A month had pa.s.sed, when one morning he received a small package by post. The address was in a handwriting unknown to him, but opening the parcel he was surprised to find only a handkerchief neatly folded.
Examining it closely, he found it was his own,--the one he had given her, the rent made by her uncle"s bullet so ingeniously and delicately mended as to almost simulate embroidery. The joy that suddenly filled him at this proof of her remembrance showed him too plainly how hollow had been his cynicism and how lasting his hope! Turning over the wrapper eagerly, he discovered what he had at first thought was some business card. It was, indeed, printed and not engraved, in some common newspaper type, and bore the address, "Hiram Tarbox, Land and Timber Agent, 1101 California Street." He again examined the parcel; there was nothing else,--not a line from HER! But it was a clue at last, and she had not forgotten him! He seized his hat, and ten minutes later was breasting the steep sand hill into which California Street in those days plunged, and again emerged at its crest, with a few struggling houses.
But when he reached the summit he could see that the outline of the street was still plainly marked along the distance by cottages and new suburban villa-like blocks of houses. No. 1101 was in one of these blocks, a small tenement enough, but a palace compared to Mr. Tarbox"s Sierran cabin. He impetuously rang the bell, and without waiting to be announced dashed into the little drawing-room and Mr. Tarbox"s presence.
That had changed too; Mr. Tarbox was arrayed in a suit of clothes as new, as cheaply decorative, as fresh and, apparently, as damp as his own drawing room.
"Did you get my letter? Did you give her the one I inclosed? Why didn"t you answer?" burst out Brice, after his first breathless greeting.
Mr. Tarbox"s face here changed so suddenly into his old dejected doggedness that Brice could have imagined himself back in the Sierran cabin. The man straightened and bowed himself at Brice"s questions, and then replied with bold, deliberate emphasis:
"Yes, I DID get your letter. I DIDN"T give no letter o" yours to her.
And I didn"t answer your letter BEFORE, for I didn"t propose to answer it AT ALL."
"Why?" demanded Brice indignantly.
"I didn"t give her your letter because I didn"t kalkilate to be any go-between "twixt you and Snapshot Harry"s niece. Look yar, Mr. Brice.
Sense I read that "ar paragraph in that paper you gave me, I allowed to myself that it wasn"t the square thing for me to have any more doin"s with him, and I quit it. I jest chucked your letter in the fire. I didn"t answer you because I reckoned I"d no call to correspond with ye, and when I showed ye that trail over to Harry"s camp, it was ended. I"ve got a house and business to look arter, and it don"t jibe with keepin"
company with "road agents." That"s what I got outer that paper you gave me, Mr. Brice."
Rage and disgust filled Brice at the man"s utter selfishness and shameless desertion of his kindred, none the less powerfully that he remembered the part he himself had played in concocting the paragraph.
"Do you mean to say," he demanded pa.s.sionately, "that for the sake of that foolish paragraph you gave up your own kindred? That you truckled to the mean prejudices of your neighbors and kept that poor, defenseless girl from the only honest roof she could find refuge under? That you dared to destroy my letter to her, and made her believe I was as selfish and ungrateful as yourself?"
"Young feller," said Mr. Tarbox still more deliberately, yet with a certain dignity that Brice had never noticed before, "what"s between you and Flo, and what rights she has fer thinkin" ye "ez selfish" and "ez ongrateful" ez me--ef she does, I dunno!--but when ye talk o" me givin"
up my kindred, and sling such hogwash ez "ongrateful" and "selfish"
round this yer sittin"-room, mebbe it mout occur to ye that Harry Dimwood might hev HIS opinion o" what was "ongrateful" and "selfish" ef I"d played in between his niece and a young man o" the express company, his nat"ral enemy. It"s one thing to hev helped ye to see her in her uncle"s own camp, but another to help ye by makin" a clandecent post-offis o" my cabin. Ef, instead o" writin", you"d hev posted yourself by comin" to me, you mout hev found out that when I broke with Harry I offered to take Flo with me for good and all--ef he"d keep away from us. And that"s the kind o" "honest roof" that that thar "poor defenseless girl" got under when her crippled mother died three weeks ago, and left Harry free. It was by "trucklin"" to them "mean prejudices," and readin" that thar "foolish paragraph," that I settled this thing then and thar!"
Brice"s revulsion of sentiment was so complete, and the grat.i.tude that beamed in his eyes was so sincere, that Mr. Tarbox hardly needed the profuse apologies which broke from him. "Forgive me!" he continued to stammer, "I have wronged you, wronged HER--everybody. But as you know, Mr. Tarbox, how I have felt over this, how deeply--how pa.s.sionately"--
"It DOES make a man loony sometimes," said Mr. Tarbox, relaxing into demure dryness again, "so I reckon you DID! Mebbe she reckoned so, too, for she asked me to give you the handkercher I sent ye. It looked as if she"d bin doin" some fancy work on it."
Brice glanced quickly at Mr. Tarbox"s face. It was stolid and imperturbable. She had evidently kept the secret of what pa.s.sed in the hollow to herself. For the first time he looked around the room curiously. "I didn"t know you were a land agent before," he said.
"No more I was! All that kem out o" that paragraph, Mr. Brice. That man Heckshill, who was so mighty perlite that night, wrote to me afterwards that he didn"t know my name till he"d seed that paragraph, and he wanted to know ef, ez a "well-known citizen," I could recommend him some timber lands. I recommended him half o" my own quarter section, and he took it.
He"s puttin" up a mill thar, and that"s another reason why we want peace and quietness up thar. I"m tryin" (betwixt and between us, Mr. Brice) to get Harry to cl"ar out and sell his rights in the valley and the water power on the Fork to Heckshill and me. I"m opening a business here."
"Then you"ve left Mrs. Tarbox with Miss Flora in your cabin while you attend to business here," said Brice tentatively.
"Not exactly, Mr. Brice. The old woman thought it a good chance to come to "Frisco and put Flo in one o" them Catholic convent schools--that asks no questions whar the raw logs come from, and turns "em out first-cla.s.s plank all round. You foller me, Mr. Brice? But Mrs. Tarbox is jest in the next room, and would admire to tell ye all this--and I"ll go in and send her to you." And with a patronizing wave of the hand, Mr.
Tarbox complacently disappeared in the hall.
Mr. Brice was not sorry to be left to himself in his utter bewilderment!
Flo, separated from her detrimental uncle, and placed in a convent school! Tarbox, the obscure pioneer, a shrewd speculator emerging into success, and taking the uncle"s place! And all this within that month which he had wasted with absurd repinings. How feeble seemed his own adventure and advancement; how even ludicrous his pretensions to any patronage and superiority. How this common backwoodsman had set him in his place as easily as SHE had evaded the advances of the journalist and Heckshill! They had taught him a lesson; perhaps even the sending back of his handkerchief was part of it! His heart grew heavy; he walked to the window and gazed out with a long sigh.
A light laugh, that might have been an echo of the one which had attracted him that night in Tarbox"s cabin, fell upon his ear. He turned quickly to meet Flora Dimwood"s laughing eyes shining upon him as she stood in the doorway.
Many a time during that month he had thought of this meeting--had imagined what it would be like--what would be his manner towards her--what would be her greeting, and what they would say. He would be cold, gentle, formal, gallant, gay, sad, trustful, reproachful, even as the moods in which he thought of her came to his foolish brain. He would always begin with respectful seriousness, or a frankness equal to her own, but never, never again would he offend as he had offended under the buckeyes! And now, with her pretty face shining upon him, all his plans, his speeches, his preparations vanished, and left him dumb. Yet he moved towards her with a brief articulate something on his lips,--something between a laugh and a sigh,--but that really was a kiss, and--in point of fact--promptly folded her in his arms.
Yet it was certainly direct, and perhaps the best that could be done, for the young lady did not emerge from it as coolly, as unemotionally, nor possibly as quickly as she had under the shade of the buckeyes. But she persuaded him--by still holding his hand--to sit beside her on the chilly, highly varnished "green rep" sofa, albeit to him it was a bank in a bower of enchantment. Then she said, with adorable reproachfulness, "You don"t ask what I did with the body."
Mr. Edward Brice started. He was young, and unfamiliar with the evasive expansiveness of the female mind at such supreme moments.
"The body--oh, yes--certainly."
"I buried it myself--it was suthin too awful!--and the gang would have been sure to have found it, and the empty belt. I burned THAT. So that n.o.body knows nothin"."
It was not a time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am afraid that the girl"s characteristically familiar speech, even when pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent, endeared her the more to him. And when she said, "And now, Mr. Edward Brice, sit over at that end of the sofy and let"s talk," they talked.
They talked for an hour, more or less continuously, until they were surprised by a discreet cough and the entrance of Mrs. Tarbox. Then there was more talk, and the discovery that Mr. Brice was long due at the office.
"Ye might drop in, now and then, whenever ye feel like it, and Flo is at home," suggested Mrs. Tarbox at parting.
Mr. Brice DID drop in frequently during the next month. On one of these occasions Mr. Tarbox accompanied him to the door. "And now--ez everything is settled and in order, Mr. Brice, and ef you should be wantin" to say anything about it to your bosses at the office, ye may mention MY name ez Flo Dimwood"s second cousin, and say I"m a depositor in their bank. And," with greater deliberation, "ef anything at any time should be thrown up at ye for marryin" a niece o" Snapshot Harry"s, ye might mention, keerless like, that Snapshot Harry, under the name o"
Henry J. Dimwood, has held shares in their old bank for years!"
A TREASURE OF THE REDWOODS
PART I
Mr. Jack Fleming stopped suddenly before a lifeless and decaying redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the very tree he had pa.s.sed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those lost in the woods.
There was no mistaking the tree, with its one broken branch which depended at an angle like the arm of a semaph.o.r.e; nor did it relieve his mind to reflect that his mishap was partly due to his own foolish abstraction. He was returning to camp from a neighboring mining town, and while indulging in the usual day-dreams of a youthful prospector, had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and invested the gloom with a profound silence.
As he stood for a moment or two, irresolute, his ear, by this time attuned to the stillness, caught the faint but distinct lap and trickle of water. He was hot and thirsty, and turned instinctively in that direction. A very few paces brought him to a fallen tree; at the foot of its upturned roots gurgled the spring whose upwelling stream had slowly but persistently loosened their hold on the soil, and worked their ruin.
A pool of cool and clear water, formed by the disruption of the soil, overflowed, and after a few yards sank again in the sodden floor.
As he drank and bathed his head and hands in this sylvan basin, he noticed the white glitter of a quartz ledge in its depths, and was considerably surprised and relieved to find, hard by, an actual outcrop of that rock through the thick carpet of bark and dust. This betokened that he was near the edge of the forest or some rocky opening. He fancied that the light grew clearer beyond, and the presence of a few fronds of ferns confirmed him in the belief that he was approaching a different belt of vegetation. Presently he saw the vertical beams of the sun again piercing the opening in the distance. With this prospect of speedy deliverance from the forest at last secure, he did not hurry forward, but on the contrary coolly retraced his footsteps to the spring again. The fact was that the instincts and hopes of the prospector were strongly dominant in him, and having noticed the quartz ledge and the contiguous outcrop, he determined to examine them more closely. He had still time to find his way home, and it might not be so easy to penetrate the wilderness again. Unfortunately, he had neither pick, pan, nor shovel with him, but a very cursory displacement of the soil around the spring and at the outcrop with his hands showed him the usual red soil and decomposed quartz which const.i.tuted an "indication." Yet none knew better than himself how disappointing and illusive its results often were, and he regretted that he had not a pan to enable him to test the soil by washing it at the spring. If there were only a miner"s cabin handy, he could easily borrow what he wanted. It was just the usual luck,--"the things a man sees when he hasn"t his gun with him!"
He turned impatiently away again in the direction of the opening. When he reached it, he found himself on a rocky hillside sloping toward a small green valley. A light smoke curled above a clump of willows; it was from the chimney of a low dwelling, but a second glance told him that it was no miner"s cabin. There was a larger clearing around the house, and some rude attempt at cultivation in a roughly fenced area.
Nevertheless, he determined to try his luck in borrowing a pick and pan there; at the worst he could inquire his way to the main road again.
A hurried scramble down the hill brought him to the dwelling,--a rambling addition of sheds to the usual log cabin. But he was surprised to find that its exterior, and indeed the palings of the fence around it, were covered with the stretched and drying skins of animals. The pelts of bear, panther, wolf, and fox were intermingled with squirrel and wildcat skins, and the displayed wings of eagle, hawk, and kingfisher. There was no trail leading to or from the cabin; it seemed to have been lost in this opening of the encompa.s.sing woods and left alone and solitary.
The barking of a couple of tethered hounds at last brought a figure to the door of the nearest lean-to shed. It seemed to be that of a young girl, but it was clad in garments so ridiculously large and disproportionate that it was difficult to tell her precise age. A calico dress was pinned up at the skirt, and tightly girt at the waist by an ap.r.o.n--so long that one corner had to be tucked in at the ap.r.o.n string diagonally, to keep the wearer from treading on it. An enormous sunbonnet of yellow nankeen completely concealed her head and face, but allowed two knotted and twisted brown tails of hair to escape under its frilled cape behind. She was evidently engaged in some culinary work, and still held a large tin basin or pan she had been cleaning clasped to her breast.
Fleming"s eye glanced at it covetously, ignoring the figure behind it.
But he was diplomatic.
"I have lost my way in the woods. Can you tell me in what direction the main road lies?"
She pointed a small red hand apparently in the direction he had come.
"Straight over thar--across the hill."
Fleming sighed. He had been making a circuit of the forest instead of going through it--and this open s.p.a.ce containing the cabin was on a remote outskirt!
"How far is it to the road?" he asked.