her round waist and
shoulders, the long sweep of her yellow braids,
the light of her gray eyes, and even the delicate
rose of her complexion, without knowing
how it was delivered to you.

The introduction by Mr. McClosky was brief.
When Ridgeway had got over the fact that it
was two o'clock in the morning, and that the
cheek of this Tuolumne goddess nearest him
was as dewy and fresh as an infant's, that she
looked like Marguerite, without, probably, ever
having heard of Gœthe's heroine, he talked, I
dare say, very sensibly. When Miss Jenny —
who from her childhood had been brought up
among the sons of Anak, and who was accustomed
to have the supremacy of our noble sex
presented to her as a physical fact — found

[figure description] Page 014.[end figure description]

herself in the presence of a new and strange
power in the slight and elegant figure beside
her, she was at first frightened and cold. But
finding that this power, against which the
weapons of her own physical charms were of
no avail, was a kindly one, albeit general, she
fell to worshipping it, after the fashion of
woman, and casting before it the fetishes and
other idols of her youth. She even confessed
to it. So that, in half an hour, Ridgeway was
in possession of all the facts connected with
her life, and a great many, I fear, of her fancies—
except one. When Mr. McClosky found the
young people thus amicably disposed, he calmly
went to sleep.

It was a pleasant time to each. To Miss
Jenny it had the charm of novelty; and she
abandoned herself to it, for that reason, much
more freely and innocently than her companion,
who knew something more of the inevitable logic
of the position. I do not think, however, he had
any intention of love-making. I do not think
he was at all conscious of being in the attitude.
I am quite positive he would have shrunk from
the suggestion of disloyalty to the one woman
whom he admitted to himself he loved. But,
like most poets, he was much more true to an
idea than a fact, and having a very lofty conception
of womanhood, with a very sanguine nature,

[figure description] Page 015.[end figure description]

he saw in each new face the possibilities of a
realization of his ideal. It was, perhaps, an
unfortunate thing for the women, particularly as
he brought to each trial a surprising freshness,
which was very deceptive, and quite distinct
from the blasé familiarity of the man of gallantry.
It was this perennial virginity of the affections
that most endeared him to the best women,
who were prone to exercise toward him a chivalrous
protection,—as of one likely to go astray,
unless looked after,—and indulged in the dangerous
combination of sentiment with the
highest maternal instincts. It was this quality
which caused Jenny to recognize in him a
certain boyishness that required her womanly
care, and even induced her to offer to accompany
him to the cross-roads when the time for
his departure arrived. With her superior
knowledge of woodcraft and the locality, she
would have kept him from being lost. I wot
not but that she would have protected him from
bears or wolves, but chiefly, I think, from the
feline fascinations of Mame Robinson and Lucy
Rance, who might be lying in wait for this
tender young poet. Nor did she cease to be
thankful that Providence had, so to speak,
delivered him as a trust into her hands.

It was a lovely night. The moon swung low,
and languished softly on the snowy ridge

[figure description] Page 016.[end figure description]

beyond. There were quaint odors in the still
air; and a strange incense from the woods perfumed
their young blood, and seemed to swoon
in their pulses. Small wonder that they lingered
on the white road, that their feet climbed,
unwillingly the little hill where they were to
part, and that, when they at last reached it,
even the saving grace of speech seemed to have
forsaken them.

For there they stood alone. There was no
sound nor motion in earth, or woods, or heaven.
They might have been the one man and woman
for whom this goodly earth that lay at their
feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was
created. And, seeing this, they turned toward
each other with a sudden instinct, and their
hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss.

And then out of the mysterious distance
came the sound of voices, and the sharp clatter
of hoofs and wheels, and Jenny slid away — a
white moonbeam — from the hill. For a moment
she glimmered through the trees, and
then, reaching the house, passed her sleeping
father on the veranda, and, darting into her
bedroom, locked the door, threw open the
window, and, falling on her knees beside it,
leaned her hot cheeks upon her hands, and
listened. In a few moments she was rewarded
by the sharp clatter of hoofs on the stony road;

[figure description] Page 017.[end figure description]

but it was only a horseman, whose dark figure
was swiftly lost in the shadows of the lower
road. At another time she might have recognized
the man; but her eyes and ears were now
all intent on something else. It came presently
with dancing lights, a musical rattle of harness,
a cadence of hoof-beats, that set her heart to
beating in unison — and was gone. A sudden
sense of loneliness came over her; and tears
gathered in her sweet eyes.

She arose, and looked around her. There was
the little bed, the dressing-table, the roses that
she had worn last night, still fresh and blooming
in the little vase. Every thing was there;
but every thing looked strange. The roses should
have been withered, for the party seemed so
long ago. She could hardly remember when she
had worn this dress that lay upon the chair.
So she came back to the window, and sank down
beside it, with her cheek a trifle paler, leaning
on her hand, and her long braids reaching to
the floor. The stars paled slowly, like her
cheek; yet with eyes that saw not, she still
looked from her window for the coming dawn.

It came, with violet deepening into purple,
with purple flushing into rose, with rose shining
into silver, and glowing into gold. The straggling
line of black picket-fence below, that had
faded away with the stars, came back with the

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

sun. What was that object moving by the
fence? Jenny raised her head, and looked
intently. It was a man endeavoring to climb
the pickets, and falling backward with each
attempt. Suddenly she started to her feet, as
if the rosy flushes of the dawn had crimsoned
her from forehead to shoulders; then she stood,
white as the wall, with her hands clasped upon
her bosom; then, with a single bound, she
reached the door, and, with flying braids and
fluttering skirt, sprang down the stairs, and out
to the garden walk. When within a few feet
of the fence, she uttered a cry, the first she had
given, — the cry of a mother over her stricken
babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub; and in
another moment she had leaped the fence, and
knelt beside Ridgeway, with his fainting head
upon her breast.

“My boy, my poor, poor boy! who has done
this?”

Who, indeed? His clothes were covered
with dust; his waistcoat was torn open; and
his handkerchief, wet with the blood it could
not stanch, fell from a cruel stab beneath his
shoulder.

“Ridgeway, my poor boy! tell me what has
happened.”

Ridgeway slowly opened his heavy blue-veined
lids, and gazed upon her. Presently a

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

gleam of mischief came into his dark eyes, a
smile stole over his lips as he whispered
slowly, —

“It — was — your kiss — did it, Jenny dear!
I had forgotten — how high-priced the article
was here. Never mind, Jenny!” — he feebly
raised her hand to his white lips, — “it was —
worth it,” and fainted away.

Jenny started to her feet, and looked wildly
around her. Then, with a sudden resolution,
she stooped over the insensible man, and with
one strong effort lifted him in her arms as if
he had been a child. When her father, a
moment later, rubbed his eyes, and awoke from
his sleep upon the veranda, it was to see a
goddess, erect and triumphant, striding toward
the house with the helpless body of a man
lying across that breast where man had never
lain before, — a goddess, at whose imperious
mandate he arose, and cast open the doors before
her. And then, when she had laid her
unconscious burden on the sofa, the goddess
fled; and a woman, helpless and trembling,
stood before him, — a woman that cried out that
she had “killed him,” that she was “wicked,
wicked!” and that, even saying so, staggered,
and fell beside her late burden. And all that
Mr. McClosky could do was to feebly rub his
beard, and say to himself vaguely and incoherently,
that “Jinny had fetched him.”

CHAPTER II.

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

Before noon the next day, it was generally
believed throughout Four Forks that Ridgeway
Dent had been attacked and wounded at Chemisal
Ridge by a highwayman, who fled on the
approach of the Wingdam coach. It is to be
presumed that this statement met with Ridgeway's
approval, as he did not contradict it, nor
supplement it with any details. His wound
was severe, but not dangerous. After the first
excitement had subsided, there was, I think, a
prevailing impression common to the provincial
mind, that his misfortune was the result of the
defective moral quality of his being a stranger,
and was, in a vague sort of a way, a warning to
others, and a lesson to him. “Did you hear
how that San-Francisco feller was took down
the other night?” was the average tone of introductory
remark. Indeed, there was a general
suggestion that Ridgeway's presence was one
that no self-respecting, high-minded highwayman,
honorably conservative of the best interests
of Tuolumne County, could for a moment
tolerate.

Except for the few words spoken on that
eventful morning, Ridgeway was reticent of
the past. When Jenny strove to gather some

[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]

details of the affray that might offer a clew to
his unknown assailant, a subtle twinkle in his
brown eyes was the only response. When Mr.
McClosky attempted the same process, the
young gentleman threw abusive epithets, and,
eventually slippers, teaspoons, and other lighter
articles within the reach of an invalid, at the
head of his questioner. “I think he's coming
round, Jinny,” said Mr. McClosky: “he laid
for me this morning with a candlestick.”

It was about this time that Miss Jenny,
having sworn her father to secrecy regarding
the manner in which Ridgeway had been
carried into the house, conceived the idea of
addressing the young man as “Mr. Dent,” and
of apologizing for intruding whenever she
entered the room in the discharge of her household
duties. It was about this time that she
became more rigidly conscientious to those
duties, and less general in her attentions. It
was at this time that the quality of the invalid's
diet improved, and that she consulted him less
frequently about it. It was about this time
that she began to see more company, that the
house was greatly frequented by her former
admirers, with whom she rode, walked, and
danced. It was at about this time also, and
when Ridgeway was able to be brought out on
the veranda in a chair, that, with great archness

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

of manner, she introduced to him Miss Lucy
Ashe, the sister of her betrothed, a flashing
brunette, and terrible heart-breaker of Four
Forks. And, in the midst of this gayety, she
concluded that she would spend a week with
the Robinsons, to whom she owed a visit. She
enjoyed herself greatly there, so much, indeed,
that she became quite hollow-eyed, the result,
as she explained to her father, of a too frequent
indulgence in festivity. “You see, father, I
won't have many chances after John and I are
married: you know how queer he is, and I must
make the most of my time;” and she laughed
an odd little laugh, which had lately become
habitual to her. “And how is Mr. Dent
getting on?” Her father replied that he was
getting on very well indeed, — so well, in fact,
that he was able to leave for San Francisco two
days ago. “He wanted to be remembered to
you, Jinny, — `remembered kindly,' — yes, they
is the very words he used,” said Mr. McClosky,
looking down, and consulting one of his large
shoes for corroboration. Miss Jenny was glad
to hear that he was so much better. Miss
Jenny could not imagine any thing that pleased
her more than to know that he was so strong as
to be able to rejoin his friends again, who must
love him so much, and be so anxious about him.
Her father thought she would be pleased, and,

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

now that he was gone, there was really no necessity
for her to hurry back. Miss Jenny, in a
high metallic voice, did not know that she had
expressed any desire to stay, still if her presence
had become distasteful at home, if her
own father was desirous of getting rid of her,
if, when she was so soon to leave his roof forever,
he still begrudged her those few days remaining,
if — “My God, Jinny, so help me!”
said Mr. McClosky, clutching despairingly at
his beard, “I didn't go for to say any thing of
the kind. I thought that you” — “Never
mind, father,” interrupted Jenny magnanimously,
“you misunderstood me: of course
you did, you couldn't help it — you're a MAN!”
Mr. McClosky, sorely crushed, would have
vaguely protested; but his daughter, having
relieved herself, after the manner of her sex,
with a mental personal application of an
abstract statement, forgave him with a kiss.

Nevertheless, for two or three days after her
return, Mr. McClosky followed his daughter
about the house with yearning eyes, and occasionally
with timid, diffident feet. Sometimes
he came upon her suddenly at her household
tasks, with an excuse so palpably false, and a
careless manner so outrageously studied, that
she was fain to be embarrassed for him. Later,
he took to rambling about the house at night,

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

and was often seen noiselessly passing and
repassing through the hall after she had retired.
On one occasion, he was surprised, first by sleep,
and then by the early-rising Jenny, as he lay on
the rug outside her chamber-door. “You
treat me like a child, father,” said Jenny. “I
thought, Jinny,” said the father apologetically,—
“I thought I heard sounds as if you was takin'
on inside, and, listenin' I fell asleep.” — “You
dear, old simple-minded baby!” said Jenny, looking
past her father's eyes, and lifting his grizzled
locks one by one with meditative fingers:
“what should I be takin' on for? Look how
much taller I am than you!” she said, suddenly
lifting herself up to the extreme of her superb
figure. Then rubbing his head rapidly with
both hands, as if she were anointing his hair
with some rare unguent, she patted him on the
back, and returned to her room. The result of
this and one or two other equally sympathetic
interviews was to produce a change in Mr.
McClosky's manner, which was, if possible,
still more discomposing. He grew unjustifiably
hilarious, cracked jokes with the servants, and
repeated to Jenny humorous stories, with the
attitude of facetiousness carefully preserved
throughout the entire narration, and the point
utterly ignored and forgotten. Certain incidents
reminded him of funny things, which

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

invariably turned out to have not the slightest
relevancy or application. He occasionally
brought home with him practical humorists,
with a sanguine hope of setting them going,
like the music-box, for his daughter's edification.
He essayed the singing of melodies with
great freedom of style, and singular limitation
of note. He sang “Come haste to the Wedding,
Ye Lasses and Maidens,” of which he
knew a single line, and that incorrectly, as
being peculiarly apt and appropriate. Yet
away from the house and his daughter's presence,
he was silent and distraught. His absence
of mind was particularly noted by his workmen
at the Empire Quartz Mill. “Ef the old
man don't look out and wake up,” said his foreman,
“he'll hev them feet of his yet under the
stamps. When he ain't givin' his mind to 'em,
they is altogether too promiskuss.”

A few nights later, Miss Jenny recognized
her father's hand in a timid tap at the door.
She opened it, and he stood before her, with
a valise in his hand, equipped as for a journey.
“I takes the stage to-night, Jinny dear, from
Four Forks to 'Frisco. Maybe I may drop in
on Jack afore I go. I'll be back in a week.
Good-by.”

“Good-by.” He still held her hand. Presently
he drew her back into the room, closing

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

the door carefully, and glancing around. There
was a look of profound cunning in his eye as
he said slowly, —

“Bear up, and keep dark, Jinny dear, and
trust to the old man. Various men has various
ways. Thar is ways as is common, and ways as
is uncommon; ways as is easy, and ways as is
oneasy. Bear up, and keep dark.” With this
Delphic utterance he put his finger to his lips,
and vanished.

It was ten o'clock when he reached Four
Forks. A few minutes later, he stood on the
threshold of that dwelling described by the
Four Forks “Sentinel” as “the palatial residence
of John Ashe,” and known to the local
satirist as the “ash-box.” “Hevin' to lay by
two hours, John,” he said to his prospective
son-in-law, as he took his hand at the door,
“a few words of social converse, not on business,
but strictly private, seems to be about as
nat'ral a thing as a man can do.” This introduction,
evidently the result of some study, and
plainly committed to memory, seemed so satisfactory
to Mr. McClosky, that he repeated it
again, after John Ashe had led him into his
private office, where, depositing his valise in
the middle of the floor, and sitting down before
it, he began carefully to avoid the eye of his
host. John Ashe, a tall, dark, handsome

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

Kentuckian, with whom even the trifles of life
were evidently full of serious import, waited
with a kind of chivalrous respect the further
speech of his guest. Being utterly devoid of
any sense of the ridiculous, he always accepted
Mr. McClosky as a grave fact, singular only
from his own want of experience of the class.

“Ores is running light now,” said Mr. McClosky
with easy indifference.

John Ashe returned that he had noticed the
same fact in the receipts of the mill at Four
Forks.

Mr. McClosky rubbed his beard, and looked
at his valise, as if for sympathy and suggestion.

“You don't reckon on having any trouble
with any of them chaps as you cut out with
Jinny?”

John Ashe, rather haughtily, had never
thought of that. “I saw Rance hanging round
your house the other night, when I took your
daughter home; but he gave me a wide berth,”
he added carelessly.

“Surely,” said Mr. McClosky, with a peculiar
winking of the eye. After a pause, he took
a fresh departure from his valise.

“A few words, John, ez between man and
man, ez between my daughter's father and her
husband who expects to be, is about the thing,

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

I take it, as is fair and square. I kem here to
say them. They're about Jinny, my gal.”

Ashe's grave face brightened, to Mr. McClosky's
evident discomposure.

“Maybe I should have said about her
mother; but, the same bein' a stranger to you,
I says naterally, `Jinny.”'

Ashe nodded courteously. Mr. McClosky,
with his eyes on his valise, went on, —

“It is sixteen year ago as I married Mrs.
McClosky in the State of Missouri. She let on,
at the time, to be a widder, — a widder with one
child. When I say let on, I mean to imply
that I subsekently found out that she was not a
widder, nor a wife; and the father of the child
was, so to speak, onbeknowst. Thet child was
Jinny — my gal.”

With his eyes on his valise, and quietly
ignoring the wholly-crimsoned face and swiftly-darkening
brow of his host, he continued, —

“Many little things sorter tended to make
our home in Missouri onpleasant. A disposition
to smash furniture, and heave knives
around; an inclination to howl when drunk,
and that frequent; a habitooal use of vulgar
language, and a tendency to cuss the casooal
visitor, — seemed to pint,” added Mr. McClosky
with submissive hesitation “that — she—
was — so to speak — quite onsuited to the
marriage relation in its holiest aspeck.”

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

“Damnation! Why didn't” — burst out
John Ashe, erect and furious.

“At the end of two year,” continued Mr.
McClosky, still intent on the valise, “I allowed
I'd get a diworce. Et about thet time, however,
Providence sends a circus into thet town,
and a feller ez rode three horses to onct. Hevin'
allez a taste for athletic sports, she left town
with this feller, leavin' me and Jinny behind.
I sent word to her, thet, if she would give Jinny
to me, we'd call it quits. And she did.”

“Tell me,” gasped Ashe, “did you ask your
daughter to keep this from me? or did she do it
of her own accord?”

“She doesn't know it,” said Mr. McClosky.
“She thinks I'm her father, and that her
mother's dead.”

“Then, sir, this is your” —

“I don't know,” said Mr. McClosky slowly,
“ez I've asked any one to marry my Jinny. I
don't know ez I've persood that ez a biziness, or
even taken it up as a healthful recreation.”

John Ashe paced the room furiously. Mr.
McClosky's eyes left the valise, and followed
him curiously. “Where is this woman?” demanded
Ashe suddenly. McClosky's eyes
sought the valise again.

“She went to Kansas; from Kansas she went
into Texas; from Texas she eventooally came

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

to Californy. Being here, I've purvided her
with money, when her business was slack,
through a friend.”

John Ashe groaned. “She's gettin' rather
old and shaky for hosses, and now does the
tight-rope business and flying trapeze. Never
hevin' seen her perform,” continued Mr. McClosky
with conscientious caution, “I can't say
how she gets on. On the bills she looks well.
Thar is a poster,” said Mr. McClosky glancing
at Ashe, and opening his valise, — “thar is
a poster givin' her performance at Marysville
next month.” Mr. McClosky slowly unfolded
a large yellow-and-blue printed poster, profusely
illustrated. “She calls herself `Mams'elle
J. Miglawski, the great Russian Trapeziste.”
'

John Ashe tore it from his hand. “Of
course,” he said, suddenly facing Mr. McClosky,
“you don't expect me to go on with this?”

Mr. McClosky took up the poster, carefully
refolded it, and returned it to his valise.
“When you break off with Jinny,” he said
quietly, “I don't want any thing said 'bout
this. She doesn't know it. She's a woman,
and I reckon you're a white man.”

“But what am I to say? How am I to go
back of my word?”

“Write her a note. Say something hez come

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

to your knowledge (don't say what) that makes
you break it off. You needn't be afeard Jinny'll
ever ask you what.”

John Ashe hesitated. He felt he had been
cruelly wronged. No gentleman, no Ashe,
could go on further in this affair. It was preposterous
to think of it. But somehow he felt
at the moment very unlike a gentleman, or an
Ashe, and was quite sure he should break down
under Jenny's steady eyes. But then — he
could write to her.

“So ores is about as light here as on the
Ridge. Well, I reckon they'll come up before
the rains. Good-night.” Mr. McClosky took
the hand that his host mechanically extended,
shook it gravely, and was gone.

When Mr. McClosky, a week later, stepped
again upon his own veranda, he saw through
the French window the figure of a man in his
parlor. Under his hospitable roof, the sight was
not unusual; but, for an instant, a subtle sense
of disappointment thrilled him. When he saw
it was not the face of Ashe turned toward him,
he was relieved; but when he saw the tawny
beard, and quick, passionate eyes of Henry
Rance, he felt a new sense of apprehension, so
that he fell to rubbing his beard almost upon
his very threshold.

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

Jenny ran into the hall, and seized her
father with a little cry of joy. “Father,” said
Jenny in a hurried whisper, “don't mind him,”
indicating Rance with a toss of her yellow
braids: “he's going soon. And I think, father,
I've done him wrong. But it's all over with
John and me now. Read that note, and see
how he's insulted me.” Her lip quivered; but
she went on, “It's Ridgeway that he means,
father; and I believe it was his hand struck
Ridgeway down, or that he knows who did.
But hush now! not a word.”

She gave him a feverish kiss, and glided back
into the parlor, leaving Mr. McClosky, perplexed
and irresolute, with the note in his hand. He
glanced at it hurriedly, and saw that it was
couched in almost the very words he had suggested.
But a sudden, apprehensive recollection
came over him. He listened; and, with an
exclamation of dismay, he seized his hat, and
ran out of the house, but too late. At the
same moment a quick, nervous footstep was
heard upon the veranda; the French window
flew open, and, with a light laugh of greeting,
Ridgeway stepped into the room.

Jenny's finer ear first caught the step. Jenny's
swifter feelings had sounded the depths of
hope, of joy, of despair, before he entered the
room. Jenny's pale face was the only one that

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

met his, self-possessed and self-reliant, when he
stood before them. An angry flush suffused
even the pink roots of Rance's beard as he rose
to his feet. An ominous fire sprang into Ridgeway's
eyes, and a spasm of hate and scorn
passed over the lower part of his face, and left
the mouth and jaw immobile and rigid.

Yet he was the first to speak. “I owe you an
apology,” he said to Jenny, with a suave scorn
that brought the indignant blood back to her
cheek, “for this intrusion; but I ask no pardon
for withdrawing from the only spot where that
man dare confront me with safety.”

With an exclamation of rage, Rance sprang
toward him. But as quickly Jenny stood between
them, erect and menacing. “There must
be no quarrel here,” she said to Rance. “While
I protect your right as my guest, don't oblige
me to remind you of mine as your hostess.”
She turned with a half-deprecatory air to Ridgeway;
but he was gone. So was her father.
Only Rance remained with a look of ill-concealed
triumph on his face.

Without looking at him, she passed toward
the door. When she reached it, she turned.
“You asked me a question an hour ago. Come
to me in the garden, at nine o'clock to-night,
and I will answer you. But promise me, first,
to keep away from Mr. Dent. Give me your

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

word not to seek him — to avoid him, if he
seeks you. Do you promise? It is well.”

He would have taken her hand; but she
waved him away. In another moment he heard
the swift rustle of her dress in the hall, the
sound of her feet upon the stair, the sharp
closing of her bedroom door, and all was quiet.

And even thus quietly the day wore away;
and the night rose slowly from the valley, and
overshadowed the mountains with purple wings
that fanned the still air into a breeze, until the
moon followed it, and lulled every thing to rest
as with the laying-on of white and benedictory
hands. It was a lovely night; but Henry Rance,
waiting impatiently beneath a sycamore at the
foot of the garden, saw no beauty in earth or
air or sky. A thousand suspicions common to a
jealous nature, a vague superstition of the spot,
filled his mind with distrust and doubt. “If
this should be a trick to keep my hands off that
insolent pup!” he muttered. But, even as the
thought passed his tongue, a white figure slid
from the shrubbery near the house, glided along
the line of picket-fence, and then stopped, midway,
motionless in the moonlight.

It was she. But he scarcely recognized her
in the white drapery that covered her head and
shoulders and breast. He approached her with
a hurried whisper. “Let us withdraw from the
moonlight. Everybody can see us here.”

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

“We have nothing to say that cannot be said
in the moonlight, Henry Rance,” she replied,
coldly receding from his proffered hand. She
trembled for a moment, as if with a chill, and
then suddenly turned upon him. “Hold up
your head, and let me look at you! I've known
only what men are: let me see what a traitor
looks like!”

He recoiled more from her wild face than her
words. He saw from the first that her hollow
cheeks and hollow eyes were blazing with fever.
He was no coward; but he would have fled.

“You are ill, Jenny,” he said: “you had best
return to the house. Another time” —

“Stop!” she cried hoarsely. “Move from
this spot, and I'll call for help! Attempt to
leave me now, and I'll proclaim you the assassin
that you are!”

“It was a fair fight,” he said doggedly.

“Was it a fair fight to creep behind an unarmed
and unsuspecting man? Was it a fair
fight to try to throw suspicion on some one else?
Was it a fair fight to deceive me? Liar and
coward that you are!”

He made a stealthy step toward her with evil
eyes, and a wickeder hand that crept within his
breast. She saw the motion; but it only stung
her to newer fury.

“Strike!” she said with blazing eyes,

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

throwing her hands open before him. “Strike! Are
you afraid of the woman who dares you? Or
do you keep your knife for the backs of unsuspecting
men? Strike, I tell you! No? Look,
then!” With a sudden movement, she tore
from her head and shoulders the thick lace
shawl that had concealed her figure, and stood
before him. “Look!” she cried passionately,
pointing to the bosom and shoulders of her
white dress, darkly streaked with faded stains
and ominous discoloration, — “look! This is
the dress I wore that morning when I found
him lying here, — here, — bleeding from your
cowardly knife. Look! Do you see? This is his
blood, — my darling boy's blood! — one drop of
which, dead and faded as it is, is more precious
to me than the whole living pulse of any other
man. Look! I come to you to-night, christened
with his blood, and dare you to strike, —
dare you to strike him again through me, and
mingle my blood with his. Strike, I implore
you! Strike! if you have any pity on me, for
God's sake! Strike! if you are a man! Look!
Here lay his head on my shoulder; here I held
him to my breast, where never — so help me my
God! — another man — Ah!” —

She reeled against the fence, and something
that had flashed in Rance's hand dropped at her
feet; for another flash and report rolled him

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

over in the dust: and across his writhing body
two men strode, and caught her ere she fell.

“She has only fainted,” said Mr. McClosky.
“Jinny dear, my girl, speak to me!”

“What is this on her dress?” said Ridgeway,
kneeling beside her, and lifting his set and colorless
face. At the sound of his voice, the color
came faintly back to her cheek: she opened her
eyes, and smiled.

“It's only your blood, dear boy,” she said;
“but look a little deeper, and you'll find my
own.”

She put up her two yearning hands, and drew
his face and lips down to her own. When
Ridgeway raised his head again, her eyes were
closed; but her mouth still smiled as with the
memory of a kiss.

They bore her to the house, still breathing,
but unconscious. That night the road was filled
with clattering horsemen; and the summoned
skill of the countryside for leagues away
gathered at her couch. The wound, they
said, was not essentially dangerous; but they
had grave fears of the shock to a system that
already seemed suffering from some strange and
unaccountable nervous exhaustion. The best
medical skill of Tuolumne happened to be young
and observing, and waited patiently an opportunity
to account for it. He was presently
rewarded.

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

For toward morning she rallied, and looked
feebly around. Then she beckoned her father
toward her, and whispered, “Where is he?”

“They took him away, Jinny dear, in a cart.
He won't trouble you agin.” He stopped; for
Miss Jenny had raised herself on her elbow, and
was levelling her black brows at him. But two
kicks from the young surgeon, and a significant
motion towards the door, sent Mr. McClosky
away muttering. “How should I know that
`he' meant Ridgeway?” he said apologetically,
as he went and returned with the young gentleman.
The surgeon, who was still holding her
pulse, smiled, and thought that — with a little
care — and attention — the stimulants — might
be — diminished — and — he — might leave —
the patient for some hours with perfect safety.
He would give further directions to Mr.
McClosky — down stairs.

It was with great archness of manner, that,
half an hour later, Mr. McClosky entered the
room with a preparatory cough; and it was with
some disappointment that he found Ridgeway
standing quietly by the window, and his daughter
apparently fallen into a light doze. He was
still more concerned, when, after Ridgeway had
retired, noticing a pleasant smile playing about
her lips, he said softly —

“You was thinking of some one, Jinny?”

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

“Yes, father,” the gray eyes met his steadily, —
“of poor John Ashe!”

Her recovery was swift. Nature, that had
seemed to stand jealously aloof from her in her
mental anguish, was kind to the physical hurt
of her favorite child. The suberb physique,
which had been her charm and her trial, now
stood her in good stead. The healing balsam of
the pine, the balm of resinous gums, and the
rare medicaments of Sierran altitudes, touched
her as it might have touched the wounded doe;
so that in two weeks she was able to walk about.
And when, at the end of the month, Ridgeway
returned from a flying visit to San Francisco,
and jumped from the Wingdam coach at four
o'clock in the morning, the Rose of Tuolumne,
with the dewy petals of either cheek fresh as
when first unfolded to his kiss, confronted him
on the road.

With a common instinct, their young feet both
climbed the little hill now sacred to their
thought. When they reached its summit, they
were both, I think, a little disappointed.
There is a fragrance in the unfolding of a passion,
that escapes the perfect flower. Jenny
thought the night was not as beautiful; Ridgeway,
that the long ride had blunted his perceptions.
But they had the frankness to confess it
to each other, with the rare delight of such a

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

confession, and the comparison of details which
they thought each had forgotten. And with
this, and an occasional pitying reference to the
blank period when they had not known each
other, hand in hand they reached the house.

Mr. McClosky was awaiting them impatiently
upon the veranda. When Miss Jenny had
slipped up stairs to replace a collar that stood
somewhat suspiciously awry, Mr. McClosky
drew Ridgeway solemnly aside. He held a
large theatre poster in one hand, and an open
newspaper in the other.

“I allus said,” he remarked slowly, with the
air of merely renewing a suspended conversation,—
“I allus said that riding three horses to onct
wasn't exactly in her line. It would seem that
it ain't. From remarks in this yer paper, it
would appear that she tried it on at Marysville
last week, and broke her neck.”

p572-050 A PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF MR. JOHN OAKHURST.

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

HE always thought it must have been fate.
Certainly nothing could have been more
inconsistent with his habits than to have been
in the Plaza at seven o'clock of that midsummer
morning. The sight of his colorless face in
Sacramento was rare at that season, and, indeed,
at any season, anywhere publicly, before two
o'clock in the afternoon. Looking back upon it
in after-years in the light of a chanceful life, he
determined, with the characteristic philosophy
of his profession, that it must have been fate.

Yet it is my duty, as a strict chronicler of
facts, to state that Mr. Oakhurst's presence
there that morning was due to a very simple
cause. At exactly half-past six, the bank being
then a winner to the amount of twenty thousand
dollars, he had risen from the faro-table,
relinquished his seat to an accomplished assistant,
and withdrawn quietly, without attracting
a glance from the silent, anxious faces bowed
over the table. But when he entered his

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

luxurious sleeping-room, across the passage-way,
he was a little shocked at finding the sun streaming
through an inadvertently opened window.
Something in the rare beauty of the morning,
perhaps something in the novelty of the idea,
struck him as he was about to close the blinds;
and he hesitated. Then, taking his hat from
the table, he stepped down a private staircase
into the street.

The people who were abroad at that early
hour were of a class quite unknown to Mr. Oakhurst.
There were milkmen and hucksters delivering
their wares, small tradespeople opening
their shops, housemaids sweeping doorsteps,
and occasionally a child. These Mr. Oakhurst
regarded with a certain cold curiosity, perhaps
quite free from the cynical disfavor with which
he generally looked upon the more pretentious
of his race whom he was in the habit of meeting.
Indeed, I think he was not altogether displeased
with the admiring glances which these humble
women threw after his handsome face and figure,
conspicuous even in a country of fine-looking
men. While it is very probable that this
wicked vagabond, in the pride of his social isolation,
would have been coldly indifferent to the
advances of a fine lady, a little girl who ran admiringly
by his side in a ragged dress had the
power to call a faint flush into his colorless

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

cheek. He dismissed her at last, but not until
she had found out — what, sooner or later, her
large-hearted and discriminating sex inevitably
did — that he was exceedingly free and open-handed
with his money, and also — what,
perhaps, none other of her sex ever did — that
the bold black eyes of this fine gentleman were
in reality of a brownish and even tender gray.

There was a small garden before a white
cottage in a side-street, that attracted Mr.
Oakhurst's attention. It was filled with roses,
heliotrope, and verbena, — flowers familiar
enough to him in the expensive and more portable
form of bouquets, but, as it seemed to him
then, never before so notably lovely. Perhaps it
was because the dew was yet fresh upon them;
perhaps it was because they were unplucked:
but Mr. Oakhurst admired them — not as a
possible future tribute to the fascinating and
accomplished Miss Ethelinda, then performing
at the Varieties, for Mr. Oakhurst's especial benefit,
as she had often assured him; nor yet as a
douceur to the inthralling Miss Montmorrissy,
with whom Mr. Oakhurst expected to sup that
evening; but simply for himself, and, mayhap,
for the flowers' sake. Howbeit he passed on,
and so out into the open Plaza, where, finding a
bench under a cottonwood-tree, he first dusted
the seat with his handkerchief, and then sat
down.

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

It was a fine morning. The air was so still
and calm, that a sigh from the sycamores seemed
like the deep-drawn breath of the just awakening
tree, and the faint rustle of its boughs as
the outstretching of cramped and reviving limbs.
Far away the Sierras stood out against a sky
so remote as to be of no positive color, — so remote,
that even the sun despaired of ever reaching
it, and so expended its strength recklessly
on the whole landscape, until it fairly glittered
in a white and vivid contrast. With a very
rare impulse, Mr. Oakhurst took off his hat,
and half reclined on the bench, with his face to
the sky. Certain birds who had taken a critical
attitude on a spray above him, apparently began
an animated discussion regarding his possible
malevolent intentions. One or two, emboldened
by the silence, hopped on the ground at his feet,
until the sound of wheels on the gravel-walk
frightened them away.

Looking up, he saw a man coming slowly
toward him, wheeling a nondescript vehicle, in
which a woman was partly sitting, partly reclining.
Without knowing why, Mr. Oakhurst
instantly conceived that the carriage was the
invention and workmanship of the man, partly
from its oddity, partly from the strong, mechanical
hand that grasped it, and partly from a
certain pride and visible consciousness in the

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

manner in which the man handled it. Then
Mr. Oakhurst saw something more: the man's
face was familiar. With that regal faculty of
not forgetting a face that had ever given him
professional audience, he instantly classified it
under the following mental formula: “At
'Frisco, Polka Saloon. Lost his week's wages.
I reckon — seventy dollars — on red. Never
came again.” There was, however, no trace of
this in the calm eyes and unmoved face that
he turned upon the stranger, who, on the contrary,
blushed, looked embarrassed, hesitated,
and then stopped with an involuntary motion
that brought the carriage and its fair occupant
face to face with Mr. Oakhurst.

I should hardly do justice to the position she
will occupy in this veracious chronicle by describing
the lady now, if, indeed, I am able to
do it at all. Certainly the popular estimate
was conflicting. The late Col. Starbottle — to
whose large experience of a charming sex I have
before been indebted for many valuable suggestions—
had, I regret to say, depreciated her fascinations.
“A yellow-faced cripple, by dash!
a sick woman, with mahogany eyes; one of your
blanked spiritual creatures — with no flesh on
her bones.” On the other hand, however, she
enjoyed later much complimentary disparagement
from her own sex. Miss Celestina Howard,

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

second leader in the ballet at the Varieties, had,
with great alliterative directness, in after-years,
denominated her as an “aquiline asp.” Mlle.
Brimborion remembered that she had always
warned “Mr. Jack” that this woman would
“empoison” him. But Mr. Oakhurst, whose
impressions are perhaps the most important,
only saw a pale, thin, deep-eyed woman, raised
above the level of her companion by the refinement
of long suffering and isolation, and a
certain shy virginity of manner. There was a
suggestion of physical purity in the folds of her
fresh-looking robe, and a certain picturesque
tastefulness in the details, that, without knowing
why, made him think that the robe was her
invention and handiwork, even as the carriage
she occupied was evidently the work of her
companion. Her own hand, a trifle too thin,
but well-shaped, subtle-fingered, and gentle-womanly,
rested on the side of the carriage, the
counterpart of the strong mechanical grasp of
her companion's.

There was some obstruction to the progress
of the vehicle; and Mr. Oakhurst stepped forward
to assist. While the wheel was being
lifted over the curbstone, it was necessary that
she should hold his arm; and for a moment her
thin hand rested there, light and cold as a snow-flake,
and then, as it seemed to him, like a

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

snow-flake melted away. Then there was a
pause, and then conversation, the lady joining
occasionally and shyly.

It appeared that they were man and wife;
that for the past two years she had been a great
invalid, and had lost the use of her lower limbs
from rheumatism; that until lately she had
been confined to her bed, until her husband —
who was a master-carpenter — had bethought
himself to make her this carriage. He took her
out regularly for an airing before going to work,
because it was his only time, and — they attracted
less attention. They had tried many doctors,
but without avail. They had been advised to
go to the Sulphur Springs; but it was expensive.
Mr. Decker, the husband, had once saved eighty
dollars for that purpose, but while in San Francisco
had his pocket picked — Mr Decker was so
senseless! (The intelligent reader need not be
told that it is the lady who is speaking.) They
had never been able to make up the sum again,
and they had given up the idea. It was a dreadful
thing to have one's pocket picked. Did he
not think so?

Her husband's face was crimson; but Mr.
Oakhurst's countenance was quite calm and
unmoved, as he gravely agreed with her, and
walked by her side until they passed the little
garden that he had admired. Here Mr.

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

Oakhurst commanded a halt, and, going to the door,
astounded the proprietor by a preposterously
extravagant offer for a choice of the flowers.
Presently he returned to the carriage with his
arms full of roses, heliotrope, and verbena, and
cast them in the lap of the invalid. While she
was bending over them with childish delight,
Mr. Oakhurst took the opportunity of drawing
her husband aside.

“Perhaps,” he said in a low voice, and a
manner quite free from any personal annoyance,—
“perhaps it's just as well that you lied to her
as you did. You can say now that the pick-pocket
was arrested the other day, and you got
your money back.” Mr. Oakhurst quietly
slipped four twenty-dollar gold-pieces into the
broad hand of the bewildered Mr. Decker.
“Say that — or any thing you like — but the
truth. Promise me you won't say that.”

The man promised. Mr. Oakhurst quietly
returned to the front of the little carriage.
The sick woman was still eagerly occupied with
the flowers, and, as she raised her eyes to his,
her faded cheek seemed to have caught some
color from the roses, and her eyes some of their
dewy freshness. But at that instant Mr. Oakhurst
lifted his hat, and before she could thank
him was gone.

I grieve to say that Mr. Decker shamelessly

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

broke his promise. That night, in the very
goodness of his heart and uxorious self-abnegation,
he, like all devoted husbands, not only
offered himself, but his friend and benefactor,
as a sacrifice on the family-altar. It is only fair,
however, to add that he spoke with great fervor
of the generosity of Mr. Oakhurst, and dwelt
with an enthusiasm quite common with his
class on the mysterious fame and prodigal vices
of the gambler.

“And now, Elsie dear, say that you'll forgive
me,” said Mr. Decker, dropping on one knee
beside his wife's couch. “I did it for the best.
It was for you, dearey, that I put that money
on them cards that night in 'Frisco. I thought
to win a heap — enough to take you away, and
enough left to get you a new dress.”

Mrs. Decker smiled, and pressed her husband's
hand. “I do forgive you, Joe dear,”
she said, still smiling, with eyes abstractedly
fixed on the ceiling; “and you ought to be
whipped for deceiving me so, you bad boy! and
making me make such a speech. There, say no
more about it. If you'll be very good hereafter,
and will just now hand me that cluster of roses,
I'll forgive you.” She took the branch in her
fingers, lifted the roses to her face, and presently
said, behind their leaves, —

“Joe!”

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

“What is it, lovey?”

“Do you think that this Mr. — what do you
call him? — Jack Oakhurst would have given
that money back to you, if I hadn't made that
speech?”

“Yes.”

“If he hadn't seen me at all?”

Mr. Decker looked up. His wife had managed
in some way to cover up her whole face
with the roses, except her eyes, which were
dangerously bright.

“No! It was you, Elsie — it was all along of
seeing you that made him do it.”

“A poor sick woman like me?”

“A sweet, little, lovely, pooty Elsie — Joe's
own little wifey! How could he help it?”

Mrs. Decker fondly cast one arm around her
husband's neck, still keeping the roses to her
face with the other. From behind them she
began to murmur gently and idiotically, “Dear,
ole square Joey. Elsie's oney booful big bear.”
But, really, I do not see that my duty as a
chronicler of facts compels me to continue this
little lady's speech any further; and, out of
respect to the unmarried reader, I stop.

Nevertheless, the next morning Mrs. Decker
betrayed some slight and apparently uncalled-for
irritability on reaching the Plaza, and presently
desired her husband to wheel her back

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

home. Moreover, she was very much astonished
at meeting Mr. Oakhurst just as they
were returning, and even doubted if it were he,
and questioned her husband as to his identity
with the stranger of yesterday as he approached.
Her manner to Mr. Oakhurst, also, was quite in
contrast with her husband's frank welcome.
Mr. Oakhurst instantly detected it. “Her husband
has told her all, and she dislikes me,” he
said to himself, with that fatal appreciation of
the half-truths of a woman's motives that
causes the wisest masculine critic to stumble,
He lingered only long enough to take the business
address of the husband, and then lifting
his hat gravely, without looking at the lady,
went his way. It struck the honest master-carpenter
as one of the charming anomalies of his
wife's character, that, although the meeting was
evidently very much constrained and unpleasant,
instantly afterward his wife's spirits began
to rise. “You was hard on him, a leetle hard;
wasn't you, Elsie?” said Mr. Decker deprecatingly.
“I'm afraid he may think I've
broke my promise.” — “Ah, indeed!” said the
lady indifferently. Mr. Decker instantly stepped
round to the front of the vehicle. “You look
like an A 1 first-class lady riding down Broad-way
in her own carriage, Elsie,” said he. “I
never seed you lookin' so peart and sassy
before.”

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

A few days later, the proprietor of the San
Isabel Sulphur Springs received the following
note in Mr. Oakhurst's well-known, dainty
hand:—

“Dear Steve, — I've been thinking over your proposition
to buy Nichols's quarter-interest, and have concluded
to go in. But I don't see how the thing will pay
until you have more accommodation down there, and for
the best class, — I mean my customers. What we want
is an extension to the main building, and two or three
cottages put up. I send down a builder to take hold of
the job at once. He takes his sick wife with him; and
you are to look after them as you would for one of us.

“I may run down there myself after the races, just
to look after things; but I sha'n't set up any game this
season.

It was only the last sentence of this letter
that provoked criticism. “I can understand,”
said Mr. Hamlin, a professional brother, to whom
Mr. Oakhurst's letter was shown, — “I can
understand why Jack goes in heavy and builds;
for it's a sure spec, and is bound to be a mighty
soft thing in time, if he comes here regularly.
But why in blank he don't set up a bank this
season, and take the chance of getting some of
the money back that he puts into circulation in
building, is what gets me. I wonder now,” he
mused deeply, “what is his little game.”

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

The season had been a prosperous one to Mr.
Oakhurst, and proportionally disastrous to several
members of the legislature, judges, colonels,
and others who had enjoyed but briefly the
pleasure of Mr. Oakhurst's midnight society.
And yet Sacramento had become very dull to
him. He had lately formed a habit of early
morning walks, so unusual and startling to his
friends, both male and female, as to occasion
the intensest curiosity. Two or three of the
latter set spies upon his track; but the inquisition
resulted only in the discovery that Mr.
Oakhurst walked to the Plaza, sat down upon
one particular bench for a few moments, and
then returned without seeing anybody; and the
theory that there was a woman in the case was
abandoned. A few superstitious gentlemen of
his own profession believed that he did it for
“luck.” Some others, more practical, declared
that he went out to “study points.”

After the races at Marysville, Mr. Oakhurst
went to San Francisco; from that place he
returned to Marysville, but a few days after was
seen at San José, Santa Cruz, and Oakland.
Those who met him declared that his manner
was restless and feverish, and quite unlike his
ordinary calmness and phlegm. Col. Starbottle
pointed out the fact, that at San Francisco, at
the club, Jack had declined to deal. “Hand

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

shaky, sir; depend upon it. Don't stimulate
enough — blank him!”

From San José he started to go to Oregon by
land with a rather expensive outfit of horses
and camp equipage; but, on reaching Stockton,
he suddenly diverged, and four hours later
found him with a single horse entering the
cañon of the San Isabel Warm Sulphur Springs.

It was a pretty triangular valley lying at the
foot of three sloping mountains, dark with pines,
and fantastic with madrono and manzanita.
Nestling against the mountain-side, the straggling
buildings and long piazza of the hotel
glittered through the leaves, and here and there
shone a white toy-like cottage. Mr. Oakhurst
was not an admirer of Nature; but he felt something
of the same novel satisfaction in the view,
that he experienced in his first morning walk in
Sacramento. And now carriages began to pass
him on the road filled with gayly-dressed women;
and the cold California outlines of the landscape
began to take upon themselves somewhat
of a human warmth and color. And then the
long hotel piazza came in view, efflorescent
with the full-toiletted fair. Mr. Oakhurst, a
good rider after the California fashion, did not
check his speed as he approached his destination,
but charged the hotel at a gallop, threw
his horse on his haunches within a foot of the

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

piazza, and then quietly emerged from the
cloud of dust that veiled his dismounting.

Whatever feverish excitement might have
raged within, all his habitual calm returned as
he stepped upon the piazza. With the instinct
of long habit, he turned and faced the battery
of eyes with the same cold indifference with
which he had for years encountered the half-hidden
sneers of men and the half-frightened
admiration of women. Only one person stepped
forward to welcome him. Oddly enough, it
was Dick Hamilton, perhaps the only one
present, who by birth, education, and position,
might have satisfied the most fastidious
social critic. Happily for Mr. Oakhurst's reputation,
he was also a very rich banker and
social leader. “Do you know who that is
you spoke to?” asked young Parker with
an alarmed expression. “Yes,” replied Hamilton
with characteristic effrontery. “The
man you lost a thousand dollars to last week.
I only know him socially.” “But isn't he a
gambler?” queried the youngest Miss Smith.
“He is,” replied Hamilton; “but I wish, my
dear young lady, that we all played as open and
honest a game as our friend yonder, and were
as willing as he is to abide by its fortunes.”

But Mr. Oakhurst was happily out of hearing
of this colloquy, and was even then

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

lounging listlessly yet watchfully along the upper
hall. Suddenly he heard a light footstep
behind him, and then his name called in a familiar
voice that drew the blood quickly to his
heart. He turned, and she stood before him.

But how transformed! If I have hesitated
to describe the hollow-eyed cripple, the
quaintly-dressed artisan's wife, a few pages ago,
what shall I do with this graceful, shapely,
elegantly-attired gentlewoman into whom she
has been merged within these two months? In
good faith she was very pretty. You and I, my
dear madam, would have been quick to see
that those charming dimples were misplaced for
true beauty, and too fixed in their quality for
honest mirthfulness; that the delicate lines
around these aquiline nostrils were cruel and
selfish; that the sweet virginal surprise of these
lovely eyes were as apt to be opened on her
plate as upon the gallant speeches of her dinner
partner; that her sympathetic color came and
went more with her own spirits than yours.
But you and I are not in love with her, dear
madam, and Mr. Oakhurst is. And, even in the
folds of her Parisian gown, I am afraid this
poor fellow saw the same subtle strokes of
purity that he had seen in her homespun robe.
And then there was the delightful revelation
that she could walk, and that she had dear

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

little feet of her own in the tiniest slippers of
her French shoemaker, with such preposterous
blue bows, and Chappell's own stamp — Rue de
something or other, Paris — on the narrow sole.

He ran toward her with a heightened color
and outstretched hands. But she whipped her
own behind her, glanced rapidly up and down
the long hall, and stood looking at him with a
half-audacious, half-mischievous admiration, in
utter contrast to her old reserve.

“I've a great mind not to shake hands with
you at all. You passed me just now on the
piazza without speaking; and I ran after you, as
I suppose many another poor woman has done.”

Mr. Oakhurst stammered that she was so
changed.

“The more reason why you should know me.
Who changed me? You. You have re-created
me. You found a helpless, crippled, sick,
poverty-stricken woman, with one dress to her
back, and that her own make, and you gave her
life, health, strength, and fortune. You did;
and you know it, sir. How do you like your
work?” She caught the side-seams of her
gown in either hand, and dropped him a playful
courtesy. Then, with a sudden, relenting
gesture, she gave him both her hands.

Outrageous as this speech was, and unfeminine
as I trust every fair reader will deem it,

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

I fear it pleased Mr. Oakhurst. Not but that
he was accustomed to a certain frank female
admiration; but then it was of the coulisse,
and not of the cloister, with which he always
persisted in associating Mrs. Decker. To be
addressed in this way by an invalid Puritan, a
sick saint with the austerity of suffering still
clothing her, a woman who had a Bible on the
dressing-table, who went to church three times
a day, and was devoted to her husband, completely
bowled him over. He still held her
hands as she went on, —

“Why didn't you come before? What were
you doing in Marysville, in San José, in Oakland?
You see I have followed you. I saw
you as you came down the cañon, and knew
you at once. I saw your letter to Joseph, and
knew you were coming. Why didn't you write
to me? You will some time! — Good-evening,
Mr. Hamilton.”

She had withdrawn her hands, but not until
Hamilton, ascending the staircase, was nearly
abreast of them. He raised his hat to her
with well-bred composure, nodded familiarly to
Oakhurst, and passed on. When he had gone,
Mrs. Decker lifted her eyes to Mr. Oakhurst.
“Some day I shall ask a great favor of you.”

Mr. Oakhurst begged that it should be now.
“No, not until you know me better. Then,
some day, I shall want you to — kill that man!”

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

She laughed such a pleasant little ringing
laugh, such a display of dimples, — albeit a little
fixed in the corners of her mouth, — such an
innocent light in her brown eyes, and such a
lovely color in her cheeks, that Mr. Oakhurst
(who seldom laughed) was fain to laugh too.
It was as if a lamb had proposed to a fox a
foray into a neighboring sheepfold.

A few evenings after this, Mrs. Decker arose
from a charmed circle of her admirers on the
hotel piazza, excused herself for a few moments,
laughingly declined an escort, and ran over to
her little cottage — one of her husband's creation—
across the road. Perhaps from the
sudden and unwonted exercise in her still convalescent
state, she breathed hurriedly and
feverishly as she entered her boudoir, and once
or twice placed her hand upon her breast. She
was startled on turning up the light to find her
husband lying on the sofa.

“You look hot and excited, Elsie love,” said
Mr. Decker. “You ain't took worse, are you?”

Mrs Decker's face had paled, but now flushed
again. “No,” she said; “only a little pain
here,” as she again placed her hand upon her
corsage.

“Can I do any thing for you?” said Mr.
Desker, rising with affectionate concern.

“Run over to the hotel and get me some
brandy, quick!”

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

Mr. Decker ran. Mrs Decker closed and
bolted the door, and then, putting her hand to
her bosom, drew out the pain. It was folded
foursquare, and was, I grieve to say, in Mr.
Oakhurst's handwriting.

She devoured it with burning eyes and
cheeks until there came a step upon the porch;
then she hurriedly replaced it in her bosom,
and unbolted the door. Her husband entered.
She raised the spirits to her lips, and declared
herself better.

“Are you going over there again to-night?”
asked Mr. Decker submissively.

“No,” said Mrs. Decker, with her eyes fixed
dreamily on the floor.

“I wouldn't if I was you,” said Mr. Decker
with a sigh of relief. After a pause, he took a
seat on the sofa, and, drawing his wife to his
side, said, “Do you know what I was thinking
of when you came in, Elsie?” Mrs. Decker
ran her fingers through his stiff black hair, and
couldn't imagine.

“I was thinking of old times, Elsie: I was
thinking of the days when I built that kerridge
for you, Elsie, — when I used to take you out to
ride, and was both hoss and driver. We was
poor then, and you was sick, Elsie; but we was
happy. We've got money now, and a house;
and you're quite another woman. I may say,

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

dear, that you're a new woman. And that's
where the trouble comes in. I could build you
a kerridge, Elsie; I could build you a house,
Elsie — but there I stopped. I couldn't build
up you. You're strong and pretty, Elsie, and
fresh and new. But somehow, Elsie, you ain't
no work of mine!”

He paused. With one hand laid gently on
his forehead, and the other pressed upon her
bosom, as if to feel certain of the presence of her
pain, she said sweetly and soothingly, —

“But it was your work, dear.”

Mr. Decker shook his head sorrowfully. “No,
Elsie, not mine. I had the chance to do it
once, and I let it go. It's done now — but not
by me.”

Mrs. Decker raised her surprised, innocent
eyes to his. He kissed her tenderly, and then
went on in a more cheerful voice, —

“That ain't all I was thinking of, Elsie. I
was thinking that maybe you give too much of
your company to that Mr. Hamilton. Not that
there's any wrong in it, to you or him; but it
might make people talk. You're the only one
here, Elsie,” said the master-carpenter, looking
fondly at his wife, “who isn't talked about,
whose work ain't inspected or condemned.”

Mrs. Decker was glad he had spoken about it.
She had thought so too. But she could not well

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

be uncivil to Mr. Hamilton, who was a fine gentleman,
without making a powerful enemy.
“And he's always treated me as if I was a born
lady in his own circle,” added the little woman,
with a certain pride that made her husband
fondly smile. “But I have thought of a plan.
He will not stay here if I should go away. If,
for instance, I went to San Francisco to visit
ma for a few days, he would be gone before I
should return.”

Mr. Decker was delighted. “By all means,”
he said, “go to-morrow. Jack Oakhurst is
going down; and I'll put you in his charge.”

Mrs. Decker did not think it was prudent.
“Mr. Oakhurst is our friend, Joseph; but you
know his reputation.” In fact, she did not
know that she ought to go now, knowing that
he was going the same day; but, with a kiss, Mr.
Decker overcame her scruples. She yielded
gracefully. Few women, in fact, knew how to
give up a point as charmingly as she.

She staid a week in San Francisco. When
she returned, she was a trifle thinner and paler
than she had been. This she explained as the
result of perhaps too active exercise and excitement.
“I was out of doors nearly all the time,
as ma will tell you,” she said to her husband,
“and always alone. I am getting quite independent
now,” she added gayly. “I don't want

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

any escort. I believe, Joey dear, I could get
along even without you, I'm so brave!”

But her visit, apparently, had not been productive
of her impelling design. Mr. Hamilton
had not gone, but had remained, and called upon
them that very evening. “I've thought of a
plan, Joey dear,” said Mrs. Decker, when he had
departed. “Poor Mr. Oakhurst has a miserable
room at the hotel. Suppose you ask him, when
he returns from San Francisco, to stop with us.
He can have our spare-room. I don't think,”
she added archly, “that Mr. Hamilton will call
often.” Her husband laughed, intimated that
she was a little coquette, pinched her cheek, and
complied. “The queer thing about a woman,”
he said afterward confidentially to Mr. Oakhurst,
“is, that, without having any plan of her
own, she'll take anybody's, and build a house
on it entirely different to suit herself. And
dern my skin if you'll be able to say whether or
not you didn't give the scale and measurements
yourself! That's what gets me!”

The next week Mr. Oakhurst was installed in
the Deckers' cottage. The business relations of
her husband and himself were known to all, and
her own reputation was above suspicion. Indeed,
few women were more popular. She was
domestic, she was prudent, she was pious. In a
country of great feminine freedom and latitude,

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

she never rode or walked with anybody but her
husband. In an epoch of slang and ambiguous
expression, she was always precise and formal
in her speech. In the midst of a fashion of ostentatious
decoration, she never wore a diamond,
nor a single valuable jewel. She never permitted
an indecorum in public. She never countenanced
the familiarities of California society.
She declaimed against the prevailing tone of
infidelity and scepticism in religion. Few people
who were present will ever forget the dignified
yet stately manner with which she
rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for
entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism,
lately published; and some among
them, also, will not forget the expression of
amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that
gradually changed to sardonic gravity, as he
courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr.
Oakhurst, who, from that moment, began to be
uneasily impatient of his friend, and even — if
such a term could be applied to any moral quality
in Mr. Oakhurst — to fear him.

For during this time Mr. Oakhurst had begun
to show symptoms of a change in his usual
habits. He was seldom, if ever, seen in his old
haunts, in a bar-room, or with his old associates.
Pink and white notes, in distracted handwriting,
accumulated on the dressing-table in his rooms

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

at Sacramento. It was given out in San Francisco
that he had some organic disease of the
heart, for which his physician had prescribed
perfect rest. He read more; he took long walks;
he sold his fast horses; he went to church.

I have a very vivid recollection of his first
appearance there. He did not accompany the
Deckers, nor did he go into their pew, but came
in as the service commenced, and took a seat
quietly in one of the back-pews. By some mysterious
instinct, his presence became presently
known to the congregation, some of whom so far
forgot themselves, in their curiosity, as to face
around, and apparently address their responses
to him. Before the service was over, it was
pretty well understood that “miserable sinners”
meant Mr. Oakhurst. Nor did this mysterious
influence fail to affect the officiating clergyman,
who introduced an allusion to Mr. Oakhurst's
calling and habits in a sermon on the architecture
of Solomon's temple, and in a manner so
pointed, and yet labored, as to cause the
youngest of us to flame with indignation. Happily,
however, it was lost upon Jack: I do not
think he even heard it. His handsome, colorless
face, albeit a trifle worn and thoughtful, was
inscrutable. Only once, during the singing of a
hymn, at a certain note in the contralto's voice,
there crept into his dark eyes a look of wistful

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

tenderness, so yearning and yet so hopeless, that
those who were watching him felt their own
glisten. Yet I retain a very vivid remembrance
of his standing up to receive the benediction,
with the suggestion, in his manner and tightly-buttoned
coat, of taking the fire of his adversary
at ten paces. After church, he disappeared
as quietly as he had entered, and fortunately
escaped hearing the comments on his rash act.
His appearance was generally considered as an
impertinence, attributable only to some wanton
fancy, or possibly a bet. One or two thought
that the sexton was exceedingly remiss in not
turning him out after discovering who he was;
and a prominent pew-holder remarked, that if he
couldn't take his wife and daughters to that
church, without exposing them to such an influence,
he would try to find some church where
he could. Another traced Mr. Oakhurst's presence
to certain Broad Church radical tendencies,
which he regretted to say he had lately noted
in their pastor. Deacon Sawyer, whose delicately-organized,
sickly wife had already borne
him eleven children, and died in an ambitious
attempt to complete the dozen, avowed that the
presence of a person of Mr. Oakhurst's various
and indiscriminate gallantries was an insult to
the memory of the deceased, that, as a man, he
could not brook.

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

It was about this time that Mr. Oakhurst,
contrasting himself with a conventional world
in which he had hitherto rarely mingled, became
aware that there was something in his face,
figure, and carriage quite unlike other men, —
something, that, if it did not betray his former
career, at least showed an individuality and
originality that was suspicious. In this belief,
he shaved off his long, silken mustache, and
religiously brushed out his clustering curls every
morning. He even went so far as to affect a
negligence of dress, and hid his small, slim,
arched feet in the largest and heaviest walking-shoes.
There is a story told that he went to his
tailor in Sacramento, and asked him to make
him a suit of clothes like everybody else. The
tailor, familiar with Mr. Oakhurst's fastidiousness,
did not know what he meant. “I mean,”
said Mr. Oakhurst savagely, “something respectable, —
something that doesn't exactly fit me,
you know.” But, however Mr. Oakhurst might
hide his shapely limbs in homespun and homemade
garments, there was something in his carriage,
something in the pose of his beautiful
head, something in the strong and fine manliness
of his presence, something in the perfect
and utter discipline and control of his muscles,
something in the high repose of his nature, — a
repose not so much a matter of intellectual

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

ruling as of his very nature, — that, go where he
would, and with whom, he was always a notable
man in ten thousand. Perhaps this was never
so clearly intimated to Mr. Oakhurst, as when,
emboldened by Mr. Hamilton's advice and assistance,
and his own predilections, he became a
San-Francisco broker. Even before objection
was made to his presence in the Board, — the objection,
I remember, was urged very eloquently
by Watt Sanders, who was supposed to be the
inventor of the “freezing-out” system of disposing
of poor stockholders, and who also
enjoyed the reputation of having been the impelling
cause of Briggs of Tuolumne's ruin and
suicide, — even before this formal protest of
respectability against lawlessness, the aquiline
suggestions of Mr. Oakhurst's mien and countenance,
not only prematurely fluttered the
pigeons, but absolutely occasioned much uneasiness
among the fish-hawks who circled below
him with their booty. “Dash me! but he's as
likely to go after us as anybody,” said Joe
Fielding.

It wanted but a few days before the close of
the brief summer season at San Isabel Warm
Springs. Already there had been some migration
of the more fashionable; and there was an
uncomfortable suggestion of dregs and lees in

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

the social life that remained. Mr. Oakhurst
was moody. It was hinted that even the secure
reputation of Mrs. Decker could no longer protect
her from the gossip which his presence
excited. It is but fair to her to say, that, during
the last few weeks of this trying ordeal, she
looked like a sweet, pale martyr, and conducted
herself toward her traducers with the gentle,
forgiving manner of one who relied not upon
the idle homage of the crowd, but upon the
security of a principle that was dearer than
popular favor. “They talk about myself and
Mr. Oakhurst, my dear,” she said to a friend;
“but heaven and my husband can best answer
their calumny. It never shall be said that my
husband ever turned his back upon a friend in
the moment of his adversity, because the position
was changed, — because his friend was poor,
and he was rich.” This was the first intimation
to the public that Jack had lost money, although
it was known generally that the Deckers had
lately bought some valuable property in San
Francisco.

A few evenings after this, an incident occurred
which seemed to unpleasantly discord with the
general social harmony that had always existed
at San Isabel. It was at dinner; and Mr. Oakhurst
and Mr. Hamilton, who sat together at a
separate table, were observed to rise in some

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

agitation. When they reached the hall, by a
common instinct they stepped into a little
breakfast-room which was vacant, and closed
the door. Then Mr. Hamilton turned with a
half-amused, half-serious smile toward his friend,
and said, —

“If we are to quarrel, Jack Oakhurst, — you
and I, — in the name of all that is ridiculous,
don't let it be about a” —

I do not know what was the epithet intended.
It was either unspoken or lost; for at that very
instant Mr. Oakhurst raised a wineglass, and
dashed its contents into Hamilton's face.

As they faced each other, the men seemed to
have changed natures. Mr. Oakhurst was
trembling with excitement, and the wineglass
that he returned to the table shivered between
his fingers. Mr. Hamilton stood there, grayish
white, erect, and dripping. After a pause, he
said coldly, —

“So be it. But remember, our quarrel
commences here. If I fall by your hand, you
shall not use it to clear her character: if you
fall by mine, you shall not be called a martyr.
I am sorry it has come to this; but amen, the
sooner now, the better.”

He turned proudly, dropped his lids over his
cold steel-blue eyes, as if sheathing a rapier,
bowed, and passed coldly out.

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

They met, twelve hours later, in a little hollow
two miles from the hotel, on the Stockton
road. As Mr. Oakhurst received his pistol
from Col. Starbottle's hands, he said to him in a
low voice, “Whatever turns up or down, I shall
not return to the hotel. You will find some
directions in my room. Go there” — But
his voice suddenly faltered, and he turned his
glistening eyes away, to his second's intense astonishment.
“I've been out a dozen times with
Jack Oakhurst,” said Col. Starbottle afterward,
“and I never saw him anyways cut before.
Blank me if I didn't think he was losing his
sand, till he walked to position.”

The two reports were almost simultaneous.
Mr. Oakhurst's right arm dropped suddenly to
his side, and his pistol would have fallen from
his paralyzed fingers; but the discipline of
trained nerve and muscle prevailed, and he kept
his grasp until he had shifted it to the other
hand, without changing his position. Then
there was a silence that seemed interminable, a
gathering of two or three dark figures where a
smoke-curl still lazily floated, and then the hurried,
husky, panting voice of Col. Starbottle in
his ear, “He's hit hard — through the lungs —
you must run for it!”

Jack turned his dark, questioning eyes upon
his second, but did not seem to listen, — rather

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

seemed to hear some other voice, remoter in
the distance. He hesitated, and then made
a step forward in the direction of the distant
group. Then he paused again as the figures
separated, and the surgeon came hastily toward
him.

“He would like to speak with you a moment,”
said the man. “You have little time to lose, I
know; but,” he added in a lower voice, “it is
my duty to tell you he has still less.”

A look of despair, so hopeless in its intensity,
swept over Mr. Oakhurst's usually impassive
face, that the surgeon started. “You are hit,”
he said, glancing at Jack's helpless arm.

“Nothing — a mere scratch,” said Jack hastily.
Then he added with a bitter laugh, “I'm
not in luck to-day. But come: we'll see what
he wants.”

His long, feverish stride outstripped the surgeon's;
and in another moment he stood where
the dying man lay, — like most dying men, —
the one calm, composed, central figure of an
anxious group. Mr. Oakhurst's face was less
calm as he dropped on one knee beside him, and
took his hand. “I want to speak with this
gentleman alone,” said Hamilton, with something
of his old imperious manner, as he turned
to those about him. When they drew back, he
looked up in Oakhurst's face.

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

“I've something to tell you, Jack.”

His own face was white, but not so white as
that which Mr. Oakhurst bent over him, — a face
so ghastly, with haunting doubts, and a hopeless
presentiment of coming evil, — a face so piteous
in its infinite weariness and envy of death, that
the dying man was touched, even in the languor
of dissolution, with a pang of compassion; and
the cynical smile faded from his lips.

“Forgive me, Jack,” he whispered more
feebly, “for what I have to say. I don't say it
in anger, but only because it must be said. I
could not do my duty to you, I could not die
contented, until you knew it all. It's a miserable
business at best, all around. But it can't be
helped now. Only I ought to have fallen by
Decker's pistol, and not yours.”

A flush like fire came into Jack's cheek, and
he would have risen; but Hamilton held him
fast.

“Listen! In my pocket you will find two
letters. Take them — there! You will know
the handwriting. But promise you will not
read them until you are in a place of safety.
Promise me.”

Jack did not speak, but held the letters between
his fingers as if they had been burning
coals.

“Promise me,” said Hamilton faintly.

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

“Why?” asked Oakhurst, dropping his
friend's hand coldly.

“Because,” said the dying man with a bitter
smile, — “because — when you have read them—
you — will — go back — to capture — and
death!”

They were his last words. He pressed Jack's
hand faintly. Then his grasp relaxed, and he
fell back a corpse.

It was nearly ten o'clock at night, and Mrs.
Decker reclined languidly upon the sofa with a
novel in her hand, while her husband discussed
the politics of the country in the bar-room of
the hotel. It was a warm night; and the French
window looking out upon a little balcony was
partly open. Suddenly she heard a foot upon
the balcony, and she raised her eyes from the
book with a slight start. The next moment the
window was hurriedly thrust wide, and a man
entered.

Mrs. Decker rose to her feet with a little cry
of alarm.

“For Heaven's sake, Jack, are you mad?
He has only gone for a little while — he may
return at any moment. Come an hour later,
to-morrow, any time when I can get rid of
him — but go, now, dear, at once.”

Mr. Oakhurst walked toward the door, bolted
it, and then faced her without a word. His face

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

was haggard; his coat-sleeve hung loosely over
an arm that was bandaged and bloody.

Nevertheless her voice did not falter as she
turned again toward him. “What has happened,
Jack. Why are you here?”

He opened his coat, and threw two letters in
her lap.

“To return your lover's letters; to kill you—
and then myself,” he said in a voice so low
as to be almost inaudible.

Among the many virtues of this admirable
woman was invincible courage. She did not
faint; she did not cry out; she sat quietly
down again, folded her hands in her lap, and
said calmly, —

“And why should you not?”

Had she recoiled, had she shown any fear or
contrition, had she essayed an explanation or
apology, Mr. Oakhurst would have looked upon
it as an evidence of guilt. But there is no
quality that courage recognizes so quickly as
courage. There is no condition that desperation
bows before but desperation. And Mr.
Oakhurst's power of analysis was not so keen as
to prevent him from confounding her courage
with a moral quality. Even in his fury, he could
not help admiring this dauntless invalid.

“Why should you not?” she repeated with
a smile. “You gave me life, health, and

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

happiness, Jack. You gave me your love. Why
should you not take what you have given? Go
on. I am ready.”

She held out her hands with that same infinite
grace of yielding with which she had taken
his own on the first day of their meeting at the
hotel. Jack raised his head, looked at her for
one wild moment, dropped upon his knees beside
her, and raised the folds of her dress to his
feverish lips. But she was too clever not to
instantly see her victory: she was too much
of a woman, with all her cleverness, to refrain
from pressing that victory home. At the same
moment, as with the impulse of an outraged
and wounded woman, she rose, and, with an imperious
gesture, pointed to the window. Mr.
Oakhurst rose in his turn, cast one glance upon
her, and without another word passed out of
her presence forever.

When he had gone, she closed the window
and bolted it, and, going to the chimney-piece,
placed the letters, one by one, in the flame of
the candle until they were consumed. I would
not have the reader think, that, during this
painful operation, she was unmoved. Her hand
trembled, and — not being a brute — for some
minutes (perhaps longer) she felt very badly,
and the corners of her sensitive mouth were
depressed. When her husband arrived, it was

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

with a genuine joy that she ran to him, and
nestled against his broad breast with a feeling
of security that thrilled the honest fellow to
the core.

“But I've heard dreadful news to-night,
Elsie,” said Mr. Decker, after a few endearments
were exchanged.

“Don't tell me any thing dreadful, dear: I'm
not well to-night,” she pleaded sweetly.

“But it's about Mr. Oakhurst and Hamilton.”

“Please!” Mr. Decker could not resist the
petitionary grace of those white hands and that
sensitive mouth, and took her to his arms.
Suddenly he said, “What's that?”

He was pointing to the bosom of her white
dress. Where Mr. Oakhurst had touched her,
there was a spot of blood.

It was nothing: she had slightly cut her hand
in closing the window; it shut so hard! If
Mr. Decker had remembered to close and bolt
the shutter before he went out, he might have
saved her this. There was such a genuine irritability
and force in this remark, that Mr.
Decker was quite overcome by remorse. But
Mrs. Decker forgave him with that graciousness
which I have before pointed out in these pages.
And with the halo of that forgiveness and marital
confidence still lingering above the pair, with
the reader's permission we will leave them, and
return to Mr. Oakhurst.

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

But not for two weeks. At the end of that
time, he walked into his rooms in Sacramento,
and in his old manner took his seat at the faro-table.

“How's your arm, Jack?” asked an incautious
player.

There was a smile followed the question,
which, however, ceased as Jack looked up
quietly at the speaker.

“It bothers my dealing a little; but I can
shoot as well with my left.”

The game was continued in that decorous
silence which usually distinguished the table at
which Mr. John Oakhurst presided.

p572-088 WAN LEE, THE PAGAN.

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

AS I opened Hop Sing's letter, there fluttered
to the ground a square strip of yellow
paper covered with hieroglyphics, which, at
first glance, I innocently took to be the label
from a pack of Chinese fire-crackers. But the
same envelope also contained a smaller strip of
rice-paper, with two Chinese characters traced
in India ink, that I at once knew to be Hop
Sing's visiting-card. The whole, as afterwards
literally translated, ran as follows: —

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

Admirable, certainly, as was this morality and
proverbial wisdom, and although this last axiom
was very characteristic of my friend Hop Sing,
who was that most sombre of all humorists, a
Chinese philosopher, I must confess, that, even
after a very free translation, I was at a loss to
make any immediate application of the message.
Luckily I discovered a third enclosure in the
shape of a little note in English, and Hop Sing's
own commercial hand. It ran thus: —

This explained all. It meant a visit to Hop
Sing's warehouse, the opening and exhibition of
some rare Chinese novelties and curios, a chat
in the back office, a cup of tea of a perfection
unknown beyond these sacred precincts, cigars,
and a visit to the Chinese theatre or temple.
This was, in fact, the favorite programme of Hop
Sing when he exercised his functions of hospitality
as the chief factor or superintendent of
the Ning Foo Company.

At eight o'clock on Friday evening, I entered
the warehouse of Hop Sing. There was that
deliciously commingled mysterious foreign odor
that I had so often noticed; there was the old

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

array of uncouth-looking objects, the long procession
of jars and crockery, the same singular
blending of the grotesque and the mathematically
neat and exact, the same endless suggestions
of frivolity and fragility, the same want
of harmony in colors, that were each, in themselves,
beautiful and rare. Kites in the shape
of enormous dragons and gigantic butterflies;
kites so ingeniously arranged as to utter at intervals,
when facing the wind, the cry of a hawk;
kites so large as to be beyond any boy's power
of restraint, — so large that you understood why
kite-flying in China was an amusement for
adults; gods of china and bronze so gratuitously
ugly as to be beyond any human interest or
sympathy from their very impossibility; jars of
sweetmeats covered all over with moral sentiments
from Confucius; hats that looked like
baskets, and baskets that looked like hats; silks
so light that I hesitate to record the incredible
number of square yards that you might pass
through the ring on your little finger, — these,
and a great many other indescribable objects,
were all familiar to me. I pushed my way
through the dimly-lighted warehouse, until I
reached the back office, or parlor, where I found
Hop Sing waiting to receive me.

Before I describe him, I want the average
reader to discharge from his mind any idea of a

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

Chinaman that he may have gathered from the
pantomime. He did not wear beautifully scalloped
drawers fringed with little bells (I
never met a Chinaman who did); he did not
habitually carry his forefinger extended before
him at right angles with his body; nor did I
ever hear him utter the mysterious sentence,
“Ching a ring a ring chaw;” nor dance under
any provocation. He was, on the whole, a
rather grave, decorous, handsome gentleman.
His complexion, which extended all over his
head, except where his long pig-tail grew, was
like a very nice piece of glazed brown papermuslin.
His eyes were black and bright, and
his eyelids set at an angle of fifteen degrees;
his nose straight, and delicately formed; his
mouth small; and his teeth white and clean.
He wore a dark blue silk blouse; and in the
streets, on cold days, a short jacket of astrachan
fur. He wore, also, a pair of drawers of blue
brocade gathered tightly over his calves and
ankles, offering a general sort of suggestion, that
he had forgotten his trousers that morning, but
that, so gentlemanly were his manners, his
friends had forborne to mention the fact to him.
His manner was urbane, although quite serious.
He spoke French and English fluently. In
brief, I doubt if you could have found the equal
of this Pagan shopkeeper among the Christian
traders of San Francisco.

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

There wee a few others present, — a judge of
the Federal Court, an editor, a high government
official, and a prominent merchant. After we
had drunk our tea, and tasted a few sweetmeats
from a mysterious jar, that looked as if it might
contain a preserved mouse among its other nondescript
treasures, Hop Sing arose, and, gravely
beckoning us to follow him, began to descend
to the basement. When we got there, we were
amazed at finding it brilliantly lighted, and that
a number of chairs were arranged in a half-circle
on the asphalt pavement. When he had
courteously seated us, he said, —

“I have invited you to witness a performance
which I can at least promise you no other foreigners
but yourselves have ever seen. Wang,
the court-juggler, arrived here yesterday morning.
He has never given a performance outside
of the palace before. I have asked him to entertain
my friends this evening. He requires no
theatre, stage accessories, or any confederate, —
nothing more than you see here. Will you be
pleased to examine the ground yourselves, gentlemen.”

Of course we examined the premises. It was
the ordinary basement or cellar of the San-Francisco
storehouse, cemented to keep out the
damp. We poked our sticks into the pavement,
and rapped on the walls, to satisfy our polite

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

host — but for no other purpose. We were quite
content to be the victims of any clever deception.
For myself, I knew I was ready to be
deluded to any extent, and, if I had been offered
an explanation of what followed, I should have
probably declined it.

Although I am satisfied that Wang's general
performance was the first of that kind ever
given on American soil, it has, probably, since
become so familiar to many of my readers, that
I shall not bore them with it here. He began
by setting to flight, with the aid of his fan, the
usual number of butterflies, made before our
eyes of little bits of tissue-paper, and kept them
in the air during the remainder of the performance.
I have a vivid recollection of the judge
trying to catch one that had lit on his knee, and
of its evading him with the pertinacity of a living
insect. And, even at this time, Wang, still
plying his fan, was taking chickens out of hats,
making oranges disappear, pulling endless yards
of silk from his sleeve, apparently filling the
whole area of the basement with goods that
appeared mysteriously from the ground, from
his own sleeves, from nowhere! He swallowed
knives to the ruin of his digestion for years to
come; he dislocated every limb of his body; he
reclined in the air, apparently upon nothing.
But his crowning performance, which I have

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

never yet seen repeated, was the most weird,
mysterious, and astounding. It is my apology
for this long introduction, my sole excuse for
writing this article, and the genesis of this
veracious history.

He cleared the ground of its encumbering
articles for a space of about fifteen feet square,
and then invited us all to walk forward, and
again examine it. We did so gravely. There
was nothing but the cemented pavement below
to be seen or felt. He then asked for the loan
of a handkerchief; and, as I chanced to be nearest
him, I offered mine. He took it, and spread
it open upon the floor. Over this he spread a
large square of silk, and over this, again, a large
shawl nearly covering the space he had cleared.
He then took a position at one of the points of
this rectangle, and began a monotonous chant,
rocking his body to and fro in time with the
somewhat lugubrious air.

We sat still and waited. Above the chant
we could hear the striking of the city clocks,
and the occasional rattle of a cart in the street
overhead. The absolute watchfulness and expectation,
the dim, mysterious half-light of the
cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen
bulk of a Chinese deity in the background,
a faint smell of opium-smoke mingling
with spice, and the dreadful uncertainty of what

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

we were really waiting for, sent an uncomfortable
thrill down our backs, and made us look at
each other with a forced and unnatural smile.
This feeling was heightened when Hop Sing
slowly rose, and, without a word, pointed with
his finger to the centre of the shawl.

There was something beneath the shawl.
Surely — and something that was not there
before; at first a mere suggestion in relief, a
faint outline, but growing more and more distinct
and visible every moment. The chant
still continued; the perspiration began to roll
from the singer's face; gradually the hidden
object took upon itself a shape and bulk that
raised the shawl in its centre some five or six
inches. It was now unmistakably the outline
of a small but perfect human figure, with
extended arms and legs. One or two of us
turned pale. There was a feeling of general
uneasiness, until the editor broke the silence by
a gibe, that, poor as it was, was received with
spontaneous enthusiasm. Then the chant suddenly
ceased. Wang arose, and with a quick,
dexterous movement, stripped both shawl and
silk away, and discovered, sleeping peacefully
upon my handkerchief, a tiny Chinese baby.

The applause and uproar which followed this
revelation ought to have satisfied Wang, even
if his audience was a small one: it was loud

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

enough to awaken the baby, — a pretty little
boy about a year old, looking like a Cupid cut
out of sandal-wood. He was whisked away
almost as mysteriously as he appeared. When
Hop Sing returned my handkerchief to me with
a bow, I asked if the juggler was the father of
the baby. “No sabe!” said the imperturbable
Hop Sing, taking refuge in that Spanish form
of non-committalism so common in California.

“But does he have a new baby for every performance?”
I asked. “Perhaps: who knows?”—
“But what will become of this one?” —
“Whatever you choose, gentlemen,” replied
Hop Sing with a courteous inclination. “It was
born here: you are its godfathers.”

There were two characteristic peculiarities of
any Californian assemblage in 1856, — it was
quick to take a hint, and generous to the point
of prodigality in its response to any charitable
appeal. No matter how sordid or avaricious the
individual, he could not resist the infection of
sympathy. I doubled the points of my handkerchief
into a bag, dropped a coin into it, and,
without a word, passed it to the judge. He
quietly added a twenty-dollar gold-piece, and
passed it to the next. When it was returned to
me, it contained over a hundred dollars. I
knotted the money in the handkerchief, and
gave it to Hop Sing.

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

“For the baby, from its godfathers.”

“But what name?” said the judge. There
was a running fire of “Erebus,” “Nox,” “Plutus,”
“Terra Cotta,” “Antæus,” &c. Finally
the question was referred to our host.

“Why not keep his own name?” he said
quietly, — “Wan Lee.” And he did.

And thus was Wan Lee, on the night of
Friday, the 5th of March, 1856, born into this
veracious chronicle.

The last form of “The Northern Star” for
the 19th of July, 1865, — the only daily paper
published in Klamath County, — had just gone
to press; and at three, A.M., I was putting aside
my proofs and manuscripts, preparatory to going
home, when I discovered a letter lying under
some sheets of paper, which I must have overlooked.
The envelope was considerably soiled:
it had no post-mark; but I had no difficulty in
recognizing the hand of my friend Hop Sing. I
opened it hurriedly, and read as follows: —

“My dear Sir, — I do not know whether the bearer
will suit you; but, unless the office of `devil' in your
newspaper is a purely technical one, I think he has all
the qualities required. He is very quick, active, and
intelligent; understands English better than he speaks
it; and makes up for any defect by his habits of observation
and imitation. You have only to show him how to

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

do a thing once, and he will repeat it, whether it is an
offence or a virtue. But you certainly know him already.
You are one of his godfathers; for is he not Wan Lee, the
reputed son of Wang the conjurer, to whose performances
I had the honor to introduce you? But perhaps
you have forgotten it.

“I shall send him with a gang of coolies to Stockton,
thence by express to your town. If you can use him
there, you will do me a favor, and probably save his life,
which is at present in great peril from the hands of the
younger members of your Christian and highly-civilized
race who attend the enlightened schools in San Francisco.

“He has acquired some singular habits and customs
from his experience of Wang's profession, which he followed
for some years, — until he became too large to go
in a hat, or be produced from his father's sleeve. The
money you left with me has been expended on his education.
He has gone through the Tri-literal Classics, but, I
think, without much benefit. He knows but little of
Confucius, and absolutely nothing of Mencius. Owing
to the negligence of his father, he associated, perhaps,
too much with American children.

“I should have answered your letter before, by post;
but I thought that Wan Lee himself would be a better
messenger for this.

And this was the long-delayed answer to my
letter to Hop Sing. But where was “the bearer”?
How was the letter delivered? I summoned
hastily the foreman, printers, and office-boy,
but without eliciting any thing. No one

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

had seen the letter delivered, nor knew any
thing of the bearer. A few days later, I had
a visit from my laundry-man, Ah Ri.

“You wantee debbil? All lightee: me
catchee him.”

He returned in a few moments with a brightlooking
Chinese boy, about ten years old, with
whose appearance and general intelligence I was
so greatly impressed, that I engaged him on the
spot. When the business was concluded, I
asked his name.

“Wan Lee,” said the boy.

“What! Are you the boy sent out by Hop
Sing? What the devil do you mean by not
coming here before? and how did you deliver
that letter?”

Wan Lee looked at me, and laughed. “Me
pitchee in top side window.”

I did not understand. He looked for a moment
perplexed, and then, snatching the letter
out of my hand, ran down the stairs. After a
moment's pause, to my great astonishment, the
letter came flying in the window, circled twice
around the room, and then dropped gently, like
a bird upon my table. Before I had got over
my surprise, Wan Lee re-appeared, smiled, looked
at the letter and then at me, said, “So, John,”
and then remained gravely silent. I said nothing
further; but it was understood that this was
his first official act.

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

His next performance, I grieve to say, was not
attended with equal success. One of our regular
paper-carriers fell sick, and, at a pinch, Wan Lee
was ordered to fill his place. To prevent mistakes,
he was shown over the route the previous
evening, and supplied at about daylight with
the usual number of subscribers' copies. He
returned, after an hour, in good spirits, and
without the papers. He had delivered them all,
he said.

Unfortunately for Wan Lee, at about eight
o'clock, indignant subscribes began to arrive at
the office. They had received their copies; but
how? In the form of hard-pressed cannon-balls,
delivered by a single shot, and a mere tour de
force, through the glass of bedroom-windows.
They had received them full in the face, like a
base ball, if they happened to be up and stirring;
they had received them in quarter-sheets,
tucked in at separate windows; they had found
them in the chimney, pinned against the door,
shot through attic-windows, delivered in long
slips through convenient keyholes, stuffed into
ventilators, and occupying the same can with
the morning's milk. One subscriber, who waited
for some time at the office-door to have a personal
interview with Wan Lee (then comfortably
locked in my bedroom), told me, with tears
of rage in his eyes, that he had been awakened

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

at five o'clock by a most hideous yelling below
his windows; that, on rising in great agitation,
he was startled by the sudden appearance of
“The Northern Star,” rolled hard, and bent into
the form of a boomerang, or East-Indian club,
that sailed into the window, described a number
of fiendish circles in the room, knocked over the
light, slapped the baby's face, “took” him (the
subscriber) “in the jaw,” and then returned out
of the window, and dropped helplessly in the
area. During the rest of the day, wads and strips
of soiled paper, purporting to be copies of “The
Northern Star” of that morning's issue, were
brought indignantly to the office. An admirable
editorial on “The Resources of Humboldt
County,” which I had constructed the evening
before, and which, I had reason to believe,
might have changed the whole balance of trade
during the ensuing year, and left San Francisco
bankrupt at her wharves, was in this way lost to
the public.

It was deemed advisable for the next three
weeks to keep Wan Lee closely confined to the
printing-office, and the purely mechanical part
of the business. Here he developed a surprising
quickness and adaptability, winning even the
favor and good will of the printers and foreman,
who at first looked upon his introduction into
the secrets of their trade as fraught with the

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

gravest political significance. He learned to set
type readily and neatly, his wonderful skill in
manipulation aiding him in the mere mechanical
act, and his ignorance of the language confining
him simply to the mechanical effort, confirming
the printer's axiom, that the printer who
considers or follows the ideas of his copy makes
a poor compositor. He would set up deliberately
long diatribes against himself, composed by
his fellow-printers, and hung on his hook as
copy, and even such short sentences as “Wan
Lee is the devil's own imp,” “Wan Lee is a
Mongolian rascal,” and bring the proof to me
with happiness beaming from every tooth, and
satisfaction shining in his huckleberry eyes.

It was not long, however, before he learned to
retaliate on his mischievous persecutors. I remember
one instance in which his reprisal came
very near involving me in a serious misunderstanding.
Our foreman's name was Webster;
and Wan Lee presently learned to know and
recognize the individual and combined letters of
his name. It was during a political campaign;
and the eloquent and fiery Col. Starbottle of
Siskyou had delivered an effective speech,
which was reported especially for “The Northern
Star.” In a very sublime peroration, Col.
Starbottle had said, “In the language of the
godlike Webster, I repeat” — and here followed

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

the quotation, which I have forgotten. Now, it
chanced that Wan Lee, looking over the galley
after it had been revised, saw the name of his
chief persecutor, and, of course, imagined the
quotation his. After the form was locked up,
Wan Lee took advantage of Webster's absence
to remove the quotation, and substitute a thin
piece of lead, of the same size as the type, engraved
with Chinese characters, making a sentence,
which, I had reason to believe, was an
utter and abject confession of the incapacity and
offensiveness of the Webster family generally,
and exceedingly eulogistic of Wan Lee himself
personally.

The next morning's paper contained Col.
Starbottle's speech in full, in which it appeared
that the “godlike” Webster had, on one occasion,
uttered his thoughts in excellent but perfectly
enigmatical Chinese. The rage of Col.
Starbottle knew no bounds. I have a vivid
recollection of that admirable man walking into
my office, and demanding a retraction of the
statement.

“But my dear sir,” I asked, “are you willing
to deny, over your own signature, that Webster
ever uttered such a sentence? Dare you deny,
that, with Mr. Webster's well-known attainments,
a knowledge of Chinese might not have
been among the number? Are you willing to

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

submit a translation suitable to the capacity of
our readers, and deny, upon your honor as a
gentleman, that the late Mr. Webster ever
uttered such a sentiment? If you are, sir, I am
willing to publish your denial.”

The colonel was not, and left, highly indignant.

Webster, the foreman, took it more coolly.
Happily, he was unaware, that, for two days
after, Chinamen from the laundries, from the
gulches, from the kitchens, looked in the front
office-door, with faces beaming with sardonic
delight; that three hundred extra copies of the
“Star” were ordered for the wash-houses on the
river. He only knew, that, during the day, Wan
Lee occasionally went off into convulsive spasms,
and that he was obliged to kick him into consciousness
again. A week after the occurrence,
I called Wan Lee into my office.

“Wan,” I said gravely, “I should like you
to give me, for my own personal satisfaction, a
translation of that Chinese sentence which my
gifted countryman, the late godlike Webster,
uttered upon a public occasion.” Wan Lee
looked at me intently, and then the slightest
possible twinkle crept into his black eyes. Then
he replied with equal gravity, —

“Mishtel Webstel, he say, `China boy makee
me belly much foolee. China boy makee me

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

heap sick.”' Which I have reason to think was
true.

But I fear I am giving but one side, and not
the best, of Wan Lee's character. As he imparted
it to me, his had been a hard life. He
had known scarcely any childhood: he had no
recollection of a father or mother. The conjurer
Wang had brought him up. He had spent the
first seven years of his life in appearing from
baskets, in dropping out of hats, in climbing
ladders, in putting his little limbs out of joint in
posturing. He had lived in an atmosphere of
trickery and deception. He had learned to look
upon mankind as dupes of their senses: in fine,
if he had thought at all, he would have been a
sceptic; if he had been a little older, he would
have been a cynic; if he had been older still, he
would have been a philosopher. As it was, he
was a little imp. A good-natured imp it was,
too, — an imp whose moral nature had never
been awakened, — an imp up for a holiday, and
willing to try virtue as a diversion. I don't know
that he had any spiritual nature. He was very
superstitious. He carried about with him a
hideous little porcelain god, which he was in the
habit of alternately reviling and propitiating.
He was too intelligent for the commoner
Chinese vices of stealing or gratuitous lying.
Whatever discipline he practised was taught by
his intellect.

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

I am inclined to think that his feelings were
not altogether unimpressible, although it was
almost impossible to extract an expression from
him; and I conscientiously believe he became
attached to those that were good to him.
What he might have become under more
favorable conditions than the bondsman of an
overworked, under-paid literary man, I don't
know: I only know that the scant, irregular,
impulsive kindnesses that I showed him were
gratefully received. He was very loyal and
patient, two qualities rare in the average
American servant. He was like Malvolio, “sad
and civil” with me. Only once, and then under
great provocation, do I remember of his exhibiting
any impatience. It was my habit, after
leaving the office at night, to take him with me
to my rooms, as the bearer of any supplemental
or happy after-thought, in the editorial way,
that might occur to me before the paper went
to press. One night I had been scribbling away
past the usual hour of dismissing Wan Lee,
and had become quite oblivious of his presence
in a chair near my door, when suddenly I
became aware of a voice saying in plaintive
accents, something that sounded like “Chy
Lee.”

I faced around sternly.

“What did you say?”

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

“Me say, `Chy Lee.”'

“Well?” I said impatiently.

“You sabe, `How do, John?”'

“Yes.”

“You sabe, `So long, John'?”

“Yes.”

“Well, `Chy Lee' allee same!”

I understood him quite plainly. It appeared
that “Chy Lee” was a form of “good-night,”
and that Wan Lee was anxious to go home.
But an instinct of mischief, which, I fear, I
possessed in common with him, impelled me to
act as if oblivious of the hint. I muttered
something about not understanding him, and
again bent over my work. In a few minutes I
heard his wooden shoes pattering pathetically
over the floor. I looked up. He was standing
near the door.

“You no sabe, `Chy Lee'?”

“No,” I said sternly.

“You sabe muchee big foolee! allee same!”

And, with this audacity upon his lips, he fled.
The next morning, however, he was as meek
and patient as before, and I did not recall his
offence. As a probable peace-offering, he
blacked all my boots, — a duty never required
of him, — including a pair of buff deer-skin
slippers and an immense pair of horseman's
jack-boots, on which he indulged his remorse
for two hours.

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

I have spoken of his honesty as being a
quality of his intellect rather than his principle;
but I recall about this time two exceptions
to the rule. I was anxious to get some fresh
eggs as a change to the heavy diet of a miningtown;
and, knowing that Wan Lee's countrymen
were great poultry-raisers, I applied to him.
He furnished me with them regularly every
morning, but refused to take any pay, saying
that the man did not sell them, — a remarkable
instance of self-abnegation, as eggs were then
worth half a dollar apiece. One morning
my neighbor Forster dropped in upon me at
breakfast, and took occasion to bewail his own
ill fortune, as his hens had lately stopped
laying, or wandered off in the bush. Wan Lee,
who was present during our colloquy, preserved
his characteristic sad taciturnity. When my
neighbor had gone, he turned to me with a
slight chuckle: “Flostel's hens — Wan Lee's
hens allee same!” His other offence was
more serious and ambitious. It was a season
of great irregularities in the mails, and Wan
Lee had heard me deplore the delay in the
delivery of my letters and newspapers. On
arriving at my office one day, I was amazed
to find my table covered with letters, evidently
just from the post-office, but, unfortunately, not
one addressed to me. I turned to Wan Lee,

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

who was surveying them with a calm satisfaction,
and demanded an explanation. To my
horror he pointed to an empty mail-bag in the
corner, and said, “Postman he say, `No lettee,
John; no lettee, John.' Postman plentee lie!
Postman no good. Me catchee lettee last
night allee same!” Luckily it was still early:
the mails had not been distributed. I had a
hurried interview with the postmaster; and
Wan Lee's bold attempt at robbing the United
States mail was finally condoned by the purchase
of a new mail-bag, and the whole affair
thus kept a secret.

If my liking for my little Pagan page had
not been sufficient, my duty to Hop Sing was
enough, to cause me to take Wan Lee with me
when I returned to San Francisco after my two
years' experience with “The Northern Star.”
I do not think he contemplated the change
with pleasure. I attributed his feelings to a
nervous dread of crowded public streets (when
he had to go across town for me on an errand,
he always made a circuit of the outskirts), to
his dislike for the discipline of the Chinese and
English school to which I proposed to send
him, to his fondness for the free, vagrant life of
the mines, to sheer wilfulness. That it might
have been a superstitious premonition did not
occur to me until long after.

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

Nevertheless it really seemed as if the opportunity
I had long looked for and confidently
expected had come, — the opportunity of placing
Wan Lee under gently restraining influences,
of subjecting him to a life and experience
that would draw out of him what good my
superficial care and ill-regulated kindness could
not reach. Wan Lee was placed at the school
of a Chinese missionary, — an intelligent and
kind-hearted clergyman, who had shown great
interest in the boy, and who, better than all,
had a wonderful faith in him. A home was
found for him in the family of a widow, who
had a bright and interesting daughter about
two years younger than Wan Lee. It was this
bright, cheery, innocent, and artless child that
touched and reached a depth in the boy's
nature that hitherto had been unsuspected;
that awakened a moral susceptibility which had
lain for years insensible alike to the teachings
of society, or the ethics of the theologian.

These few brief months — bright with a
promise that we never saw fulfilled — must have
been happy ones to Wan Lee. He worshipped
his little friend with something of the same
superstition, but without any of the caprice,
that he bestowed upon his porcelain Pagan god.
It was his delight to walk behind her to school,
carrying her books, — a service always fraught

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

with danger to him from the little hands of his
Caucasian Christian brothers. He made her the
most marvellous toys; he would cut out of
carrots and turnips the most astonishing roses
and tulips; he made life-like chickens out of
melon-seeds; he constructed fans and kites, and
was singularly proficient in the making of dolls'
paper dresses. On the other hand, she played
and sang to him, taught him a thousand little
prettinesses and refinements only known to girls,
gave him a yellow ribbon for his pig-tail, as best
suiting his complexion, read to him, showed him
wherein he was original and valuable, took him
to Sunday school with her, against the precedents
of the school, and, small-woman-like,
triumphed. I wish I could add here, that she
effected his conversion, and made him give up
his porcelain idol. But I am telling a true
story; and this little girl was quite content to fill
him with her own Christian goodness, without
letting him know that he was changed. So
they got along very well together, — this little
Christian girl with her shining cross hanging
around her plump, white little neck; and this
dark little Pagan, with his hideous porcelain
god hidden away in his blouse.

There were two days of that eventful year
which will long be remembered in San Francisco, —
two days when a mob of her citizens

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

set upon and killed unarmed, defenceless foreigners
because they were foreigners, and of
another race, religion, and color, and worked
for what wages they could get. There were
some public men so timid, that, seeing this,
they thought that the end of the world had
come. There were some eminent statesmen,
whose names I am ashamed to write here,
who began to think that the passage in the
Constitution which guarantees civil and religious
liberty to every citizen or foreigner was
a mistake. But there were, also, some men
who were not so easily frightened; and in
twenty-four hours we had things so arranged,
that the timid men could wring their hands in
safety, and the eminent statesmen utter their
doubts without hurting any body or any thing.
And in the midst of this I got a note from Hop
Sing, asking me to come to him immediately.

I found his warehouse closed, and strongly
guarded by the police against any possible
attack of the rioters. Hop Sing admitted me
through a barred grating with his usual imperturbable
calm, but, as it seemed to me, with
more than his usual seriousness. Without a
word, he took my hand, and led me to the rear
of the room, and thence down stairs into the
basement. It was dimly lighted; but there was
something lying on the floor covered by a shawl.

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

As I approached he drew the shawl away with
a sudden gesture, and revealed Wan Lee, the
Pagan, lying there dead.

Dead, my reverend friends, dead, — stoned to
death in the streets of San Francisco, in the
year of grace 1869, by a mob of half-grown
boys and Christian school-children!

As I put my hand reverently upon his breast,
I felt something crumbling beneath his blouse.
I looked inquiringly at Hop Sing. He put his
hand between the folds of silk, and drew out
something with the first bitter smile I had ever
seen on the face of that Pagan gentleman.

It was Wan Lee's porcelain god, crushed by
a stone from the hands of those Christian iconoclasts!

p572-114 HOW OLD MAN PLUNKETT WENT HOME.

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

I THINK we all loved him. Even after he
mismanaged the affairs of the Amity Ditch
Company, we commiserated him, although most
of us were stockholders, and lost heavily. I
remember that the blacksmith went so far as
to say that “them chaps as put that responsibility
on the old man oughter be lynched.” But
the blacksmith was not a stockholder; and the
expression was looked upon as the excusable
extravagance of a large, sympathizing nature,
that, when combined with a powerful frame,
was unworthy of notice. At least, that was
the way they put it. Yet I think there was a
general feeling of regret that this misfortune
would interfere with the old man's long-cherished
plan of “going home.”

Indeed, for the last ten years he had been
“going home.” He was going home after a six-months'
sojourn at Monte Flat; he was going
home after the first rains; he was going home

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

when the rains were over; he was going home
when he had cut the timber on Buckeye Hill,
when there was pasture on Dow's Flat, when he
struck pay-dirt on Eureka Hill, when the Amity
Company paid its first dividend, when the election
was over, when he had received an answer
from his wife. And so the years rolled by,
the spring rains came and went, the woods of
Buckeye Hill were level with the ground, the
pasture on Dow's Flat grew sear and dry, Eureka
Hill yielded its pay-dirt and swamped its owner,
the first dividends of the Amity Company were
made from the assessments of stockholders,
there were new county officers at Monte Flat,
his wife's answer had changed into a persistent
question, and still old man Plunkett remained.

It is only fair to say that he had made several
distinct essays toward going. Five years before,
he had bidden good-by to Monte Hill with
much effusion and hand-shaking. But he never
got any farther than the next town. Here
he was induced to trade the sorrel colt he was
riding for a bay mare, — a transaction that at
once opened to his lively fancy a vista of vast
and successful future speculation. A few days
after, Abner Dean of Angel's received a letter
from him, stating that he was going to Visalia to
buy horses. “I am satisfied,” wrote Plunkett,
with that elevated rhetoric for which his

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

correspondence was remarkable, — “I am satisfied
that we are at last developing the real resources
of California. The world will yet look to Dow's
Flat as the great stock-raising centre. In view
of the interests involved, I have deferred my
departure for a month.” It was two before he
again returned to us — penniless. Six months
later, he was again enabled to start for the Eastern
States; and this time he got as far as San
Francisco. I have before me a letter which I
received a few days after his arrival, from which
I venture to give an extract: “You know, my
dear boy, that I have always believed that gambling,
as it is absurdly called, is still in its infancy
in California. I have always maintained
that a perfect system might be invented, by
which the game of poker may be made to yield
a certain percentage to the intelligent player.
I am not at liberty at present to disclose the
system; but before leaving this city I intend to
perfect it.” He seems to have done so, and
returned to Monte Flat with two dollars and
thirty-seven cents, the absolute remainder of
his capital after such perfection.

It was not until 1868 that he appeared to
have finally succeeded in going home. He left
us by the overland route, — a route which he
declared would give great opportunity for the
discovery of undeveloped resources. His last

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

letter was dated Virginia City. He was absent
three years. At the close of a very hot day in
midsummer, he alighted from the Wingdam
stage, with hair and beard powdered with dust
and age. There was a certain shyness about his
greeting, quite different from his usual frank
volubility, that did not, however, impress us as
any accession of character. For some days he
was reserved regarding his recent visit, contenting
himself with asserting, with more or less
aggressiveness, that he had “always said he was
going home, and now he had been there.” Later
he grew more communicative, and spoke freely
and critically of the manners and customs of
New York and Boston, commented on the social
changes in the years of his absence, and, I
remember, was very hard upon what he deemed
the follies incidental to a high state of civilization.
Still later he darkly alluded to the moral
laxity of the higher planes of Eastern society;
but it was not long before he completely tore
away the veil, and revealed the naked wickedness
of New York social life in a way I even
now shudder to recall. Vinous intoxication, it
appeared, was a common habit of the first ladies
of the city. Immoralities which he scarcely
dared name were daily practised by the refined
of both sexes. Niggardliness and greed were the
common vices of the rich. “I have always

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

asserted,” he continued, “that corruption must
exist where luxury and riches are rampant,
and capital is not used to develop the natural
resources of the country. Thank you — I will
take mine without sugar.” It is possible that
some of these painful details crept into the local
journals. I remember an editorial in “The Monte
Flat Monitor,” entitled “The Effete East,” in
which the fatal decadence of New York and
New England was elaborately stated, and California
offered as a means of natural salvation.
“Perhaps,” said “The Monitor,” “we might
add that Calaveras County offers superior inducements
to the Eastern visitor with capital.”

Later he spoke of his family. The daughter
he had left a child had grown into beautiful
womanhood. The son was already taller and
larger than his father; and, in a playful trial of
strength, “the young rascal,” added Plunkett,
with a voice broken with paternal pride and
humorous objurgation, had twice thrown his
doting parent to the ground. But it was of his
daughter he chiefly spoke. Perhaps emboldened
by the evident interest which masculine Monte
Flat held in feminine beauty, he expatiated at
some length on her various charms and accomplishments,
and finally produced her photograph,—
that of a very pretty girl, — to their infinite
peril. But his account of his first meeting with

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

her was so peculiar, that I must fain give it
after his own methods, which were, perhaps,
some shades less precise and elegant than his
written style.

“You see, boys, it's always been my opinion
that a man oughter be able to tell his own flesh
and blood by instinct. It's ten years since I'd
seen my Melindy; and she was then only seven,
and about so high. So, when I went to New
York, what did I do? Did I go straight to my
house, and ask for my wife and daughter, like
other folks? No, sir! I rigged myself up as a
peddler, as a peddler, sir; and I rung the bell.
When the servant came to the door, I wanted—
don't you see? — to show the ladies some
trinkets. Then there was a voice over the banister
says, `Don't want any thing: send him
away.' — `Some nice laces, ma'am, smuggled,' I
says, looking up. `Get out, you wretch!' says
she. I knew the voice, boys: it was my wife,
sure as a gun. Thar wasn't any instinct thar.
`Maybe the young ladies want somethin',' I
said. `Did you hear me?' says she; and with
that she jumps forward, and I left. It's ten
years, boys, since I've seen the old woman; but
somehow, when she fetched that leap, I naterally
left.”

He had been standing beside the bar — his
usual attitude — when he made this speech; but

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

at this point he half faced his auditors with a
look that was very effective. Indeed, a few
who had exhibited some signs of scepticism and
lack of interest, at once assumed an appearance
of intense gratification and curiosity as he
went on, —

“Well, by hanging round there for a day or
two, I found out at last it was to be Melindy's
birthday next week, and that she was goin' to
have a big party. I tell ye what, boys, it
weren't no slouch of a reception. The whole
house was bloomin' with flowers, and blazin'
with lights; and there was no end of servants
and plate and refreshments and fixin's” —

“Uncle Joe.”

“Well?”

“Where did they get the money?”

Plunkett faced his interlocutor with a severe
glance. “I always said,” he replied slowly,
“that, when I went home, I'd send on ahead of
me a draft for ten thousand dollars. I always
said that, didn't I? Eh? And I said I was
goin' home — and I've been home, haven't I?
Well?”

Either there was something irresistibly conclusive
in this logic, or else the desire to hear
the remainder of Plunkett's story was stronger;
but there was no more interruption. His ready
good-humor quickly returned, and, with a slight
chuckle, he went on, —

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

“I went to the biggest jewelry shop in town,
and I bought a pair of diamond ear-rings, and
put them in my pocket, and went to the house.
`What name?' says the chap who opened the
door; and he looked like a cross 'twixt a restaurant
waiter and a person. `Skeesicks,' said I.
He takes me in; and pretty soon my wife comes
sailin' into the parlor, and says, `Excuse me;
but I don't think I recognize the name.' She
was mighty polite; for I had on a red wig and
side-whiskers. `A friend of your husband's
from California, ma'am, with a present for your
daughter, Miss —,' and I made as I had forgot
the name. But all of a sudden a voice
said, `That's too thin;' and in walked Melindy.
`It's playin' it rather low down, father, to
pretend you don't know your daughter's name;
ain't it, now? How are you, old man?' And
with that she tears off my wig and whiskers,
and throws her arms around my neck — instinct,
sir, pure instinct!”

Emboldened by the laughter which followed
his description of the filial utterances of Melinda,
he again repeated her speech, with more or
less elaboration, joining in with, and indeed
often leading, the hilarity that accompanied it,
and returning to it, with more or less incoherency,
several times during the evening.

And so, at various times and at various

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

places, but chiefly in bar-rooms, did this
Ulysses of Monte Flat recount the story of
his wanderings. There were several discrepancies
in his statement; there was sometimes
considerable prolixity of detail; there was occasional
change of character and scenery; there
was once or twice an absolute change in the
denoûment: but always the fact of his having
visited his wife and children remained. Of
course, in a sceptical community like that of
Monte Flat, — a community accustomed to great
expectation and small realization, — a community
wherein, to use the local dialect, “they got
the color, and struck hardpan,” more frequently
than any other mining-camp, — in such a community,
the fullest credence was not given to
old man Plunkett's facts. There was only one
exception to the general unbelief, — Henry York
of Sandy Bar. It was he who was always an
attentive listener; it was his scant purse that
had often furnished Plunkett with means to
pursue his unprofitable speculations; it was to
him that the charms of Melinda were more frequently
rehearsed; it was he that had borrowed
her photograph; and it was he that, sitting
alone in his little cabin one night, kissed that
photograph, until his honest, handsome face
glowed again in the firelight.

It was dusty in Monte Flat. The ruins of

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

the long dry season were crumbling everywhere:
everywhere the dying summer had
strewn its red ashes a foot deep, or exhaled
its last breath in a red cloud above the troubled
highways. The alders and cottonwoods, that
marked the line of the water-courses, were
grimy with dust, and looked as if they might
have taken root in the open air. The gleaming
stones of the parched water-courses themselves
were as dry bones in the valley of death. The
dusty sunset at times painted the flanks of the
distant hills a dull, coppery hue: on other days,
there was an odd, indefinable earthquake halo
on the volcanic cones of the farther coast-spurs.
Again an acrid, resinous smoke from the burning
wood on Heavytree Hill smarted the eyes, and
choked the free breath of Monte Flat; or a
fierce wind, driving every thing, including the
shrivelled summer, like a curled leaf before it,
swept down the flanks of the Sierras, and
chased the inhabitants to the doors of their
cabins, and shook its red fist in at their windows.
And on such a night as this, the dust
having in some way choked the wheels of material
progress in Monte Flat, most of the inhabitants
were gathered listlessly in the gilded
bar-room of the Moquelumne Hotel, spitting
silently at the red-hot stove that tempered the
mountain winds to the shorn lambs of Monte
Flat, and waiting for the rain.

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

Every method known to the Flat of beguiling
the time until the advent of this long-looked-for
phenomenon had been tried. It is true, the
methods were not many, being limited chiefly
to that form of popular facetiæ known as practical
joking; and even this had assumed the
seriousness of a business-pursuit. Tommy Roy,
who had spent two hours in digging a ditch in
front of his own door, into which a few friends
casually dropped during the evening, looked
ennuyé and dissatisfied. The four prominent
citizens, who, disguised as foot-pads, had
stopped the county treasurer on the Wingdam
road, were jaded from their playful efforts
next morning. The principal physician and
lawyer of Monte Flat, who had entered into an
unhallowed conspiracy to compel the sheriff
of Calaveras and his posse to serve a writ of
ejectment on a grizzly bear, feebly disguised
under the name of one “Major Ursus,” who
haunted the groves of Heavytree Hill, wore
an expression of resigned weariness. Even the
editor of “The Monte Flat Monitor,” who had
that morning written a glowing account of a
battle with the Wipneck Indians, for the benefit
of Eastern readers, — even he looked grave
and worn. When, at last, Abner Dean of Angel's,
who had been on a visit to San Francisco,
walked into the room, he was, of course,

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

victimized in the usual way by one or two apparently
honest questions, which ended in his
answering them, and then falling into the trap
of asking another, to his utter and complete
shame and mortification; but that was all. Nobody
laughed; and Abner, although a victim,
did not lose his good-humor. He turned quietly
on his tormentors, and said, —

“I've got something better than that — you
know old man Plunkett?”

Everybody simultaneously spat at the stove,
and nodded his head.

“You know he went home three years ago?”
Two or three changed the position of their legs
from the backs of different chairs; and one man
said, “Yes.”

“Had a good time, home?”

Everybody looked cautiously at the man who
had said, “Yes;” and he, accepting the responsibility
with a faint-hearted smile, said, “Yes,”
again, and breathed hard. “Saw his wife and
child — purty gal?” said Abner cautiously.
“Yes,” answered the man doggedly. “Saw
her photograph, perhaps?” continued Abner
Dean quietly.

The man looked hopelessly around for support.
Two or three, who had been sitting near
him, and evidently encouraging him with a look
of interest, now shamelessly abandoned him,

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

and looked another way. Henry York flushed
a little, and veiled his gray eyes. The man
hesitated, and then with a sickly smile, that
was intended to convey the fact that he was
perfectly aware of the object of this questioning,
and was only humoring it from abstract
good feeling, returned, “Yes,” again.

“Sent home — let's see — ten thousand dollars,
wasn't it?” Abner Dean went on. “Yes,”
reiterated the man with the same smile.

“Well, I thought so,” said Abner quietly.
“But the fact is, you see, that he never went
home at all — nary time.”

Everybody stared at Abner in genuine surprise
and interest, as, with provoking calmness
and a half-lazy manner, he went on, —

“You see, thar was a man down in 'Frisco as
knowed him, and saw him in Sonora during the
whole of that three years. He was herding
sheep, or tending cattle, or spekilating all that
time, and hadn't a red cent. Well it 'mounts
to this, — that 'ar Plunkett ain't been east of
the Rocky Mountains since '49.”

The laugh which Abner Dean had the right
to confidently expect came; but it was bitter
and sardonic. I think indignation was apparent
in the minds of his hearers. It was felt,
for the first time, that there was a limit to practical
joking. A deception carried on for a year,

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

compromising the sagacity of Monte Flat, was
deserving the severest reprobation. Of course,
nobody had believed Plunkett; but then the
supposition that it might be believed in adjacent
camps that they had believed him was gall
and bitterness. The lawyer thought that an
indictment for obtaining money under false pretences
might be found. The physician had long
suspected him of insanity, and was not certain
but that he ought to be confined. The four
prominent merchants thought that the businessinterests
of Monte Flat demanded that something
should be done. In the midst of an
excited and angry discussion, the door slowly
opened, and old man Plunkett staggered into
the room.

He had changed pitifully in the last six
months. His hair was a dusty, yellowish gray,
like the chemisal on the flanks of Heavytree
Hill; his face was waxen white, and blue and
puffy under the eyes; his clothes were soiled
and shabby, streaked in front with the stains
of hurriedly eaten luncheons, and fluffy behind
with the wool and hair of hurriedly-extemporized
couches. In obedience to that odd
law, that, the more seedy and soiled a man's
garments become, the less does he seem inclined
to part with them, even during that portion
of the twenty-four hours when they are

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

deemed less essential, Plunkett's clothes had
gradually taken on the appearance of a kind
of a bark, or an outgrowth from within, for
which their possessor was not entirely responsible.
Howbeit, as he entered the room, he
attempted to button his coat over a dirty
shirt, and passed his fingers, after the manner
of some animal, over his cracker-strewn beard,
in recognition of a cleanly public sentiment.
But, even as he did so, the weak smile faded
from his lips; and his hand, after fumbling aimlessly
around a button, dropped helplessly at
his side. For as he leaned his back against the
bar, and faced the group, he, for the first time,
became aware that every eye but one was fixed
upon him. His quick, nervous apprehension at
once leaped to the truth. His miserable secret
was out, and abroad in the very air about him.
As a last resort, he glanced despairingly at
Henry York; but his flushed face was turned
toward the windows.

No word was spoken. As the bar-keeper
silently swung a decanter and glass before him,
he took a cracker from a dish, and mumbled it
with affected unconcern. He lingered over his
liquor until its potency stiffened his relaxed
sinews, and dulled the nervous edge of his apprehension,
and then he suddenly faced around.
“It don't look as if we were goin' to hev any

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

rain much afore Christmas,” he said with defiant
ease.

No one made any reply.

“Just like this in '52, and again in '60. It's
always been my opinion that these dry seasons
come reg'lar. I've said it afore. I say it again.
It's jist as I said about going home, you know,”
he added with desperate recklessness.

“Thar's a man,” said Abner Dean lazily,
“ez sez you never went home. Thar's a man
ez sez you've been three years in Sonora.
Thar's a man ez sez you hain't seen your wife
and daughter since '49. Thar's a man ez sez
you've bee playin' this camp for six months.”

There was a dead silence. Then a voice said
quite as quietly, —

“That man lies.”

It was not the old man's voice. Everybody
turned as Henry York slowly rose, stretching
out his six feet of length, and, brushing away
the ashes that had fallen from his pipe upon
his breast, deliberately placed himself beside
Plunkett, and faced the others.

“That man ain't here,” continued Abner
Dean, with listless indifference of voice, and a
gentle pre-occupation of manner, as he carelessly
allowed his right hand to rest on his hip
near his revolver. “That man ain't here; but,
if I'm called upon to make good what he says,
why, I'm on hand.”

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

All rose as the two men — perhaps the least
externally agitated of them all — approached
each other. The lawyer stepped in between
them.

“Perhaps there's some mistake here. York,
do you know that the old man has been home?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know it?”

York turned his clear, honest, frank eyes on
his questioner, and without a tremor told the
only direct and unmitigated lie of his life.
“Because I've seen him there.”

The answer was conclusive. It was known
that York had been visiting the East during the
old man's absence. The colloquy had diverted
attention from Plunkett, who, pale and breathless,
was staring at his unexpected deliverer.
As he turned again toward his tormentors, there
was something in the expression of his eye that
caused those that were nearest to him to fall
back, and sent a strange, indefinable thrill
through the boldest and most reckless. As
he made a step forward, the physician, almost
unconsciously, raised his hand with a warning
gesture; and old man Plunkett, with his eyes
fixed upon the red-hot stove, and an odd smile
playing about his mouth, began, —

“Yes — of course you did. Who says you
didn't? It ain't no lie. I said I was goin'

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

home — and I've been home. Haven't I? My
God! I have. Who says I've been lyin'?
Who says I'm dreamin'? Is it true — why
don't you speak? It is true, after all. You say
you saw me there: why don't you speak again?
Say, say! — is it true? It's going now. O my
God! it's going again. It's going now. Save
me!” And with a fierce cry he fell forward in
a fit upon the floor.

When the old man regained his senses, he
found himself in York's cabin. A flickering
fire of pine-boughs lit up the rude rafters, and
fell upon a photograph tastefully framed with
fir-cones, and hung above the brush whereon he
lay. It was the portrait of a young girl. It
was the first object to meet the old man's gaze;
and it brought with it a flush of such painful
consciousness, that he started, and glanced
quickly around. But his eyes only encountered
those of York, — clear, gray, critical, and patient, —
and they fell again.

“Tell me, old man,” said York not unkindly,
but with the same cold, clear tone in his voice
that his eye betrayed a moment ago, — “tell
me, is that a lie too?” and he pointed to the
picture.

The old man closed his eyes, and did not
reply. Two hours before, the question would
have stung him into some evasion or bravado.

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

But the revelation contained in the question, as
well as the tone of York's voice, was to him now,
in his pitiable condition, a relief. It was plain,
even to his confused brain, that York had lied
when he had indorsed his story in the bar-room;
it was clear to him now that he had not been
home, that he was not, as he had begun to
fear, going mad. It was such a relief, that, with
characteristic weakness, his former recklessness
and extravagance returned. He began to
chuckle, finally to laugh uproariously.

York, with his eyes still fixed on the old man,
withdrew the hand with which he had taken
his.

“Didn't we fool 'em nicely; eh, Yorky! He,
he! The biggest thing yet ever played in this
camp! I always said I'd play 'em all some day,
and I have — played 'em for six months. Ain't
it rich? — ain't it the richest thing you ever
seed? Did you see Abner's face when he spoke
'bout that man as seed me in Sonora? Warn't
it good as the minstrels? Oh, it's too much!”
and, striking his leg with the palm of his hand,
he almost threw himself from the bed in a
paroxysm of laughter, — a paroxysm that, nevertheless,
appeared to be half real and half
affected.

“Is that photograph hers?” said York in a
low voice, after a slight pause.

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

“Hers? No! It's one of the San Francisco
actresses. He, he! Don't you see? I bought
it for two bits in one of the bookstores. I
never thought they'd swaller that too; but they
did! Oh, but the old man played 'em this
time didn't he — eh?” and he peered curiously
in York's face.

“Yes, and he played me too,” said York,
looking steadily in the old man's eye.

“Yes, of course,” interposed Plunkett hastily;
“but you know, Yorky, you got out of it
well! You've sold 'em too. We've both got
'em on a string now — you and me — got to
stick together now. You did it well, Yorky:
you did it well. Why, when you said you'd
seen me in York City, I'm d—d if I didn't” —

“Didn't what?” said York gently; for the
old man had stopped with a pale face and wandering
eye.

“Eh?”

“You say when I said I had seen you in New
York you thought” —

“You lie!” said the old man fiercely. “I
didn't say I thought any thing. What are you
trying to go back on me for, eh?” His hands
were trembling as he rose muttering from the
bed, and made his way toward the hearth.

“Gimme some whiskey,” he said presently,
“and dry up. You oughter treat anyway.

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

Them fellows oughter treated last night. By
hookey, I'd made 'em — only I fell sick.”

York placed the liquor and a tin cup on the
table beside him, and, going to the door, turned
his back upon his guest, and looked out on the
night. Although it was clear moonlight, the
familiar prospect never to him seemed so dreary.
The dead waste of the broad Wingdam
highway never seemed so monotonous, so like
the days that he had passed, and were to come
to him, so like the old man in its suggestion
of going sometime, and never getting there.
He turned, and going up to Plunkett put his
hand upon his shoulder, and said, —

“I want you to answer one question fairly
and squarely.”

The liquor seemed to have warmed the torpid
blood in the old man's veins, and softened his
acerbity; for the face he turned up to York
was mellowed in its rugged outline, and more
thoughtful in expression, as he said, —

“Go on, my boy.”

“Have you a wife and — daughter?”

“Before God I have!”

The two men were silent for a moment, both
gazing at the fire. Then Plunkett began rubbing
his knees slowly.

“The wife, if it comes to that, ain't much,”
he began cautiously, “being a little on the

[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]

shoulder, you know, and wantin', so to speak,
a liberal California education, which makes, you
know, a bad combination. It's always been my
opinion, that there ain't any worse. Why, she's
as ready with her tongue as Abner Dean is with
his revolver, only with the difference that she
shoots from principle, as she calls it; and the
consequence is, she's always layin' for you.
It's the effete East, my boy, that's ruinin' her.
It's them ideas she gets in New York and Boston
that's made her and me what we are. I
don't mind her havin' 'em, if she didn't shoot.
But, havin' that propensity, them principles
oughtn't to be lying round loose no more'n fire-arms.”

“But your daughter?” said York.

The old man's hands went up to his eyes
here, and then both hands and head dropped
forward on the table. “Don't say any thing
'bout her, my boy, don't ask me now.” With
one hand concealing his eyes, he fumbled about
with the other in his pockets for his handkerchief—
but vainly. Perhaps it was owing to
this fact, that he repressed his tears; for, when
he removed his hand from his eyes, they were
quite dry. Then he found his voice.

“She's a beautiful girl, beautiful, though I
say it; and you shall see her, my boy, — you shall
see her sure. I've got things about fixed now.

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

I shall have my plan for reducin' ores perfected
in a day or two; and I've got proposals from all
the smeltin' works here” (here he hastily produced
a bundle of papers that fell upon the floor),
“and I'm goin' to send for 'em. I've got the
papers here as will give me ten thousand dollars
clear in the next month,” he added, as he strove
to collect the valuable documents again. “I'll
have 'em here by Christmas, if I live; and you
shall eat your Christmas dinner with me, York,
my boy, — you shall sure.”

With his tongue now fairly loosened by
liquor and the suggestive vastness of his prospects,
he rambled on more or less incoherently,
elaborating and amplifying his plans, occasionally
even speaking of them as already accomplished,
until the moon rode high in the
heavens, and York led him again to his couch.
Here he lay for some time muttering to himself,
until at last he sank into a heavy sleep. When
York had satisfied himself of the fact, he gently
took down the picture and frame, and, going to
the hearth, tossed them on the dying embers,
and sat down to see them burn.

The fir-cones leaped instantly into flame;
then the features that had entranced San Francisco
audiences nightly, flashed up and passed
away (as such things are apt to pass); and
even the cynical smile on York's lips faded too.

[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

And then there came a supplemental and unexpected
flash as the embers fell together, and
by its light York saw a paper upon the floor.
It was one that had fallen from the old man's
pocket. As he picked it up listlessly, a photograph
slipped from its folds. It was the portrait
of a young girl; and on its reverse was written
in a scrawling hand, “Melinda to father.”

It was at best a cheap picture, but, ah me! I
fear even the deft graciousness of the highest
art could not have softened the rigid angularities
of that youthful figure, its self-complacent
vulgarity, its cheap finery, its expressionless illfavor.
York did not look at it a second time.
He turned to the letter for relief.

It was misspelled; it was unpunctuated; it
was almost illegible; it was fretful in tone, and
selfish in sentiment. It was not, I fear, even
original in the story of its woes. It was the
harsh recital of poverty, of suspicion, of mean
makeshifts and compromises, of low pains and
lower longings, of sorrows that were degrading,
of a grief that was pitiable. Yet it was sincere
in a certain kind of vague yearning for the
presence of the degraded man to whom it was
written, — an affection that was more like a confused
instinct than a sentiment.

York folded it again carefully, and placed it
beneath the old man's pillow. Then he

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

returned to his seat by the fire. A smile that had
been playing upon his face, deepening the curves
behind his mustache, and gradually overrunning
his clear gray eyes, presently faded away.
It was last to go from his eyes; and it left there,
oddly enough to those who did not know him,
a tear.

He sat there for a long time, leaning forward,
his head upon his hands. The wind that had
been striving with the canvas roof all at once
lifted its edges, and a moonbeam slipped suddenly
in, and lay for a moment like a shining blade
upon his shoulder; and, knighted by its touch,
straightway plain Henry York arose, sustained,
high-purposed and self-reliant.

The rains had come at last. There was already
a visible greenness on the slopes of Heavytree
Hill; and the long, white track of the Wingdam
road was lost in outlying pools and ponds
a hundred rods from Monte Flat. The spent
water-courses, whose white bones had been sinuously
trailed over the flat, like the vertebræ of
some forgotten saurian, were full again; the
dry bones moved once more in the valley; and
there was joy in the ditches, and a pardonable
extravagance in the columns of “The Monte Flat
Monitor.” “Never before in the history of the
county has the yield been so satisfactory. Our

[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]

contemporary of `The Hillside Beacon,' who
yesterday facetiously alluded to the fact (?)
that our best citizens were leaving town in
`dugouts,' on account of the flood, will be glad
to hear that our distinguished fellow-townsman,
Mr. Henry York, now on a visit to his relatives
in the East, lately took with him in his `dugout'
the modest sum of fifty thousand dollars,
the result of one week's clean-up. We can
imagine,” continued that sprightly journal, “that
no such misfortune is likely to overtake Hillside
this season. And yet we believe `The Beacon'
man wants a railroad.” A few journals broke
out into poetry. The operator at Simpson's
Crossing telegraphed to “The Sacramento Universe”
“All day the low clouds have shook
their garnered fulness down.” A San-Francisco
journal lapsed into noble verse, thinly
disguised as editorial prose: “Rejoice: the
gentle rain has come, the bright and pearly rain,
which scatters blessings on the hills, and sifts
them o' er the plain. Rejoice,” &c. Indeed,
there was only one to whom the rain had not
brought blessing, and that was Plunkett. In
some mysterious and darksome way, it had interfered
with the perfection of his new method
of reducing ores, and thrown the advent of
that invention back another season. It had
brought him down to an habitual seat in the

[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]

bar-room, where, to heedless and inattentive
ears, he sat and discoursed of the East and his
family.

No one disturbed him. Indeed, it was rumored
that some funds had been lodged with
the landlord, by a person or persons unknown,
whereby his few wants were provided for. His
mania — for that was the charitable construction
which Monte Flat put upon his conduct —
was indulged, even to the extent of Monte Flat's
accepting his invitation to dine with his family
on Christmas Day, — an invitation extended
frankly to every one with whom the old man
drank or talked. But one day, to everybody's
astonishment, he burst into the bar-room, holding
an open letter in his hand. It read as follows: —

“Be ready to meet your family at the new cottage on
Heavytree Hill on Christmas Day. Invite what friends
you choose.

The letter was handed round in silence. The
old man, with a look alternating between hope
and fear, gazed in the faces of the group. The
doctor looked up significantly, after a pause.
“It's a forgery evidently,” he said in a low
voice. “He's cunning enough to conceive it
(they always are); but you'll find he'll fail in

[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]

executing it. Watch his face! — Old man,” he
said suddenly, in a loud peremptory tone, “this
is a trick, a forgery, and you know it. Answer
me squarely, and look me in the eye. Isn't
it so?”

The eyes of Plunkett stared a moment, and
then dropped weakly. Then, with a feebler
smile, he said, “You're too many for me, boys.
The Doc's right. The little game's up. You
can take the old man's hat;” and so, tottering,
trembling, and chuckling, he dropped into silence
and his accustomed seat. But the next
day he seemed to have forgotten this episode,
and talked as glibly as ever of the approaching
festivity.

And so the days and weeks passed until
Christmas — a bright, clear day, warmed with
south winds, and joyous with the resurrection
of springing grasses — broke upon Monte Flat.
And then there was a sudden commotion in the
hotel bar-room; and Abner Dean stood beside
the old man's chair, and shook him out of a
slumber to his feet. “Rouse up, old man. York
is here, with your wife and daughter, at the
cottage on Heavytree. Come, old man. Here,
boys, give him a lift;” and in another moment
a dozen strong and willing hands had raised the
old man, and bore him in triumph to the street,
up the steep grade of Heavytree Hill, and

[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]

deposited him, struggling and confused, in the
porch of a little cottage. At the same instant
two women rushed forward, but were restrained
by a gesture from Henry York. The old man
was struggling to his feet. With an effort at
last, he stood erect, trembling, his eye fixed, a
gray pallor on his cheek, and a deep resonance
in his voice.

“It's all a trick, and a lie! They ain't no
flesh and blood or kin o' mine. It ain't my
wife, nor child. My daughter's a beautiful girl—
a beautiful girl, d'ye hear? She's in New York
with her mother, and I'm going to fetch her here.
I said I'd go home, and I've been home: d'ye
hear me?' I've been home! It's a mean trick
you're playin' on the old man. Let me go: d'ye
hear? Keep them women off me! Let me go!
I'm going — I'm going — home!”

His hands were thrown up convulsively in
the air, and, half turning round, he fell sideways
on the porch, and so to the ground. They
picked him up hurriedly, but too late. He had
gone home.

p572-143 THE FOOL OF FIVE FORKS.

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

HE lived alone. I do not think this
peculiarity arose from any wish to withdraw
his foolishness from the rest of the camp;
nor was it probable that the combined wisdom
of Five Forks ever drove him into exile. My
impression is, that he lived alone from choice, —
a choice he made long before the camp indulged
in any criticism of his mental capacity. He
was much given to moody reticence, and,
although to outward appearances a strong man,
was always complaining of ill-health. Indeed,
one theory of his isolation was, that it afforded
him better opportunities for taking medicine, of
which he habitually consumed large quantities.

His folly first dawned upon Five Forks
through the post-office windows. He was, for
a long time, the only man who wrote home by
every mail; his letters being always directed to
the same person, — a woman. Now, it so happened
that the bulk of the Five Forks correspondence
was usually the other way. There
were many letters received (the majority being

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

in the female hand), but very few answered.
The men received them indifferently, or as a
matter of course. A few opened and read them
on the spot, with a barely repressed smile of
self-conceit, or quite as frequently glanced over
them with undisguised impatience. Some of
the letters began with “My dear husband;” and
some were never called for. But the fact that
the only regular correspondent of Five Forks
never received any reply became at last quite
notorious. Consequently, when an envelope was
received, bearing the stamp of the “dead letter
office,” addressed to “The Fool,” under the
more conventional title of “Cyrus Hawkins,”
there was quite a fever of excitement. I do
not know how the secret leaked out; but it was
eventually known to the camp, that the envelope
contained Hawkins's own letters returned.
This was the first evidence of his weakness.
Any man who repeatedly wrote to a woman who
did not reply must be a fool. I think Hawkins
suspected that his folly was known to the
camp; but he took refuge in symptoms of chills
and fever, which he at once developed, and
effected a diversion with three bottles of Indian
cholagogue and two boxes of pills. At all
events, at the end of a week, he resumed a pen
stiffened by tonics, with all his old epistolatory
pertinacity. This time the letters had a new
address.

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

In those days a popular belief obtained in
the mines, that luck particularly favored the
foolish and unscientific. Consequently, when
Hawkins struck a “pocket” in the hillside near
his solitary cabin, there was but little surprise.
“He will sink it all in the next hole” was the
prevailing belief, predicated upon the usual
manner in which the possessor of “nigger
luck” disposed of his fortune. To everybody's
astonishment, Hawkins, after taking out about
eight thousand dollars, and exhausting the
pocket, did not prospect for another. The
camp then waited patiently to see what he
would do with his money. I think, however, that
it was with the greatest difficulty their indignation
was kept from taking the form of a personal
assault when it became known that he had
purchased a draft for eight thousand dollars, in
favor of “that woman.” More than this, it
was finally whispered that the draft was returned
to him as his letters had been, and that he was
ashamed to reclaim the money at the express-office.
“It wouldn't be a bad specilation to go
East, get some smart gal, for a hundred dollars,
to dress herself up and represent that `Hag,'
and jest freeze onto that eight thousand,” suggested
a far-seeing financier. I may state here,
that we always alluded to Hawkins's fair unknown
as the “Hag” without having, I am

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

confident, the least justification for that epithet.

That the “Fool” should gamble seemed eminently
fit and proper. That he should occasionally
win a large stake, according to that popular
theory which I have recorded in the preceding
paragraph, appeared, also, a not improbable or
inconsistent fact. That he should, however,
break the faro bank which Mr. John Hamlin
had set up in Five Forks, and carry off a sum
variously estimated at from ten to twenty thousand
dollars, and not return the next day, and
lose the money at the same table, really
appeared incredible. Yet such was the fact.
A day or two passed without any known investment
of Mr. Hawkins's recently-acquired capital.
“Ef he allows to send it to that `Hag,”'
said one prominent citizen, “suthin' ought to
be done. It's jest ruinin' the reputation of
this yer camp, — this sloshin' around o' capital
on non-residents ez don't claim it!” “It's
settin' an example o' extravagance,” said
another, “ez is little better nor a swindle.
Thais mor'n five men in this camp, thet, hearin'
thet Hawkins hed sent home eight thousand
dollars, must jest rise up and send home their
hard earnings too! And then to think thet
thet eight thousand was only a bluff, after all,
and thet it's lyin' there on call in Adams &

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

Co.'s bank! Well, I say it's one o' them things
a vigilance committee oughter look into.”

When there seemed no possibility of this
repetition of Hawkins's folly, the anxiety to
know what he had really done with his money
became intense. At last a self-appointed committee
of four citizens dropped artfully, but to
outward appearances carelessly, upon him in his
seclusion. When some polite formalities had
been exchanged, and some easy vituperation
of a backward season offered by each of the
parties, Tom Wingate approached the subject.

“Sorter dropped heavy on Jack Hamlin the
other night, didn't ye? He allows you didn't
give him no show for revenge. I said you
wasn't no such d—d fool; didn't I, Dick?”
continued the artful Wingate, appealing to a
confederate.

“Yes,” said Dick promptly. “You said
twenty thousand dollars wasn't goin' to be
thrown around recklessly. You said Cyrus had
suthin' better to do with his capital,” superadded
Dick with gratuitous mendacity. “I disremember
now what partickler investment you
said he was goin' to make with it,” he continued,
appealing with easy indifference to his
friend.

Of course Wingate did not reply, but looked
at the “Fool,” who, with a troubled face, was

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

rubbing his legs softly. After a pause, he
turned deprecatingly toward his visitors.

“Ye didn't enny of ye ever hev a sort of
tremblin' in your legs, a kind o' shakiness
from the knee down? Suthin',” he continued,
slightly brightening with his topic, — “suthin'
that begins like chills, and yet ain't chills? A
kind o' sensation of goneness here, and a kind
o' feelin' as if you might die suddint? — when
Wright's Pills don't somehow reach the spot,
and quinine don't fetch you?”

“No!” said Wingate with a curt directness,
and the air of authoritatively responding for his
friends, — “no, never had. You was speakin'
of this yer investment.”

“And your bowels all the time irregular?”
continued Hawkins, blushing under Wingate's
eye, and yet clinging despairingly to his theme,
like a shipwrecked mariner to his plank.

Wingate did not reply, but glanced significantly
at the rest. Hawkins evidently saw this
recognition of his mental deficiency, and said
apologetically, “You was saying suthin' about
my investment?”

“Yes,” said Wingate, so rapidly as to almost
take Hawkins's breath away, — “the investment
you made in” —

“Rafferty's Ditch,” said the “Fool” timidly.

For a moment, the visitors could only stare

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

blankly at each other. “Rafferty's Ditch,” the
one notorious failure of Five Forks! — Rafferty's
Ditch, the impracticable scheme of an utterly
unpractical man! — Rafferty's Ditch, a ridiculous
plan for taking water that could not be
got to a place where it wasn't wanted! — Rafferty's
Ditch, that had buried the fortunes of
Rafferty and twenty wretched stockholders in
its muddy depths!

“And thet's it, is it?” said Wingate, after a
gloomy pause. “Thet's it! I see it all now,
boys. That's how ragged Pat Rafferty went
down to San Francisco yesterday in store-clothes,
and his wife and four children went off
in a kerridge to Sacramento. Thet's why them
ten workmen of his, ez hadn't a cent to bless
themselves with, was playin' billiards last night,
and eatin' isters. Thet's whar that money kum
frum, — one hundred dollars to pay for the
long advertisement of the new issue of ditch
stock in the “Times” yesterday. Thet's why
them six strangers were booked at the Magnolia
Hotel yesterday. Don't you see? It's thet
money — and that `Fool'!”

The “Fool” sat silent. The visitors rose
without a word.

“You never took any of them Indian Vegetable
Pills?” asked Hawkins timidly of Wingate.

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

“No!” roared Wingate as he opened the
door.

“They tell me, that, took with the Panacea, —
they was out o' the Panacea when I went to the
drug-store last week, — they say, that, took with
the Panacea, they always effect a certin cure.”
But by this time, Wingate and his disgusted
friends had retreated, slamming the door on
the “Fool” and his ailments.

Nevertheless, in six months the whole affair
was forgotten: the money had been spent; the
“Ditch” had been purchased by a company of
Boston capitalists, fired by the glowing description
of an Eastern tourist, who had spent one
drunken night at Five Forks; and I think
even the mental condition of Hawkins might
have remained undisturbed by criticism, but for
a singular incident.

It was during an exciting political campaign,
when party-feeling ran high, that the irascible
Capt. McFadden of Sacramento visited Five
Forks. During a heated discussion in the
Prairie Rose Saloon, words passed between the
captain and the Hon. Calhoun Bungstarter,
ending in a challenge. The captain bore the infelicitous
reputation of being a notorious duellist
and a dead-shot. The captain was unpopular.
The captain was believed to have been sent by
the opposition for a deadly purpose; and the

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

captain was, moreover, a stranger. I am sorry
to say that with Five Forks this latter condition
did not carry the quality of sanctity or
reverence that usually obtains among other
nomads. There was, consequently, some little
hesitation when the captain turned upon the
crowd, and asked for some one to act as his
friend. To everybody's astonishment, and to
the indignation of many, the “Fool” stepped
forward, and offered himself in that capacity.
I do not know whether Capt. McFadden would
have chosen him voluntarily; but he was constrained,
in the absence of a better man, to
accept his services.

The duel never took place. The preliminaries
were all arranged, the spot indicated; the
men were present with their seconds; there
was no interruption from without; there was no
explanation or apology passed — but the duel
did not take place. It may be readily imagined
that these facts, which were all known to Five
Forks, threw the whole community into a fever
of curiosity. The principals, the surgeon, and
one second left town the next day. Only the
“Fool” remained. He resisted all questioning,
declaring himself held in honor not to divulge:
in short, conducted himself with consistent
but exasperating folly. It was not until six
months had passed, that Col. Starbottle, the

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

second of Calhoun Bungstarter, in a moment of
weakness, superinduced by the social glass,
condescended to explain. I should not do
justice to the parties, if I did not give that
explanation in the colonel's own words. I may
remark, in passing, that the characteristic
dignity of Col. Starbottle always became intensified
by stimulants, and that, by the same
process, all sense of humor was utterly eliminated.

“With the understanding that I am addressing
myself confidentially to men of honor,”
said the colonel, elevating his chest above the
bar-room counter of the Prairie Rose Saloon,
“I trust that it will not be necessary for me to
protect myself from levity, as I was forced to
do in Sacramento on the only other occasion
when I entered into an explanation of this
delicate affair by — er — er — calling the individual
to a personal account — er. I do not
believe,” added the colonel, slightly waving his
glass of liquor in the air with a graceful gesture
of courteous deprecation, “knowing what I
do of the present company, that such a course
of action is required here. Certainly not,
sir, in the home of Mr. Hawkins — er — the
gentleman who represented Mr. Bungstarter,
whose conduct, ged, sir, is worthy of praise,
blank me!”

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

Apparently satisfied with the gravity and
respectful attention of his listeners, Col. Starbottle
smiled relentingly and sweetly, closed his
eyes half-dreamily, as if to recall his wandering
thoughts, and began, —

“As the spot selected was nearest the tenement
of Mr. Hawkins, it was agreed that
the parties should meet there. They did so
promptly at half-past six. The morning being
chilly, Mr. Hawkins extended the hospitalities
of his house with a bottle of Bourbon whiskey,
of which all partook but myself. The reason
for that exception is, I believe, well known. It
is my invariable custom to take brandy — a
wineglassful in a cup of strong coffee — immediately
on rising. It stimulates the functions,
sir, without producing any blank derangement
of the nerves.”

The barkeeper, to whom, as an expert, the
colonel had graciously imparted this information,
nodded approvingly; and the colonel, amid
a breathless silence, went on.

“We were about twenty minutes in reaching
the spot. The ground was measured, the
weapons were loaded, when Mr. Bungstarter
confided to me the information that he was
unwell, and in great pain. On consultation
with Mr. Hawkins, it appeared that his principal,
in a distant part of the field, was also

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

suffering, and in great pain. The symptoms
were such as a medical man would pronounce
`choleraic.' I say would have pronounced; for,
on examination, the surgeon was also found to
be — er — in pain, and, I regret to say, expressing
himself in language unbecoming the occasion.
His impression was, that some powerful
drug had been administered. On referring the
question to Mr. Hawkins, he remembered that
the bottle of whiskey partaken by them contained
a medicine which he had been in the
habit of taking, but which, having failed to
act upon him, he had concluded to be generally
ineffective, and had forgotten. His perfect
willingness to hold himself personally responsible
to each of the parties, his genuine concern
at the disastrous effect of the mistake, mingled
with his own alarm at the state of his system,
which — er — failed to — er — respond to the
peculiar qualities of the medicine, was most
becoming to him as a man of honor and a
gentleman. After an hour's delay, both principals
being completely exhausted, and abandoned
by the surgeon, who was unreasonably
alarmed at his own condition, Mr. Hawkins and
I agreed to remove our men to Markleville.
There, after a further consultation with Mr.
Hawkins, an amicable adjustment of all difficulties,
honorable to both parties, and governed by

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

profound secrecy, was arranged. I believe,”
added the colonel, looking around, and setting
down his glass, “no gentleman has yet expressed
himself other than satisfied with the
result.”

Perhaps it was the colonel's manner; but,
whatever was the opinion of Five Forks regarding
the intellectual display of Mr. Hawkins in
this affair, there was very little outspoken
criticism at the moment. In a few weeks the
whole thing was forgotten, except as part of
the necessary record of Hawkins's blunders,
which was already a pretty full one. Again,
some later follies conspired to obliterate the
past, until, a year later, a valuable lead was
discovered in the “Blazing Star” tunnel, in the
hill where he lived; and a large sum was
offered him for a portion of his land on the hilltop.
Accustomed as Five Forks had become to
the exhibition of his folly, it was with astonishment
that they learned that he resolutely and
decidedly refused the offer. The reason that he
gave was still more astounding, — he was about
to build.

To build a house upon property available for
mining-purposes was preposterous; to build at
all, with a roof already covering him, was an
act of extravagance; to build a house of the
style he proposed was simply madness.

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

Yet here were facts. The plans were made,
and the lumber for the new building was
already on the ground, while the shaft of the
“Blazing Star” was being sunk below. The
site was, in reality, a very picturesque one,
the building itself of a style and quality
hitherto unknown in Five Forks. The citizens,
at first sceptical, during their moments of
recreation and idleness gathered doubtingly
about the locality. Day by day, in that climate
of rapid growths, the building, pleasantly
known in the slang of Five Forks as the “Idiot
Asylum,” rose beside the green oaks and clustering
firs of Hawkins Hill, as if it were part
of the natural phenomena. At last it was
completed. Then Mr. Hawkins proceeded to
furnish it with an expensiveness and extravagance
of outlay quite in keeping with his
former idiocy. Carpets, sofas, mirrors, and
finally a piano, — the only one known in the
county, and brought at great expense from
Sacramento, — kept curiosity at a fever-heat.
More than that, there were articles and ornaments
which a few married experts declared
only fit for women. When the furnishing of
the house was complete, — it had occupied two
months of the speculative and curious attention
of the camp, — Mr. Hawkins locked the front-door,
put the key in his pocket, and quietly

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

retired to his more humble roof, lower on the
hillside.

I have not deemed it necessary to indicate to
the intelligent reader all of the theories which
obtained in Five Forks during the erection of
the building. Some of them may be readily
imagined. That the “Hag” had, by artful
coyness and systematic reticence, at last completely
subjugated the “Fool,” and that the new
house was intended for the nuptial bower of the
(predestined) unhappy pair, was, of course, the
prevailing opinion. But when, after a reasonable
time had elapsed, and the house still
remained untenanted, the more exasperating
conviction forced itself upon the general mind,
that the “Fool” had been for the third time imposed
upon; when two months had elapsed,
and there seemed no prospect of a mistress for
the new house, — I think public indignation became
so strong, that, had the “Hag” arrived,
the marriage would have been publicly prevented.
But no one appeared that seemed to answer
to this idea of an available tenant; and all
inquiry of Mr. Hawkins as to his intention in
building a house, and not renting it, or occupying
it, failed to elicit any further information.
The reasons that he gave were felt to be vague,
evasive, and unsatisfactory. He was in no hurry
to move, he said. When he was ready, it surely

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

was not strange that he should like to have his
house all ready to receive him. He was often
seen upon the veranda, of a summer evening,
smoking a cigar. It is reported that one night
the house was observed to be brilliantly lighted
from garret to basement; that a neighbor, observing
this, crept toward the open parlor-window,
and, looking in, espied the “Fool” accurately
dressed in evening costume, lounging upon a sofa
in the drawing-room, with the easy air of socially
entertaining a large party. Notwithstanding
this, the house was unmistakably vacant that
evening, save for the presence of the owner, as
the witness afterward testified. When this
story was first related, a few practical men suggested
the theory that Mr. Hawkins was simply
drilling himself in the elaborate duties of hospitality
against a probable event in his history.
A few ventured the belief that the house was
haunted. The imaginative editor of the Five
Forks “Record” evolved from the depths of
his professional consciousness a story that Hawkins's
sweetheart had died, and that he regularly
entertained her spirit in this beautifully
furnished mausoleum. The occasional spectacle
of Hawkins's tall figure pacing the veranda on
moonlight nights lent some credence to this
theory, until an unlooked-for incident diverted
all speculation into another channel.

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

It was about this time that a certain wild,
rude valley, in the neighborhood of Five Forks,
had become famous as a picturesque resort.
Travellers had visited it, and declared that there
were more cubic yards of rough stone cliff, and
a waterfall of greater height, than any they had
visited. Correspondents had written it up with
extravagant rhetoric and inordinate poetical
quotation. Men and women who had never
enjoyed a sunset, a tree, or a flower, who had
never appreciated the graciousness or meaning
of the yellow sunlight that flecked their homely
doorways, or the tenderness of a midsummer's
night, to whose moonlight they bared their
shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from
thousands of miles away to calculate the height
of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm,
to remark upon the enormous size of this
unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable
self-complacency that they really admired
Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance
with the tastes or weaknesses of the individual,
the more prominent and salient points
of the valley were christened; and there was a
“Lace Handkerchief Fall,” and the “Tears of
Sympathy Cataract,” and one distinguished
orator's “Peak,” and several “Mounts” of
various noted people, living or dead, and an
“Exclamation-Point,” and a “Valley of Silent

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

Adoration.” And, in course of time, empty
soda-water bottles were found at the base of the
cataract, and greasy newspapers, and fragments
of ham-sandwiches, lay at the dusty roots of
giant trees. With this, there were frequent
irruptions of closely-shaven and tightly-cravated
men, and delicate, flower-faced women, in the
one long street of Five Forks, and a scampering
of mules, and an occasional procession of
dusty brown-linen cavalry.

A year after “Hawkins's Idiot Asylum” was
completed, one day there drifted into the valley
a riotous cavalcade of “school-marms,” teachers
of the San-Francisco public schools, out for a
holiday. Not severely-spectacled Minervas, and
chastely armed and mailed Pallases, but, I fear,
for the security of Five Forks, very human,
charming, and mischievous young women. At
least, so the men thought, working in the
ditches, and tunnelling on the hillside; and
when, in the interests of science, and the mental
advancement of juvenile posterity, it was finally
settled that they should stay in Five Forks two
or three days for the sake of visiting the various
mines, and particularly the “Blazing Star”
tunnel, there was some flutter of masculine
anxiety. There was a considerable inquiry for
“store-clothes,” a hopeless overhauling of old
and disused raiment, and a general demand for
“boiled shirts” and the barber.

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

Meanwhile, with that supreme audacity and
impudent hardihood of the sex when gregarious,
the school-marms rode through the town, admiring
openly the handsome faces and manly
figures that looked up from the ditches, or rose
behind the cars of ore at the mouths of tunnels.
Indeed, it is alleged that Jenny Forester, backed
and supported by seven other equally shameless
young women, had openly and publicly waved
her handkerchief to the florid Hercules of Five
Forks, one Tom Flynn, formerly of Virginia,
leaving that good-natured but not over-bright
giant pulling his blonde mustaches in bashful
amazement.

It was a pleasant June afternoon that Miss
Milly Arnot, principal of the primary department
of one of the public schools of San Francisco,
having evaded her companions, resolved
to put into operation a plan which had lately
sprung up in her courageous and mischief-loving
fancy. With that wonderful and mysterious
instinct of her sex, from whom no secrets of
the affections are hid, and to whom all hearts
are laid open, she had heard the story of Hawkins's
folly, and the existence of the “Idiot
Asylum.” Alone, on Hawkins Hill, she had
determined to penetrate its seclusion. Skirting
the underbrush at the foot of the hill, she
managed to keep the heaviest timber between

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

herself and the “Blazing Star” tunnel at its
base, as well as the cabin of Hawkins, half-way
up the ascent, until, by a circuitous route,
at last she reached, unobserved, the summit.
Before her rose, silent, darkened, and motionless,
the object of her search. Here her
courage failed her, with all the characteristic
inconsequence of her sex. A sudden fear of
all the dangers she had safely passed — bears,
tarantulas, drunken men, and lizards — came
upon her. For a moment, as she afterward
expressed it, “she thought she should die.”
With this belief, probably, she gathered three
large stones, which she could hardly lift, for the
purpose of throwing a great distance; put two
hair-pins in her mouth; and carefully re-adjusted
with both hands two stray braids of her lovely
blue-black mane, which had fallen in gathering
the stones. Then she felt in the pockets of her
linen duster for her card-case, handkerchief,
pocket-book, and smelling-bottle, and, finding
them intact, suddenly assumed an air of easy,
ladylike unconcern, went up the steps of the
veranda, and demurely pulled the front door-bell,
which she knew would not be answered.
After a decent pause, she walked around the
encompassing veranda, examining the closed
shutters of the French windows until she found
one that yielded to her touch. Here she paused

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

again to adjust her coquettish hat by the
mirror-like surface of the long sash-window,
that reflected the full length of her pretty
figure. And then she opened the window, and
entered the room.

Although long closed, the house had a smell
of newness and of fresh paint, that was quite unlike
the mouldiness of the conventional haunted
house. The bright carpets, the cheerful walls,
the glistening oil-cloths, were quite inconsistent
with the idea of a ghost. With childish curiosity,
she began to explore the silent house, at first
timidly, — opening the doors with a violent push,
and then stepping back from the threshold to
make good a possible retreat, — and then more
boldly, as she became convinced of her security
and absolute loneliness. In one of the chambers—
the largest — there were fresh flowers in
a vase, evidently gathered that morning; and,
what seemed still more remarkable, the pitchers
and ewers were freshly filled with water. This
obliged Miss Milly to notice another singular
fact, namely, that the house was free from dust,
the one most obtrusive and penetrating visitor
of Five Forks. The floors and carpets had been
recently swept, the chairs and furniture carefully
wiped and dusted. If the house was haunted,
it was possessed by a spirit who had none of the
usual indifference to decay and mould. And yet

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

the beds had evidently never been slept in; the
very springs of the chair in which she sat
creaked stiffly at the novelty; the closet-doors
opened with the reluctance of fresh paint and
varnish; and in spite of the warmth, cleanliness,
and cheerfulness of furniture and decoration,
there was none of the ease of tenancy and
occupation. As Miss Milly afterward confessed,
she longed to “tumble things around;” and, when
she reached the parlor or drawing-room again,
she could hardly resist the desire. Particularly
was she tempted by a closed piano, that stood
mutely against the wall. She thought she would
open it just to see who was the maker. That
done, it would be no harm to try its tone. She
did so, with one little foot on the soft pedal.
But Miss Milly was too good a player, and too
enthusiastic a musician, to stop at half-measures.
She tried it again, this time so sincerely, that
the whole house seemed to spring into voice.
Then she stopped and listened. There was no
response: the empty rooms seemed to have relapsed
into their old stillness. She stepped out
on the veranda. A woodpecker recommenced his
tapping on an adjacent tree: the rattle of a cart
in the rocky gulch below the hill came faintly
up. No one was to be seen far or near. Miss
Milly, re-assured, returned. She again ran her
fingers over the keys, stopped, caught at a

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

melody running in her mind, half played it, and
then threw away all caution. Before five minutes
had elapsed, she had entirely forgotten herself,
and with her linen duster thrown aside,
her straw hat flung on the piano, her white
hands bared, and a black loop of her braided
hair hanging upon her shoulder, was fairly
embarked upon a flowing sea of musical recollection.

She had played, perhaps, half an hour, when
having just finished an elaborate symphony, and
resting her hands on the keys, she heard very
distinctly and unmistakably the sound of applause
from without. In an instant the fires of
shame and indignation leaped into her cheeks;
and she rose from the instrument, and ran to the
window, only in time to catch sight of a dozen
figures in blue and red flannel shirts vanishing
hurriedly through the trees below.

Miss Milly's mind was instantly made up. I
think I have already intimated, that, under the
stimulus of excitement, she was not wanting in
courage; and as she quietly resumed her gloves,
hat, and duster, she was not, perhaps, exactly
the young person that it would be entirely safe
for the timid, embarrassed, or inexperienced of
my sex to meet alone. She shut down the
piano; and having carefully reclosed all the
windows and doors, and restored the house to

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

its former desolate condition, she stepped from
the veranda, and proceeded directly to the cabin
of the unintellectual Hawkins, that reared its
adobe chimney above the umbrage a quarter of
a mile below.

The door opened instantly to her impulsive
knock, and the “Fool of Five Forks” stood before
her. Miss Milly had never before seen the man
designated by this infelicitous title; and as he
stepped backward, in half courtesy and half
astonishment, she was, for the moment, disconcerted.
He was tall, finely formed, and dark-bearded.
Above cheeks a little hollowed by
care and ill-health shone a pair of hazel eyes,
very large, very gentle, but inexpressibly sad
and mournful. This was certainly not the kind
of man Miss Milly had expected to see; yet,
after her first embarrassment had passed, the
very circumstance, oddly enough, added to her
indignation, and stung her wounded pride still
more deeply. Nevertheless, the arch hypocrite
instantly changed her tactics with the swift
intuition of her sex.

“I have come,” she said with a dazzling smile,
infinitely more dangerous than her former dignified
severity, — “I have come to ask your pardon
for a great liberty I have just taken. I believe
the new house above us on the hill is yours. I
was so much pleased with its exterior, that I left

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

my friends for a moment below here,” she continued
artfully, with a slight wave of the hand,
as if indicating a band of fearless Amazons without,
and waiting to avenge any possible insult
offered to one of their number, “and ventured
to enter it. Finding it unoccupied, as I had
been told, I am afraid I had the audacity to sit
down and amuse myself for a few moments at
the piano, while waiting for my friends.”

Hawkins raised his beautiful eyes to hers. He
saw a very pretty girl, with frank gray eyes
glistening with excitement, with two red, slightly
freckled cheeks glowing a little under his
eyes, with a short scarlet upper-lip turned back,
like a rose-leaf, over a little line of white teeth,
as she breathed somewhat hurriedly in her nervous
excitement. He saw all this calmly, quietly,
and, save for the natural uneasiness of a shy,
reticent man, I fear without a quickening of his
pulse.

“I knowed it,” he said simply. “I heerd ye
as I kem up.”

Miss Milly was furious at his grammar, his
dialect, his coolness, and, still more, at the suspicion
that he was an active member of her invisible
claque.

“Ah!” she said, still smiling. “Then I think I
heard you” —

“I reckon not,” he interrupted gravely. “I

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

didn't stay long. I found the boys hanging
round the house, and I allowed at first I'd go in
and kinder warn you; but they promised to keep
still: and you looked so comfortable, and wrapped
up in your music, that I hadn't the heart to disturb
you, and kem away. I hope,” he added
earnestly, “they didn't let on ez they heerd
you. They ain't a bad lot, — them Blazin' Star
boys — though they're a little hard at times.
But they'd no more hurt ye then they would a—
a — a cat!” continued Mr. Hawkins, blushing
with a faint apprehension of the inelegance
of his simile.

“No, no!” said Miss Milly, feeling suddenly
very angry with herself, the “Fool,” and the
entire male population of Five Forks. “No! I
have behaved foolishly, I suppose — and, if they
had, it would have served me right. But I
only wanted to apologize to you. You'll find
every thing as you left it. Good-day!”

She turned to go. Mr. Hawkins began to feel
embarrassed. “I'd have asked ye to sit down,”
he said finally, “if it hed been a place fit for a
lady. I oughter done so, enny way. I don't
know what kept me from it. But I ain't well,
miss. Times I get a sort o' dumb ager, — it's
the ditches, I think, miss, — and I don't seem to
hev my wits about me.”

Instantly Miss Arnot was all sympathy: her
quick woman's heart was touched.

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

“Can I — can any thing be done?” she asked
more timidly than she had before spoken.

“No — not onless ye remember suthin' about
these pills.” He exhibited a box containing
about half a dozen. “I forget the direction —
I don't seem to remember much, any way, these
times. They're `Jones's Vegetable Compound.'
If ye've ever took 'em, ye'll remember whether
the reg'lar dose is eight. They ain't but six
here. But perhaps ye never tuk any,” he added
deprecatingly.

“No,” said Miss Milly curtly. She had usually
a keen sense of the ludicrous; but somehow
Mr. Hawkins's eccentricity only pained her.

“Will you let me see you to the foot of the
hill?” he said again, after another embarrassing
pause.

Miss Arnot felt instantly that such an act
would condone her trespass in the eyes of the
world. She might meet some of her invisible
admirers, or even her companions; and, with all
her erratic impulses, she was, nevertheless, a
woman, and did not entirely despise the verdict
of conventionality. She smiled sweetly, and
assented; and in another moment the two were
lost in the shadows of the wood.

Like many other apparently trivial acts in
an uneventful life, it was decisive. As she
expected, she met two or three of her late

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

applauders, whom, she fancied, looked sheepish
and embarrassed; she met, also, her companions
looking for her in some alarm, who really
appeared astonished at her escort, and, she
fancied, a trifle envious of her evident success.
I fear that Miss Arnot, in response to their
anxious inquiries, did not state entirely the
truth, but, without actual assertion, led them
to believe that she had, at a very early stage
of the proceeding, completely subjugated this
weak-minded giant, and had brought him triumphantly
to her feet. From telling this story
two or three times, she got finally to believing
that she had some foundation for it, then to a
vague sort of desire that it would eventually
prove to be true, and then to an equally vague
yearning to hasten that consummation. That
it would redound to any satisfaction of the
“Fool” she did not stop to doubt. That it would
cure him of his folly she was quite confident.
Indeed, there are very few of us, men or
women, who do not believe that even a hopeless
love for ourselves is more conducive to
the salvation of the lover than a requited affection
for another.

The criticism of Five Forks was, as the
reader may imagine, swift and conclusive.
When it was found out that Miss Arnot was
not the “Hag” masquerading as a young and

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

pretty girl, to the ultimate deception of Five
Forks in general, and the “Fool” in particular,
it was at once decided that nothing but the
speedy union of the “Fool” and the “pretty
school-marm” was consistent with ordinary
common sense. The singular good-fortune of
Hawkins was quite in accordance with the
theory of his luck as propounded by the camp.
That, after the “Hag” failed to make her
appearance, he should “strike a lead” in his
own house, without the trouble of “prospectin',”
seemed to these casuists as a wonderful
but inevitable law. To add to these fateful
probabilities, Miss Arnot fell, and sprained her
ankle, in the ascent of Mount Lincoln, and was
confined for some weeks to the hotel after her
companions had departed. During this period,
Hawkins was civilly but grotesquely attentive.
When, after a reasonable time had elapsed,
there still appeared to be no immediate prospect
of the occupancy of the new house, public
opinion experienced a singular change in regard
to its theories of Mr. Hawkins's conduct. The
“Hag” was looked upon as a saint-like and long-suffering
martyr to the weaknesses and inconsistency
of the “Fool.” That, after erecting
this new house at her request, he had suddenly
“gone back” on her; that his celibacy was the
result of a long habit of weak proposal and

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

subsequent shameless rejection; and that he
was now trying his hand on the helpless school-marm,
was perfectly plain to Five Forks. That
he should be frustrated in his attempts at any
cost was equally plain. Miss Milly suddenly
found herself invested with a rude chivalry
that would have been amusing, had it not been
at times embarrassing; that would have been
impertinent, but for the almost superstitious
respect with which it was proffered. Every
day somebody from Five Forks rode out to
inquire the health of the fair patient. “Hez
Hawkins bin over yer to-day?” queried Tom
Flynn, with artful ease and indifference, as he
leaned over Miss Milly's easy-chair on the
veranda. Miss Milly, with a faint pink flush
on her cheek, was constrained to answer, “No.”
“Well, he sorter sprained his foot agin a rock
yesterday,” continued Flynn with shameless
untruthfulness. “You mus'n't think any thing
o' that, Miss Arnot. He'll be over yer to-morrer;
and meantime he told me to hand this yer
bookay with his re-gards, and this yer specimen.”
And Mr. Flynn laid down the flowers
he had picked en route against such an emergency,
and presented respectfully a piece of
quartz and gold, which he had taken that morning
from his own sluice-box. “You mus'n't
mind Hawkins's ways, Miss Milly,” said another

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

sympathizing miner. “There ain't a better
man in camp than that theer Cy Hawkins —
but he don't understand the ways o' the world
with wimen. He hasn't mixed as much with
society as the rest of us,” he added, with an
elaborate Chesterfieldian ease of manner; “but
he means well.” Meanwhile a few other sympathetic
tunnel-men were impressing upon Mr.
Hawkins the necessity of the greatest attention
to the invalid. “It won't do, Hawkins,” they
explained, “to let that there gal go back to
San Francisco and say, that, when she was sick
and alone, the only man in Five Forks under
whose roof she had rested, and at whose table
she had sat” (this was considered a natural
but pardonable exaggeration of rhetoric) “ever
threw off on her; and it sha'n't be done. It
ain't the square thing to Five Forks.” And
then the “Fool” would rush away to the valley,
and be received by Miss Milly with a certain
reserve of manner that finally disappeared in a
flush of color, some increased vivacity, and a
pardonable coquetry. And so the days passed.
Miss Milly grew better in health, and more
troubled in mind; and Mr. Hawkins became
more and more embarrassed; and Five Forks
smiled, and rubbed its hands, and waited for
the approaching denoûment. And then it came—
but not, perhaps, in the manner that Five
Forks had imagined.

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

It was a lovely afternoon in July that a
party of Eastern tourists rode into Five Forks.
They had just “done” the Valley of Big
Things; and, there being one or two Eastern
capitalists among the party, it was deemed
advisable that a proper knowledge of the practical
mining-resources of California should be
added to their experience of the merely picturesque
in Nature. Thus far every thing had been
satisfactory; the amount of water which passed
over the Fall was large, owing to a backward
season; some snow still remained in the cañons
near the highest peaks; they had ridden round
one of the biggest trees, and through the prostrate
trunk of another. To say that they were
delighted is to express feebly the enthusiasm
of these ladies and gentlemen, drunk with the
champagny hospitality of their entertainers, the
utter novelty of scene, and the dry, exhilarating
air of the valley. One or two had already
expressed themselves ready to live and die
there; another had written a glowing account
to the Eastern press, depreciating all other
scenery in Europe and America; and, under
these circumstances, it was reasonably expected
that Five Forks would do its duty, and equally
impress the stranger after its own fashion.

Letters to this effect were sent from San
Francisco by prominent capitalists there; and,

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

under the able superintendence of one of their
agents, the visitors were taken in hand, shown
“what was to be seen,” carefully restrained
from observing what ought not to be visible,
and so kept in a blissful and enthusiastic condition.
And so the graveyard of Five Forks, in
which but two of the occupants had died natural
deaths; the dreary, ragged cabins on the
hillsides, with their sad-eyed, cynical, broken-spirited
occupants, toiling on day by day for
a miserable pittance, and a fare that a self-respecting
Eastern mechanic would have scornfully
rejected, — were not a part of the Eastern
visitors' recollection. But the hoisting works
and machinery of the “Blazing Star Tunnel
Company” was, — the Blazing Star Tunnel Company,
whose “gentlemanly superintendent” had
received private information from San Francisco
to do the “proper thing” for the party.
Wherefore the valuable heaps of ore in the
company's works were shown; the oblong bars
of gold, ready for shipment, were playfully
offered to the ladies who could lift and carry
them away unaided; and even the tunnel itself,
gloomy, fateful, and peculiar, was shown as
part of the experience; and, in the noble language
of one correspondent, “The wealth of
Five Forks, and the peculiar inducements that
it offered to Eastern capitalists,” were

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

established beyond a doubt. And then occurred a
little incident, which, as an unbiassed spectator,
I am free to say offered no inducements to
anybody whatever, but which, for its bearing
upon the central figure of this veracious chronicle,
I cannot pass over.

It had become apparent to one or two more
practical and sober-minded in the party, that
certain portions of the “Blazing Star” tunnel
(owing, perhaps, to the exigencies of a flattering
annual dividend) were economically and
imperfectly “shored” and supported, and were,
consequently, unsafe, insecure, and to be avoided.
Nevertheless, at a time when champagne corks
were popping in dark corners, and enthusiastic
voices and happy laughter rang through the
half-lighted levels and galleries, there came a
sudden and mysterious silence. A few lights
dashed swiftly by in the direction of a distant
part of the gallery, and then there was a sudden
sharp issuing of orders, and a dull, ominous
rumble. Some of the visitors turned pale: one
woman fainted.

Something had happened. What? “Nothing”
(the speaker is fluent, but uneasy) — “one
of the gentlemen, in trying to dislodge a `specimen'
from the wall, had knocked away a support.
There had been a `cave' — the gentleman
was caught, and buried below his shoulders. It

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

was all right, they'd get him out in a moment—
only it required great care to keep from extending
the `cave.' Didn't know his name.
It was that little man, the husband of that
lively lady with the black eyes. Eh! Hullo,
there! Stop her! For God's sake! Not that
way! She'll fall from that shaft. She'll be
killed!”

But the lively lady was already gone. With
staring black eyes, imploringly trying to pierce
the gloom, with hands and feet that sought to
batter and break down the thick darkness, with
incoherent cries and supplications following the
moving of ignis fatuus lights ahead, she ran, and
ran swiftly! — ran over treacherous foundations,
ran by yawning gulfs, ran past branching galleries
and arches, ran wildly, ran despairingly,
ran blindly, and at last ran into the arms of
the “Fool of Five Forks.”

In an instant she caught at his hand. “Oh,
save him!” she cried. “You belong here; you
know this dreadful place: bring me to him.
Tell me where to go, and what to do, I implore
you! Quick, he is dying! Come!”

He raised his eyes to hers, and then, with a
sudden cry, dropped the rope and crowbar he
was carrying, and reeled against the wall.

“Annie!” he gasped slowly. “Is it you?”

She caught at both his hands, brought her

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

face to his with staring eyes, murmured, “Good
God, Cyrus!” and sank upon her knees before
him.

He tried to disengage the hand that she
wrung with passionate entreaty.

“No, no! Cyrus, you will forgive me — you
will forget the past! God has sent you here
to-day. You will come with me. You will —
you must — save him!”

“Save who?” cried Cyrus hoarsely.

“My husband!”

The blow was so direct, so strong and over-whelming,
that, even through her own stronger
and more selfish absorption, she saw it in the
face of the man, and pitied him.

“I thought — you — knew — it,” she faltered.

He did not speak, but looked at her with
fixed, dumb eyes. And then the sound of distant
voices and hurrying feet started her again
into passionate life. She once more caught his
hand.

“O Cyrus, hear me! If you have loved me
through all these years, you will not fail me
now. You must save him! You can! You
are brave and strong — you always were, Cyrus.
You will save him, Cyrus, for my sake, for the
sake of your love for me! You will — I know
it. God bless you!”

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

She rose as if to follow him; but, at a gesture
of command, she stood still. He picked
up the rope and crowbar slowly, and in a dazed,
blinded way, that, in her agony of impatience
and alarm, seemed protracted to cruel infinity.
Then he turned, and, raising her hand to his
lips, kissed it slowly, looked at her again, and
the next moment was gone.

He did not return; for at the end of the
next half-hour, when they laid before her the
half-conscious, breathing body of her husband,
safe and unharmed, but for exhaustion and some
slight bruises, she learned that the worst fears
of the workmen had been realized. In releasing
him, a second cave had taken place. They had
barely time to snatch away the helpless body
of her husband, before the strong frame of his
rescuer, Cyrus Hawkins, was struck and smitten
down in his place.

For two hours he lay there, crushed and
broken-limbed, with a heavy beam lying across
his breast, in sight of all, conscious and patient.
For two hours they had labored around him,
wildly, despairingly, hopefully, with the wills of
gods and the strength of giants; and at the end
of that time they came to an upright timber,
which rested its base upon the beam. There
was a cry for axes, and one was already swinging
in the air, when the dying man called to
them feebly,—

[figure description] Page 171.[end figure description]

“Don't cut that upright!”

“Why?”

“It will bring down the whole gallery with
it.”

“How?”

“It's one of the foundations of my house.”

The axe fell from the workman's hand, and
with a blanched face he turned to his fellows.
It was too true. They were in the uppermost
gallery; and the “cave” had taken place directly
below the new house. After a pause,
the “Fool” spoke again more feebly.

“The lady — quick!”

They brought her, — a wretched, fainting
creature, with pallid face and streaming eyes, —
and fell back as she bent her face above him.

“It was built for you, Annie darling,” he
said in a hurried whisper, “and has been waiting
up there for you and me all these long days.
It's deeded to you, Annie; and you must — live
there — with him! He will not mind that I
shall be always near you; for it stands above—
my grave.”

And he was right. In a few minutes later,
when he had passed away, they did not move
him, but sat by his body all night with a torch
at his feet and head. And the next day they
walled up the gallery as a vault; but they put
no mark or any sign thereon, trusting, rather, to

[figure description] Page 172.[end figure description]

the monument, that, bright and cheerful, rose
above him in the sunlight of the hill. And
those who heard the story said, “This is not an
evidence of death and gloom and sorrow, as are
other monuments, but is a sign of life and
light and hope, wherefore shall all know that
he who lies under it is what men call — “a fool.”

p572-182 BABY SYLVESTER.

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

IT was at a little mining-camp in the California
Sierras that he first dawned upon me
in all his grotesque sweetness.

I had arrived early in the morning, but not in
time to intercept the friend who was the object
of my visit. He had gone “prospecting,” — so
they told me on the river, — and would not probably
return until late in the afternoon. They
could not say what direction he had taken;
they could not suggest that I would be likely to
find him if I followed. But it was the general
opinion that I had better wait.

I looked around me. I was standing upon
the bank of the river; and apparently the only
other human beings in the world were my interlocutors,
who were even then just disappearing
from my horizon, down the steep bank, toward
the river's dry bed. I approached the edge of
the bank.

Where could I wait?

Oh! anywhere, — down with them on the riverbar,
where they were working, if I liked. Or I

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

could make myself at home in any of those
cabins that I found lying round loose. Or perhaps
it would be cooler and pleasanter for me
in my friend's cabin on the hill. Did I see
those three large sugar-pines, and, a little to
the right, a canvas roof and chimney, over the
bushes? Well, that was my friend's, — that
was Dick Sylvester's cabin. I could stake my
horse in that little hollow, and just hang round
there till he came. I would find some books in
the shanty. I could amuse myself with them;
or I could play with the baby.

Do what?

But they had already gone. I leaned over
the bank, and called after their vanishing
figures, —

“What did you say I could do?”

The answer floated slowly up on the hot,
sluggish air, —

“Pla-a-y with the ba-by.”

The lazy echoes took it up, and tossed it languidly
from hill to hill, until Bald Mountain
opposite made some incoherent remark about
the baby; and then all was still.

I must have been mistaken. My friend was
not a man of family; there was not a woman
within forty miles of the river camp; he never
was so passionately devoted to children as to
import a luxury so expensive. I must have
been mistaken.

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

I turned my horse's head toward the hill.
As we slowly climbed the narrow trail, the little
settlement might have been some exhumed
Pompeiian suburb, so deserted and silent were
its habitations. The open doors plainly disclosed
each rudely-furnished interior, — the
rough pine table, with the scant equipage of
the morning meal still standing; the wooden
bunk, with its tumbled and dishevelled blankets.
A golden lizard, the very genius of desolate
stillness, had stopped breathless upon the
threshold of one cabin; a squirrel peeped impudently
into the window of another; a woodpecker,
with the general flavor of undertaking
which distinguishes that bird, withheld his
sepulchral hammer from the coffin-lid of the
roof on which he was professionally engaged,
as we passed. For a moment I half regretted
that I had not accepted the invitation to the
river-bed; but, the next moment, a breeze
swept up the long, dark cañon, and the waiting
files of the pines beyond bent toward me in salutation.
I think my horse understood, as well
as myself, that it was the cabins that made the
solitude human, and therefore unbearable; for
he quickened his pace, and with a gentle trot
brought me to the edge of the wood, and the
three pines that stood like vedettes before the
Sylvester outpost.

[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]

Unsaddling my horse in the little hollow, I
unslung the long riata from the saddle-bow,
and, tethering him to a young sapling, turned
toward the cabin. But I had gone only a few
steps, when I heard a quick trot behind me; and
poor Pomposo, with every fibre tingling with
fear, was at my heels. I looked hurriedly
around. The breeze had died away; and only
an occasional breath from the deep-chested
woods, more like a long sigh than any articulate
sound, or the dry singing of a cicala in the
heated cañon, were to be heard. I examined
the ground carefully for rattlesnakes, but in
vain. Yet here was Pomposo shivering from
his arched neck to his sensitive haunches, his
very flanks pulsating with terror. I soothed
him as well as I could, and then walked to the
edge of the wood, and peered into its dark
recesses. The bright flash of a bird's wing, or
the quick dart of a squirrel, was all I saw. I
confess it was with something of superstitious
expectation that I again turned towards the
cabin. A fairy-child, attended by Titania and
her train, lying in an expensive cradle, would
not have surprised me: a Sleeping Beauty,
whose awakening would have repeopled these
solitudes with life and energy, I am afraid I
began to confidently look for, and would have
kissed without hesitation.

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

But I found none of these. Here was the
evidence of my friend's taste and refinement, in
the hearth swept scrupulously clean, in the picturesque
arrangement of the fur-skins that covered
the floor and furniture, and the striped
serápe1 lying on the wooden couch. Here were
the walls fancifully papered with illustrations
from “The London News;” here was the wood-cut
portrait of Mr. Emerson over the chimney,
quaintly framed with blue-jays' wings; here were
his few favorite books on the swinging-shelf;
and here, lying upon the couch, the latest copy
of “Punch.” Dear Dick! The flour-sack was
sometimes empty; but the gentle satirist seldom
missed his weekly visit.

I threw myself on the couch, and tried to
read. But I soon exhausted my interest in my
friend's library, and lay there staring through
the open door on the green hillside beyond. The
breeze again sprang up; and a delicious coolness,
mixed with the rare incense of the woods, stole
through the cabin. The slumbrous droning of
bumblebees outside the canvas roof, the faint
cawing of rooks on the opposite mountain, and
the fatigue of my morning ride, began to droop
my eyelids. I pulled the serápe over me, as a

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

precaution against the freshening mountain
breeze, and in a few moments was asleep.

I do not remember how long I slept. I must
have been conscious, however, during my slumber,
of my inability to keep myself covered by
the serápe; for I awoke once or twice, clutching
it with a despairing hand as it was disappearing
over the foot of the couch. Then I became
suddenly aroused to the fact that my efforts to
retain it were resisted by some equally persistent
force; and, letting it go, I was horrified at seeing
it swiftly drawn under the couch. At this
point I sat up, completely awake; for immediately
after, what seemed to be an exaggerated
muff began to emerge from under the couch.
Presently it appeared fully, dragging the serápe
after it. There was no mistaking it now: it
was a baby-bear, — a mere suckling, it was true,
a helpless roll of fat and fur, but unmistakably
a grizzly cub!

I cannot recall any thing more irresistibly
ludicrous than its aspect as it slowly raised its
small, wondering eyes to mine. It was so much
taller on its haunches than its shoulders, its
forelegs were so disproportionately small, that,
in walking, its hind-feet invariably took precedence.
It was perpetually pitching forward over
its pointed, inoffensive nose, and recovering itself
always, after these involuntary somersaults,

[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]

with the gravest astonishment. To add to its
preposterous appearance, one of its hind-feet
was adorned by a shoe of Sylvester's, into which
it had accidentally and inextricably stepped.
As this somewhat impeded its first impulse to
fly, it turned to me; and then, possibly recognizing
in the stranger the same species as its
master, it paused. Presently it slowly raised
itself on its hind-legs, and vaguely and deprecatingly
waved a baby-paw, fringed with little
hooks of steel. I took the paw, and shook it
gravely. From that moment we were friends.
The little affair of the serápe was forgotten.

Nevertheless, I was wise enough to cement
our friendship by an act of delicate courtesy.
Following the direction of his eyes, I had no
difficulty in finding on a shelf near the ridgepole
the sugar-box and the square lumps of
white sugar that even the poorest miner is
never without. While he was eating them, I had
time to examine him more closely. His body
was a silky, dark, but exquisitely-modulated
gray, deepening to black in his paws and muzzle.
His fur was excessively long, thick, and soft as
eider-down; the cushions of flesh beneath perfectly
infantine in their texture and contour.
He was so very young, that the palms of his
half-human feet were still tender as a baby's.
Except for the bright blue, steely hooks,

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

half-sheathed in his little toes, there was not a single
harsh outline or detail in his plump figure. He
was as free from angles as one of Leda's offspring.
Your caressing hand sank away in his
fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long
was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him
was a wild delirium; to embrace him, an utter
demoralization of the intellectual faculties.

When he had finished the sugar, he rolled
out of the door with a half-diffident, half-inviting
look in his eyes as if he expected me
to follow. I did so; but the sniffing and snorting
of the keen-scented Pomposo in the hollow
not only revealed the cause of his former terror,
but decided me to take another direction.
After a moment's hesitation, he concluded to go
with me, although I am satisfied, from a certain
impish look in his eye, that he fully understood
and rather enjoyed the fright of Pomposo. As
he rolled along at my side, with a gait not unlike
a drunken sailor, I discovered that his long
hair concealed a leather collar around his neck,
which bore for its legend the single word
“Baby!” I recalled the mysterious suggestion
of the two miners. This, then, was the “baby”
with whom I was to “play.”

How we “played;” how Baby allowed me
to roll him down hill, crawling and puffing up
again each time with perfect good-humor; how

[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]

he climbed a young sapling after my Panama
hat, which I had “shied” into one of the topmost
branches; how, after getting it, he refused
to descend until it suited his pleasure; how,
when he did come down, he persisted in
walking about on three legs, carrying my hat, a
crushed and shapeless mass, clasped to his breast
with the remaining one; how I missed him at
last, and finally discovered him seated on a
table in one of the tenantless cabins, with a
bottle of sirup between his paws, vainly
endeavoring to extract its contents, — these and
other details of that eventful day I shall not
weary the reader with now. Enough that, when
Dick Sylvester returned, I was pretty well
fagged out, and the baby was rolled up, an immense
bolster, at the foot of the couch, asleep.
Sylvester's first words after our greeting
were, —

“Isn't he delicious?”

“Perfectly. Where did you get him?”

“Lying under his dead mother, five miles
from here,” said Dick, lighting his pipe.
“Knocked her over at fifty yards: perfectly
clean shot; never moved afterwards. Baby
crawled out, scared, but unhurt. She must
have been carrying him in her mouth, and
dropped him when she faced me; for he wasn't
more than three days old, and not steady on his

[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]

pins. He takes the only milk that comes to the
settlement, brought up by Adams Express at
seven o'clock every morning. They say he
looks like me. Do you think so?” asked Dick
with perfect gravity, stroking his hay-colored
mustachios, and evidently assuming his best
expression.

I took leave of the baby early the next morning
in Sylvester's cabin, and, out of respect to
Pomposo's feelings, rode by without any postscript
of expression. But the night before I
had made Sylvester solemnly swear, that, in the
event of any separation between himself and
Baby, it should revert to me. “At the same
time,” he had added, “it's only fair to say that
I don't think of dying just yet, old fellow; and
I don't know of any thing else that would part
the cub and me.”

Two months after this conversation, as I was
turning over the morning's mail at my office in
San Francisco, I noticed a letter bearing Sylvester's
familiar hand. But it was post-marked
“Stockton,” and I opened it with some anxiety
at once. Its contents were as follows: —

“O Frank! — Don't you remember what we agreed
upon anent the baby? Well, consider me as dead for the
next six months, or gone where cubs can't follow me, —
East. I know you love the baby; but do you think, dear
boy, — now, really, do you think you could be a father

[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]

to it? Consider this well. You are young, thoughtless,
well-meaning enough; but dare you take upon yourself
the functions of guide, genius, or guardian to one so
young and guileless? Could you be the Mentor to this
Telemachus? Think of the temptations of a metropolis.
Look at the question well, and let me know speedily; for
I've got him as far as this place, and he's kicking up an
awful row in the hotel-yard, and rattling his chain like a
maniac. Let me know by telegraph at once.

I am afraid that my desire to possess myself
of Baby overcame all other considerations; and I
telegraphed an affirmative at once to Sylvester.
When I reached my lodgings late that afternoon,
my landlady was awaiting me with a
telegram. It was two lines from Sylvester, —

It was due, then, at one o'clock that night.

[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]

For a moment I was staggered at my own precipitation.
I had as yet made no preparations,
had said nothing to my landlady about her new
guest. I expected to arrange every thing in
time; and now, through Sylvester's indecent
haste, that time had been shortened twelve
hours.

Something, however, must be done at once.
I turned to Mrs. Brown. I had great reliance
in her maternal instincts: I had that still
greater reliance common to our sex in the
general tender-heartedness of pretty women.
But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a
feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject
with classical ease and lightness. I even said,
“If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown,
believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful
thing, what must” — But here I broke
down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition
of her sex, I saw at once was more occupied
with my manner than my speech. So I tried a
business brusquerie, and, placing the telegram
in her hand, said hurriedly, “We must do something
about this at once. It's perfectly absurd;
but he will be here at one to-night. Beg
thousand pardons; but business prevented my
speaking before” — and paused out of breath
and courage.

Mrs. Brown read the telegram gravely, lifted

[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]

her pretty eyebrows, turned the paper over, and
looked on the other side, and then, in a remote
and chilling voice, asked me if she understood
me to say that the mother was coming also.

“Oh, dear no!” I exclaimed with considerable
relief. “The mother is dead, you know. Sylvester,
that is my friend who sent this, shot
her when the baby was only three days old.”
But the expression of Mrs. Brown's face at this
moment was so alarming, that I saw that nothing
but the fullest explanation would save me.
Hastily, and I fear not very coherently, I told
her all.

She relaxed sweetly. She said I had frightened
her with my talk about lions. Indeed, I
think my picture of poor Baby, albeit a trifle
highly colored, touched her motherly heart.
She was even a little vexed at what she called
Sylvester's “hardheartedness.” Still I was not
without some apprehension. It was two months
since I had seen him; and Sylvester's vague
allusion to his “slinging an ugly left” pained
me. I looked at sympathetic little Mrs. Brown;
and the thought of Watson's pups covered me
with guilty confusion.

Mrs. Brown had agreed to sit up with me
until he arrived. One o'clock came, but no
Baby. Two o'clock, three o'clock, passed. It
was almost four when there was a wild clatter

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

of horses' hoofs outside, and with a jerk a
wagon stopped at the door. In an instant I
had opened it, and confronted a stranger. Almost
at the same moment, the horses attempted
to run away with the wagon.

The stranger's appearance was, to say the
least, disconcerting. His clothes were badly
torn and frayed; his linen sack hung from his
shoulders like a herald's apron; one of his
hands was bandaged; his face scratched; and
there was no hat on his dishevelled head. To
add to the general effect, he had evidently
sought relief from his woes in drink; and he
swayed from side to side as he clung to the
door-handle, and, in a very thick voice, stated
that he had “suthin” for me outside. When
he had finished, the horses made another plunge.

Mrs. Brown thought they must be frightened
at something.

“Frightened!” laughed the stranger with
bitter irony. “Oh, no! Hossish ain't frightened!
On'y ran away four timesh comin' here. Oh,
no! Nobody's frightened. Every thin's all ri'.
Ain't it, Bill?” he said, addressing the driver.
“On'y been overboard twish; knocked down a
hatchway once. Thash nothin'! On'y two
men unner doctor's han's at Stockton. Thash
nothin'! Six hunner dollarsh cover all dammish.”

[figure description] Page 187.[end figure description]

I was too much disheartened to reply, but
moved toward the wagon. The stranger eyed
me with an astonishment that almost sobered
him.

“Do you reckon to tackle that animile yourself?”
he asked, as he surveyed me from head
to foot.

I did not speak, but, with an appearance of
boldness I was far from feeling, walked to the
wagon, and called “Baby!”

“All ri'. Cash loose them straps, Bill, and
stan' clear.”

The straps were cut loose; and Baby, the remorseless,
the terrible, quietly tumbled to the
ground, and, rolling to my side, rubbed his
foolish head against me.

I think the astonishment of the two men was
beyond any vocal expression. Without a word,
the drunken stranger got into the wagon, and
drove away.

And Baby? He had grown, it is true, a trifle
larger; but he was thin, and bore the marks
of evident ill usage. His beautiful coat was
matted and unkempt; and his claws, those
bright steel hooks, had been ruthlessly pared to
the quick. His eyes were furtive and restless;
and the old expression of stupid good humor
had changed to one of intelligent distrust. His
intercourse with mankind had evidently

[figure description] Page 188.[end figure description]

quickened his intellect, without broadening his moral
nature.

I had great difficulty in keeping Mrs. Brown
from smothering him in blankets, and ruining
his digestion with the delicacies of her larder;
but I at last got him completely rolled up in
the corner of my room, and asleep. I lay awake
some time later with plans for his future. I
finally determined to take him to Oakland —
where I had built a little cottage, and always
spent my Sundays — the very next day. And
in the midst of a rosy picture of domestic
felicity, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was broad day. My eyes
at once sought the corner where Baby had
been lying; but he was gone. I sprang from
the bed, looked under it, searched the closet,
but in vain. The door was still locked; but
there were the marks of his blunted claws upon
the sill of the window that I had forgotten to
close. He had evidently escaped that way.
But where? The window opened upon a
balcony, to which the only other entrance was
through the hall. He must be still in the
house.

My hand was already upon the bell-rope; but
I stayed it in time. If he had not made himself
known, why should I disturb the house? I
dressed myself hurriedly, and slipped into the

[figure description] Page 189.[end figure description]

hall. The first object that met my eyes was a
boot lying upon the stairs. It bore the marks
of Baby's teeth; and, as I looked along the hall,
I saw too plainly that the usual array of freshlyblackened
boots and shoes before the lodgers'
doors was not there. As I ascended the stairs,
I found another, but with the blacking carefully
licked off. On the third floor were two
or three more boots, slightly mouthed; but at
this point Baby's taste for blacking had evidently
palled. A little farther on was a ladder,
leading to an open scuttle. I mounted the
ladder, and reached the flat roof, that formed a
continuous level over the row of houses to the
corner of the street. Behind the chimney on
the very last roof, something was lurking. It
was the fugitive Baby. He was covered with
dust and dirt and fragments of glass. But he
was sitting on his hind-legs, and was eating an
enormous slab of peanut candy, with a look of
mingled guilt and infinite satisfaction. He
even, I fancied, slightly stroked his stomach
with his disengaged fore-paw as I approached.
He knew that I was looking for him; and the
expression of his eye said plainly, “The past,
at least, is secure.”

I hurried him, with the evidences of his
guilt, back to the scuttle, and descended on
tiptoe to the floor beneath. Providence favored

[figure description] Page 190.[end figure description]

us: I met no one on the stairs; and his own
cushioned tread was inaudible. I think he was
conscious of the dangers of detection; for he
even forebore to breathe, or much less chew the
last mouthful he had taken; and he skulked
at my side with the sirup dropping from his
motionless jaws. I think he would have silently
choked to death just then, for my sake; and
it was not until I had reached my room again,
and threw myself panting on the sofa, that I
saw how near strangulation he had been. He
gulped once or twice apologetically, and then
walked to the corner of his own accord, and
rolled himself up like an immense sugarplum,
sweating remorse and treacle at every pore.

I locked him in when I went to breakfast,
when I found Mrs. Brown's lodgers in a state
of intense excitement over certain mysterious
events of the night before, and the dreadful
revelations of the morning. It appeared that
burglars had entered the block from the scuttles;
that, being suddenly alarmed, they had
quitted our house without committing any
depredation, dropping even the boots they had
collected in the halls; but that a desperate
attempt had been made to force the till in the
confectioner's shop on the corner, and that the
glass show-cases had been ruthlessly smashed.
A courageous servant in No. 4 had seen a

[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]

masked burglar, on his hands and knees, attempting
to enter their scuttle; but, on her
shouting, “Away wid yees!” he instantly fled.

I sat through this recital with cheeks that
burned uncomfortably; nor was I the less
embarrassed, on raising my eyes, to meet Mrs.
Brown's fixed curiously and mischievously on
mine. As soon as I could make my escape
from the table, I did so, and, running rapidly
up stairs, sought refuge from any possible
inquiry in my own room. Baby was still
asleep in the corner. It would not be safe to
remove him until the lodgers had gone down
town; and I was revolving in my mind the
expediency of keeping him until night veiled
his obtrusive eccentricity from the public eye,
when there came a cautious tap at my door.
I opened it. Mrs. Brown slipped in quietly,
closed the door softly, stood with her back
against it, and her hand on the knob, and beckoned
me mysteriously towards her. Then she
asked in a low voice, —

“Is hair-dye poisonous?”

I was too confounded to speak.

“Oh, do! you know what I mean,” she said
impatiently. “This stuff.” She produced suddenly
from behind her a bottle with a Greek
label so long as to run two or three times
spirally around it from top to bottom. “He

[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

says it isn't a dye: it's a vegetable preparation,
for invigorating” —

“Who says?” I asked despairingly.

“Why, Mr. Parker, of course!” said Mrs.
Brown severely, with the air of having repeated
the name a great many times, — “the
old gentleman in the room above. The simple
question I want to ask,” she continued with
the calm manner of one who has just convicted
another of gross ambiguity of language, “is
only this: If some of this stuff were put in a
saucer, and left carelessly on the table, and a
child, or a baby, or a cat, or any young animal,
should come in at the window, and drink it up,—
a whole saucer full, — because it had a sweet
taste, would it be likely to hurt them?”

I cast an anxious glance at Baby, sleeping
peacefully in the corner, and a very grateful
one at Mrs. Brown, and said I didn't think it
would.

“Because,” said Mrs. Brown loftily as she
opened the door, “I thought, if it was poisonous,
remedies might be used in time. Because,”
she added suddenly, abandoning her lofty manner,
and wildly rushing to the corner with a
frantic embrace of the unconscious Baby,
“because, if any nasty stuff should turn its
booful hair a horrid green, or a naughty pink, it
would break its own muzzer's heart, it would!”

[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]

But, before I could assure Mrs. Brown of the
inefficiency of hair-dye as an internal application,
she had darted from the room.

That night, with the secrecy of defaulters,
Baby and I decamped from Mrs. Brown's. Distrusting
the too emotional nature of that noble
animal, the horse, I had recourse to a handcart,
drawn by a stout Irishman, to convey my
charge to the ferry. Even then, Baby refused
to go, unless I walked by the cart, and at times
rode in it.

“I wish,” said Mrs. Brown, as she stood by
the door, wrapped in an immense shawl, and
saw us depart, “I wish it looked less solemn, —
less like a pauper's funeral.”

I must admit, that, as I walked by the cart
that night, I felt very much as if I were accompanying
the remains of some humble friend to
his last resting-place; and that, when I was
obliged to ride in it, I never could entirely convince
myself that I was not helplessly overcome
by liquor, or the victim of an accident, en route
to the hospital. But at last we reached the
ferry. On the boat, I think no one discovered
Baby, except a drunken man, who approached
me to ask for a light for his cigar, but who
suddenly dropped it, and fled in dismay to the
gentlemen's cabin, where his incoherent ravings
were luckily taken for the earlier indications of
delirium tremens.

[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]

It was nearly midnight when I reached my
little cottage on the outskirts of Oakland; and
it was with a feeling of relief and security that
I entered, locked the door, and turned him
loose in the hall, satisfied that henceforward
his depredations would be limited to my own
property. He was very quiet that night; and
after he had tried to mount the hat-rack, under
the mistaken impression that it was intended
for his own gymnastic exercise, and knocked
all the hats off, he went peaceably to sleep on
the rug.

In a week, with the exercise afforded him by
the run of a large, carefully-boarded enclosure,
he recovered his health, strength, spirits, and
much of his former beauty. His presence was
unknown to my neighbors, although it was
noticeable that horses invariably “shied” in
passing to the windward of my house, and that
the baker and milkman had great difficulty in
the delivery of their wares in the morning, and
indulged in unseemly and unnecessary profanity
in so doing.

At the end of the week, I determined to invite
a few friends to see the Baby, and to that purpose
wrote a number of formal invitations.
After descanting, at some length, on the great
expense and danger attending his capture and
training, I offered a programme of the

[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]

performance, of the “Infant Phenomenon of Sierran
Solitudes,” drawn up into the highest professional
profusion of alliteration and capital letters.
A few extracts will give the reader some
idea of his educational progress: —

The morning of the exhibition came; but
an hour before the performance the wretched
Baby was missing. The Chinese cook could
not indicate his whereabouts. I searched the
premises thoroughly; and then, in despair,
took my hat, and hurried out into the narrow
lane that led toward the open fields and the
woods beyond. But I found no trace nor track
of Baby Sylvester. I returned, after an hour's
fruitless search, to find my guests already
assembled on the rear veranda. I briefly recounted
my disappointment, my probable loss,
and begged their assistance.

[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]

“Why,” said a Spanish friend, who prided
himself on his accurate knowledge of English,
to Barker, who seemed to be trying vainly to
rise from his reclining position on the veranda,
“why do you not disengage yourself from the
veranda of our friend? And why, in the
name of Heaven, do you attach to yourself so
much of this thing, and make to yourself such
unnecessary contortion? Ah,” he continued,
suddenly withdrawing one of his own feet from
the veranda with an evident effort, “I am
myself attached! Surely it is something here!”

It evidently was. My guests were all rising
with difficulty. The floor of the veranda was
covered with some glutinous substance. It
was — sirup!

I saw it all in a flash. I ran to the barn.
The keg of “golden sirup,” purchased only the
day before, lay empty upon the floor. There
were sticky tracks all over the enclosure, but
still no Baby.

“There's something moving the ground over
there by that pile of dirt,” said Barker.

He was right. The earth was shaking in one
corner of the enclosure like an earthquake. I
approached cautiously. I saw, what I had not
before noticed, that the ground was thrown
up; and there, in the middle of an immense
grave-like cavity, crouched Baby Sylvester, still

[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]

digging, and slowly but surely sinking from
sight in a mass of dust and clay.

What were his intentions? Whether he was
stung by remorse, and wished to hide himself
from my reproachful eyes, or whether he was
simply trying to dry his sirup-besmeared coat,
I never shall know; for that day, alas! was his
last with me.

He was pumped upon for two hours, at the
end of which time he still yielded a thin
treacle. He was then taken, and carefully
inwrapped in blankets, and locked up in the
store-room. The next morning he was gone!
The lower portion of the window sash and pane
were gone too. His successful experiments on
the fragile texture of glass at the confectioner's,
on the first day of his entrance to civilization,
had not been lost upon him. His first essay at
combining cause and effect ended in his escape.

Where he went, where he hid, who captured
him, if he did not succeed in reaching the foothills
beyond Oakland, even the offer of a large
reward, backed by the efforts of an intelligent
police, could not discover. I never saw him
again from that day until —

Did I see him? I was in a horse-car on
Sixth Avenue, a few days ago, when the horses
suddenly became unmanageable, and left the
track for the sidewalk, amid the oaths and

[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]

execrations of the driver. Immediately in front
of the car a crowd had gathered around two
performing bears and a showman. One of the
animals, thin, emaciated, and the mere wreck
of his native strength, attracted my attention.
I endeavored to attract his. He turned a pair
of bleared, sightless eyes in my direction; but
there was no sign of recognition. I leaned
from the car-window, and called softly, “Baby!”
But he did not heed. I closed the window.
The car was just moving on, when he suddenly
turned, and, either by accident or design, thrust
a callous paw through the glass.

“It's worth a dollar and half to put in a new
pane,” said the conductor, “if folks will play
with bears!” —

p572-208 AN EPISODE OF FIDDLETOWN.

[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]

IN 1858 Fiddletown considered her a very
pretty woman. She had a quantity of light
chestnut hair, a good figure, a dazzling complexion,
and a certain languid grace which passed
easily for gentlewomanliness. She always dressed
becomingly, and in what Fiddletown accepted
as the latest fashion. She had only two blemishes:
one of her velvety eyes, when examined
closely, had a slight cast; and her left cheek
bore a small scar left by a single drop of vitriol—
happily the only drop of an entire phial —
thrown upon her by one of her own jealous sex,
that reached the pretty face it was intended to
mar. But, when the observer had studied the
eyes sufficiently to notice this defect, he was
generally incapacitated for criticism; and even
the scar on her cheek was thought by some to
add piquancy to her smile. The youthful editor
of “The Fiddletown Avalanche” had said
privately that it was “an exaggerated dimple.”
Col. Starbottle was instantly “reminded of the
beautifying patches of the days of Queen Anne,

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

but more particularly, sir, of the blankest beautiful
women, that, blank you, you ever laid your
two blank eyes upon, — a Creole woman, sir, in
New Orleans. And this woman had a scar, — a
line extending, blank me, from her eye to her
blank chin. And this woman, sir, thrilled you,
sir; maddened you, sir; absolutely sent your
blank soul to perdition with her blank fascination!
And one day I said to her, `Celeste, how
in blank did you come by that beautiful scar,
blank you?' And she said to me, `Star, there
isn't another white man that I'd confide in but
you; but I made that scar myself, purposely, I
did, blank me.' These were her very words,
sir, and perhaps you think it a blank lie, sir;
but I'll put up any blank sum you can name
and prove it, blank me.”

Indeed, most of the male population of Fiddletown
were or had been in love with her. Of
this number, about one-half believed that their
love was returned, with the exception, possibly,
of her own husband. He alone had been known
to express scepticism.

The name of the gentleman who enjoyed this
infelicitous distinction was Tretherick. He had
been divorced from an excellent wife to marry
this Fiddletown enchantress. She, also, had been
divorced; but it was hinted that some previous
experiences of hers in that legal formality had

[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]

made it perhaps less novel, and probably less
sacrificial. I would not have it inferred from
this that she was deficient in sentiment, or
devoid of its highest moral expression. Her
intimate friend had written (on the occasion of
her second divorce), “The cold world does not
understand Clara yet;” and Col. Starbottle had
remarked blankly, that with the exception of
a single woman in Opelousas Parish, La., she
had more soul than the whole caboodle of
them put together. Few indeed could read
those lines entitled “Infelissimus,” commencing,
“Why waves no cypress o'er this brow?” originally
published in “The Avalanche,” over the
signature of “The Lady Clare,” without feeling
the tear of sensibility tremble on his eyelids, or
the glow of virtuous indignation mantle his
cheek, at the low brutality and pitiable jocularity
of “The Dutch Flat Intelligencer,” which the
next week had suggested the exotic character
of the cypress, and its entire absence from Fiddletown,
as a reasonable answer to the query.

Indeed, it was this tendency to elaborate her
feelings in a metrical manner, and deliver them
to the cold world through the medium of the
newspapers, that first attracted the attention of
Tretherick. Several poems descriptive of the
effects of California scenery upon a too sensitive
soul, and of the vague yearnings for the infinite,

[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]

which an enforced study of the heartlessness of
California society produced in the poetic breast,
impressed Mr. Tretherick, who was then driving
a six-mule freight-wagon between Knight's
Ferry and Stockton, to seek out the unknown
poetess. Mr. Tretherick was himself dimly
conscious of a certain hidden sentiment in his
own nature; and it is possible that some reflections
on the vanity of his pursuit, — he supplied
several mining-camps with whiskey and tobacco,—
in conjunction with the dreariness of the
dusty plain on which he habitually drove, may
have touched some chord in sympathy with this
sensitive woman. Howbeit, after a brief courtship, —
as brief as was consistent with some
previous legal formalities, — they were married;
and Mr. Tretherick brought his blushing bride
to Fiddletown, or “Fidéletown,” as Mrs. Tretherick
preferred to call it in her poems.

The union was not a felicitous one. It was
not long before Mr. Tretherick discovered that
the sentiment he had fostered while freighting
between Stockton and Knight's Ferry was different
from that which his wife had evolved from
the contemplation of California scenery and
her own soul. Being a man of imperfect logic,
this caused him to beat her; and she, being
equally faulty in deduction, was impelled to a
certain degree of unfaithfulness on the same

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premise. Then Mr. Tretherick began to drink,
and Mrs. Tretherick to contribute regularly to
the columns of “The Avalanche.” It was at
this time that Col. Starbottle discovered a similarity
in Mrs. Tretherick's verse to the genius
of Sappho, and pointed it out to the citizens of
Fiddletown in a two-columned criticism, signed
“A. S.,” also published in “The Avalanche,”
and supported by extensive quotation. As
“The Avalanche” did not possess a font of
Greek type, the editor was obliged to reproduce
the Leucadian numbers in the ordinary Roman
letter, to the intense disgust of Col. Starbottle,
and the vast delight of Fiddletown, who saw fit
to accept the text as an excellent imitation of
Choctaw, — a language with which the colonel,
as a whilom resident of the Indian Territories,
was supposed to be familiar. Indeed, the next
week's “Intelligencer” contained some vile
doggerel, supposed to be an answer to Mrs.
Tretherick's poem, ostensibly written by the
wife of a Digger Indian chief, accompanied by
a glowing eulogium, signed “A. S. S.”

The result of this jocularity was briefly given
in a later copy of “The Avalanche.” “An unfortunate
rencounter took place on Monday last,
between the Hon. Jackson Flash of “The Dutch
Flat Intelligencer” and the well-known Col.
Starbottle of this place, in front of the Eureka

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Saloon. Two shots were fired by the parties
without injury to either, although it is said that
a passing Chinaman received fifteen buckshot in
the calves of his legs from the colonel's double-barrelled
shot-gun, which were not intended
for him. John will learn to keep out of the
way of Melican man's fire-arms hereafter. The
cause of the affray is not known, although it is
hinted that there is a lady in the case. The
rumor that points to a well-known and beautiful
poetess whose lucubrations have often graced
our columns seems to gain credence from those
that are posted.”

Meanwhile the passiveness displayed by Tretherick
under these trying circumstances was
fully appreciated in the gulches. “The old
man's head is level,” said one long-booted philosopher.
“Ef the colonel kills Flash, Mrs.
Tretherick is avenged: if Flash drops the colonel,
Tretherick is all right. Either way, he's
got a sure thing.” During this delicate condition
of affairs, Mrs. Tretherick one day left her
husband's home, and took refuge at the Fiddletown
Hotel, with only the clothes she had on
her back. Here she staid for several weeks,
during which period it is only justice to say
that she bore herself with the strictest propriety.

It was a clear morning in early spring that

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Mrs. Tretherick, unattended, left the hotel, and
walked down the narrow street toward the
fringe of dark pines which indicated the extreme
limits of Fiddletown. The few loungers at
that early hour were pre-occupied with the
departure of the Wingdown coach at the other
extremity of the street; and Mrs. Tretherick
reached the suburbs of the settlement without
discomposing observation. Here she took a
cross street or road, running at right angles with
the main thoroughfare of Fiddletown, and passing
through a belt of woodland. It was evidently
the exclusive and aristocratic avenue of
the town. The dwellings were few, ambitious,
and uninterrupted by shops. And here she was
joined by Col. Starbottle.

The gallant colonel, notwithstanding that he
bore the swelling port which usually distinguished
him, that his coat was tightly buttoned,
and his boots tightly fitting, and that his cane,
hooked over his arm, swung jauntily, was not
entirely at his ease. Mrs. Tretherick, however,
vouchasafed him a gracious smile and a glance
of her dangerous eyes; and the colonel, with an
embarrassed cough and a slight strut, took his
place at her side.

“The coast is clear,” said the colonel, “and
Tretherick is over at Dutch Flat on a spree.
There is no one in the house but a Chinaman;

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and you need fear no trouble from him. I,” he
continued, with a slight inflation of the chest
that imperilled the security of his button, “I
will see that you are protected in the removal
of your property.”

“I'm sure it's very kind of you, and so disinterested!”
simpered the lady as they walked
along. “It's so pleasant to meet some one who
has soul, — some one to sympathize with in a
community so hardened and heartless as this.”
And Mrs. Tretherick cast down her eyes, but
not until they wrought their perfect and accepted
work upon her companion.

“Yes, certainly, of course,” said the colonel,
glancing nervously up and down the street, —
“yes, certainly.” Perceiving, however, that
there was no one in sight or hearing, he proceeded
at once to inform Mrs. Tretherick that
the great trouble of his life, in fact, had been
the possession of too much soul. That many
women — as a gentleman she would excuse
him, of course, from mentioning names — but
many beautiful women had often sought his
society, but being deficient, madam, absolutely
deficient, in this quality, he could not reciprocate.
But when two natures thoroughly in
sympathy, despising alike the sordid trammels
of a low and vulgar community, and the conventional
restraints of a hypocritical society, —

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when two souls in perfect accord met and
mingled in poetical union, then — but here the
colonel's speech, which had been remarkable for a
certain whiskey-and-watery fluency, grew husky,
almost inaudible, and decidedly incoherent.
Possibly Mrs. Tretherick may have heard something
like it before, and was enabled to fill the
hiatus. Nevertheless, the cheek that was on
the side of the colonel was quite virginal and
bashfully conscious until they reached their
destination.

It was a pretty little cottage, quite fresh and
warm with paint, very pleasantly relieved
against a platoon of pines, some of whose foremost
files had been displaced to give freedom
to the fenced enclosure in which it sat. In the
vivid sunlight and perfect silence, it had a new,
uninhabited look, as if the carpenters and
painters had just left it. At the farther end of
the lot, a Chinaman was stolidly digging; but
there was no other sign of occupancy. “The
coast,” as the colonel had said, was indeed
“clear.” Mrs. Tretherick paused at the gate.
The colonel would have entered with her, but
was stopped by a gesture. “Come for me in a
couple of hours, and I shall have every thing
packed,” she said, as she smiled, and extended
her hand. The colonel seized and pressed it
with great fervor. Perhaps the pressure was

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