In Exile

and Other Stories

by

Mary Hallock Foote

CONTENTS. 

IN EXILE

FRIEND BARTON'S "CONCERN"

THE STORY OF THE ALCÁZAR

A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN

THE RAPTURE OF HETTY

THE WATCHMAN

IN EXILE

I. 

Nicky Dyer and the schoolmistress sat upon the slope of a hill, one of alow range overlooking an arid Californian valley. These sunburnt slopeswere traversed by many narrow footpaths, descending, ascending, windingamong the tangle of poison-oak and wild-rose bushes, leading from theminers' cabins to the shaft-houses and tunnels of the mine which gave tothe hills their only importance. Nicky was a stout Cornish lad of thirteen, with large light eyes that seemed mildly to protest against the sportiverelation which a broad, freckled, turned-up nose bore to the rest of hiscountenance; he was doing nothing in particular, and did it as if he wereused to it. The schoolmistress sat with her skirts tucked round her ankles, the heels of her stout little boots driven well into the dry, grittysoil. There was in her attitude the tension of some slight habitualstrain--perhaps of endurance--as she leaned forward, her arms stretchedstraight before her, with her delicate fingers interlocked. Whatever maybe the type of Californian young womanhood, it was not her type; you felt, looking at her cool, clear tints and slight, straight outlines, that shehad winter in her blood. 

She was gazing down into the valley, as one looks at a landscape who hasnot yet mastered all its changes of expression; its details were blurred inthe hot, dusty glare; the mountains opposite had faded to a flat outlineagainst the indomitable sky. A light wind blew up the slope, flickering thepale leaves of a manzanita, whose burnished, cinnamon-colored stems glowedin the sun. As the breeze strengthened, the young girl stood up, liftingher arms, to welcome its coolness on her bare wrists. 

"Nicky, why do the trees in that hollow between the hills look so green?"

"There'll be water over there, miss; that's the Chilano's spring. I'mthinkin' the old cow might 'a' strayed over that way somewheres; theymostly goes for the water, wherever it is. "

"Is it running water, Nicky, --not water in a tank?"

"Why, no, miss; it cooms right out o' the rock as pretty as iver you saw!I often goes there myself for a drink, cos it tastes sort o' different, coomin' out o' the ground like. We wos used to that kind o' water at 'ome. "

"Let us go, Nicky, " said the girl. "I should like to taste that water, too. Do we cross the hill first, or is there a shorter way?"

"Over the 'ill's the shortest, miss. It's a bit of a ways, but you've beenlonger ways nor they for less at th' end on't. "

They "tacked" down the steepest part of the hill, and waded through ashady hollow, where ferns grew rank and tall, --crisp, faded ferns, with anaromatic odor which escaped by the friction of their garments, like theperfume of warmed amber. They reached at length the green trees, a clumpof young cottonwoods at the entrance to a narrow cañon, and followed thedry bed of a stream for some distance, until water began to show among thestones. The principal outlet of the spring was on a small plantation at thehead of the cañon, rented of the "company" by a Chilian, or "the Chilano, "as he was called; he was not at all a pastoral-looking personage, but, withthe aid of his good water, he earned a moderately respectable living bysupplying the neighboring cabins and the miners' boarding-house with greenvegetables. After a temporary disappearance, as if to purge its memory ofthe Chilano's water-buckets, the spring again revealed itself in a thin, clear trickle down the hollowed surface of a rock which closed the narrowpassage of the cañon. Young sycamores and cottonwoods shut out the sunabove; their tangled roots, interlaced with vines still green and growing, trailed over the edge of the rock, where a mass of earth had fallen; greenmoss lined the hollows of the rock, and water-plants grew in the dark poolsbelow. 

The strollers had left behind them the heat and glare; only the breezefollowed them into this green stillness, stirring the boughs overhead andscattering spots of sunlight over the wet stones. Nicky, after enjoyingfor a few moments the schoolmistress' surprised delight, proposed that sheshould wait for him at the spring, while he went "down along" in searchof his cow. Nicky was not without a certain awe of the schoolmistress, asa part of creation he had not fathomed in all its bearings; but when theyrambled on the hills together, he found himself less uneasily conscious ofher personality, and more comfortably aware of the fact that, after all, she was "nothin' but a woman. " He was a trifle disappointed that she showedno uneasiness at being left alone, but consoled himself by the reflectionthat she was "a good un to 'old 'er tongue, " and probably felt more thanshe expressed. 

The schoolmistress did not look in the least disconsolate after Nicky'sdeparture. She gazed about her very contentedly for a while, and thenprepared to help herself to a drink of water. She hollowed her two handsinto a cup, and waited for it to fill, stooping below the rock, her liftedskirt held against her side by one elbow, while she watched with a childisheagerness the water trickle into her pink palms. Miss Frances Newell hadnever looked prettier in her life. A pretty girl is always prettier inthe open air, with her head uncovered. Her cheeks were red; the sun justtouched the roughened braids of dark brown hair, and intensified the glowof a little ear which showed beneath. She stooped to drink; but MissFrances was destined never to taste that virgin cup of water. There was atrampling among the bushes, overhead; a little shower of dust and pebblespattered down upon her bent head, soiling the water. She let her hands fallas she looked up, with a startled "Oh!" A pair of large boots were rapidlymaking their way down the bank, and the cause of all this disturbance stoodbefore her, --a young man in a canvas jacket, with a leathern case slungacross his shoulder, and a small tin lamp fastened in front of the hatwhich he took off while he apologized to the girl for his intrusion. 

"Miss Newell! Forgive me for dropping down on you like a thousand of brick!You've found the spring, I see. "

Miss Frances stood with her elbows still pressed to her sides, though herskirt had slipped down into the water, her wet palms helplessly extended. "I was getting a drink, " she said, searching with the tips of her fingersamong the folds of her dress for a handkerchief. "You came just in time toremind me of the slip between the cup and the lip. "

"I'm very sorry, but there is plenty of water left. I came for some myself. Let me help you. " He took from one of the many pockets stitched into thebreast and sides of his jacket a covered flask, detached the cup, and, after carefully rinsing, filled and handed it to the girl. "I hope itdoesn't taste of 'store claret;' the water underground is just a shadeworse than that exalted vintage. "

"It is delicious, thank you, and it doesn't taste in the least of claret. Have you just come out of the mine?"

"Yes. It is measuring-up day. I've been toddling through the drifts andsliding down chiflons"--he looked ruefully at the backs of his trouserslegs--"ever since seven o'clock this morning. Haven't had time to eat anyluncheon yet, you see. " He took from another pocket a small package foldedin a coarse napkin. "I came here to satisfy the pangs of hunger and enjoythe beauties of nature at the same time, --such nature as we have here. Willyou excuse me, Miss Newell? I'll promise to eat very fast. "

"I'll excuse you if you will not ask me to eat with you. "

"Oh, I've entirely too much consideration for myself to think of such athing; there isn't enough for two. "

He seated himself, with a little sigh, and opened the napkin on the groundbefore him. Miss Newell stood leaning against a rock on the opposite sideof the brook, regarding the young man with a shy and smiling curiosity. "Meals, " he continued, "are a reckless tribute to the weakness of the fleshwe all engage in three times a day at the boarding-house; a man must eat, you know, if he expects to live. Have you ever tried any of Mrs. Bondy'sfare, Miss Newell?"

"I'm sure Mrs. Bondy tries to have everything very nice, " the young girlreplied, with some embarrassment. 

"Of course she does; she is a very good old girl. I think a great deal ofMrs. Bondy; but when she asks me if I have enjoyed my dinner, I always makea point of telling her the truth; she respects me for it. This is her ideaof sponge cake, you see. " He held up admiringly a damp slab of some compactpale-yellow substance, with crumbs of bread adhering to one side. "It is alittle mashed, but otherwise a fair specimen. "

Miss Frances laughed. "Mr. Arnold, I think you are too bad. How can shehelp it, with those dreadful Chinamen? But I would really advise you not toeat that cake; it doesn't look wholesome. "

"Oh, as to that, I've never observed any difference; one thing is aboutas wholesome as another. Did you ever eat bacon fried by China Sam? Thesandwiches were made of that. You see I still live. " The sponge cake wasrapidly disappearing. "Miss Newell, you look at me as if I were making awaywith myself, instead of the cake, --will you appear at the inquest?"

"No, I will not testify to anything so unromantic; besides, it might beinconvenient for Mrs. Bondy's cook. " She put on her hat, and stepped alongthe stones towards the entrance to the glen. 

"You are not going to refuse me the last offices?"

"I am going to look for Nicky Dyer. He came with me to show me the spring, and now he has gone to hunt for his cow. "

"And you are going to hunt for him? I hope you won't try it, Miss Frances:a boy on the track of a cow is a very uncertain object in life. Let me callhim, if you really must have him. "

"Oh, don't trouble yourself. I suppose he will come after a while. I said Iwould wait for him here. "

"Then permit me to say that I think you had better do as you promised. "

Miss Frances recrossed the stones, and seated herself, with a faintdeprecatory smile. 

"I hope you don't mind if I stay, " Arnold said, moving some loose stones tomake her seat more comfortable. "You have the prior right to-day, but thisis an old haunt of mine. I feel as if I were doing the honors; and to tellyou the truth, I am rather used up. The new workings are very hot and thedrifts are low. It's a combination of steam-bath and hoeing corn. "

The girl's face cleared, as she looked at him. His thin cheek was paleunder the tan, and where his hat was pushed back the hair clung in damppoints to his forehead and temples. 

"I should be very sorry to drive you away, " she said. "I thought you lookedtired. If you want to go to sleep, or anything, I will promise to be veryquiet. "

Arnold laughed. "Oh, I'm not such an utter wreck; but I'm glad you can bevery quiet. I was afraid you might be a little uproarious at times, youknow. "

The girl gave a sudden shy laugh. It was really a giggle, but a very sweet, girlish giggle. It called up a look of keen pleasure to Arnold's face. 

"Now I call this decidedly gay, " he remarked, stretching out his long legsslowly, and leaning against a slanting rock, with one arm behind his head. "Miss Frances, will you be good enough to tell me that my face isn'tdirty?"

"Truth compels me to admit that you have one little daub over your lefteyebrow. "

"Thank you, " said Arnold, rubbing it languidly with his handkerchief. Hishat had dropped off, and he did not replace it; he did not look at thegirl, but let his eyes rest on the thread of falling water that gleamedfrom the spring. Miss Frances, regarding him with some timidity, thought:How much younger he looks without his hat! He had that sensitive fairnesswhich in itself gives a look of youth and purity; the sternness of hisface lay in the curves which showed under his mustache, and in the silent, dominant eye. 

"You've no idea how good it sounds to a lonely fellow like me, " he said, "to hear a girl's laugh. "

"But there are a great many women here, " Miss Frances observed. 

"Oh yes, there are women everywhere, such as they are; but it takes a nicegirl, a lady, to laugh!"

"I don't agree with you at all, " replied Miss Frances coldly. "Some ofthose Mexican women have the sweetest voices, speaking or laughing, that Ihave ever heard; and the Cornish women, too, have very fresh, pure voices. I often listen to them in the evening when I sit alone in my room. Theirvoices sound so happy"--

"Well, then it is the home accent, --or I'm prejudiced. Don't laugh again, please, Miss Frances; it breaks me all up. " He moved his head a little, andlooked across at the girl to assure himself that her silence did not meandisapproval. "I admit, " he went on, "that I like our Eastern girls. I knowyou are from the East, Miss Newell. "

"I am from what I used to think was East, " she said, smiling. "Buteverything is East here; people from Indiana and Wisconsin say they arefrom the East. "

"Ah, but you are from our old Atlantic coast. I was sure of it when I firstsaw you. If you will pardon me, I knew it by your way of dressing. "

The young girl flushed with pleasure; then, with a reflective air: "Iconfess myself, since you speak of clothes, to a feeling of relief when Isaw your hat the first Sunday after I came. Western men wear such dreadfulhats. "

"Good!" he cried gayly. "You mean my hat that I _call_ a hat. " He reachedfor the one behind his head, and spun it lightly upward, where it settledon a projecting branch. "I respect that hat myself, --my _other_ hat, Imean; I'm trying to live up to it. Now, let me guess your State, MissNewell: is it Massachusetts?"

"No, --Connecticut; but at this distance it seems like the same thing. "

"Oh, pardon me, there are very decided differences. I'm from Massachusettsmyself. Perhaps the points of difference show more in the women, --the oneswho stay at home, I mean, and become more local and idiomatic than the men. You are not one of the daughters of the soil, Miss Newell. "

She looked pained as she said, "I wish I were; but there is not room for usall, where there is so little soil. "

Arnold moved uneasily, extracted a stone from under the small of hisback and tossed it out of sight with some vehemence. "You think it goesrather hard with women who are uprooted, then, " he said. "I suppose it issomething a roving man can hardly conceive of, --a woman's attachment toplaces, and objects, and associations; they are like cats. "

Miss Newell was silent. 

Arnold moved restlessly; then began again, with his eyes still on thetrickle of water: "Miss Newell, do you remember a poem--I think it isBryant's--called 'The Hunter of the Prairies'? It's no disgrace not toremember it, and it may not be Bryant's. "

"I remember seeing it, but I never read it. I always skipped those Westernthings. "

Arnold gave a short laugh, and said, "Well, you are punished, you see, bygoing West yourself to hear me repeat it to you. I think I can give you theidea in the Hunter's own words:--

 "'Here, with my rifle and my steed, And her who left the world for me'"--

The sound of his own voice in the stillness of the little glen, and a lookof surprise in the young girl's quiet eyes, brought a sudden access ofcolor to Arnold's face. "Hm-m-m, " he murmured to himself, "it's queer howrhymes slip away. Well, the last line ends in _free_. You see, it is aman's idea of happiness, --a young man's. Now, how do you suppose _she_liked it, --the girl, you know, who left the world, and all that? Did youever happen to see a poem or a story, written by a woman, celebrating thejoys of a solitary existence with the man of her heart?"

"I suppose that many a woman has tried it, " Miss Newell said evasively, "but I'm sure she"--

"Never lived to tell the tale?" cried Arnold. 

"She probably had something else to do, while the hunter was riding aroundwith his gun, " Miss Frances continued. 

"Well, give her the odds of the rifle and the steed; give the man somecommonplace employment to take the swagger out of him; let him come homereasonably tired and cross at night, --do you suppose he would find the'kind' eyes and the 'smile'? I forgot to tell you that the Hunter of thePrairies is always welcomed by a smile at night. "

"He must have been an uncommonly fortunate man, " she said. 

"Of course he was; but the question is: Could any living man be sofortunate? Come, Miss Frances, don't prevaricate!"

"Well, am I speaking for the average woman?"

"Oh, not at all, --you are speaking for the very nicest of women; any otherkind would be intolerable on a prairie. "

"I should think, if she were very healthy, " said Miss Newell, hesitatingbetween mischief and shyness, "and not too imaginative, and of a cheerfuldisposition; and if he, the hunter, were above the average, --supposing thatshe cared for him in the beginning, --I should think the smile might last ayear or two. "

"Heavens, what a cynic you are! I feel like a mere daub of sentiment besideyou. There have been moments, do you know, even in this benighted miningcamp, when I have believed in that hunter and his smile!"

He got up suddenly, and stood against the rock, facing her. Although hekept his cool, bantering tone, his breathing had quickened, and his eyeslooked darker. 

"You may consider me a representative man, if you please: I speak forhundreds of us scattered about in mining camps and on cattle ranches, inlighthouses and frontier farms and military posts, and all the Godforsakenholes you can conceive of, where men are trying to earn a living, or loseone, --we are all going to the dogs for the want of that smile! What is tobecome of us if the women whose smiles we care for cannot support life inthe places where we have to live? Come, Miss Frances, can't you make thatsmile last at least two years?" He gathered a handful of dry leaves from abroken branch above his head and crushed them in his long hands, siftingthe yellow dust upon the water below. 

"The places you speak of are very different, " the girl answered, witha shade of uneasiness in her manner. "A mining camp is anything but asolitude, and a military post may be very gay. "

"Oh, the principle is the same. It is the absolute giving up of everything. You know most women require a background of family and friends andcongenial surroundings; the question is whether _any_ woman can do withoutthem. "

The young girl moved in a constrained way, and flushed as she said, "Itmust always be an experiment, I suppose, and its success would depend, as Isaid before, on the woman and on the man. "

"An 'experiment' is good!" said Arnold, rather savagely. "I see you won'tsay anything you can't swear to. "

"I really do not see that I am called upon to say anything on the subjectat all!" said the girl, rising and looking at him across the brook withindignant eyes and a hot glow on her cheek. 

He did not appear to notice her annoyance. 

"You are, because you know something about it, and most women don't: yourtestimony is worth something. How long have you been here, --a year? Iwonder how it seems to a woman to live in a place like this a year! I hateit all, you know, --I've seen so much of it. But is there really any beautyhere? I suppose beauty, and all that sort of thing, is partly within us, isn't it?--at least, that's what the goody little poems tell us. "

"I think it is very beautiful here, " said Miss Frances, softening, as helaid aside his strained manner, and spoke more quietly. "It is the kindof place a happy woman might be very happy in; but if she weresad--or--disappointed"--

"Well?" said Arnold, pulling at his mustache, and fixing a rather gloomygaze upon her. 

"She would die of it! I really do not think there would be any hope for herin a place like this. "

"But if she were happy, as you say, " persisted the young man, "don'tyou think her woman's adaptability and quick imagination would help herimmensely? She wouldn't see what I, for instance, know to be ugly andcoarse; her very ignorance of the world would help her. "

There was a vague, pleading look in his eyes. "Arrange it to suityourself, " she said. "Only, I can assure you, if anything should happen toher, it will be the--the hunter's fault. "

"All right, " said he, rousing himself. "That hunter, if I know him, is aman who is used to taking risks! Where are you going?"

"I thought I heard Nicky. "

They were both silent, and as they listened, footsteps, with a tinklingaccompaniment, crackled among the bushes below the cañon. Miss Newellturned towards the spring again. "I want one more drink before I go, " shesaid. 

Arnold followed her. "Let us drink to our return. Let this be our fountainof Trevi. "

"Oh, no, " said Miss Frances. "Don't you remember what your favorite Bryantsays about bringing the 'faded fancies of an elder world' into these'virgin solitudes'?"

"Faded fancies!" cried Arnold. "Do you call that a faded fancy? It is asfresh and graceful as youth itself, and as natural. I should have thoughtof it myself, if there had been no fountain of Trevi. "

"Do you think so?" smiled the girl. "Then imagination, it would seem, isnot entirely confined to homesick women. "

"Come, fill the cup, Miss Frances! Nicky is almost here. "

The girl held her hands beneath the trickle again, until they were brimmingwith the clear sweet water. 

"Drink first, " said Arnold. 

"I'm not sure that I want to return, " she replied, smiling, with her eyeson the space of sky between the treetops. 

"Nonsense, --you must be morbid. Drink, drink!"

"Drink yourself; the water is all running away!"

He bent his head, and took a vigorous sip of the water, holding his handsbeneath hers, inclosing the small cup in the larger one. The small cuptrembled a little. He was laughing and wiping his mustache, when Nickyappeared; and Miss Frances, suddenly brightening and recovering her freedomof movement, exclaimed, "Why, Nicky! You have been _forever_! We must go atonce, Mr. Arnold; so good-by! I hope"--

She did not say what she hoped, and Arnold, after looking at her with aninterrogative smile a moment, caught his hat from the branch overhead, andmade her a great flourishing bow with it in his hand. 

He did not follow her, pushing her way through the swaying, rustling ferns, but he watched her light figure out of sight. "What an extraordinary assI've been making of myself!" He confided this remark to the stillness ofthe little cañon, and then, with long strides, took his way over the hillsin an opposite direction. 

It was the middle of July when this little episode of the spring occurred. The summer had reached its climax. The dust did not grow perceptiblydeeper, nor the fields browner, during the long brazen weeks that followed;one only wearied of it all, more and more. 

So thought Miss Newell, at least. It was her second summer in California, and the phenomenon of the dry season was not so impressive on itsrepetition. She had been surprised to observe how very brief had been thecharm of strangeness, in her experience of life in a new country. She beganto wonder if a girl, born and brought up among the hills of Connecticut, could have the seeds of _ennui_ subtly distributed through her frame, toreach a sudden development in the heat of a Californian summer. She longedfor the rains to begin, that in their violence and the sound of the windshe might gain a sense of life in action by which to eke out her dull andexpressionless days. She was, as Nicky Dyer had said, "a good un to 'old'er tongue, " and therein lay her greatest strength as well as her greatestdanger. 

Miss Newell boarded at Captain Dyer's. The prosperous ex-mining captainwas a good deal nearer to the primitive type than any man Miss Newell hadever sat at table with in her life before, but she had a thorough respectfor him, and she felt that the time might come when she could enjoyhim--as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossipthan her neighbors; and there were no children, --only one grandchild, the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, buteverything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell'shomesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across theboarding-house table by Boker and Pratt, and pitied by the engineer. Shehad a little room at the Dyers', which was a reflection of herself so faras a year's occupancy and very moderate resources could make it; perhapsfor that very reason she often found her little room an intolerable prison. One night her homesickness had taken its worst form, a restlessness, whichbegan in a nervous inward throbbing and extended to her cold and tremulousfinger-tips. She went softly downstairs and out on the piazza, where themoonlight lay in a brilliant square on the unpainted boards. The moonlightincreased her restlessness, but she could not keep away from it. She darednot walk up and down the piazza, because the people in the street belowwould see her; she stood there perfectly still, holding her elbows with herhands, crouched into a little dark heap against the side of the house. 

Lights were twinkling, far and near, over the hills, singly, and inclusters. Black figures moved across the moonlit spaces in the street. There were sounds of talking, laughing, and singing; dogs barking;occasionally a stir and tinkle in the scrub, as a cow wandered past. Theengines throbbed from the distant shaft-houses. A miner's wife was hushingher baby in the next house, and across the street a group of Mexicans weretalking all at once in a loud, monotonous cadence. 

In her early days at the mines there had been a certain piquancy in hersense of the contrast between herself and her circumstances, but that hadlong passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real partin the life of the place. 

She recalled one afternoon when Arnold had passed the schoolhouse, andfound her sitting alone on the doorstep. He had stopped to ask if that"mongrel pack on the hill were worrying the life out of her, " and had addedwith a laugh, in answer to her look of silent disapproval, "Oh, I mean thedear lambs of your flock. I saw two of them just now on the trail, fightingover a lame donkey. The clans were gathering on both sides; there will bea pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I thinkhe was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patientlittle schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense ofunavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as bloodfollows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he haddone. "I am a brute, I believe, --worse than any of the pack. You have somuch patience with them, --please have a little with me. Trust me, I am notutterly blind to your sufferings. Indeed, Miss Newell, I see them, and theymake me savage!" With the gentlest touch he had lifted her hand, held it inhis a moment, and then had mounted his horse and ridden away. 

Yes, he _did_ understand, --she felt sure of that. What an unutterable restit would be if she could go to some one with the small worries of her life!But she could not yield to such impulses. It was different with men. Shehad often thought of Arnold's words that day at the spring, all the morethat he had never, before or since, revealed so much of himself to her. Under an apparently careless frankness and extravagance of speech he was areticent man; but lightly spoken as the words had been, were they not thesparks and ashes blown from a deep and smothered core of fire? She seemedto feel its glow on her cheek as she recalled his singular persistence andthe darkening of his imperious eyes. No, she would not permit herself tothink of that day at the spring. 

There was a bright light in the engineer's office across the street. Shecould see Arnold through the windows (for, like a man, he did not pull hisshades down) at one of the long drawing-tables. He worked late, it seemed. He was writing; he wrote rapidly page after page, tearing each sheet fromwhat appeared to be a paper block, and tossing it on the table beside him;he covered only one side of the paper, she noticed, thinking with a smileof her own small economies. Presently he got up, swept the papers togetherin his hands, and stooped over them. He is numbering and folding them, she thought, and now he is directing the envelope, --to whom, I wonder!He turned, and as he walked towards the window she saw him put somethinginto the pocket of his coat. He lighted a cigar, and began walking, withlong strides, up and down the room, one hand in his pocket; the otherhe occasionally rubbed over his eyes and head, as if they hurt him. Sheremembered that the engineer had headaches, and wished that somebody wouldask him to try valerian. Is he ever really lonely? she thought. What canhe, what can any man, know of loneliness? He may go out and walk about onthe hills; he may go away altogether, and take the risks of life somewhereelse. A woman must take no risks. There is not a house in the camp wherehe might not enter to-night, if he chose; he might come over here andtalk to me. The East, with all its cherished memories and prejudices andassociations, seemed so hopelessly far away; they two alone, in thatstrange, uncongenial new world which had crowded out the old, seemed tospeak a common language: and yet how little she really knew of him!

Suddenly the lights disappeared from the windows of the office. She hearda door unlock, and presently the young man's figure crossed the street andturned up the trail past the house. 

Two other figures going up halted, and the taller one said, "Will you go upon the hill, to-night, Arnold?"

"What for?" said Arnold, slackening his pace without stopping. 

"Oh, nothing in particular, --to see the señoritas. "

"Oh, thank you, Boker, I've seen the señoritas. "

He walked quickly past the men, and the shorter one, who had not spoken, called after him rather huskily, --

"W-what do you think of the little school-ma'am?"

Arnold turned back and confronted the speaker in silence. 

"I say! Is she thin 'nough to suit you?" the heavy-playful one persisted. 

"Shut up, Jack!" said his comrade. "You're a little high now, you know. "

He dragged him on, up the trail; the voices of the two men blended with thenight chorus of the camp as they passed out of sight. 

Miss Newell sat perfectly still for a while; then she went to her room, andthrew herself down on the bed, listening to an endless mental repetition ofthose words that the faithless night had brought to her ear. The moonlighthad left the piazza, and crept round to the side of the house; it shonein at the window, touching the girl's cold fingers pressed to her burningcheeks and temples. She got up, drew the curtain, and groped her way backto the bed, where she lay for hours, trying to convince herself that hermisery was out of all proportion to the cause, and that those coarse wordscould make no real difference in her life. 

They did make a little difference: they loosened the slight, indefinitethreads of intercourse which a year had woven between these two exiles. Miss Newell was prepared to withdraw from any further overtures offriendship from the engineer; but he made it unnecessary for her to doso, --he made no overtures. On the night of Pratt's tipsy salutation he hadabruptly decided that a mining camp was no place for a nice girl, with noacknowledged masculine protector. In Miss Newell's circumstances a girlmust be left entirely alone, or exposed to the gossip of the camp. Heknew very well which she would choose, and so he kept away, --though atconsiderable loss to himself, he felt. It made him cross to watch herpretty figure going up the trail every morning and to reflect that so muchsweetness and refinement should not be having its ameliorating influence onhis own barren and somewhat defiant existence. 

II. 

The autumn rains set in early, and the winter was unusually severe. Arnoldhad a purpose which kept him hard at work and very happy in those days. 

During the long December nights he was shut up in his office, ploddingover his maps and papers, or smoking in dreamy comfort by the fire. He wasseldom interrupted, for he had earned the character of a social ingrate andhardened recluse in the camp. He had earned it quite unconsciously, andwas as little troubled by the fact as by its consequences. On the eveningof New Year's Day he crossed the street to the Dyers' and asked for MissNewell. She presently greeted him in the parlor, where she looked, Arnoldthought, more than ever out of place, among the bead baskets, and splintframes inclosing photographs of deceased members of the Dyer family, andthe pallid walls, weak-legged chairs, and crude imaginings in worsted work. Her apparent unconsciousness of these abominations was another source ofirritation. It is always irritating to a man to see a charming woman in anunhappy and false position, where he is powerless to help her. Arnold hadnot expected that it would be a very exhilarating occasion, --he rememberedthe Dyer parlor, --but it was even less pleasant than he had expected. Hesat down, carefully, in a glued chair whose joints had opened with thedry season and refused to close again; he did not know where the transferof his person might end. Captain Dyer was present, and told a great manystories in a loud, tiring voice. Miss Frances sat by with some soft whiteknitting in her hands, and her attitude of patient attention made Arnoldlong to attack her with some savage pleasantries on the subject ofChristmas in a mining camp; it seemed to him that patience was a virtuethat could be carried too far, even in woman. Then Mrs. Dyer came in, andmanoeuvred her husband out into the passage; after some loudly suggestivewhispering there, she succeeded in getting him into the kitchen, and shutthe door. Arnold got up soon after that, and said good-evening. 

Miss Newell remained in the parlor for some time, after he had gone, movingsoftly about. She had gathered her knitting closely into her clasped hands;the ball trailed after her, among the legs of the chairs, and when inher silent promenade she had spun a grievous tangle of wool she sat down, and dropped the work out of her hands with a helpless gesture. Her headdrooped, and tears trickled slowly between the slender white fingerswhich covered her face. Presently the fingers descended to her throat andclasped it close, as if to still an intolerable throbbing ache which herhalf-suppressed tears had left. 

At length she rose, picked up her work, and patiently followed the tangledclue until she had recovered her ball; then she wound it all up neatly, wrapped the knitting in a thin white handkerchief, and went to her room. 

With the fine March weather--fine in spite of the light rains--the engineerwas laying out a road to the new shaft; it wound along the hillside whereMiss Newell had first seen the green trees, by the spring. The engineer'sorders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from theChilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which hadguarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamenprofaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter;the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering treesabove, and the brook below was a mass of trampled mud. 

The engineer's visits to the spring gave him no pleasure, in those days. Hefelt that he was the inevitable instrument of its desecration; but over thehill, just in sight from the spring, carpenters were putting a new piazzaround a cottage that stood remote from the camp, where a spur of the hillsdescended steeply towards the valley. Arnold took a great interest in thiscottage. He was frequently to be seen there in the evening, tramping up anddown the new piazza, and offering to the moon, that looked in through theboughs of a live-oak at the end of the gallery, the incense of his lonelycigar. Sometimes he would take the key of the front door from his pocket, enter the silent house, and wander from one room to another, like arestless but not unhappy ghost; the moonlight, touching his face, showed itstrangely stirred and softened. His was no melancholy madness. 

Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when theschoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to seehim, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage, and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a fewminutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road, where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago. 

"I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone, " he said. "The men onthe road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners. I hope you are not going to the spring!"

"Why?" said she. "Did you not drink to our return?"

"But you would not drink with me, so the spell did not work; and now thespring is gone, --all its beauty, I mean. The water is there, in a tank, where the Chinamen fill their buckets night and morning, and the teamsterswater their horses. We'll go over there, if you would like to see the marchof modern improvements. "

"No, " she said; "I had rather remember it as it was; still, I don't believein being sentimental about such things. Let us sit down a while. "

A vague depression, which Arnold had been aware of in her manner when theymet, became suddenly manifest in her paleness and in a look of dull pain inher eyes. 

"But you are hurt about it, " he said. "I wish I hadn't told you in thatbrutal way. I'm afraid I'm not many degrees removed from the primevalsavage, after all. "

"Oh, you needn't mind, " she said, after a moment. "That was the only placeI cared for, here, so now there will be nothing to regret when I go away. "

"Are you going away, then? I'm very sorry to hear it; but of course I'mnot surprised. You couldn't be expected to stand it another year; thosechildren must have been something fearful. "

"Oh, it wasn't the children. "

"Well, I'm sorry. I had hoped"--

"Yes, " said she, with a modest interrogation, as he hesitated, "what is ityou had hoped?"

"That I might indirectly be the means of making your life less lonely here. You remember that 'experiment' we talked about at the spring?"

"That _you_ talked about, you mean. "

"I am going to try it myself. Not because you were soencouraging, --but--it's a risk anyway, you know, and I'm not sure thecircumstances make so much difference. I've known people to be wretchedwith all the modern conveniences. I am going East for her in about twoweeks. How sorry she will be to find you gone! I wrote to her about you. You might have helped each other; couldn't you stand it, Miss Newell, don'tyou think, if you had another girl?"

"I'm afraid not, " she said very gently. "I _must_ go home. You may be sureshe will not need me; you must see to it that she doesn't need--any one. "

They were walking back and forth on the hill. 

"I was just looking for the cottonwood-trees; are they gone too?" sheasked. 

"Oh yes; there isn't a tree left in the cañon. Don't you envy me my work?"

"I suppose everything we do seems like desecration to somebody. Here am Imaking history very rapidly for this colony of ants. " She looked down witha rueful smile as she spoke. 

"I wish you had the history of the entire species under your foot, andcould finish it at once. "

"I'm not sure that I would; I'm not so fond of extermination as you pretendto be. "

"Well, keep the ants if you like them, but I am firm on the subject ofthe camp children. There _are_ blessings that brighten as they take theirflight. I pay my monthly assessment for the doctor with the greatestcheerfulness; if it wasn't for him, in this climate, they would crowd usoff the hill. "

"Please don't!" she said wearily. "Even _I_ don't like to hear you talklike that; I am sure _she_ will not. "

He laughed softly. "You have often reminded me of her in little ways: thatwas what upset me at the spring. I was very near telling you all about herthat day. "

"I wish that you had!" she said. They were walking towards home now. "Isuppose you know it is talked of in the camp, " she said, after a pause. "Mr. Dyer told me, and showed me the house, a week ago. And now I must tellyou about my violets. I had them in a box in my room all winter. I shouldlike to leave them as a little welcome to her. Last night Nicky Dyer andI planted them on the bank by the piazza under the climbing-rose; it wasa secret between Nicky and me, and Nicky promised to water them until shecame; but of course I meant to tell you. Will you look at them to-night, please, and see if Nicky has been faithful?"

"I will, indeed, " said Arnold. "That is just the kind of thing shewill delight in. If you are going East, Miss Newell, shall we not befellow-travelers? I should be so glad to be of any service. "

"No, thank you. I am to spend a month in Santa Barbara, and escort aninvalid friend home. I shall have to say good-by, now. Don't go any fartherwith me, please. "

That night Arnold mused late, leaning over the railing of the new piazzain the moonlight. He fancied that a faint perfume of violets came from thedamp earth below; but it could have been only fancy, for when he searchedthe bank for them they were not there. The new sod was trampled, and a fewleaves and slight, uptorn roots lay scattered about, with some broken twigsfrom the climbing-rose. He had found the gate open when he came, and theDyer cow had passed him, meandering peacefully up the trail. 

 * * * * *

The crescent moon had waxed and waned since the night when it lighted theengineer's musings through the wind-parted live-oak boughs, and anotherslender bow gleamed in the pale, tinted haze of twilight. The month hadgone, like a feverish dream, to the young schoolmistress, as she lay in hersmall, upper chamber, unconscious of all save alternate light and darkness, and rest following pain. When, at last, she crept down the short staircaseto breathe the evening coolness, clinging to the stair-rail and holding hersoft white draperies close around her, she saw the pink light lingeringon the mountains, and heard the chorus to the "Sweet By and By" from theminers' chapel on the hill. It was Sunday evening, and the house waspiously "emptied of its folk. " She took her old seat by the parlor window, and looked across to the engineer's office; its windows and doors wereshut, and the dogs of the camp were chasing each other over the looseboards of the piazza floor. She laughed a weak, convulsive laugh, thinkingof the engineer's sallies of old upon that band of Ishmaelites, and of thescrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else thedogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountainsparted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cutoff her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. Thethought of that immensity of distance made her faint. 

There were steps on the porch, --not Captain Dyer's, for he and his goodwife were lending their voices to swell the stentorian chorus that wasshaking the church on the hill; the footsteps paused at the door, andArnold himself opened it. He had not, evidently, expected to see her. 

"I was looking for some one to ask about you, " he said. "Are you sure youare able to be down?"

"Oh yes. I've been sitting up for several days. I wanted to see themountains again. "

He was looking at her intently, while she flushed with weakness, and drewthe fringes of her shawl over her tremulous hands. 

"How ill you have been! I have wished myself a woman, that I might dosomething for you! I suppose Mrs. Dyer nursed you like a horse. "

"Oh no; she was very good; but I don't remember much about the worst of it. I thought you had gone home. "

"Home! Where do you mean? I didn't know that I had ever boasted of anyreserved rights of that kind. I have no mortgage, in fact or sentiment, onany part of the earth's surface, that I'm acquainted with!"

He spoke with a hard carelessness in his manner which make her shrink. 

"I mean the East. I am homeless, too, but all the East seems like home tome. "

"You had better get rid of those sentimental, backward fancies as soon aspossible. The East concerns itself very little about us, I can tell you! Itcan spare us. "

She thrilled with pain at his words. "I should think you would be the lastone to say so, --you, who have so much treasure there. "

"Will you please to understand, " he said, turning upon her a face of bittercalmness, "that I claim no treasure anywhere, --not even in heaven!"

She sat perfectly still, conscious that by some fatality of helplessincomprehension every word that she said goaded him, and she feared tospeak again. 

"Now I have hurt you, " he said in his gentlest voice. "I am always hurtingyou. I oughtn't to come near you with my rough edges! I'll go away now, ifyou will tell me that you forgive me!"

She smiled at him without speaking, while her fair throat trembled with apulse of pain. 

"Will you let me take your hand a moment? It is so long since I havetouched a woman's hand! God! how lonely I am! Don't look at me in that way;don't pity me, or I shall lose what little manhood I have left!"

"What is it?" she said, leaning towards him. "There is something strange inyour face. If you are in trouble, tell me; it will help me to hear it. I amnot so very happy myself. "

"Why should I add my load to yours? I seem always to impose myself uponyou, first my hopes, and now my--no, it isn't despair; it is only a kindof brutal numbness. You must have the fatal gift of sympathy, or you wouldnever have seen my little hurt. "

Miss Frances was not strong enough to bear the look in his eyes as heturned them upon her, with a dreary smile. She covered her face with onehand, while she whispered, --

"Is it--you have not lost her?"

"Yes! Or, rather, I never had her. I've been dreaming like a boy all theseyears, --'In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter. '"

"It is not death, then?"

"No, she is not dead. She is not even false; that is, not very false. Howcan I tell you how little it is, and yet how much! She is only a trifleselfish. Why shouldn't she be? Why should we men claim the exclusive rightto choose the best for ourselves? It was selfish of me to ask her to sharesuch a life as mine; and she has gently and reasonably reminded me thatI'm not worth the sacrifice. It's quite true. I always knew I wasn't. Sheput it very delicately and sweetly;--she's the sweetest girl you ever saw. She'd marry me to-morrow if I could add myself, such as I am, --she doesn'toverrate me, --to what she has already; but an exchange she wasn't preparedfor. In all my life I never was so clearly estimated, body and soul. Idon't blame her, you understand. When I left her, three years ago, I saw myway easily enough to a reputation, and an income, and a home in the East;she never thought of anything else; I never taught her to look for anythingelse. I dare say she rather enjoyed having a lover working for her in theunknown West; she enjoyed the pretty letters she wrote me; but when it cameto the bare bones of existence in a mining camp, with a husband not veryrich or very distinguished, she had nothing to clothe them with. You saidonce that to be happy here a woman must not have too much imagination; shehadn't quite enough. I had to be dead honest with her when I asked her tocome. I told her there was nothing here but the mountains and the sunsets, and a few items of picturesqueness which count with some people. Of courseI had to tell her I was but little better off than when I left. A man'sexperience is something he cannot set forth at its value to himself; shepassed it over as a word of no practical meaning. There her imaginationfailed her again. She took me frankly at my own estimate; and in justice toher I must say I put myself at the lowest figures. I made a very poor showon paper. "

"You wrote to her!" exclaimed Miss Frances. "You did not go on? Oh, youhave made a great mistake! Do go: it cannot be too late. Letters are themost untrusty things!"

"Wait, " he said. "There is something else. She has a head for business;she proposed that I should come East, and accept a superintendentship froma cousin of hers, the owner of a gun-factory in one of those shady NewEngland towns women are so fond of. She intimated that he was in politics, this cousin, and of course would expect his employees to become part ofhis constituency. It's a very pretty little bribe, you see; when you addthe--the girl, it's enough to shake a man--who wants that girl. I'm notworth much to myself, or to anybody else, apparently, but by Heaven I'llnot sell out as cheap as that!

"It all amounts to nothing except one more illusion gone. If there is awoman on this earth that can love a man without knowing for what, and takethe chances of life with him without counting the cost, I have never knownher. I asked you once if a woman could do that. You hadn't the courageto tell me the truth. I wouldn't have been satisfied if you had; but I'msatisfied now. "

"I believed she would be happy; I believe she would be, now, if only youwould go to her and persuade her to try. "

"I persuade her! I would never try to persuade a woman to be my wife were Idying for love of her! I don't think myself invented by nature to promotethe happiness of woman, in the aggregate or singly. I know there are menwho do: let them urge their claims. I thought that she loved me; that wasanother illusion. She will probably marry the cousin, and become the mostloyal of his constituents. He is welcome to her; but there's a ghostlyblank somewhere. How I have tired you! You'll be in bed another week forthis selfishness of mine. " He stopped, while a sudden thought brought achange to his face. "But when are you going home?"

"I cannot go, " she said. Her weakness came over her like a cloud, darkeningthe room and pressing upon her heavily. "Will you give me your arm?"

At the stairs she stopped, and leaning against the wall looked at him withwide, hopeless eyes. 

"We are cut off from everything. My friend does not need me now; she hasgone home, --alone. She is dead!"

Arnold took a long walk upon the hills that night, and smoked a greatmany cigars in gloomy meditation. He was thinking of two girls, as youngmen who smoke a great many cigars without counting them often are; he wasalso thinking of Arizona. He had fully made up his mind to resign, anddepart for that problematic region as soon as his place was filled; but analternative had presented itself to him with a pensive attractiveness, --analternative unmistakably associated with the fact that the schoolmistresswas to remain in her present isolated circumstances. It even had occurredto him that there might be some question of duty involved in his "standingby her, " as he phrased it to himself, "till she got her color back. " Therewas an unconscious appeal in the last words he had heard her speak whichconstrained him to do so. He was not in the habit of pitying himself, buthad there been another soul to follow this mental readjustment of himselfto his mutilated life, it would surely have pitied the eagerness with whichhe clung to this one shadow of a duty to a fellow-creature. It was themeasure of his loneliness. 

It was late in November. The rains had begun again with sound and fury;with ranks of clouds forming along the mountain sides, and driven beforethe sea-winds upward through the gulches; with days of breeze and sunshine, when the fog veil was lightly lifted and blown apart, showing the valleyalways greener; with days of lowering stillness, when the veil descendedand left the mountains alone, like islands of shadow rising from a sea ofmisty whiteness. 

On such a lowering day, Miss Frances stood at the junction of three trails, in front of the door of the blacksmith's shop. She was wrapped in a darkblue cloak, with the hood drawn over her head; the cool dampness had givento her cheeks a clear, pure glow, and her brown eyes looked out with acheerful light. She was watching the parting of the mist in the valleybelow; for a wind had sprung up, and now the rift widened, as the windowsof heaven might have opened, giving a glimpse of the world to the "BlessedDamozel. " All was dark above and around her; only a single shaft ofsunlight pierced the fog, and startled into life a hundred tints ofbrightness in the valley. She caught the sparkle on the roofs and windowsof the town ten miles away; the fields of sunburnt stubble glowed a deepIndian red; the young crops were tenderest emerald; and the line of thedistant bay, a steel-blue thread against the horizon. 

Arnold was plodding up the lower trail on his gray mare, fetlock deep inmud. He dismounted at the door of the shop, and called to him a smallMexican lad with a cheek of the tint of ripe corn. 

"Here, Pedro Segundo! Take this mare up to the camp! Can you catch?" Hetossed him a coin. "Bueno!"

"Mucho bueno!" said Pedro the First, looking on approvingly from the doorof his shop. 

Arnold turned to the schoolmistress, who was smiling from her perch on apile of wet logs. 

"I'm perfectly happy!" she said. "This east wind takes me home. I hear thebluebirds, and smell the salt-marshes and the wood-mosses. I'm not sure butthat when the fog lifts we shall see white caps in the valley. "

"I dare say there are some very good people down there, " said Arnold, withdeliberation, "but all the same I should welcome an inundation. Thinkwhat a climate this would be, if we could have the sea below us, knockingagainst the rocks on still nights, and thundering at us in a storm!"

"Don't speak of it! It makes me long for a miracle, or a judgment, orsomething that's not likely to happen. "

"Meantime, I want you to come down the trail, and pass judgment on mybachelor quarters. I can't stand the boarding-house any longer! By Jove, I'm like the British footman in 'Punch, '--'what with them legs o' muttonand legs o' pork, I'm a'most wore out! I want a new hanimal inwented!' I'vefound an old girl down in the valley who consents to look after me and varythe monotony of my dinners at the highest market price. She isn't here yet, but the cabin is about ready. I want you to come down and look it over. I'ma perfect barbarian about color! You can't put it on too thick and strongto suit me. I dare say I need toning down. "

They were slipping and sliding down the muddy trail, brushing the raindropsfrom the live-oak scrub as they passed. A subtle underlying content hadlulled them both, of late, into an easier companionship than they had everfound possible before, and they were gay with that enjoyment of wet weatherwhich is like an intoxication after seven months of drought. 

"Now I suppose you like soft, harmonious tints and neutral effects. You'rea bit of a conservative in everything, I fear. "

"I think I should like plenty of color here, or else positive white; themonotony of the landscape and its own deep, low tones demand it. A neutralhouse would fade into an ash heap under this sun. "

"Good! Then you'll like my dark little den, with its barbaric reds andblues. "

They were at the gate of the little cottage, overlooking the valley. Thegleam of sunlight had faded and the fog curtain rolled back. The housedid indeed seem very dark as they entered. It was only a little after fouro'clock, but the cloudy twilight of a short November day was suddenlydescending upon them. The schoolmistress looked shyly around, while Arnoldtramped about the rooms and sprung the shades up as high as they would go. 

They were in a small, irregular parlor, wainscoted and floored in redwood, and lightly furnished with bamboo. This room communicated by a low archwith the dining-room beyond. 

"I have some flags and spurs and old trophies to hang up there, " he said, pointing to the arch; "and perhaps I can get you to sew the rings on thecurtain that's to hang underneath. I don't want too much of the society ofmy angel from the valley, you know; besides, I want to shield her from thevulgar gaze, as they do the picture of the Madonna. "

"It will serve you right if she never comes at all!"

"Oh, she's pining to come. She's dying to sacrifice herself for twenty-fivedollars a month. Did I tell you, by the way, that I've had a rise in mysalary? There is a rise in the work, too, which rather overbalances theincrease of pay, but that's understood; for a good many years it will bemore work than wage, but at the other end I hope it will be more wage thanwork. You don't seem to be very much interested in my affairs; if you knewhow seldom I speak of them to any one but yourself, you might perhaps deignto listen. "

"I am listening; but I'm thinking, too, that it's getting very late. "

"See, here is my curtain!" he said, dragging out a breadth of heavy stuff. He took it to the window, and threw it over a Chinese lounge that stoodbeneath. "It's an old serape I picked up at Guadalajara five years ago:the beauty of having a house is that all the old rubbish you have boredyourself with for years immediately becomes respectable and useful. Iexpect to become so myself. You don't say that you like my curtain!"

"I think it is very pagan looking, and rather--dirty. "

"Well, I shan't make a point of the dirt. I dare say the thing would lookjust as well if it was clean. Won't you try my lounge?" he said, as shelooked restlessly towards the door. "It was invented by a race that canloaf more naturally than we do: it takes an American back some time torelax enough to appreciate it. "

Miss Frances half reluctantly drew her cloak about her, and yielded herNorthern slenderness to the long Oriental undulations of the couch. Herhead was thrown back, showing her fair throat and the sweet upward curvesof her lips and brows. 

Arnold gazed at her with too evident delight. 

"Why won't you sit still? You cannot deny that you have never been socomfortable in your life before. "

"It's a very good place to 'loaf and invite one's soul, '" she said, risingto a sitting position; "but that isn't my occupation at present. I must gohome. It is almost dark. "

"There is no hurry. I'm going with you. I want you to see how the littleroom lights up. I've never seen it by firelight, and I'll have myhouse-warming to-night!"

"Oh no, indeed! I must go back. There's the five o'clock whistle, now!"

"Well, we've an hour yet. You must get warm before you go. "

He went out, and quickly returned with an armful of wood and shavings, which he crammed into the cold fireplace. 

"What a litter you have made! Do you think your mature angel from thevalley will stand that sort of thing?"

As she spoke, the rain descended in violence, sweeping across the piazza, and obliterating the fast-fading landscape. They could scarcely see eachother in the darkness, and the trampling on the roof overhead made speecha useless effort. Almost as suddenly as it had opened upon them the tumultceased, and in the silence that followed they listened to the heavyraindrops spattering from the eaves. 

Arnold crossed to the window, where Miss Frances stood shivering andsilent, with her hands clasped before her. 

"I want you to light my fire, " he said, with a certain concentration in hisvoice. 

"Why do you not light it yourself?" She drew away from his outstretchedhand. "It seems to me you are a bit of a tyrant in your own house. "

He drew a match across his knee and held it towards her: by its gleam shesaw his pale, unsmiling face, and again that darkening of the eyes whichshe remembered. 

"Do you refuse me such a little thing, --my first guest? I ask it as a mostespecial grace!"

She took the match, and knelt with it in her hands; but it only flickered amoment, and went out. "It will not go for me. You must light it yourself. "

He knelt beside her and struck another match. "We will try together, " hesaid, placing it in her fingers and closing his hand about them. He heldthe trembling fingers and the little spark they guarded steadily againstthe shaving. It kindled; the flame breathed and brightened and curledupward among the crooked manzanita stumps, illuminating the two entrancedyoung faces bending before it. Miss Frances rose to her feet, and Arnold, rising too, looked at her with a growing dread and longing in his eyes. 

"You said to-day that you were happy, because in fancy you were at home. Isthat the only happiness possible to you here?"

"I am quite contented here, " she said. "I am getting acclimated. "

"Oh, don't be content: I am not; I am horribly otherwise. I wantsomething--so much that I dare not ask for it. You know what itis, --Frances!"

"You said once that I reminded you--of her: is that the reason you--Am Iconsoling you?"

"Good God! I don't want consolation! _That_ thing never existed; but hereis the reality; I cannot part with it. I wish you had as little as I have, outside of this room where we two stand together!"

"I don't know that I have anything, " she said under her breath. 

"Then, " said he, taking her in his arms, "I don't see but that we are readyto enter the kingdom of heaven. It seems very near to me. "

They are still in exile: they have joined the band of lotus-eaters whoinhabit that region of the West which is pervaded by a subtle breath fromthe Orient, blowing across the seas between. Mrs. Arnold has not yet madethat first visit East which is said by her Californian friends to be sodisillusioning, and the old home still hovers, like a beautiful mirage, onthe receding horizon. 

FRIEND BARTON'S "CONCERN. "

It had been "borne in" upon him, more or less, during the long winter;it had not relaxed when the frosts unlocked their hold and the streamswere set free from their long winter's silence, among the hills. He grewrestless and abstracted under "the turnings of the Lord's hand upon him, "and his speech unconsciously shaped itself into the Biblical cadences whichcame to him in his moments of spiritual exercise. 

The bedrabbled snows of March shrank away before the keen, quickeningsunbeams; the hills emerged, brown and sodden, like the chrysalis of thenew year; the streams woke in a tumult, and all day and night their voicescalled from the hills back of the mill: the waste-weir was a foamingtorrent, and spread itself in muddy shallows across the meadow, beyondthe old garden where the robins and bluebirds were house-hunting. FriendBarton's trouble stirred with the life-blood of the year, and pressedupon him sorely; but as yet he gave it no words. He plodded about, amonghis lean kine, tempering the winds of March to his untimely lambs, andreconciling unnatural ewes to their maternal duties. 

Friend Barton had never heard of the doctrine of the survival of thefittest, though it was the spring of 1812, and England and America wereinvestigating the subject on the seas, while the nations of Europe werepractically illustrating it. The "hospital tent, " as the boys called an oldcorn-basket, covered with carpet, which stood beside the kitchen chimney, was seldom without an occupant, --a brood of chilled chickens, a weaklylamb, or a wee pig (with too much blue in its pinkness), that had beenleft behind by its stouter brethren in the race for existence. The oldmill hummed away through the day, and often late into the evening if timepressed, upon the grists which added a thin, intermittent stream of tributeto the family income. Whenever work was "slack, " Friend Barton was sawingor chopping in the woodshed adjoining the kitchen; every moment he couldseize or make he was there, stooping over the rapidly growing pile. 

"Seems to me, father, thee's in a great hurry with the wood this spring. Idon't know when we've had such a pile ahead. "

"'T won't burn up any faster for being chopped, " Friend Barton said; andthen his wife Rachel knew that if he had a reason for being "forehanded"with the wood, he was not ready to give it. 

One rainy April afternoon, when the smoky gray distances began to take atinge of green, and through the drip and rustle of the rain the call ofthe robins sounded, Friend Barton sat in the door of the barn, oiling theroad-harness. The old chaise had been wheeled out and greased, and itscushions beaten and dusted. 

An ox-team with a load of grain creaked up the hill and stopped at themill door. The driver, seeing Friend Barton's broad-brimmed drab felt hatagainst the dark interior of the barn, came down the short lane leadingfrom the mill, past the house and farm-buildings. 

"Fixin' up for travelin', Uncle Tommy?"

Vain compliments, such as worldly titles of Mr. And Mrs. , were unacceptableto Thomas Barton, and he was generally known and addressed as "Uncle Tommy"by the world's people of a younger generation. 

"It is not in man that walketh to direct his own steps, neighbor Jordan. I am getting myself in readiness to obey the Lord, whichever way He shallcall me. "

Farmer Jordan cast a shrewd eye over the premises. They wore that patient, sad, exhumed look which old farm-buildings are apt to have in early spring. The roofs were black with rain, and brightened with patches of green moss. Farmer Jordan instinctively calculated how many "bunches o' shingle" wouldbe required to rescue them from the decline into which they had fallen, indicated by these hectic green spots. 

"Wal, the Lord calls most of us to stay at home and look after things, suchweather as this. Good plantin' weather; good weather for breakin' ground;fust-rate weather for millin'! This is a reg'lar miller's rain, UncleTommy. You'd ought to be takin' advantage of it. I've got a grist backhere; wish ye could manage to let me have it when I come back from store. "

The grist was ground and delivered before Friend Barton went in to hissupper that night. Dorothy Barton had been mixing bread, and was wiping herwhite arms and hands on the roller towel by the kitchen door, as her fatherstamped and scraped his feet on the stones outside. 

"There! I do believe I forgot to toll neighbor Jordan's rye, " he said, ashe gave a final rub on the broom Dorothy handed out to him. "It's wonderfulhow careless I get!"

"Well, father, I don't suppose thee'd ever forget, and toll a grist twice!"

"I believe I've been mostly preserved from mistakes of that kind, " saidFriend Barton gently. "Well, well! To be sure, " he continued musingly. "Itmay be the Lord who stays my hand from gathering profit unto myself whilehis lambs go unfed. "

Dorothy put her hands on her father's shoulders: she was almost as tall ashe, and could look into his patient, troubled eyes. 

"Father, I know what thee is thinking of, but do think long. It will be ahard year; the boys ought to go to school; and mother is so feeble!"

Friend Barton's "concern" kept him awake that night. His wife watched byhis side, giving no sign, lest her wakeful presence should disturb hissilent wrestlings. The tall, cherry-wood clock in the entry measured thehours, as they passed, with its slow, dispassionate tick. 

At two o'clock Rachel Barton was awakened from her first sleep of wearinessby her husband's voice, whispering heavily in the darkness. 

"My way is hedged up! I see no way to go forward. Lord, strengthen mypatience, that I murmur not, after all I have seen of thy goodness. I finddaily bread is very desirable; want and necessity are painful to nature;but shall I follow Thee for the sake of the loaves, or will it do toforsake Thee in times of emptiness and abasement?"

There was silence again, and restless tossings and sighings continued thestruggle. 

"Thomas, " the wife's voice spoke tremulously in the darkness, "my dearhusband, I know whither thy thoughts are tending. If the Spirit is withthee, do not deny it for our sakes, I pray thee. The Lord did not givethee thy wife and children to hang as a millstone round thy neck. I am thyhelpmeet, to strengthen thee in his service. I am thankful that I have myhealth this spring better than usual, and Dorothy is a wonderful help. Herspirit was sent to sustain me in thy long absences. Go, dear, and serve ourMaster, who has called thee in these bitter strivings! Dorothy and I willkeep things together as well as we can. The way will open--never fear!" Sheput out her hand and touched his face in the darkness; there were tears onthe furrowed cheeks. "Try to sleep, dear, and let thy spirit have rest. There is but one answer to this call. "

With the first drowsy twitterings of the birds, when the crescent-shapedopenings in the board shutters began to define themselves clearly in theshadowy room, they arose and went about their morning tasks in silence. Friend Barton's step was a little heavier than usual, and the hollowsround his wife's pale brown eyes were a little deeper. As he sat on thesplint-bottomed chair by the kitchen fireplace, drawing on his boots, sheplaced her hands on his shoulders, and touched with her cheek the worn spoton the top of his head. 

"Thee will lay this concern before meeting to-morrow, father?"

"I had it on my mind to do so, --if my light be not quenched before then. "

Friend Barton's light was not quenched. Words came to him, withoutseeking, --a sure sign that the Spirit was with him, --in which to "open theconcern" that had ripened in his mind, of a religious visit to the meetingconstituting the yearly meetings of Philadelphia and Baltimore. A "minute"was given him, encouraging him in the name, and with the full concurrence, of the monthly meetings of Nine Partners and Stony Valley, to go whereverthe Truth might lead him. 

While Friend Barton was thus freshly anointed, and "abundantly encouraged, "his wife, Rachel, was talking with Dorothy, in the low upper chamber knownas the "wheel-room. "

Dorothy was spinning wool on the big wheel, dressed in her light calicoshort gown and brown quilted petticoat; her arms were bare, and her hairwas gathered away from her flushed cheeks and knotted behind her ears. Theroof sloped down on one side, and the light came from a long, low windowunder the eaves. There was another window (shaped like a half-moon, highup in the peak), but it sent down only one long beam of sunlight, whichglimmered across the dust and fell upon Dorothy's white neck. 

The wheel was humming a quick measure and Dorothy trod lightly back andforth, the wheel-pin in one hand, the other holding the tense, lengtheningthread, which the spindle devoured again. 

"Dorothy, thee looks warm: can't thee sit down a moment, while I talk tothee?"

"Is it anything important, mother? I want to get my twenty knots beforedinner. " She paused as she joined a long tress of wool at the spindle. "Isit anything about father?"

"Yes, it's about father, and all of us. "

"I know, " said Dorothy, with a sigh. "He's going away again!"

"Yes, dear. He feels that he is called. It is a time of trouble andcontention everywhere: 'the harvest, ' truly, 'is plenteous, but thelaborers are few. '"

"There are not so many 'laborers' here, mother, though to be sure, theharvest"--

"Dorothy, my daughter, don't let a spirit of levity creep into thy speech. Thy father has striven and wrestled with his urgings. I've seen it workingon him all winter. He feels, now, it is the Lord's will. "

"I don't see how he can be so sure, " said Dorothy, swaying gloomily to andfro against the wheel. "I don't care for myself, I'm not afraid of work, but thee's not able to do what thee does now, mother. If I have outsidethings to look after, how can I help thee as I should? And the boys areabout as much dependence as a flock of barn swallows!"

"Don't thee fret about me, dear; the way will open. Thy father has thoughtand planned for us. Have patience while I tell thee. Thee knows that WalterEvesham's pond is small and his mill is doing a thriving business?"

"Yes, indeed, I know it!" Dorothy exclaimed. "He has his own share, andours too, most of it!"

"Wait, dear, wait! Thy father has rented him the ponds, to use when his owngives out. He is to have the control of the water, and it will give us alittle income, even though the old mill does stand idle. "

"He may as well take the mill, too. If father is away all summer it willbe useless ever to start it again. Thee'll see, mother, how it will end, if Walter Evesham has the custom and the water all summer. I think it'smiserable for a young man to be so keen about money. "

"Dorothy, seems to me thee's hasty in thy judgments. I never heard thatsaid of Walter Evesham. His father left him with capital to improve hismill. It does better work than ours; we can't complain of that. Thy fatherwas never one to study much after ways of making money. He felt he had noright to more than an honest livelihood. I don't say that Walter Evesham'sin the wrong. We know that Joseph took advantage of his opportunities, though I can't say that I ever felt much unity with some of histransactions. What would thee have, my dear? Thee's discouraged with thyfather for choosing the thorny way, which we tread with him; but thee seemsno better satisfied with one who considers the flesh and its wants'"

"I don't know, mother, what I want for myself; that doesn't matter; butfor thee I would have rest from all these cruel worries thee has borne solong. "

She buried her face in her mother's lap and put her strong young arms aboutthe frail, toil-bent form. 

"There, there, dear. Try to rule thy spirit, Dorothy. Thee's too muchworked up about this. They are not worries to me. I am thankful we havenothing to decide one way or the other, only to do our best with what isgiven us. Thee's not thyself, dear. Go downstairs and fetch in the clothes, and don't hurry; stay out till thee gets more composed. "

Dorothy did not succeed in bringing herself into unity with her father'scall, but she came to a fuller realization of his struggle. When he badethem good-by his face showed what it had cost him; but Rachel was calm andcheerful. The pain of parting is keenest to those who go, but it stayslonger with those that are left behind. 

"Dorothy, take good care of thy mother!" Friend Barton said, taking hisdaughter's face between his hands and gravely kissing her brow between thelow-parted ripples of her hair. 

"Yes, father, " she said, looking into his eyes; "Thee knows I'm thy eldestson. "

They watched the old chaise swing round the corner of the lane, then thepollard willows shut it from sight. 

"Come, mother, " said Dorothy, hurrying her in at the gate. "I'm goingto make a great pot of mush, and have it hot for supper, and fried forbreakfast, and warmed up with molasses for dinner, and there'll be somecold with milk for supper, and we shan't have any cooking to do at all!"

They went around by the kitchen door. Rachel stopped in the woodshed, andthe tears rushed to her eyes. 

"Dear father! How he has worked over that wood, early and late, to spareus!"

We will not revive Dorothy's struggles with the farm-work, and with theboys. They were an isolated family at the mill-house; their peculiar faithisolated them still more, and they were twelve miles from meeting and thesettlement of Friends at Stony Valley. Dorothy's pride kept her silentabout her needs, lest they might bring reproach upon her father among theneighbors, who would not be likely to feel the urgency of his spiritualsummons. 

The summer heats came on apace and the nights grew shorter. It seemedto Dorothy that she had hardly stretched out her tired young body andforgotten her cares, in the low, attic bedroom, before the east wasstreaked with light and the birds were singing in the apple-trees, whosefalling blossoms drifted in at the window. 

One day in early June, Friend Barton's flock of sheep (consisting of nineexperienced ewes, six yearlings, and a sprinkling of close-curled lambswhose legs had not yet come into mature relations with their bodies) wasgathered in a wattled inclosure, beside the stream that flowed into themill-head. It was supplied by the waste from the pond, and, when the gatewas shut, rambled easily over the gray slate pebbles, with here and there afall just forcible enough to serve as a douche-bath for a well-grown sheep. The victims were panting in their heavy fleeces, and mingling their hoarse, plaintive tremolo with the ripple of the water and the sound of youngvoices in a frolic. Dorothy had divided her forces for the washing to thebest advantage. The two elder boys stood in midstream to receive the sheep, which she, with the help of little Jimmy, caught and dragged to the bank. 

The boys were at work now upon an elderly ewe, while Dorothy stood on thebrink of the stream braced against an ash sapling, dragging forward by thefleece a beautiful but reluctant yearling. Her bare feet were incased in apair of moccasins that laced around the ankle; her petticoats were kilted, and her broad hat bound down with a ribbon; one sleeve was rolled up, theother had been sacrificed in a scuffle in the sheep-pen. The new candidatefor immersion stood bleating and trembling with her forefeet plantedagainst the slippery bank, pushing back with all her strength while Jimmypropelled from the rear. 

"Boys!" Dorothy's clear voice called across the stream. "_Do_ hurry! She'sbeen in long enough, now! Keep her head up, can't you, and squeeze the wool_hard_! You're not _half_ washing! Oh, Reuby! thee'll drown her! Keep her_head_ up!"

Another unlucky douse and another half-smothered bleat, --Dorothy releasedthe yearling and plunged to the rescue. "Go after that lamb, Reuby!" shecried with exasperation in her voice. Reuby followed the yearling, thathad disappeared over the orchard slope, upsetting an obstacle in its path, which happened to be Jimmy. He was wailing now on the bank, while Dorothy, with the ewe's nose tucked comfortably in the bend of her arm, was partingand squeezing the fleece, with the water swirling round her. Her stout armsached, and her ears were stunned with the incessant bleatings; she countedwith dismay the sheep still waiting in the pen. "Oh, Jimmy! Do stop crying, or else go to the house!"

"He'd better go after Reuby, " said Sheppard Barton, who was now Dorothy'ssole dependence. 

"Oh yes, do, Jimmy, that's a good boy. Tell him to let the yearling go andcome back quick. "

The water had run low that morning in Evesham's pond. He shut down themill, and strode up the hills, across lots, to raise the gate of the lowerBarton pond, which had been heading up for his use. He passed the cornfieldwhere, a month before, he had seen pretty Dorothy Barton dropping corn withher brothers. It made him ache to think of Dorothy with her feeble mother, the boys as wild as preachers' sons proverbially are, and the old farmrunning down on her hands; the fences all needed mending, and there wentReuben Barton, now, careering over the fields in chase of a stray yearling. His mother's house was big, and lonely, and empty; and he flushed as hethought of the "one ewe-lamb" he coveted out of Friend Barton's ruggedpastures. 

As Evesham raised the gate, and leaned to watch the water swirl and gurglethrough the "trunk, " sucking the long weeds with it, and thickening withits tumult the clear current of the stream, the sound of voices and thebleating of sheep came up from below. He had not the farming instincts inhis blood; the distant bleating, the hot June sunshine and cloudless skydid not suggest to him sheep-washing; but now came a boy's voice shoutingand a cry of distress, and he remembered with a thrill that Friend Bartonused the stream for that peaceful purpose. He shut down the gate and torealong through the ferns and tangled grass till he came to the sheep-pen, where the bank was muddy and trampled. The prisoners were bleating drearilyand looking with longing eyes across to the other side, where those who hadsuffered were now straying and cropping the short turf through the lightsand shadows of the orchard. 

There was no other sign of life, except a broad hat with a brown ribbonbuffeted about in an eddy among the stones. The stream dipped now below thehill, and the current, still racing fast with the impetus he had given it, shot away amongst the hazel thickets that crowded close to the brink. Hewas obliged to make a détour by the orchard and to come out below at the"mill-head, " a black, deep pool with an ugly ripple setting across it tothe head-gate. He saw something white clinging there, and ran round thebrink. It was the sodden fleece of the old ewe, which had been driftedagainst the head-gate and held there to her death. Evesham, with asickening contraction of the heart, threw off his jacket for a plunge, whenDorothy's voice called rather faintly from the willows on the oppositebank. 

"Don't jump! I'm here, " she said. Evesham searched the willows and foundher seated in the sun, just beyond, half buried in a bed of ferns. 

"I _shouldn't_ have called thee, " she said shyly, as he sank pale andpanting beside her, "but thee looked--I thought thee was going to jump intothe mill-head!"

"I thought _you_ were there, Dorothy!"

"I was there quite long enough. Shep pulled me out; I was too tired to helpmyself much. " Dorothy held her palm pressed against her temple and theblood trickled from beneath, streaking her pale, wet cheek. 

"He's gone to the house to get me a cloak. I don't want mother to see me, not yet, " she said. 

"I'm afraid you ought not to wait, Dorothy. Let me take you to the house, won't you? I'm afraid you'll get a deadly chill. "

Dorothy did not look in the least like death. She was blushing now, becauseEvesham would think it so strange of her to stay, and yet she could notrise in her wet clothes, that clung to her like the calyx to a bud. 

"Let me see that cut, Dorothy!"

"Oh, it's nothing. I don't wish thee to look at it!"

"But I will! Do you want to make me your murderer, sitting there in yourwet clothes with a cut on your head?"

He drew away her hand; the wound, indeed, was no great affair, but he boundit up deftly with strips of his handkerchief. Dorothy's wet curls touchedhis fingers and clung to them, and her eyelashes drooped lower and lower. 

"I think it was _very_ stupid of thee. Didn't thee hear us from the dam?I'm sure we made noise enough. "

"Yes, I heard you when it was too late. I heard the sheep before, but howcould I imagine that you, Dorothy, and three boys as big as cockerels, weresheep-washing? It's the most preposterous thing I ever heard of!", "Well, I can't help being a woman, and the sheep had to be washed. I thinkthere ought to be more men in the world when half of them are preaching andfighting. "

"If you'd only let the men who are left help you a little, Dorothy. "

"I don't want any help. I only _don't_ want to be washed into themill-head. "

They both laughed, and Evesham began again entreating her to let him takeher to the house. 

"Hasn't thee a coat or something I could put around me until Shep comes?"said Dorothy. "He must be here soon. "

"Yes, I've a jacket here somewhere. "

He sped away to find it, and faithless Dorothy, as the willows closedbetween them, sprang to her feet and fled like a startled Naiad to thehouse. 

When Evesham, pushing through the willows, saw nothing but the bed of wet, crushed ferns and the trail through the long grass where Dorothy's feet hadfled, he smiled grimly to himself, remembering that "ewe-lambs" are notalways as meek as they look. 

That evening Rachel had received a letter from Friend Barton and waspreparing to read it aloud to the children. They were in the kitchen, wherethe boys had been helping Dorothy in a desultory manner to shell corn forthe chickens; but now all was silence while Rachel wiped her glasses andturned the large sheet of paper, squared with many foldings, to the candle. 

She read the date, "'London Grove, 5th month, 22d. --Most affectionatelybeloved. '" "He means us all, " said Rachel, turning to the children with atender smile. "It's spelled with a small _b_. "

"He means thee!" said Dorothy, laughing. "Thee's not such a very bigbeloved. "

There was a moment's silence. "I don't know that the opening of the letteris of general interest, " Rachel mused, with her eyes traveling slowly downthe page. "He says: 'In regard to my health, lest thee should concernthyself, I am thankful to say I have never enjoyed better since years havemade me acquainted with my infirmities of body, and I earnestly hope thatmy dear wife and children are enjoying the same blessing. 

"'I trust the boys are not deficient in obedience and helpfulness. AtSheppard's age I had already begun to take the duties of a man upon myshoulders. '"

Sheppard giggled uncomfortably, and Dorothy laughed outright. 

"Oh, if father only _knew_ how good the boys are! Mother, thee must writeand tell him about their 'helpfulness and obedience'! Thee can tell himtheir appetites keep up pretty well; they manage to take their mealsregularly, and they are _always_ out of bed by eight o'clock to help mehang up the milking-stool!"

"Just wait till thee gets into the mill-head again, Dorothy Barton! Theeneedn't come to _me_ to help thee out!"

"Go on, mother. Don't let the boys interrupt thee!"

"Well, " said Rachel, rousing herself, "where was I? Oh, 'At Sheppard'sage'! Well, next come some allusions to the places where he has visited andhis spiritual exercises there. I don't know that the boys are quite oldenough to enter into this yet. Thee'd better read it thyself, Dorothy. I'mkeeping all father's letters for the boys to read when they are old enoughto appreciate them. "

"Well, I think thee might read to us about where he's been preachin'. Wecan understand a great deal more than thee thinks we can, " said Shep inan injured voice. "Reuby can preach some himself. Thee ought to hear him, mother. It's almost as good as meetin'. "

"I _wondered_ how Reuby spent his time, " said Dorothy, and the motherhastened to interpose. 

"Well! here's a passage that may be interesting: 'On sixth day attended theyouths' meeting here, a pretty favored time on the whole. Joseph' (that'sJoseph Carpenter; he mentions him aways back) 'had good service in livelytestimony, while I was calm and easy without a word to say. At a meeting atPlumstead we suffered long, but at length we felt relieved. The unfaithfulwere admonished, the youth invited, and the heavy-hearted encouraged. Itwas a heavenly time. ' Heretofore he seems to have been closed up withsilence a good deal, but now the way opens continually for him to freehimself. He's been 'much favored, ' he says, 'of late. ' Reuby, what's theedoing to thy brothers?" (Shep and Reuby, who had been persecuting Jimmy bypouring handfuls of corn down the neck of his jacket until he had takenrefuge behind Dorothy's chair, were now recriminating with corn-cobs oneach other's faces. ) "Dorothy, can't thee keep those boys quiet?"

"Did thee ever know them to be quiet?" said Dorothy, helping Jimmy torelieve himself of his corn. 

"Well now, listen. " Rachel continued placidly, "'Second day, 27th' (offifth month, he means; the letter's been a long time coming), 'attendedtheir mid-week meeting at London Grove, where my tongue, as it were, claveto the roof of my mouth, while Hannah Husbands was much favored and enabledto lift up her voice like the song of an angel'"--

"Who's Hannah Husbands?" Dorothy interrupted. 

"Thee doesn't know her, dear. She was second cousin to thy father'sstepmother; the families were not congenial, I believe, but she has a greatgift for the ministry. "

"I should think she'd better be at home with her children, if she has any. Fancy _thee_, mother, going about to strange meetings and lifting up thyvoice"--

"Hush, hush, Dorothy! Thy tongue's running away with thee. Consider theexample thee's setting the boys. "

"Thee'd better write to father about Dorothy, mother. Perhaps HannahHusbands would like to know what she thinks about her preachin'. "

"Well, now, be quiet, all of you. Here's something about Dorothy: 'I knowthat my dear daughter Dorothy is faithful and loving, albeit somewhat quickof speech and restive under obligation. I would have thee remind her thatan unwillingness to accept help from others argues a want of ChristianMeekness. Entreat her from me not to conceal her needs from our neighbors, if so be she find her work oppressive. We know them to be of kindlyintention, though not of our way of thinking in all particulars. Let herreceive help from them, not as individuals, but as instruments of theLord's protection, which it were impiety and ingratitude to deny. '"

"There!" cried Shep. "That means thee is to let Luke Jordan finish thesheep-washing. Thee'd better have done it in the first place. We shouldn'thave the old ewe to pick if thee had. "

Dorothy was dimpling at the idea of Luke Jordan in the character of aninstrument of heavenly protection. She had not regarded him in that light, it must be confessed, but had rejected him with scorn. 

"He may, if he wants to, " she said; "but you boys shall drive them over. I'll have nothing to do with it. "

"And shear them too, Dorothy? He asked to shear them long ago. "

"Well, _let_ him shear them and keep the wool too. "

"I wouldn't say that, Dorothy, " said Rachel Barton. "We need the wool, andit seems as if over-payment might not be quite honest, either. "

"Oh, mother, mother! What a mother thee is!" cried Dorothy laughing andrumpling Rachel's cap-strings in a tumultuous embrace. 

"She's a great deal too good for _thee_, Dorothy Barton. "

"She's too good for all of us. How did thee ever come to have such agraceless set of children, mother?"

"I'm very well satisfied, " said Rachel. "But now do be quiet and let'sfinish the letter. We must get to bed some time to-night!"

 * * * * *

The wild clematis was in blossom now; the fences were white with it, andthe rusty cedars were crowned with virgin wreaths; but the weeds were thickin the garden and in the potato patch. Dorothy, stretching her crampedback, looked longingly up the shadowy vista of the farm-lane that hadnothing to do but ramble off into the remotest green fields, where thedaisies' faces were as white and clear as in early June. 

One hot August night she came home late from the store. The stars werethick in the sky; the katydids made the night oppressive with their raspingquestionings, and a hoarse revel of frogs kept the ponds from fallingasleep in the shadow of the hills. 

"Is thee very tired to-night, Dorothy?" her mother asked, as she took herseat on the low step of the porch. "Would thee mind turning old John outthyself?"

"No, mother, I'm not tired. But why? Oh, _I_ know!" cried Dorothy witha quick laugh. "The dance at Slocum's barn. I thought those boys wereuncommonly helpful. "

"Yes, dear, it's but natural they should want to see it. Hark! we can hearthe music from here. "

They listened, and the breeze brought across the fields the sound offiddles and the rhythmic tramp of feet, softened by the distance. Dorothy'syoung pulses leaped. 

"Mother, is it any harm for them just to see it? They have so little fun, except what they get out of teasing and shirking. "

"My dear, thy father would never countenance such a scene of frivolity, orpermit one of his children to look upon it; through our eyes and ears theworld takes possession of our hearts. "

"Then I'm to spare the boys this temptation, mother? Thee will trust _me_to pass the barn?"

"I would trust my boys, if they were thy age, Dorothy; but their resolutionis tender like their years. "

It might be questioned whether the frame of mind in which the boys went tobed that night under their mother's eye, for Rachel could be firm in a caseof conscience, was more improving than the frivolity of Slocum's barn. 

"Mother, " called Dorothy, looking in at the kitchen window where Rachel wasstooping over the embers in the fireplace to light a bedroom candle, "Iwant to speak to thee. "

Rachel came to the window, screening the candle with her hand. 

"Will thee trust me to look at the dancing a little while? It is so verynear. "

"Why, Dorothy, does thee want to?"

"Yes, mother, I believe I do. I've never seen a dance in my life. It cannotruin me to look just once. "

Rachel stood puzzled. 

"Thee's old enough to judge for thyself, Dorothy. But, my child, do nottamper with thy inclinations through heedless curiosity. Thee knows thee'smore impulsive than I could wish for thy own peace. "

"I'll be very careful, mother. If I feel in the least wicked I will comestraight away. "

She kissed her mother's hand that rested on the window-sill. Rachel didnot like the kiss, nor Dorothy's brilliant eyes and flushed cheeks, asthe candle revealed them like a fair picture painted on the darkness. Shehesitated, but Dorothy sped away up the lane with old John lagging at hishalter. 

Was it the music growing nearer that quickened her breathing, or only thecloseness of the night shut in between the wild grapevine curtains swungfrom one dark cedar column to another? She caught the sweetbrier's breathas she hurried by, and now a loop in the leafy curtain revealed the pond, lying black in a hollow of the hills with a whole heaven of stars reflectedin it. Old John stumbled along over the stones, cropping the grass as hewent. Dorothy tugged at his halter and urged him on to the head of thelane, where two farm-gates stood at right angles. One of them was open anda number of horses were tethered in a row along the fence within. Theywhinnied a cheerful greeting to John as Dorothy slipped his halter and shuthim into the field adjoining. Now should she walk into temptation with hereyes and ears open? The gate stood wide, with only one field of perfumedmeadow-grass between her and the lights and music of Slocum's barn. Thesound of revelry by night could hardly have taken a more innocent form thanthis rustic dancing of neighbors after a "raisin' bee, " but had it been therout of Comus and his crew, and Dorothy the Lady Una trembling near, herheart could hardly have throbbed more quickly as she crossed the dewymeadow. A young maple stood within ten rods of the barn, and here shecrouched in shadow. 

The great doors stood wide open and lanterns were hung from the beams, lighting the space between the mows where a dance was set, with youths andmaidens in two long rows. The fiddlers sat on barrel-heads near the door;a lantern hanging just behind projected their shadows across the squareof light on the trodden space in front, where they executed a grotesquepantomime, keeping time to the music with spectral wavings and noddings. The dancers were Dorothy's young neighbors, whom she had known, and yet notknown, all her life, but they had the strangeness of familiar faces seensuddenly in some fantastic dream. 

Surely that was Nancy Slocum in the bright pink gown heading the line ofgirls, and that was Luke Jordan's sunburnt profile leaning from his placeto pluck a straw from the mow behind him. They were marching, and themeasured tramp of feet keeping solid time to the fiddles set a strangetumult vibrating in Dorothy's blood; and now it stopped, with a thrill, asshe recognized that Evesham was there, marching with the young men, andthat his peer was not among them. The perception of his difference cameto her with a vivid shock. He was coming forward now with his light, firmstep, formidable in evening dress and with a smile of subtle triumph in hiseyes, to meet Nancy Slocum in the bright pink gown. Dorothy felt she hatedpink of all the colors her faith had abjured. She could see, in spite ofthe obnoxious gown, that Nancy was very pretty. He was taking her first bythe right hand, then by the left, and turning her gayly about; and now theywere meeting again for the fourth or fifth time in the centre of the barn, with all eyes upon them, and the music lingered while Nancy, holding outher pink petticoats, coyly revolved around him. Then began a mysteriousturning and clasping of hands, and weaving of Nancy's pink frock andEvesham's dark blue coat and white breeches in and out of the line offigures, until they met at the door, and, taking each other by both hands, swept with a joyous measure to the head of the barn. Dorothy gave a littlechoking sigh. 

What a senseless whirl it was. She was thrilling with a new and strangeexcitement, too near the edge of pain to be long endured as a pleasure. If this were the influence of dancing she did not wonder so much at herfather's scruples, and yet it held her like a spell. 

All hands were lifted now, making an arch through which Evesham, holdingNancy by the hands, raced, stooping and laughing. As they emerged at thedoor, Evesham threw up his head to shake a brown lock back. He lookedflushed and boyishly gay, and his hazel eye searched the darkness with thatsubtle ray of triumph in it which made Dorothy afraid. She drew back behindthe tree and pressed her hot cheek to the cool, rough bark. She longedfor the stillness of the starlit meadow, and the dim lane with its faintperfumes and whispering leaves. 

But now suddenly the music stopped and the dance broke up in a tumult ofvoices. Dorothy stole backward in the shadow of the tree-trunk, until itjoined the darkness of the meadow, and then fled, stumbling along withblinded eyes, the music still vibrating in her ears. Then came a quick rushof footsteps behind her, swishing through the long grass. She did not lookback, but quickened her pace, struggling to reach the gate. Evesham wasthere before her. He had swung the gate to and was leaning with his backagainst it, laughing and panting. 

"I've caught you, Dorothy, you little deceiver! You'll not get rid of meto-night with any of your tricks. I'm going to take you home to your motherand tell her you were peeping at the dancing. "

"Mother knows that I came; I asked her, " said Dorothy. Her knees weretrembling and her heart almost choked her with its throbbing. 

"I'm so glad you don't dance, Dorothy. This is much nicer than the barn, and the katydids are better fiddlers than old Darby and his son. I'll openthe gate if you will put your hand in mine, so that I can be sure of you, you little runaway. "

"I will stay here all night, first, " said Dorothy, in a low, quiveringvoice. 

"As you choose. I shall be happy as long as you are here. "

Dead silence, while the katydids seemed to keep time to their heart-beats;the fiddles began tuning for another reel, and the horses, tethered near, stretched out their necks with low, inquiring whinnies. 

"Dorothy, " said Evesham softly, leaning toward her and trying to see herface in the darkness, "are you angry with me? Don't you think you deserve alittle punishment for the trick you played me at the mill-head?"

"It was all thy fault for insisting. " Dorothy was too excited and angry tocry, but she was as miserable as she had ever been in her life before. "Ididn't want thee to stay. People that force themselves where they are notwanted must take what they get. "

"What did you say, Dorothy?"

"I say I didn't want thee then. I do not want thee now. Thee may go backto thy fiddling and dancing. I'd rather have one of those dumb brutes forcompany to-night than thee, Walter Evesham. "

"Very well; the reel has begun, " said Evesham. "Fanny Jordan is waiting todance it with me, or if she isn't she ought to be. Shall I open the gatefor you?"

She passed out in silence, and the gate swung to with a heavy jar. She madegood speed down the lane and then waited outside the fence till her breathcame more quietly. 

"Is that thee, Dorothy?" Rachel's voice called from the porch. She came outto meet her daughter and they went along the walk together. "How damp thyforehead is, child. Is the night so warm?" They sat down on the low stepsand Dorothy slid her arm under her mother's and laid her soft palm againstthe one less soft by twenty years of toil for others. "Thee's not beenlong, dear; was it as much as thee expected?"

"Mother, it was dreadful! I never wish to hear a fiddle again as long as Ilive. "

Rachel opened the way for Dorothy to speak further; she was not withoutsome mild stirrings of curiosity on the subject herself, but Dorothy had nomore to say. 

They went into the house soon after, and as they separated for the nightDorothy clung to her mother with a little nervous laugh. 

"Mother, what is that text about Ephraim?"

"Ephraim is joined to idols?" Rachel suggested. 

"Yes, Ephraim is joined to his idols, " said Dorothy, lifting her head. "Lethim go!"

"Let him _alone_, " corrected Rachel. 

"Let him _alone_!" Dorothy repeated. "That is better yet. "

"What's thee thinking of, dear?"

"Oh, I'm thinking about the dance in the barn. "

"I'm glad thee looks at it in that light, " said Rachel calmly. 

 * * * * *

Dorothy knelt by her bed in the low chamber under the eaves, crying toherself that she was not the child of her mother any more. 

She felt that she had lost something, that in truth had never been hers. It was but the unconscious poise of her unawakened girlhood which had beenstirred; she had mistaken it for that abiding peace which is not lost orwon in a day. 

Dorothy could no more stifle the spring thrills in her blood than she couldcrush the color out of her cheek or brush the ripples out of her brighthair, but she longed for the cool grays and the still waters. She prayedthat the "grave and beautiful damsel called Discretion" might take her bythe hand and lead her to that "upper chamber, whose name is Peace. " She layawake listening to the music from the barn, and waiting through breathlesssilences for it to begin again. She wondered if Fanny Jordan had grown anyprettier since she had seen her as a half-grown girl, and then she despisedherself for the thought. The katydids seemed to beat their wings upon herbrain, and all the noises of the night, far and near, came to her strainedsenses as if her silent chamber were a whispering gallery. The clock strucktwelve, and in the silence that followed she missed the music; but voicestalking and laughing were coming down the lane. There was the clink of ahorse's hoof on the stones: now it was lost on the turf, and now they wereall trooping noisily past the house. She buried her head in her pillow andtried to bury with it the consciousness that she was wondering if Eveshamwere there laughing with the rest. 

Yes, Evesham was there. He walked with Farmer Jordan, behind the young menand girls, and discussed with him, somewhat absently, the war news and theprices of grain. 

As they passed the dark old house, spreading its wide roofs like a hengathering her chickens under her wing, he became suddenly silent. A whitecurtain flapped in and out of an upper window. Evesham looked up andslightly raised his hat, but his instinct failed him there, --it was thewindow of the boys' room. 

"Queer kinks them old Friend preachers gits into their heads sometimes, "said Farmer Jordan, as they passed the empty mill. "Now what do you s'posetook Uncle Tommy Barton off right on top of plantin', leavin' his wife 'n'critters 'n' child'en to look after themselves? Mighty good preachin' itought to be to make up for such practicin'. Wonderful set ag'in the war, Uncle Tommy is. He's a-preachin' up peace now. But Lord! all the preachin'sense Moses won't keep men from fightin' when their blood's up and there'ster'tory in it. "

"It makes saints of the women, " said Evesham shortly. 

"Wal, yes. Saints in heaven before their time, some of 'em. There'sDorothy, now. She'll hoe her row with any saint in the kingdom or out ofit. I never see a hulsomer-lookin' gal. My Luke, he run the furrers inher corn-patch last May. Said it made him sick to see a gal like thata-staggerin' after a plough. She wouldn't more 'n half let him. She's aproud little piece. They're all proud, Quakers is. I never could see no'poorness of spirit, ' come to git at 'em. And they're wonderful clannish, too. My Luke, he'd a notion he'd like to run the hull concern, Dorothy 'n'all; but I told him he might's well p'int off. Them Quaker gals don't nevermarry out o' meetin'. Besides, the farm's too poor. "

"Good-night, Mr. Jordan, " said Evesham suddenly. "I'm off across lots. " Heleaped the fence, crashed through the alder hedgerow, and disappeared inthe dusky meadow. 

Evesham was by no means satisfied with his experiments in planetarydistances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his orbit or hers, theremust be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the attractionof atoms in the mass. Thus far she had reversed the laws of the spheres, and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold apermanent place in his thoughts he had invested her with something of thatatmosphere of peace and cool passivity which hedges in the women of herfaith. It had been like a thin, clear glass, revealing her loveliness, but cutting off the magnetic currents. A young man is not long satisfiedwith the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is theirobject. Evesham had grown impatient; he had broken the spell of hersweet remoteness. He had touched her and found her human, deliciously, distractingly human, but with a streak of that obduracy which historyhas attributed to the Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted themill-dam, and bribed the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at thewell-curb to ask Dorothy for water that did not reach his thirst. She wasthere in the flesh, with her arms aloft balancing the well-sweep, while hestooped with his lips at the bucket; but in spirit she was unapproachable. He felt, with disgust at his own persistence, that she even grudged him thewater. He grew savage and restless, and fretted over the subtle changesthat he counted in Dorothy as the summer waned. She was thinner and paler;perhaps with the heats of harvest, which had not, indeed, been burdensomefrom its abundance. Her eyes were darker and shyer, and her voice morelanguid. Was she wearing down with all this work and care? A fierce disgustpossessed him that this sweet life should be cast into the breach betweenfaith and works. 

He did not see that Rachel Barton had changed, too, with a change thatmeant more, at her age, than Dorothy's flushings and palings. He did notmiss the mother's bent form from the garden, or the bench by the kitchendoor where she had been used to wash the milk-things. 

Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in thesunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat andmused for hours over the five letters that she had received from herhusband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified theirfather's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was releasedfrom much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when shewas there alone with her ironing and dish washing, was a heavier burdenthan she had yet known. 

Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remotefarmhouses with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms ofdestruction, but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling intothe stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal. 

The storms, that had ambushed in the lurid August skies and circledominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke atlast in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house. It tookits place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the hard winter of1800, with the late frost that had coated the incipient apples with ice andfrozen the new potatoes in the ground in the spring of '97, and with theyear the typhus had visited the valley. 

The rain had been falling a night and a day; it had been welcomed withthanksgiving, but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now theearly darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy and thetwo older boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings, seeing all safefor the second night. The barns and mill stood on high ground, while thehouse occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little streams from the hillswere washing in turbid currents across the lower levels; the waste-weirroared as in early spring, the garden was inundated, and the meadowa shallow pond. The sheep had been driven into the upper barn floor:the chickens were in the corn-bin; and old John and the cows had beentransferred from the stable, that stood low, to the weighing floor of themill. A gloomy echoing and gurgling sounded from the dark wheel-chamberwhere the water was rushing under the wheel and jarring it with its tumult. At eight o'clock the woodshed was flooded and water began to creep underthe kitchen door. Dorothy and the boys carried armfuls of wood and stackedthem in the passage to the sitting-room, two steps higher up. At nineo'clock the boys were sent protesting to bed, and Dorothy, looking out oftheir window as she fumbled about in the dark for a pair of Shep's trousersthat needed mending, saw a lantern flickering up the road. It was Eveshamon his way to the mill-dams. The light glimmered on his oilskin coat as heclimbed the stile behind the well-curb. 

"He raised the flood-gates at noon, " Dorothy said to herself. "I wonder ifhe is anxious about the dams. " She resolved to watch for his return, butshe was busy settling her mother for the night when she heard his footstepson the porch. The roar of water from the hills startled Dorothy as sheopened the door; it had increased in violence within an hour. A gust ofwind and rain followed Evesham into the entry. 

"Come in, " she said, running lightly across the sitting-room to close thedoor of her mother's room. 

He stood opposite her on the hearth-rug and looked into her eyes, acrossthe estrangement of the summer. It was not Dorothy of the mill-head, orof Slocum's meadow, or the cold maid of the well; it was a very anxious, lonely little girl in a crumbling old house, with a foot of water in thecellar and a sick mother in the next room. She had forgotten about Ephraimand his idols; she picked up Shep's trousers from the rug, where she haddropped them, and, looking intently at her thimble finger, told him she wasvery glad that he had come. 

"Did you think I would not come?" said he. "I'm going to take you home withme, Dorothy, --you and your mother and the boys. It's not fit for you to behere alone. "

"Does thee know of any danger?"

"I know of none, but water's a thing you can't depend on. It's an uglyrain; older men than your father remember nothing like it. "

"I shall be glad to have mother go, and Jimmy; the house is very damp. It'san awful night for her to be out, though. "

"She _must_ go!" said Evesham. "You must all go. I'll be back in half anhour"--

"_I_ shall not go, " Dorothy said; "the boys and I must stay and look afterthe stock. "

"What's that?" Evesham was listening to a trickling of water outside thedoor. 

"Oh! it's from the kitchen. The door has blown open, I guess. "

Dorothy looked out into the passage; a strong wind was blowing in from thekitchen, where the water covered the floor and washed against the chimney. 

"This is a nice state of things! What's all this wood here for?"

"The woodshed's under water. "

"You must get yourself ready, Dorothy. I'll come for your mother first inthe chaise. "

"I cannot go, " she said. "I don't believe there is any danger. This oldhouse has stood for eighty years; it's not likely this is the first bigrain in all that time. " Dorothy's spirits had risen. "Besides, I have afamily of orphans to take care of. See here, " she said, stooping over abasket in the shadow of the chimney. It was the "hospital tent, " and as sheuncovered it, a brood of belated chickens stretched out their thin neckswith plaintive peeps. 

Dorothy covered them with her hands and they nestled with comfortabletwitterings into silence. 

"You're a kind of special providence, aren't you, Dorothy? But I've nosympathy with chickens who will be born just in time for the equinoctial. "

"_I_ didn't want them, " said Dorothy, anxious to defend her management. "The old hen stole her nest and she left them the day before the rain. She's making herself comfortable now in the corn-bin. "

"She ought to be made an example of; that's the way of the world, however, --retribution doesn't fall always on the right shoulders. I must gonow. We'll take your mother and Jimmy first, and then, if you _won't_ come, you shall let me stay with you. The mill is safe enough, anyhow. "

Evesham returned with the chaise and a man, who, he insisted, should driveaway old John and the cows, so that Dorothy should have less care. Themother was packed into the chaise with a vast collection of wraps, whichalmost obliterated Jimmy. As they started, Dorothy ran out in the rain withher mother's spectacles and the five letters, which always lay in a box onthe table by her bed. Evesham took her gently by the arms and lifted herback across the puddles to the stoop. 

As the chaise drove off, she went back into the sitting-room and crouchedon the rug, her wet hair shining in the firelight. She took out herchickens one by one and held them under her chin, with tender words andfinger-touches. If September chickens have feelings as susceptible as theirbodies, Dorothy's orphans must have been imperiled by her caresses. 

"Look here, Dorothy! Where's my trousers?" cried Shep, opening the door atthe foot of the stairs. 

Reuby was behind him, fully arrayed in his own garment aforesaid, andcarrying the bedroom candle. 

"Here they are--with a needle in them, " said Dorothy. "What are you gettingup in the middle of the night for?"

"Well, I guess it's time somebody's up. Who's that man driving off ourcows?"

"Goosey! It's Walter Evesham's man. He came for mother and all of us, andhe's taken old John and the cows to save us so much foddering. "

"Ain't we going too?"

"I don't see why we should, just because there happens to be a little waterin the kitchen. I've often seen it come in there before. "

"Well, thee never saw anything like _this_ before--nor anybody else, either, " said Shep. 

"I don't care, " said Reuby, "I wish there'd come a reg'lar flood. We couldclimb up in the mill-loft and go sailin' down over Jordan's meadows. Wouldn't Luke Jordan open that big mouth of his to see us heave in sightabout cock-crow, wing and wing, and the old tackle a-swingin'!"

"Do hush!" said Dorothy. "We may have to try it yet. "

"There's an awful roarin' from our window, " said Shep. "Thee can't halfhear it down here. Come out on the stoop. The old ponds have got theirdander up this time. "

They opened the door and listened, standing together on the low step. Therewas, indeed, a hoarse murmur from the hills, which grew louder as theylistened. 

"Now she's comin'! There goes the stable-door. There was only one hingeleft, anyway, " said Reuby. "Mighty! Look at that wave!"

It crashed through the gate, swept across the garden and broke at theirfeet, sending a thin sheet of water over the floor of the porch. 

"Now it's gone into the entry. Why didn't thee shut the door, Shep?"

"Well, I think we'd better clear out, anyhow. Let's go over to the mill. Say, Dorothy, shan't we?"

"Wait. There comes another wave. "

The second onset was not so violent; but they hastened to gather togethera few blankets, and the boys filled their pockets with cookies, with adelightful sense of unusualness and peril almost equal to a shipwreck or anattack by Indians. Dorothy took her unlucky chickens under her cloak, andthey made a rush all together across the road and up the slope to the mill. 

"Why didn't we think to bring a lantern?" said Dorothy, as they huddledtogether on the platform of the scale. "Will thee go back after one, Shep?"

"If Reuby'll go, too. "

"Well, _my_ legs are wet enough now. What's the use of a lantern? MightyMoses! What's that?"

"The old mill's got under way, " cried Shep. "_She's_ going to tune up forKingdom Come. "

A furious head of water was rushing along the race; the great wheel creakedand swung over, and with a shudder the old mill awoke from its long sleep. The cogs clenched their teeth, the shafting shook and rattled, the stoneswhirled merrily round. 

"Now she goes it!" cried Shep, as the humming increased to a tremor, andthe tremor to a wild, unsteady din, till the timbers shook and the boltsand windows rattled. "I just wish father could hear them old stones hum. "

"Oh, this is awful!" said Dorothy. She was shivering and sick with terrorat this unseemly midnight revelry of her grandfather's old mill. It wasas if it had awakened in a fit of delirium, and given itself up to a wildtravesty of its years of peaceful work. 

Shep was creeping about in the darkness. 

"Look here! We've got to stop this clatter somehow. The stones are hot now. The whole thing'll burn up like tinder if we can't chock her wheels. "

"Shep! Does thee _mean_ it?"

"Thee'll see if I don't. Thee won't need any lantern either. "

"Can't we break away the race?"

"Oh, there's a way to stop it. There's the tip-trough, but it's downstairsand we can't reach the pole. "

"I'll go, " said Dorothy. 

"It's outside, thee knows. Thee'll get awful wet, Dorothy. "

"Well, I'd just as soon be drowned as burned up. Come with me to the headof the stairs. "

They felt their way hand in hand in the darkness, and Dorothy went downalone. She had forgotten about the "tip-trough, " but she understood itssignificance. In a few moments a cascade shot out over the wheel, sendingthe water far into the garden. 

"Right over my chrysanthemum bed, " sighed Dorothy. 

The wheel swung slower and slower, the mocking tumult subsided, and the oldmill sank into sleep again. 

There was nothing now to drown the roaring of the floods and the steadydrive of the storm. 

"There's a lantern, " Shep called from the door. He had opened the upperhalf and was shielding himself behind it. "I guess it's Evesham coming backfor us. He's a pretty good sort of a fellow after all; don't thee think so, Dorothy? He owes us something for drowning us out at the sheep-washing. "

"What does all this mean?" said Dorothy, as Evesham swung himself over thehalf-door and his lantern showed them to each other in their various phasesof wetness. 

"There's a big leak in the lower dam; I've been afraid of it all along;there's something wrong in the principle of the thing. "

Dorothy felt as if he had called her grandfather a fraud, and her fathera delusion and a snare. She had grown up in the belief that the mill-damswere part of Nature's original plan in laying the foundations of the hills;but it was no time to be resentful, and the facts were against her. 

"Dorothy, " said Evesham, as he tucked the buffalo about her, "this is thesecond time I've tried to save you from drowning, but you never will wait. I'm all ready to be a hero, but you won't be a heroine. "

"I'm too practical for a heroine, " said Dorothy. "There! I've forgotten mychickens. "

"I'm glad of it. Those chickens were a mistake. They oughtn't to beperpetuated. "

Youth and happiness can stand a great deal of cold water; but it was not tobe expected that Rachel Barton would be especially benefited by her nightjourney through the floods. Evesham waited in the hall when he heard thedoor of her room open next morning. Dorothy came slowly down the stairs;he knew by her lingering-step and the softly closed door that she was nothappy. 

"Mother is very sick, " she answered his inquiry. "It is like the turn ofinflammation and rheumatism she had once before. It will be very slow, --andoh, it is such suffering! Why do the best women in the world have to sufferso?"

"Will you let me talk things over with you after breakfast, Dorothy?"

"Oh yes, " she said, "there is so much to do and think about. I wish fatherwould come home!"

The tears came into Dorothy's eyes as she looked at him. Rest, such as shehad never known or felt the need of till now, and strength immeasurable, since it would multiply her own by an unknown quantity, stood within reachof her hand, but she might not put it out. 

Evesham was dizzy with the struggle between longing and resolution. Hehad braced his nerves for a long and hungry waiting, but fate had yieldedsuddenly; the floods had brought her to him, --his flotsam and jetsam moreprecious than all the guarded treasures of the earth. She had come, withall her girlish, unconscious beguilements, and all her womanly cares andanxieties too. He must strive against her sweetness, while he helped her tobear her burdens. 

"Now about the boys, Dorothy, " he said, two hours later, as they stoodtogether by the fire in the low, oak-finished room, which was his officeand book-room. The door was ajar so that Dorothy might hear her mother'sbell. "Don't you think they had better be sent to school somewhere?"

"Yes, " said Dorothy, "they ought to go to school, --but--well, I may as welltell thee the truth. There's very little to do it with. We've had a poorsummer. I suppose I've managed badly, and mother has been sick a goodwhile. "

"You've forgotten about the pond-rent, Dorothy. "

"No, " she said, with a quick flush, "I hadn't forgotten it, but I couldn't_ask_ thee for it. "

"I spoke to your father about monthly payments, but he said better leaveit to accumulate for emergencies. Shouldn't you call this an 'emergency, 'Dorothy?"

"But does thee think we ought to ask rent for a pond that has all leakedaway?"

"Oh, there's pond enough left, and I've used it a dozen times over thissummer. I should be ashamed to tell you, Dorothy, how my horn has beenexalted in your father's absence. However, retribution has overtaken me atlast; I'm responsible, you know, for all the damage last night. It was inthe agreement that I should keep up the dams. "

"Oh!" said Dorothy; "is thee sure?"

Evesham laughed. 

"If your father was like any other man, Dorothy, he'd make me 'sure, ' whenhe gets home. I will defend myself to this extent; I've patched and proppedthem all summer, after every rain, and tried to provide for the fallstorms; but there's a flaw in the original plan"--

"Thee said that once before, " said Dorothy. "I wish thee wouldn't say itagain. "

"Why not?"

"Because I love those old mill-dams. I've trotted over them ever since Icould walk alone. "

"You shall trot over them still. We will make them as strong as theeverlasting hills. They shall outlast our time, Dorothy. "

"Well, about the rent, " said Dorothy. "I'm afraid it will not take usthrough the winter, unless there is something I can do. Mother couldn'tpossibly be moved now; and if she could, it will be months before the houseis fit to live in. But we cannot stay here in comfort, unless thy motherwill let me make up in some way. Mother will not need me all the time, andI know thy mother hires women to spin. "

"She'll let you do all you like if it will make you any happier. But youdon't know how much money is coming to you. Come, let us look over thefigures. "

He lowered the lid of the black mahogany secretary, placed a chair forDorothy and opened a great ledger before her, bending down, with one handon the back of the chair, the other turning the leaves of the ledger. Considering the index and the position of the letter B in the alphabet, hewas a long time finding his place. Dorothy looked out of the window overthe tops of the yellowing woods to the gray and turbid river below. Wherethe hemlocks darkened the channel of the glen she heard the angry floodsrushing down. The formless rain mists hung low and hid the opposite shore. 

"See!" said Evesham, his finger wandering rather vaguely down the page. "Your father went away on the 3d of May. The first month's rent came due onthe 3d of June. That was the day I opened the gate and let the water downon you, Dorothy. I'm responsible for everything, you see, --even for the oldewe that was drowned. "

His words came in a dream as he bent over her, resting his unsteady handheavily on the ledger. 

Dorothy laid her cheek on the date that she could not see and burst intotears. 

"Don't, --please don't!" he said, straightening himself and locking hishands behind him. "I am human, Dorothy. "

The weeks of Rachel's sickness that followed were perhaps the bestdiscipline Evesham's life had ever known. He held the perfect flower of hisbliss unclosing in his hand; yet he might barely permit himself to breatheits fragrance. His mother had been a strong and prosperous woman; there hadbeen little he had ever been able to do for her. It was well for him tofeel the weight of helpless infirmity in his arms as he lifted Dorothy'smother from side to side of her bed, while Dorothy's hands smoothed thecoverings. It was well for him to see the patient endurance of suffering, such as his youth and strength defied. It was bliss to wait on Dorothyand follow her with little watchful homages, received with a shy wonderwhich was delicious to him; for Dorothy's nineteen years had been too fullof service to others to leave much room for dreams of a kingdom of herown. Her silent presence in her mother's sick-room awed him. Her gentle, decisive voice and ways, her composure and unshaken endurance throughnights of watching and days of anxious confinement and toil, gave him a newreverence for the powers and mysteries of her unfathomable womanhood. 

The time of Friend Barton's return drew near. It must be confessed thatDorothy welcomed it with something of dread, and that Evesham did notwelcome it at all. On the contrary, the thought of it roused all his latentobstinacy and aggressiveness. The first day or two after the momentousarrival wore a good deal upon every member of the family, except MargaretEvesham, who was provided with a philosophy of her own, that amountedalmost to a gentle obtuseness and made her a comfortable non-conductor, preventing more electric souls from shocking each other. 

On the morning of the fourth day, Dorothy came out of her mother's roomwith a tray of empty dishes in her hands. She saw Evesham at the stair-headand hovered about in the shadowy part of the hall till he should go down. 

"Dorothy, " he said, "I'm waiting for you. " He took the tray from her andrested it on the banisters. "Your father and I have talked over all thebusiness. He's got the impression that I'm one of the most generous fellowsin the world. I intend to leave him in that delusion for the present. Nowmay I speak to him about something else, Dorothy? Have I not waited longenough for my heart's desire?"

"Take care, " said Dorothy softly, --"thee'll upset the tea-cups. "

"Confound the tea-cups!" He stooped to place the irrelevant tray on thefloor, but now Dorothy was halfway down the staircase. He caught her on thelanding, and taking both her hands drew her down on the step beside him. 

"Dorothy, this is the second time you've taken advantage of my trustingnature. This time you shall be punished. You needn't try to hide your face, you little traitor. There's no repentance in you!"

"If I'm to be punished there's no need of repentance. "

"Oh, is that your Quaker doctrine? Dorothy, do you know, I've never heardyou speak my name, except once, and then you were angry with me. "

"When was that?"

"The night I caught you at the gate. You said, 'I had rather have one ofthose dumb brutes for company than thee, Walter Evesham. ' You said it inthe fiercest little voice. Even the 'thee' sounded as if you hated me. "

"I did, " said Dorothy promptly. "I had reason to. "

"Do you hate me now, Dorothy?"

"Not so much as I did then. "

"What an implacable little Quaker you are. "

"A tyrant is always hated, " said Dorothy, trying to release her hands. 

"If you will look in my eyes, Dorothy, and call me by my name, just once, I'll let 'thee' go. "

"Walter Evesham, " said Dorothy, with great firmness and decision. 

"No, that won't do! You must look at me, and say it softly, in a littlesentence, Dorothy. "

"Will thee please let me go, Walter?"

Walter Evesham was a man of his word, but as Dorothy sped away, he lookedas if he wished that he was not. 

The next evening Friend Barton sat by his wife's easy-chair drawn into thecircle of firelight, with his elbows on his knees and his head between hishands. 

The worn spot on the top of his head had widened considerably during thesummer, but Rachel looked stronger and brighter than she had done for manya day. There was even a little flush on her cheek, but this might have comefrom the excitement of a long talk with her husband. 

"I'm sorry thee takes it so hard, Thomas. I was afraid thee would. But theway didn't seem to open for me to do much. I can see now that Dorothy'sinclinations have been turning this way for some time; though it's notlikely she would own it, poor child; and Walter Evesham's not one who iseasily gainsaid. If thee could only feel differently about it, I can't saybut that it would make me very happy to see Dorothy's heart satisfied. Can't thee bring thyself into unity with it, father? He's a nice young man. They're nice folks. Thee can't complain of the blood. Margaret Eveshamtells me a cousin of hers married one of the Lawrences, so we are kind ofkin after all. "

"I don't complain of the blood; they're well enough placed, as far as theworld is concerned. But their ways are not our ways, Rachel; their faith isnot our faith. "

"Well, I can't see such a very great difference, come to live amongthem. 'By their fruits ye shall know them. ' To comfort the widow and thefatherless, and keep ourselves unspotted from the world;--thee's alwayspreached that, father. I really can't see any more worldliness here thanamong many households with us; and I'm sure if we haven't been the widowand the fatherless this summer, we've been next to it. "

Friend Barton raised his head: "Rachel, " he said, "look at that!" Hepointed upward to an ancient sword with belt and trappings which gleamed onthe paneled chimney-piece, crossed by an old queen's-arm. Evesham had givenup his large, sunny room to Dorothy's mother, but he had not removed allhis lares and penates. 

"Yes, dear; that's his grandfather's sword--Colonel Evesham, who was killedat Saratoga. "

"Why does he hang up that thing of abomination for a light and a guide tohis footsteps, if his way be not far from ours?"

"Why, father! Colonel Evesham was a good man. I dare say he fought for thesame reason that thee preaches, because he felt it to be his duty. "

"I find no fault with him, Rachel. Doubtless he followed his light, as theesays, but he followed it in better ways too. He cleared land and built ahomestead and a meeting-house. Why doesn't his grandson hang up his oldbroadaxe and plowshare and worship them, if he must have idols, instead ofthat symbol of strife and bloodshed. Does thee want our Dorothy's childrento grow up under the shadow of the sword?"

There was a stern light of prophecy in the old man's eyes. 

"May be Walter Evesham would take it down, " said Rachel simply, leaningback and closing her eyes. "I never was much of a hand to argue, even ifI had the strength for it; but it would hurt me a good deal--I must sayit--if thee should deny Dorothy in this matter, Thomas. It's a very seriousthing for old folks to try to turn young hearts the way they think theyought to go. I remember now, --I was thinking about it last night, and itall came back as fresh--I don't know that I ever told thee about that youngFriend who visited me before I heard thee preach at Stony Valley? Well, father, he was wonderful pleased with him, but I didn't feel any drawingthat way. He urged me a good deal, more than was pleasant for either of us. He wasn't at all reconciled to thee, Thomas, if thee remembers. "

"I remember, " said Thomas Barton. "It was an anxious time. "

"Well, dear, if father _had_ insisted and had sent thee away, I can't saybut life would have been a very different thing to me. "

"I thank thee for saying it, Rachel. " Friend Barton's head drooped. "Theehas suffered much through me; thee's had a hard life, but thee's been wellbeloved. "

The flames leaped and flickered in the chimney; they touched the wrinkledhands whose only beauty was in their deeds; they crossed the room and litthe pillows where, for three generations, young heads had dreamed and grayheads had watched and wearied; then they mounted to the chimney and strucka gleam from the sword. 

"Well, father, " said Rachel, "what answer is thee going to give WalterEvesham?"

"I shall say no more, my dear. Let the young folks have their way. There'sstrife and contention enough in the world without my stirring up more. Andit may be I'm resisting the Master's will. I left her in his care; this maybe his way of dealing with her. "

Walter Evesham did not take down his grandfather's sword. Fifty years lateranother went up beside it, the sword of a young Evesham who never left thefield of Shiloh; and beneath them both hangs the portrait of the Quakergrandmother, Dorothy Evesham, at the age of sixty-nine. 

The golden ripples, silver now, are hidden under a "round-eared cap;" thequick flush has faded in her cheek, and fold upon fold of snowy gauze andcreamy silk are crossed over the bosom that once thrilled to the fiddles ofSlocum's barn. She has found the cool grays and the still waters; but onDorothy's children rests the "Shadow of the Sword. "

THE STORY OF THE ALCÁZAR. 

It was told by Captain John to a boy from the mainland who was spending thesummer on the Island, as they sat together one August evening at sunset, ona broken bowsprit which had once been a part of the Alcázar. 

It was dead low water in Southwest Harbor, a land-locked inlet that nearlycut the Island in two, and was the gateway through which the fishing-craftfrom the village at the harbor head found their way out into the greatPenobscot Bay. There were many days during the stern winter and bleakspring months when the gate was blocked with ice or veiled in fog, butnature relented a little toward the Island folk in the fall and sent themsunny days for their late, scant harvesting, and steady winds for themackerel-fishing, to give them a little hope before the winter set in sharpwith the equinoctial. Now, at low tide, the bright gateway shone wide open, as if to let out the waters that rise and fall ten feet in the inlet. You could look far out, beyond the lighthouse on Creenlaw's Neck and theislands that throng the mouth of the harbor, to the red spot of flame thesunset had kindled below the rack of smoke-gray clouds. The color burned ina dull gleam upon the water, broken by the dark shapes of shadowy islands;the sail-boats at anchor in the muddy, glistening flats leaned overdisconsolately on their sides, in despair of ever again feeling the thrillof the returning waters beneath their keels; and the gray, weather-beatenhouses crowded together on the brink of the cliff above the beach, lookinglike a group of hooded old women watching for a belated sail, seemed tohave caught the expression of their inmates' lives. At high tide the hulkof the Alcázar had been full of water, which was now pouring out through ahole in the planking of her side in a continuous, murmurous stream, likethe voice of a persistent talker in a silent company. The old ship lookedmuch too big for her narrow grave at the foot of the green cliff, in whichher anchor was deeply sunk and half overgrown with thistles. Her blunt bowand the ragged stump of the figure-head rose, dark and high, above the wetbeach where Captain John sat with his absorbed listener. There were riftsabout her rail where the red sunset looked through. Her naked sides, thatfor years had been moistened only by the perennial rains and snows, showedrough and scaly like the armor of some fabled sea-monster. She was tetheredto the cliff by her rusty anchor-chain that swung across the space between, serving as a clothes-line for the draggled driftweed left by the recedingtide to dry. 

"She was a big ship for these parts, " Captain John was saying. "There wan'tone like her ever come into these waters before. Lord! folks come downfrom the Neck, and from Green's Landin', and Nor'east Harbor, and I don'tknow but they come from the main, to see her when she was fust towed in. And such work as they made of her name! Some called it one way and someanother. It's a kind of a Cubian name, they say. I expect there ain'tanybody round here that can call it right. However 'twas, old Cap'n Greentook and pried it off her starboard quarter, and somebody got hold of itand nailed it up over the blacksmith's shop; and there you can see it now. The old cap'n named her the Stranger when he had her refitted. May be youcould make out the tail of an S on her stern if you could git around there. That name's been gone these forty year; seem's if she never owned to it, and it didn't stick to her. She was never called anythin' but the Alcázar, long as ever I knew her, and I expect I know full's much about her asanybody round here. 'Twas a-settin' here on this very beach at low water, just's we be now, that the old man told me fust how he picked her up. Ittook a wonderful holt on him, there's no doubt about that. He told it tome more 'n once before the time come when he was to put the finish on toit; but in a gen'ral way the cap'n wan't much of a talker, and he wasshy of this partic'lar business, for reasons that I expect nobody knowsmuch about. But a man most always likes to talk to somebody, no matterhow close-mouthed he may be. 'Twas just about this time o' year, fallof '27, the year Parson Flavor was ordained, Cap'n Green had gonea-mack'rel-fishin' with his two boys off Isle au Haut, and they did thinko' cruisin' out into Frenchman's Bay if the weather hel' steady. They washavin' fair luck, hangin' round the island off and on for a matter of aweek, when it thickened up a little and set in foggy, and for two daysthey didn't see the shore. The second evenin' the wind freshened from thesouth'ard and east'ard and drove the fog in shore a bit, and the sun, justbefore he set, looked like a big yellow ball through the fog and made asickly kind of a glimmer over the water. They was a-lyin' at anchor, andall of a sudden, right to the wind'ard of 'em, this old ship loomed up, driftin' in with the wind and flood-tide. They couldn't make her out, and I guess for a minute the old cap'n didn't know but it was the Flyin'Dutchman; but she hadn't a rag o' sail on her, and as she got nearer theycould see there wan't a man on board. The cap'n didn't like the looks ofher, but he knew she wan't no phantom, and he and one of his boys down withthe punt and went alongside. 'Twan't more 'n a quarter of a mile to her. They hailed and couldn't git no answer. They knew she was a furriner by herbuild, and she must 'a' been a long time at sea by her havin' barnacleson her nigh as big's a mack'rel kit. Finally, they pulled up to herfore--chains and clum aboard of her. I never see a ship abandoned at sea, myself, but I ain't no doubt but what it made 'em feel kind o' shivery whenthey looked aft along her decks, and not a soul in sight, and every-thin'bleached, and gray, and iron-rusted, and the riggin' all slack and white'sthough it had been chawed, and nothin' left of her sails but some oldrags flappin' like a last year's scarecrow. They went and looked in thefo'k'sel: there wan't nothin' there but some chists, men's chists, with alittle old beddin' left in the bunks. They went down the companion-way:cabin-door unlocked, everything in there as nat'ral's though it had justbeen left, only 'twas kind o' mouldy-smellin'. I expect the cap'n give akind of a start as he looked around. 'Twan't no old greasy whaler's cabin, nor no packet-ship neither. There wan't many craft like her on the seas inthem days. She was fixed up inside more like a gentleman's yacht is now. Merchantmen in them days didn't have their Turkey carpets and their coloredwine-glasses jinglin' in the racks. While they was explorin' round inthere, movin' round kind o' cautious, the door of the cap'n's stateroomswung open with a creak, just's though somebody was a-shovin' it slow like, and the ship give a kind of a stir and a rustlin', moanin' sound, as ifshe was a-comin' to life. The old man never made no secret but what he wasscairt when he went through her that night. 'Twan't so much what he said asthe way he looked when he told it. I expect he thought he'd seen enough, about the time that door blew open. He said he knowed 'twas nothin' but apuff o' wind struck her, and that he'd better be a-gittin' on to his owncraft before he lost her in the fog. So he went back and got under weigh, and sent a line aboard of the stranger and took her in tow, and all thatnight with a good southeast wind they kept a-movin' toward home. The oldman was kind o' res'less and wakeful, walkin' the decks and lookin' overthe stern at the big ship follerin' him like a ghost. The moonlight was alittle dull with fog, but he could see her, plain, a-comin' on before thewind with her white riggin' and bare poles, and hear the water sousin'under her bows. He said 'twas in his mind more 'n a dozen times to cut heradrift. You see he had his misgivin's about her from the fust, though henever let on what they was; but he hung on to her as a man will, sometimes, agin feelin's that have more sense in 'em than reason, like as not. He kneweverybody at the Harbor would laugh at him for lettin' go such a prize asthat just for a notion, and it wan't his way, you may be sure; he didn'tneed no one to tell him what she was wuth. Anyhow he hung to her, and nextday they beached her at high water, right over there by the old ship-yard. He took Deacon S'lvine and his brother-in-law, Cap'n Purse--Pierce theycall it nowadays, but in the cap'n's time 'twas Purse. That sounds kind o'broad and comfortable, like the cap'n's wescoat; but the family's thinnin'down a good deal lately and gettin' kind o' sharp and lean, and may bePierce is more suitable. But 's I was sayin', Cap'n Green took themtwo--cheerful, loud-talkin' men they was both of 'em--aboard of her to gothrough her, for he hadn't no notion o' goin' into that cap'n's stateroomalone, even in broad daylight; but 'twan't there the secret of her lay;there wan't nothin' in there to scare anybody. She was trimmed up, Itell you, just elegant. Real mahogany, none of your veneerin', but thereal stuff; lace curt'ins to the berth, lace on the pillows, and a satincoverlid, rumpled up as though the cap'n had just turned out; and there washis slippers handy--the greatest-lookin' slippers for a man you ever saw. They wouldn't 'a' been too big for the neatest-footed woman in the Harbor. But Land! they was just thick with mould, and so was everythin' in theplace, even to an old gittar with the strings most rotted off of it, and the picters of fur-rin-lookin' women on the walls, --trinin'-lookin'creeturs most of 'em. They hunted all through his desk, but couldn't findno log. 'Twas plain enough that whoever'd left that ship had took painsthat she shouldn't tell no tales, and 'twan't long before they found outthe reason. 

"When they come to go below, --there was considerable of a crowd on deck bythat time, standin' round while they knocked out the keys and took off thefore-hatch, --Cap'n Green called on Cap'n Purse and the deacon to go downwith him; but they didn't 'pear to be very anxious, and the old man wan'tgoin' to hang back for company with everybody lookin' at him, so he lit acandle and went down, and the folks crowded round and waited for him. I wasthere myself, 's close to him as I be to that fish barrel, when he come up, his face white 's a sheet and the candle shakin' in his hand, and sot downon the hatch-combin'. 

"'Give me room!' says he, kind o' leanin' back on the crowd. 'Give me air, can't you? She's full o' dead niggers. She's a slaver. '

"Now, 'twas the talk pretty gen'rally that the cap'n had had a hand in thatbusiness himself in his early days, and that it set uncomfortable on himafterwards. It never was known how he'd got his money. He didn't have anyto begin with. He was always a kind of a lone bird and dug his way along upsomehow. Nobody knows what was workin' on him while he sot there; he lookedawful sick. It was kind of quiet for a minute, but them that couldn't seehim kep' pushin' for'ards and callin' out: 'What d'you see? What's downthere?' And them close by wanted to know, all talkin' to once, why hethought she was a slaver, and how long the niggers had been dead. Lord!what a fuss there was. Everybody askin' the foolishest questions, andcrowdin' and squeezin', and them in front pushin' back away from thehatchway, as if they expected the dead would rise and walk out o' thatblack hole where they'd laid so long. They couldn't get much out o' the oldman, except that there was skel'tons scattered all over the after hold, and that he knew she was a slaver by the way she was fixed up. '_How_'d heknow?' folks asked amongst themselves; but nobody liked to ask the cap'n. As for how long them Africans had been dead, they had to find that out forthemselves, --all they ever did find out, --for the cap'n wouldn't talk aboutit, and he wouldn't go down in her again. It 'peared's if he was satisfied. 

"Wal, it made a terrible stir in the place. As I tell you, they come fromfifty mile around to see her. They had it all in the papers. Some hadone idee and some another about the way she come to be abandoned, all ingood shape and them human bein's in her hold. Some said ship-fever, somesaid mutiny; but when they come to look her over and found there wan't awater-cask aboard of her that hadn't s'runk up and gone to pieces, theysettled down on the notion that she was a Spanish or a Cubian slaver, ormay be a Portagee, got short o' water in the horse-latitudes; cap'n andcrew left her in the boats, and the niggers--Lord! it makes a body sick tothink o' them. That was always my the'ry 'bout her--short o' water; butsome folks wan't satisfied 'thout somethin' more ex-citin'. 'Twan't enoughfor 'em to have all them creeturs dyin' down there by inches. They stuck toit about some blood-stains on the linin' in her hold, but I tell you thedifference between old blood-stains and rust that's may be ten or fifteenyears old's might' hard to tell. 

"Nobody knows what the old cap'n was thinkin' about in them days. 'Twasfull three month or more 'fore he went aboard of her ag'in. He let it beknown about that he wanted to sell her, but he couldn't git an offer even;nobody seemed to want to take hold of her. Winter set in early and the iceblocked her in, and there she lay, the lonesomest thing in sight. You neversee no child'n climbin' 'round on her, and there was a story that queernoises like moanin' and clankin' of chains come out of her on windy nights;but it might 'a' been the ice, crowdin' as she careened over and back withthe risin' and fallin' tide. But when spring opened, folks used to see theold cap'n hangin' round the ship-yard and lookin' her over at low tide, where the ice had cut the barnacles off of her. 

"One night in the store he figgered up how much lumber she'd carry fromBangor, and 'twan't long 'fore he had a gang o' men at work on her. Itseemed's though he was kind of infatuated with her. He was 'fraid of her, but he couldn't let her alone. And she was a mighty well-built craft. Floridy pine and live-oak and mahogany from the Mosquito coast; built inCadiz, most likely. Look at her now--she don't look to home here, doesshe? She never did. She's as much like our harbor craft as one o' thembig, yallow-eyed, bare-necked buzzards is to one o' these here littlesand-peeps. But she was a handsome vessel. Them live-oak ribs'll outlastyour time, if you was to live to be old. "

The two faces looked up at the hulk of the Alcázar, --the blanched, wave-worn messenger sent by the tropic seas into the far North with a talethat the living had never dared to tell, and that had perished on the lipsof the dead. Its shadow, spreading broad upon the beach, made the gatheringtwilight deeper. Out on the harbor the pale saffron light lingered, longafter the red had faded. How many tides had ebbed and flowed since the oldship, chained at the foot of the cliff, had warmed in the waters of theGulf her bare, corrugated sides, warped by the frosts, stabbed by the iceof pitiless Northern winters! Where were the sallow, dark-bearded facesthat had watched from her high poop the brief twilights die on that"unshadowed main, " which a century ago was the scene of some of the wildestromances and blackest crimes in maritime history--the bright, restlessbosom that warmed into life a thousand serpents whose trail could betraced through the hot, flower-scented Southern plazas and courts into thepeaceful white villages of the North!

"Sho! I'd no idee 'twas a-gittin' on so late, " said Captain John. "Thereain't anybody watchin' out for me. I kin put my family under my hat, but Idon' know what your folks'll think's come o' you. 

"Wal, the rest on 'twon't take long to tell. The old man had her fitted upin good shape by the time the ice was out of the river, and run her up toBangor in ballast, and loaded her there for New York. He had an ugly tripdown the coast: lost his deck load and three men overboard in a southeasteroff Nantucket Shoals. It made the whole ship's company feel pretty solemn, but the old man took it the hardest of any of 'em, and from that time seemsas if he lost his grip; the old scare settled back on him blacker 'n ever. There wan't a man aboard of her that liked her. They all knew her story, that she was the Alcázar from nobody knows where, instead of the Strangerfrom Newburyport. The cap'n had Newburyport put on to her because he was aNewburyport man and all his vessels was built there. But she hadn't more 'ntouched the dock in New York before every one on 'em left her, even to thecook. 'I'm leery o' this 'ere ship, ' says one big Cornishman. 'No betterthan a floatin' coffin, anyway, ' was what they all said of her; and I guessthe cap'n would 'a' left her right there himself if it hadn't been for themoney he'd put into her. I expect he was a little too fond of money, maybe; but I've knowed others just as sharp's the old cap'n that didn't seemto have his luck. The mate saw him two or three times while he was a-lyin'in New York, and noticed he was drinkin' more 'n usual. He come homelight and anchored off the bar, just as a southeaster was a-comin' on. Itwouldn't 'a' been no trouble for him to have laid there, if he'd had goodground-gear; but there 'twas ag'in, he'd been a leetle too savin'. He'dused the old cables he found in her. The new mate didn't know nothin' abouther, and he put out one anchor. The cap'n had taken a kag o' New Englandrum aboard and been drawin' on it pretty reg'lar all the way up, and asthe gale come on he got kind o' wild and went at it harder 'n ever. Aboutmidnight the cable parted. They let go the other anchor, but it didn't snubher for a minute, and she swung, broadside to, on to the bar. The men cluminto the riggin' before she struck, but the old cap'n was staggerin' 'rounddecks, kind o' dazed and dumb-like, not tryin' to do anythin' to savehimself. The mate tried to git him into the riggin', seein' he wan't in nocondition to look out for himself; but the old man struck loose from hisholt and cried out to him through the noise:--

"'Let me alone! I've got to go with her. I tell ye I've got to go withher!'

"The mate just had time to swing himself back into the mizzen-shroudsbefore the sea broke over her and left the decks bare. The old ship poundedover the bar in an hour or so, and drifted up here on to the beach whereshe is now. Every man on board was saved except the cap'n. He 'went withher, ' sure enough. 

"There was talk enough about that thing before they got done with it to 'a'made the old man roll in his grave. They raked up all the stories about hiscruisin' on the Spanish main when he was a young man. They wan't stories_he_'d ever told; he wan't much of a hand to talk about what he'd seen anddone on his v'yages. They never let him rest till 'twas pretty much thegen'ral belief, and is to this day, that he knew more about that slaverfrom the first than he ever owned to. 

"I never had much to say about it, but 'twas plain enough to me. I had mysuspicions the mornin' he towed her in. He looked terrible shattered. It'peared to me he wan't ever the same man afterwards. 

"'I've got to go with her!' Them was his last words. He knew that shipand him belonged together, same as a man and his sins. He knew she'd beena-huntin' him up and down the western ocean for twenty year, with them deado' his'n in her hold, --and she'd hunted him down at last. "

Captain John paused with this peroration: he dug a hole in the wet sandwith the toe of his boot, and watched it slowly fill. 

"'Twas a bait most any one would 'a' smelt of, a six-hundred-ton ship andevery timber in her sound; but you'd 'a' thought he'd been more cautious, knowin' what he did of her. She was bound to have him, though. "

"Captain John, " said the boy, a little hoarse from his long silence, "whatdo you suppose it _was_ he did? Anything except just leave them--thenegroes, I mean?"

"Lord! Wan't that _enough_? To steal 'em, and then leave 'emthere--battened down like rats in the hold! However, I expect there ain'tanybody that can tell you the whole of that story. It's one of themmysteries that rests with the dead. 

"The new mate--the young fellow he brought on from New York--he married thecap'n's daughter. None o' the Harbor boys ever seemed to jibe in with her. I always had a notion that she was a touch above most of 'em, but she andher mother was as good as a providence to them shipwrecked men when theywas throwed ashore, strangers in the place and no money; and it ended inRachel's takin' up with the mate and the whole family's leavin' the place. It was long after all the talk died away that the widow come back and livedhere in the same quiet way she always had, till she was laid alongside theold cap'n. There wan't a better woman ever walked this earth than MaryGreen, that was Mary Spofford. "

Captain John rose from the bowsprit and rubbed his cramped knees beforeclimbing the hill. He parted with his young listener at the top and tooka lonely path across the shore-pasture to a little cabin, where no lightshone, built like the nest of a sea-bird on the edge of high-water mark. 

On the gray beach below, a small, dingy yawl, with one sail loosely bundledover the thwarts, leaned toward the door-latch as if listening for itsclick. It had an almost human expression of patient though wistful waiting. It was the poorest boat in the Harbor; it had no name painted on its stern, but Captain John, in the solitude of his watery wanderings among theislands and channels of the bay, always called her the Mary Spofford. Theboy from the main went home slowly along the village street toward themany-windowed house in which his mother and sisters were boarding. Therewere voices, calling and singing abroad on the night air, reflectedfrom the motionless, glimmering sheet of dark water below as from asounding-board. Cow-bells tinkled away among the winding paths along thelow, dim shores. The night-call of the heron from the muddy flats strucksharply across the stillness, and from the outer bay came the murmur of theold ground-swell, which never rests, even in the calmest weather. 

A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN. 

Ruth Mary stood on the high river bank, looking along the beach below tosee if her small brother Tommy was lurking anywhere under the willows withhis fishing-pole. He had been sent half an hour before to the earth cellarfor potatoes, and Ruth Mary's father, Mr. Tully, was waiting for hisdinner. 

She did not see Tommy; but while she lingered, looking at the riverhurrying down the shoot between the hills and curling up over the pebblesof the bar, she saw a team of bay horses and a red-wheeled wagon comerattling down the stony slope of the opposite shore. In the wagon shecounted four men. Three of them wore white, helmet-shaped hats that madebrilliant spots of light against the bank. The horses were driven halftheir length into the stream and allowed to drink, as well as they couldfor the swiftness of the current, while the men seemed to consult together, the two on the front seat turning back to speak with the two behind, andpointing across the river. 

Ruth Mary watched them with much interest, for travelers such as theseseemed to be seldom came as far up Bear River valley as the Tullys' cattlerange. The visitors who came to them were mostly cow-boys looking up straycattle, or miners on their way to the "Banner district, " or packers withmule trains going over the mountains, to return in three weeks, or threemonths, as their journey prospered. Fishermen and hunters came up intothe hills in the season of trout and deer, but they came as a rule onhorseback, and at a distance were hardly to be distinguished from thecow-boys and the miners. 

The men in the wagon were evidently strangers to that locality. They hadseen Ruth Mary watching them from the hill, and now one of them rose up inthe wagon and shouted across to her, pointing to the river. 

She could not hear his words for the noise of the ripple and of the windwhich blew freshly down-stream, but she understood that he was inquiringabout the ford. She motioned up the river and called to him, though sheknew her words could not reach him, to keep on the edge of the ripple. Her gestures, however, aided by the driver's knowledge of fords, weresufficient; he turned his horses up-stream and they took water at the placeshe had tried to indicate. The wagon sank to the wheel-hubs; the horseskept their feet well, though the current was strong; the sun shone brightlyon the white hats and laughing faces of the men, on the guns in theirhands, on the red paint of the wagon and the warm backs of the horsesbreasting the stream. When they were halfway across, one of the men tosseda small, reluctant black dog over the wheel into the river, and all thecompany, with the exception of the driver, who was giving his attention tohis horses, broke into hilarious shouts of encouragement to the swimmerin his struggle with the current. It was carrying him down and would havelanded him, without effort of his own, on a strip of white sand beach underthe willows above the bend; but now the unhappy little object, merely ablack nose and two blinking anxious eyes above the water, had drifted intoan eddy, from which he cast forlorn glances toward his faithless friends inthe wagon. The dog was in no real peril, but Ruth Mary did not know this, and her heart swelled with indignant pity. Only shyness kept her fromwading to his rescue. Now one of the laughing young men, thinking the jokehad gone far enough perhaps, and reckless of a wetting, leaped out into thewater, and, plunging along in his high boots, soon had the terrier by thescruff of his neck, and waded ashore with his sleek, quivering little bodynestled in the bosom of his flannel hunting shirt. 

A deep cut in the bank, through which the wagon was dragged, was screenedby willows. When the fording party had arrived at the top, Ruth Mary wasnowhere to be seen. "Where's that girl got to all of a sudden?" one of themen demanded. They had intended to ask her several questions; but she wasgone, and the road before them plainly led to the low-roofed cabin, andloosely built barn with straw and daylight showing through its cracks, thenewly planted poplar-trees above the thatched earth cellar, and all thesigns of a tentative home in this solitude of the hills. 

They drove on slowly, the young man who had waded ashore, whom his comradesaddressed as Kirkwood or Kirk, walking behind the wagon with the dog inhis arms, responding to his whimpering claims for attention with teasingcaresses. The dog, it seemed, was the butt as well as the pet of the party. As they approached the house he scrambled out of Kirkwood's arms andlingered to take a roll in the sandy path, coming up a moment afterwardto be received with blighting sarcasms upon his appearance. After hisignominious wetting he was quite unable to bear up under them, and slunk tothe rear with deprecatory blinks and waggings of his tail whenever one ofthe men looked back. 

Ruth Mary had run home quickly to tell her father, who was sitting in thesun by the wood-pile, of the arrival of strangers from across the river. Mr. Tully rose up deliberately and went to meet his guests, keeping betweenhis teeth the sliver of pine he had been chewing while waiting for hisdinner. It helped to bear him out in that appearance of indifferencehe thought it well to assume, as if such arrivals were an every-dayoccurrence. 

"Hasn't Tommy got back yet, mother?" Ruth Mary asked as she entered thehouse. Mrs. Tully was a stout, low-browed woman, with grayish yellow hairof that dry and lifeless texture which shows declining health or want ofcare. Her blue eyes looked faded in the setting of her tanned complexion. She sat in a low chair, her knees wide apart, defined by her limp calicodraperies, rocking a child of two years, a fat little girl with flushedcheeks and flaxen hair braided into tight knots on her forehead, who wasasleep in the large cushioned rocking-chair in the middle of the room. Theroom was somewhat bare, for the shed-room outside was evidently the moreused part of the house. The cook stove was there in the inclosed corner, and beside it a table and shelf with a tin hand-basin hanging beneath, while the crannies of the logs on each side of the doorway were utilizedas shelves for all the household articles in frequent requisition thatwere not hanging from nails driven into the logs, or from the projectingroof-poles against the light. 

Tommy had not returned, and Mrs. Tully suggested as a reason for his delaythat he had stopped somewhere to catch grasshoppers for bait. 

"I should think he had enough of 'em in that bottle of his, " Ruth Marysaid, "to last him till the 'hoppers come again. Some strange men fordedthe river just now. Father's gone to speak to them. I guess he'll ask 'emto stop to dinner. "

Mrs. Tully got up heavily and went to the door. "Here, Angy, "--sheaddressed a girl of eight or ten years who sat on the flat boulder thatwas the cabin doorstep;--"you go get them taters; that's a good girl, " sheadded coaxingly, as Angy did not stir. "If your foot hurts you, you canwalk on your heel. "

Angy, who was complaining of a stone-bruise, got up and limped away, upsetting from her lap as she rose two kittens of tender years, who tumbledover each other before getting their legs under them, and staggered off, steering themselves jerkily with their tails. 

"Oh, Angy!" Ruth Mary remonstrated, but she could not stay to comfort thekittens. She ran up the short, crooked stairs leading to the garret bedroomwhich she shared with Angy, hastily to put on her shoes and stockings andbrace her pretty figure, under the blue calico waist she wore, with herfirst pair of stays, an important purchase made on her last visit to thetown in the valley, and to be worn now, if ever. It was hot at noon in thebedroom under the roof, and by the time Ruth Mary had fortified herselfto meet the eyes of strangers she was uncomfortably flushed, and short ofbreath besides from the pressure of the new stays. She went slowly down theuneven stairs, wishing that she could walk as softly in her shoes as shecould barefoot. 

Her father was talking to the strangers in the shed-room. They seemed talland formidable, under the low roof, against the flat glare of the sun onthe hard-swept ground in front of the shed. She waited inside until hermother reminded her of the dinner half cooked on the stove; then she wentout shyly, the light falling on her downcast face and full white eyelids, on her yellow hair, sun-faded and meekly parted over her forehead, whichwas low like her mother's, but smooth as one of the white stones of theriver beach. Her fair skin was burned to a clear, light red tint, and herblonde eyebrows and lashes showed silvery against it, but her chin was verywhite underneath, and there was a white space behind each of her littleears where her hair was knotted tightly away from her neck. 

"This is my daughter, " Mr. Tully said briefly; and then he gave somehospitable orders about dinner which the strangers interrupted, saying thatthey had brought a lunch with them and would not trouble the family untilsupper-time. 

They gathered up their hunting gear, and lifting their hats to Ruth Mary, followed Mr. Tully, who had offered to show them the best fishing on thatpart of the river. 

Mr. Tully explained to his wife and daughter, as the latter placed thedinner on the table, that three of the strangers were the engineers fromthe railroad camp at Moor's Bridge, and the fourth was a packer andteamster from the same camp; that they were all going up the river to lookat timber, and wanted a little sport by the way. They had expected to keepon the other side of the river, but seeing the ranch on the opposite shore, with wheel-tracks going down to the water, they had concluded to try theford and the fishing and ask for a night's accommodation. 

"They don't want we should put ourselves out any. They're used to roughin'it, they say. If you can git together somethin' to feed 'em on, mother, they say they'd as soon sleep on the straw in the barn as anywheres else. "

"There's plenty to eat, such as it is, but Ruth Mary'll have it all to do. I can't be on my feet. " Mrs. Tully spoke in a depressed tone, but to herno less than to her husband was this little break welcome in the monotonyof their life in the hills, even though it brought with it a more vividconsciousness of the family circumstances, and a review of them in thelight of former standards of comfort and gentility: for Mrs. Tully had beena woman of some social pretensions, in the small Eastern village where shewas born. To all that to her guests made the unique charm of her presenthome she had grown callous, if she had ever felt it at all, while dwellingwith an incurable regret upon the neatly painted houses and fenceddoor-yards, the gatherings of women in their best clothes in primlyfurnished parlors on summer afternoons, the church-going, the passing inthe street, and, more than all, the housekeeping conveniences she had beenused to, accumulated through many years' occupancy of the same house. 

"Seems as though I hadn't any ambition left, " she often complained to herdaughter. "There's nothin' here to do with, and nobody to do for. The mostof the folks we ever see wouldn't know sour-dough bread from salt-risin', and as for dressin' up, I might keep the same clothes on from Fourth Julytill Christmas--your father'd never know. "

But Ruth Mary was haunted by no fleshpots of the past. As she dressed thechickens and mixed the biscuit for supper, she paused often in her workand looked towards the high pastures with the pale brown lights and purpleshadows on them, rolling away and rising towards the great timbered ridges, and these lifting here and there along their profiles a treeless peak orbare divide into the regions above vegetation. She had no misgivings abouther home. Fences would not have improved her father's vast lawn, to hermind, or white paint the low-browed front of his dwelling; nor did she feelthe want of a stair-carpet and a parlor-organ. She was sure that they, the strangers, had never seen anything more lovely than her beloved riverdancing down between the hills, tripping over rapids, wrinkling oversand-bars of its own spreading, and letting out its speed down the longreaches where the channel was deep. 

About four o'clock she found leisure to stroll along the shore with Tommy, whose competitive energies as a fisherman had been stimulated by the adventof strange craftsmen with scientific-looking tackle. Tommy must forthwithshow what native skill could do with a willow pole and grasshoppers forbait. But Ruth Mary's sense of propriety would by no means tolerate Tommy'sintruding his company upon the strangers, and to frustrate any rash, gregarious impulses on his part she judged it best to keep him in sight. 

Tommy knew of a deep pool under the willows which he could whip, unseen, in the shady hours of the afternoon. Thither he led Ruth Mary, leaving herseated upon the bank above him lest she should be tempted to talk, and sointerfere with his sport. The moments went by in silence, broken only bythe river; Ruth Mary happy on the high bank in the sun, Tommy happy bythe shady pool below, and now and then slapping a lively trout upon thestones. Across the river two Chinamen were washing gravel in a rude miner'scradle, paddling about on the river's brink, and anon staggering down fromthe gravel bank above, with large square kerosene cans filled with paydirt balanced on either end of a pole across their meagre shoulders. Bare-headed, in their loose garments, with their pottering movements andwrinkled faces shining with heat, they looked like two weird, unrevered oldwomen working out some dismal penance. High up in the sky the great blackbuzzards sailed and sailed on slanting wing; the wood doves coo-oo-ed fromthe willow thickets that gathered the sunlight close to the water's edge. A few horses and cattle moved like specks upon the sides of the hills, cropping the bunchgrass, but the greater herds had been driven up into thehigh pastures where the snow falls early; and all these lower hills werebare of life, unless one might fancy that the far-off processions of pinesagainst the sky, marching up the northern sides of the divides, had asolemn personality, going up like priests to a sacrifice, or that therestless river, flowing through the midst of all and bearing the light ofthe white noonday sky deep into the bosom of the darkest hills, had a soulas well as a voice. In its sparkle and ever-changing motion it was like achild among its elders at play. The hills seemed to watch it, and the greatcloud-heads as they looked down between the parting summits, and the threetall pines, standing about a young bird's flight from each other by theshore and mingling their fitful crooning with the river's babble. 

It is pleasant to think of Ruth Mary, sitting high above the river, in thepeaceful afternoon, surrounded by the inanimate life that to her broughtthe fullness of companionship and left no room for vain cravings; theshadow creeping upward over her hands folded in her lap, the light restingon her girlish face and meek, smooth hair. For this was during thatunquestioning time of content which may not always last, even in a life assafe and as easily predicted as hers. But even now this silent communionwas interrupted by the appearance of one of Tommy's rivals. It was theyoung man whose comrades called him Kirk, who came along the shore, stooping under the willow boughs and scattering all their shadows lightlytraced on the stones below. He held his fishing-rod, couched like a lance, in one hand, and a string of gleaming fish in the other. 

Tommy, with practiced eye, rapidly counted them and saw with chagrin thathe was outnumbered, but another look satisfied him that the stranger'scatch was nearly all "white-fish" instead of trout. He caressed his owndappled beauties complacently. 

Kirkwood stopped and looked at them; he was evidently impressed by Tommy'ssuperior luck. 

"Those are big fellows, " he said; "did you catch them?"

"You don't suppose _she_ did?" said Tommy, with a jerk of his head towardsRuth Mary. 

Kirkwood looked up and smiled, seeing the young girl on her sunny perch. The smile lingered pleasantly in his eyes as he seated himself on thestones, --deliberately, as if he meant to stay. 

Tommy watched him while he made himself comfortable, taking from hispocket a short briar-wood pipe and a bag of tobacco, leisurely fillingthe pipe and lighting it with a wax match held in the hollow of hishands--apparently from habit, for there was no wind. He did not seem tomind in the least that his legs were wet and that his trout were nearlyall white-fish. He was evidently a person of happy resources, and ajoy-compelling temperament that could find virtue in white-fish if itcouldn't get trout. He began to talk to Tommy, not without an amusedconsciousness of Tommy's silent partner on the bank above, nor without anoccasional glance up at the maidenly head serenely exalted in the sunlight. Nor did Ruth Mary fail to respond, with her down-bent looks, as simply andunawares as the clouds turning their bright side to the sun. 

Tommy, on his part, was stoutly withholding, in words, the admirationhis eyes could not help showing, of the strange fisherman's tools. Hecautiously felt the weight of the ringed and polished rod, and snapped itlightly over the water; he was permitted to examine the book of flies andto handle the reel, things in themselves fascinating, but to Tommy's mindmerely a hindrance and a snare to the understanding in the real business ofcatching fish. Still, he admitted, where a man could take a whole day allto himself like that, without fear of being called off at any moment by thewomen on some frivolous household errand, he might afford to potter withsuch things. Tommy kept the conservative attitude of native experience andskill towards foreign innovation. 

"If Joe Enselman was here, " he said, "I bet he could ketch more fish inhalf 'n hour, with a pole like this o' mine and a han'ful o' 'hoppers, thanany of you can in a whole week o' fishing with them fancy things. "

"Oh, Tommy!" Ruth Mary expostulated, looking distressed. 

"Who is this famous fisherman?" Kirkwood asked, smiling at Tommy's boast. 

"Oh, he's a feller I know. He's a packer, and he owns ha'f o' father'sstock. He's goin' to marry our Sis soon's he gits back from Sheep Mountain, and then he'll be my brother. " Tommy had been a little reckless in hisdesire for the distinction of a personal claim on the hero of his boyishheart. He was even conscious of this himself, as he glanced up at hissister. 

Kirkwood's eyes involuntarily followed Tommy's. He withdrew them at once, but not before he saw the troubled blush that reddened the girl's avertedface. It struck him, though he was not deeply versed in blushes, that itwas not quite the expression of happy, maidenly consciousness, when thename of a lover is unexpectedly spoken. 

It was the first time in her life that Ruth Mary had ever blushed at thename of Joe Enselman. She could not understand why it should pain her tohave this young stranger hear of him in his relation to herself. 

Before her blush had faded, Kirkwood had dismissed the subject of RuthMary's engagement, with the careless reflection that Enselman was probablynot the right man, but that the primitive laws which decide such haphazardunions doubtless provided the necessary hardihood of temperament wherewithto meet their exigencies. She was a nice little girl, but possibly she wasnot so sensitive as she looked. 

His pipe had gone out, and after relighting it, he showed Tommy the gaylypictured paper match-box from Havana, which opened with a spring, anddisclosed the matches lying in a little drawer within. Tommy's wistfuleyes, as he returned the box, prompted Kirkwood to make prudent search inhis pockets for a second box of matches before presenting Tommy with theone his eyes coveted. Finding himself secure against want in the immediatefuture, he gave himself up to the mild amusement of watching Tommy with hisnew acquisition. 

Tommy could not resist lighting one of the little tapers, which burned inthe sunlight with a still, clear flame like a fairy candle. Then a secondone was sacrificed. By this time the attraction had proved strong enoughto bring Ruth Mary down from her high seat in the sun. She looked scarcelyless a child than Tommy, as, with her face close to his, she watched thepale flame flower wasting its waxen stem. Then she must needs light oneherself and hold it, with a little fixed smile on her face, till the flamecrept down and warmed her finger-tips. 

"There, " she said, putting it out with a breath, "don't let us burn anymore. It's too bad to waste 'em in the daylight. "

"We will burn one more, " said Kirkwood, "not for amusement, but forinformation. " And while he whittled a piece of driftwood into the shape ofa boat, he told Ruth Mary how the Hindoo maidens set their lighted lampsafloat at night on the Ganges, and watch them perilously voyaging, tolearn, by the fate of the traveling flame, the safety of their absentlovers. 

He told it simply and gravely, as he might have described some fact innatural history, for he rightly guessed that this little seed of sentimentfell on virgin soil. According to Tommy, Ruth Mary was betrothed and soonto be a wife, but Kirkwood was curiously sure that as yet she knew notlove, nor even fancy. Nor had he any deliberate intention of tampering withher inexperience. He spoke of the lamps on the Ganges because they cameinto his mind while Ruth Mary was bending over the wasting match flame;any hesitation he might have had about introducing so delicate a topic wasconquered by an idle fancy that he would like to observe its effect uponher almost pathetic innocence. 

While he talked, interrupting himself as his whittling absorbed him, butalways conscious of her eyes upon his face, the boat took shape in hishands. Tommy had failed to catch the connection between Hindoo girls andboat-making, but was satisfied with watching Kirkwood's skillful fingers, without paying much heed to his words. The stranger had, too, a wonderfulknife, with tools concealed in its handle, with one of which he bored ahole for the mast. In the top of the mast he fixed a wax taper upright andsteady for the voyage. 

Ruth Mary's cheeks grew red, as she suddenly perceived the intention ofKirkwood's whittling. 

"Now, " he said, steadying the boat on the shallow ripple, "before we lightour beacon you must think of some one you care for, who is away. PerhapsTommy's friend, on Sheep Mountain?" he ventured softly, glancing at RuthMary. 

The color in her cheeks deepened, and again Kirkwood fancied it was not ahappy confusion that covered her downcast face. 

"No?" he questioned, as Ruth Mary did not speak; "that is too serious, perhaps. Well, then, make a little wish, and if the light is still alivewhen the boat passes that rock--the flat one with two stones on top--thewish will come true. But you must have faith, you know. "

Ruth Mary looked at Kirkwood, the picture of faith in her sweetseriousness. His heart smote him a little, but he met her wide-eyed gazewith a gravity equal to her own. 

"I would rather not wish for myself, " she said, "but I will wish somethingfor you, if you want me to. "

"That is very kind of you. Am I to know what it is to be?"

"Oh yes. You must tell me what to wish. "

"That is easily done, " said Kirkwood gayly. "Wish that I may come back someother day, and sit here with you and Tommy by the river. "

It was impossible not to see that Ruth Mary was blushing again. But sheanswered him with a gentle courtesy that rebuked the foolish blush: "Thatwill be wishing for us all. "

"Shall we light up then, and set her afloat?"

"I've made a wish, " shouted Tommy; "I've wished Joe Enselman would bring mean Injun pony: a good one that won't buck!"

"You must keep your wish for the next trip. This ship is freighted deepenough already. Off she goes then, and good luck to the wish, " saidKirkwood, as the current took the boat, with the light at its peak burningclearly, and swept it away. The pretty plaything dipped and danced amoment, while the light wavered but still lived. Then a breath of windshook the willows, and the light was gone. 

"Now it's my turn, " Tommy exclaimed, wasting no sentiment on another'sfailure. He rushed down the bank and into the shallow water to catch thewishing-boat before it drifted away. 

"All the same I'm coming back again, " said Kirkwood, looking at Ruth Mary. 

Tommy's wish fared no better than his sister's, but he bore up briskly, declaring it was "all foolishness anyway, " and accused Kirkwood of having"just made it up for fun. "

Kirkwood only laughed, and, ignoring Tommy, said to Ruth Mary, "The gamewas hardly worth the candle, was it?"

"Was it a game?" she asked. "I thought you meant it for true. "

"Oh no, " he said; "when we try it in earnest we must find a smoother riverand a stronger light. Besides, you know, I'm coming back. "

Ruth Mary kept her eyes upon his face, still questioning his seriousness, but its quick changes of expression baffled while fascinating her. Shecould not have told whether she thought him handsome or not, but she had adesire to look at him all the time. 

Suddenly her household duties recurred to her, and, refusing the help ofKirkwood's hand, she sprang up the bank and hurried back to the house. Kirkwood could see her head above the wild-rose thickets as she went alongthe high path by the shore. He was more sure than ever that Enselman wasnot the right man. 

At supper Ruth Mary waited on the strangers in silence, while Angy kept thecats and dogs "corraled, " as her father called it, in the shed, that theirimpetuous appetites might not disturb the feast. 

Mr. Tully stood in the doorway and talked with his guests while they ate, and Mrs. Tully, with the little two-year-old in her lap, rocked in thelarge rocking-chair and sighed apologetically between her promptings ofRuth Mary's attendance on the table. 

Tommy hung about in a state of complete infatuation with the person andconversation of his former rival. He was even beginning to waver in hisallegiance to his absent hero, especially as the wish about the Indian ponyhad not come true. 

During the family meal the young men sat outside in the shed-room, andsmoked and lazily talked together. Their words reached the silent group atthe table. Kirkwood's companions were deriding him as a recreant sportsman. He puffed his short-stemmed pipe and looked at them tranquilly. He was notdissatisfied with his share of the day's pleasure. 

When Mr. Tully had finished his supper, he took the young men down to thebeach to look at his boat. Kirkwood had pointed it out to his comrades, where it lay moored under the bank, and ventured the opinion of a boatingman that it had not been built in the mountains. But there he hadgeneralized too rashly. 

"I built her myself, " said Mr. Tully; "rip-sawed the lumber up here. Myyoung ones are as handy with her!" he boasted cheerfully, warmed by theadmiration his work called forth. "You'd never believe, to see 'em knockingabout in her, they hadn't the first one of 'em ever smelt salt water. RuthMary now, the oldest of 'em, is as much to home in that boat as she is ona hoss--and that's sayin' enough. She looks quiet, but she's got as firm aseat and as light a hand as any cow-boy that ever put leg over a cayuse. "

Mr. Tully, on being questioned, admitted willingly that he was an Easternman, --a Down-East lumberman and boat-builder. He couldn't say just why he'dcome West. Got restless, and his wife's health was always poor back there. He had mined it some and had had considerable luck, --cleaned up severalthousands, the summer of '63, at Junction Bar. Put it in a sawmill andgot burned out. Then he took up this cattle range and went into stock, inpartnership with a young fellow from Montana, named Enselman. They expectedto make a good thing of it, but it was a long ways from anywheres; and formonths of the year they couldn't do any teaming. Had no way out except bythe horseback trail. The women found it lonesome. In winter no team couldget up that grade in the cañon they call the "freeze-out, " even if theycould cross the river, on account of the ice; and from April to August theriver was up so you couldn't ford. 

All this in the intervals of business, for Mr. Tully, in his circuitousway, was agreeing to build a boat for the engineers, after the model of hisown. He would have to go down to the camp at Moor's Bridge to build it, hesaid, for suitable lumber could not be procured so far up the river, exceptat great expense. It would take him better'n a month, anyhow, and he didn'tknow what his women-folks would say to having him so long away. He wouldsee about it. 

The four men sauntered up the path from the shore, Tommy bringing up therear with the little black-and-tan terrier. In default of a word from hismaster, Tommy tried to make friends with the dog, but the latter, wideawake and suspicious after dozing under the wagon all the afternoon, wouldnone of him. Possibly he divined that Tommy's attentions were not whollydisinterested. 

The family assembled for the evening in the shed-room. The women weresilent, for the talk was confined to masculine topics, such as the qualityof the placer claims up the river, the timber, the hunting, the progressand prospects of the new railroad. Tommy, keeping himself forcibly awake, was seeing two Kirkwoods where there was but one. The terrier had takenshelter between Kirkwood's knees, after trying conclusions with the motherof the kittens, --a cat of large experience and a reserved disposition, withonly one ear, but in full possession of her faculties. 

Betimes the young men arose and said good-night. Mr. Tully was loath tohave the evening, with its rare opportunity for conversation, brought to aclose, but he was too modest a host to press his company upon his guests. He went with them to their bed, on the clean straw in the barn, and if goodwishes could soften pillows the travelers would have slept sumptuously. They did not know, in fact, how they slept, but woke, strong and joyousover the beauty of the morning on the hills, and the prospect of continuingtheir journey. 

They parted from the family at the ranch with a light-hearted promise tostop again on their way down the river. When they would return they weregayly uncertain, --it might be ten days, it might be two weeks. It was apromise that nestled with delusive sweetness in Ruth Mary's thoughts, asshe went silently about her work. She was helpful in all ways, and verygentle with the children, but she lingered more hours dreaming by theriver, and often at twilight she climbed the hill back of the cabin and satthere alone, her cheek in the hollow of her hand, until the great planesof distance were lost, and all the hills drew together in one dark profileagainst the sky. 

 * * * * *

Mrs. Tully had been intending to spare Ruth Mary for a journey to town, on some errands of a feminine nature which could not be intrusted to Mr. Tully's larger but less discriminating judgment. Ruth Mary had never beforebeen known to trifle with an opportunity of this kind. Her rides to townhad been the one excitement of her life; looked forward to with eagernessand discussed with tireless interest for many days afterwards. But now shehung back with an unaccountable apathy, and made excuses for postponing theride from day to day, until the business became too pressing to be longerneglected. She set off one morning at daybreak, following the horsebacktrail, around the steep and sliding bluffs high above the river, or acrossbeds of broken lava rock, --arrested avalanches from the slowly crumblingcliffs which crowned the bluff, --or picking her way at a soft-footed pacethrough the thickets of the river bottoms. In such a low and shelteredspot, scarcely four feet above the river, she found the engineers' camp, a group of white tents shining among the willows. She keenly noted itslocation and surroundings. The broken timbers of the old bridge projectedfrom the bank a short distance above the camp; a piece of weather-stainedcanvas stretched over them formed a kind of awning shading the rocks below, where the Chinese cook of the camp sat impassively fishing. The camp had adeserted appearance, for the men were all at work, tunneling the hill halfa mile lower down. Her errands kept her so late that she was obliged tostay over night at the house of a friend of her father's, who owned a fruitranch near the town. They were prosperous, talkative people, who loudlypitied the isolation of the family in the upper valley. 

Ruth Mary reached home about noon the next day, tired and several shadesmore deeply sunburned, to find that she had passed the engineers, withoutknowing it, on their way down the river by the wagon road on the otherside. They had stopped over night at the ranch and made an early start thatmorning. Ruth Mary was obliged to listen to enthusiastic reminiscences, from each member of the family, of the visit she had missed. 

This was the last social event of the year. The willow copses turnedyellow and leaf-bare; the scarlet hips of the rosebushes looked as if tinyfinger-tips had left their prints upon them. The wreaths of wild clematisfaded ashen gray, and were scattered by the winds. The wood dove's cooingno longer sounded at twilight in the leafless thickets. They had gone downthe river and the wild duck with them. 

But the voice of the river, rising with the autumn rains, was loud on thebar; the sky was hung with clouds that hid the hilltops or trailed theirragged pennants below the summits. The mist lay cold on the river; it rosewith the sun, dissolving in soft haze that dulled the sunshine, and atnight, descending, shrouded the dark, hoarse water without stilling itslament. Then the first snow fell, and ghostly companies of deer came outupon the hills, or filed silently down the draws of the cañons at morningand evening. The cattle had come down from the mountain pastures, and atnight congregated about the buildings with deep breathings and sighings;the river murmured in its fretted channel; now and then the yelp of ahungry coyote sounded from the hills. 

The young men had said, among their light and pleasant sayings, that theywould like to come up again to the hills when the snow fell, and get a shotat the deer; but they did not come, though often Ruth Mary stood on thebank and looked across the swollen ford, and listened for the echo ofwheels among the hills. 

About the 1st of November Mr. Tully went down to the camp at Moor's Bridgeto build the engineers' boat. The women were now alone at the ranch, butJoe Enselman's return was daily expected. Mr. Tully, always cheerful, hadbeen confident that he would be home by the 5th. 

The 5th of November and the 10th passed, but Enselman had not returned. On the 12th, in the midst of a heavy fall of snow, his pack animals weredriven in by another man, a stranger to the women at the ranch, who saidthat Enselman had changed his mind suddenly about coming home that fall, and decided to go to Montana and "prove up" on his ranch there. 

Mr. Tully's work was finished before the second week of December. On hisreturn to the ranch he brought with him a great brown paper bundle, whichthe children opened by the cabin fire on the joyous evening of his arrival. There were back numbers of the illustrated magazines and papers, straycopies of which now and then had drifted into the hands of the voraciousyoung readers in the cabin. There were a few novels, selected by Kirkwoodfrom the camp library with especial reference to Ruth Mary. For Tommy therewas a duplicate of the wonderful pocket-knife that he had envied Kirkwood. Angy was remembered with a little music-box, which played "Willie, we havemissed you" with a plaintive iteration that brought the sensitive tearsto Ruth Mary's eyes; and for Ruth Mary herself there was a lace pin ofhammered gold. 

"He said it must be your wedding present from him, as you'd be marriedlikely before he saw you again, " Mr. Tully said, with innocent pride in thegift with which his daughter had been honored. 

"Who said that?" Ruth Mary asked. 

"Why, Mr. Kirkwood said it. He's the boss one of the whole lot to mythinkin'. He's got that way with him some folks has! We had some real goodtalks, evenings, down on the rocks under the old bridge, --I told him aboutyou and Enselman"--

"Father, I wish you hadn't done that. " The protest in Ruth Mary's voice wasstronger than her words. 

She had become slightly pale when Kirkwood's name was mentioned, but now, as she held out the box with the trinket in it, a deep blush covered herface. 

"I cannot take it, father. Not with that message. He can wait till I ammarried before he sends me his wedding present. "

To her father's amazement, she burst into tears and went out into theshed-room, leaving Kirkwood's ill-timed gift in his hands. 

"What in all conscience' sake's got into her?" he demanded of his wife, "totake offense at a little thing like that! She didn't use to be so techy. "

Mrs. Tully nodded her head at him sagely and glanced at the children, ahint that she understood Ruth Mary's state of mind, but could not explainbefore them. 

At bedtime, the father and mother being alone together, Mrs. Tully revealedthe cause of her daughter's sensitiveness, according to her theory ofit. "She's put out because Joe Enselman chose to wait till spring beforemarryin', and went off to Montany instead of comin' home as he said hewould. "

"Sho, sho!" said Mr. Tully. "That don't seem like Ruth Mary. She ain't inany such a hurry as all that comes to. I've had it on my mind lately thatshe took it a little too easy. "

"You'll see, " said the mother. "_She_ ain't in any hurry, but she likes_him_ to be. She feels's if he thought more of money-makin' than he does ofher. She's like all girls. She won't use her reason and see it's all forher in the end he's doin' it. "

"Why didn't you tell her 'twas my plan, his goin' to Montany this fall?He wouldn't listen to it nohow then. He'd rather lose his ranch than waitany longer for Sis, so he said; but I guess he's seen the sense of what Itold him. 'Ruth Mary ain't a-goin' to run away, ' I says, 'even if ye don'tprove up on her this fall. ' You ought to 'a' told her, mother, 'twas myproposition. "

"I told her that and more too. I told her it showed he'd make a goodprovider. She looked at me solemn as a graven image all the time I wastalkin' and not a word out of her. But that's Ruth Mary. I never said thechild was sullen, but she is just like your sister Ruth--the more shefeels, the less she talks. "

"Well, " said Mr. Tully, "that's all right, if that's it. That'll allstraighten out with time. It was natural perhaps she should fire up atthe talk about marryin' if she felt the bridegroom was hangin' back. Why, Joe, --he'd eat the dirt she treads on, if he couldn't make her like him noother way! He's most too foolish about her, to my thinkin'. That's whattook me so by surprise when word come back he'd gone to Montany after all;I didn't expect anything so sensible of him. "

"'Twas a reg'lar man's piece o' work anyhow, " said Mrs. Tullydisconsolately. 

"And you'll be sorry for it, I'm afraid. I never knew any good come ofputtin' off a marriage, where everything was suitable, just for a fewhundred acres of wild land, more or less. "

"No use your worryin', " said Mr. Tully. "Young folks always has theirlittle troubles before they settle down--besides, what sort of a marriagewould it be if you or I could make it or break it?" But he bore himselfwith a deprecating tenderness towards his daughter, in whose affairs he hadmeddled, perhaps disastrously, as his better half feared. 

 * * * * *

The winters of Idaho are not long, even in the higher valleys. Close uponthe cold footsteps of the retreating snows trooped the first wild flowers. The sun seemed to laugh in the cloudless sky. The children were let looseon the hills; their voices echoed the river's chime. Its waters, risingwith the melting snows, no longer babbled childishly on their way; theyshouted, and brawled, and tumbled over the bar, rolling huge pine trunksalong as if they were sticks of kindling wood. 

One cool May evening, Ruth Mary, climbing the path from the beach, sawthere was a strange horse and two pack animals in the corral. She did notstop to look at them, but, quickly guessing who their owner must be, shewent on to the house, her knees weak and trembling, her heart beatingheavily. Her father met her at the door and detained her outside. She wasprepared for his announcement. She knew that Joe Enselman had returned, and that the time was come for her to prove her new resolve, born of thewinter's silent struggle. 

"I thought I'd better have a few words with you, Ruthie, before you seehim--to prepare your mind. Set down here. " Mr. Tully took his daughter'shands in his own and held them while he talked. 

"You thought it was queer Joe stayed away so long, didn't you?" RuthMary opened her lips to speak, but no words came. "Well, I did, " saidthe father. "Though it was my plan first off. I might 'a' know'd it wassomething more 'n business that kep' him. Joe's had an accident. Ithappened to him just about the time he meant to 'a' started for home lastfall. It broke him all up, --made him feel like he didn't want to see any ofus just then. He was goin' along a trail through the woods one dark night;he never knew what stunned him; must have been a twig or something struckhim in the eye; he was giddy and crazy-like for a spell; his horse took himhome. Well, he ain't got but one eye left, Joe ain't. There, Sis, I knewyou'd feel bad. But he's well. It's hurt his looks some, but what's looks!We ain't any of us got any to brag on. Joe had some hopes at first he'dgit to seein' again out of the eye that was hurt, and so he sent home hisanimals and put out for Salt Lake to show it to a doctor there; but itwan't any use. The eye's gone; and it doos seem as if for the time bein'some of Joe's grit had gone with it. He went up to Montany and tended tohis business, but it was all like a dumb show and no heart in it. It's cuthim pretty deep, through his bein' alone so long, perhaps, and thinkin'about how you'd feel. And then he's pestered in his mind about marryin'. Hefeels he's got no claim to you now. Says it ain't fair to ask a young girlthat's likely to have plenty good chances to tie up to what's left of him. I wanted you should know about this before you go inside. It might hurthim some to see a change in your face when you look at him first. As tohis givin' you your word back, that you'll settle between yourselves; but, however you fix it, I guess you'll make it as easy as you can for Joe. Idon' know as ever I see a big strappin' fellow so put down. "

Mr. Tully had waited, between his short and troubled sentences, for someresponse from Ruth Mary, but she was still silent. Her hands felt coldin his. As he released them she leaned suddenly forward and hid her faceagainst his shoulder. She shivered and her breast heaved, but she was notweeping. 

"There, there!" said Mr. Tully, stroking her head clumsily with his largehand. "I've made a botch of it. I'd ought to 'a' let your mother told ye. "

She pressed closer to him, and wrapped her arms around him withoutspeaking. 

"I expect I better go in now, " he said gently, putting her away from him. "Will you come along o' me, or do you want to git a little quieter first?"

"You go in, " Ruth Mary whispered. "I'll come soon. "

It was not long before she followed her father into the house. No one wassurprised to see her white and tremulous. She seemed to know where Enselmansat without raising her eyes; neither did he venture to look at her, as shecame to him, and stooping forward, laid her little cold hands on his. 

"I'm glad you've come back, " she said. Then sinking down suddenly on thefloor at his feet, she threw her apron over her head and sobbed aloud. 

The father and mother wept too. Joe sat still, with a great and bitterlonging in his smitten countenance, but did not dare to comfort her. 

"Pick her up, Joe, " said Mr. Tully. 

"Take hold of her, man, and show her you've got a whole heart if you ain'tgot but one eye. "

It was understood, as Ruth Mary meant that it should be, without morewords, that Enselman's misfortune would make no difference in their oldrelation. The difference it had made in that new resolve born of thewinter's struggle she told to no one; for to no one had she confided herresolve. 

 * * * * *

Joe stayed two weeks at the ranch, and was comforted into a semblance ofhis former hardy cheerfulness. But Ruth Mary knew that he was not happy. One evening he asked her to go with him down the high shore path. He toldher that he was going to town the next day on business that might keep himabsent about a fortnight, and entreated her to think well of her promiseto him, for that on his return he should expect its fulfillment. For God'ssake he begged her to let no pity for his misfortune blind her to thetrue nature of her feeling for him. He held her close to his heart andkissed her many times. Did she love him so--and so?--he asked. Ruth Mary, trembling, said she did not know. How could she help knowing? he demandedpassionately. Had her thoughts been with him all winter, as his had beenwith her? Had she looked up the river towards the hills where he wasstaying so long and wished for him, as he had gazed southward into thevalleys many and many a day, longing for the sweet blue eyes of his littlegirl so far away?

Alas, Ruth Mary! She gazed almost wildly into his stricken face, distortedby the anguish of his great love and his great dread. She wished that shewere dead. There seemed no other way out of her trouble. 

The next morning, before she was dressed, Enselman rode away, and herfather went with him. 

She was alone, now, in the midst of the hills she loved--alone as shewould never be again. She foresaw that she would not have the strength tolay that last blow upon her faithful old friend, --the crushing blow thatperfect truth demanded. Her tenderness was greater than her truth. 

 * * * * *

The river was now swollen to its greatest volume. Its voice, that had beenthe babble of a child and the tumult of a boy, was now deep and heavy likethe chest notes of a strong man. Instead of the sparkling ripple on thebar, there was a continuous roar of yellow, turbid water that could beheard a mile away. There had been no fording for six weeks, nor would therebe again until late summer. The useless boat lay in the shallow wash thatfilled the deep cut among the willows. The white sand beach was gone; heavywaves swirled past the banks and sent their eddies up into the channels ofthe hills to meet the streams of melted snow. Thunder clouds chased eachother about the mountains, or met in sudden downfalls of rain. 

One sultry noon, when the sun had come out hot on the hills after a wetmorning, Ruth Mary, at work in the shed-room, heard a sound that drove thecolor from her cheek. She ran out and looked up the river, listening to adistant but ever increasing roar which could be heard above the incessantlaboring of the waters over the bar. Above the summit of Sheep Mountain, asit seemed, a huge turban-shaped cloud had rolled itself up, and from itscentral folds was discharging gray sheets of water that veered and slantedwith the wind, but were always distinct in their density against therain-charged atmosphere. How far away the floods were descending she didnot know; but that they were coming in a huge wall of water, overtaking andswallowing up the river's current, she was as sure as that she had beenbred in the mountains. 

Bare-headed, bare-armed as she was, without a backward look, she ran downthe hill to the place where the boat was moored. Tommy was there, sittingin the boat and making the shallow water splash as he rocked from side toside. 

"Get out, Tommy, and let me have her, quick!" Ruth Mary called to him. 

Tommy looked at her stolidly and kept on rocking. "What you want with her?"he asked. 

"Come out, for mercy's sake! Don't you _hear_ it? There's a cloud-burst onthe mountain. "

Tommy listened. He did hear it, but he did not stir. "It'll be a bullything to see when it comes. What you doin'? You act like you was crazy, " heexclaimed, as Ruth Mary waded through the water and got into the boat. 

"Tommy, you will kill me if you stop to talk! Don't you know the camp atMoor's Bridge? Go home and tell mother I've gone to give 'em warning. "

Tommy was instantly sobered. "I'm going with you, " he said. "You can'thandle her alone in that current. "

Ruth Mary, wild with the delay, every second of which might be the price ofprecious lives, seized Tommy in her arms, hugged him close and kissed him, and by main strength rolled him out into the water. He grasped the gunwalewith both hands. "You're going to be drowned, " he shrieked, as if alreadyshe were far away. She pushed off his hands and shot out into the current. 

"Don't cry, Tommy, I'll get there somehow, " she called back to him. Shecould see nothing for the first few minutes of her journey but his littlewet, dismal figure toiling, sobbing, up the hill. It hurt her to have hadto be rough with him. But all the while she sat upright with her eyes onthe current, plying her paddle right and left, as rocks and driftwoodand eddies were passed. She heard it coming, that distant roar from thehills, and prayed with beating heart that the wild current might carry herfaster--faster--past the draggled willow copses--past the beds of blacklava rock, and the bluffs with their patches of green moss livid in thesunshine--hurling along, past glimpses of the well-known trail she hadfollowed dreamily on those peaceful rides she might never take again. Thethought did not trouble her, only the fear that she might be overtakenbefore she reached the camp. For the waters were coming--or was it the windthat brought that dread sound so near! She dared not look round lest sheshould see, through the gates of the cañon, the black lifted head of thegreat wave, devouring the river behind her. How it would come swoopingdown, between those high narrow walls of rock, her heart stood still tothink of. If the hills would but open and let it loose, over the emptypastures--if the river would only hurry, hurry, hurry! She whispered theword to herself with frantic repetition, and the oncoming roar behind heranswered her whisper of fear with its awful intoning. 

She trembled with joy as the cañon walls lowered and fell apart, and shesaw the blessed plains, the low green flats and the willows, and the whitetents of the camp, safe in the sunshine. Now if she be given but onemoment's grace to swing into the bank! The roar behind her made her faintas she listened. For the first time she turned and looked back, and the cryof her despair went up and was lost, as boat and message and messenger werelost, --gone utterly, gorged at one leap by the senseless flood. 

 * * * * *

At half past five o'clock that afternoon the men of the camp filed out ofthe tunnel, along the new road-bed, with the low sunlight in their faces. It was "Saturday night, " and the whole force was in good humor. As theytramped gayly along, tools and instruments glinting in the sun, word wentdown the line that something unusual had been going on by the river. Thereseemed to have been a wild uprising of its waters since they saw it last. Then a shout from those ahead proclaimed the disaster at the bridge. TheChinese cook, crouched among the rocks high up under the bluff, where hehad fled for safety when he heard the waters coming, rushed down to themwith wild wavings and gabblings, to tell them of a catastrophe that wasbest described by its results. A few provisions were left them, stored ina magazine under a rock on the hillside. They cooked their supper with thesplinters of the ruined blacksmith's hut. After supper, in the clear, pinkevening light, they wandered about on the slippery rocks, seeking whateverfragments of their camp equipage the flood might have left them. Everythinghad been swept away, and tons of mud and gravel covered the little greenmeadow where their tents had stood. Kirkwood, straying on ahead of hiscomrades, came to the rocks below the bridge timbers, from which the awninghad been torn away. The wet rocks glistened in the light, but there was awhiter gleam which caught his eye. He stooped and crawled under the timbersanchored in the bank, until he came to the spot of whiteness. Was this thatfair young girl from the hills, dragged here by the waters in their cruelorgy, and then hidden by them as if in shame of their work? Kirkwoodrecognized the simple features, the meek eyes, wide open in the searchinglight. The mud that filled her garments had spared the pure young face. Kirkwood gazed into it reverently, but the passionate sacrifice, theuseless warning, were sealed from him. She could not tell him why she wasthere. 

The three young men watched in turn, that night, by the little motionlessheap covered with Kirkwood's coat. Kirkwood was very sad about Ruth Mary, yet he slept when his watch was over. 

In the morning they nailed together some boards into the shape of a longbox. There was not a boat left on the river; fording was impossible. Theycould only take her home by the trail. So once more Ruth Mary traveled thatwinding path, high in the sunlight or low in the shade of the shore. A logof driftwood, left by the great wave, slung on one side of a mule's packsaddle, balanced the rude coffin on the other. No one meeting the threeengineers and their pack-mule filing down the trail would have known thatthey were a funeral procession; but they were heavy-hearted as they rodealong, and Kirkwood would fain it had not been his part to ride ahead andprepare the family at the ranch for their child's coming. 

The mother, with Tommy and Angy hiding their faces against her, stood onthe hill and watched for it, and broke into cries as the mule with itsburden came in sight. 

Kirkwood walked with them down the hill to meet it. His comradesdismounted, and the three young men, with heads uncovered, carried thecoffin over the hill and set it down in the shed-room. Then Tommy, in aburst of childish grief, made them know that this piteous sacrifice hadbeen for them. 

The tunnel made its way through the hill, the sinuous road-bed wound up thevalley, new camps were built along its course; but when the young men sattogether of an evening and looked at the hills in the strange pink light, aspell of quietness rested upon them which no one tried to explain. 

 * * * * *

The railroad has been built these two years. Every summer brings touristsup into the Bear River valley. They look with delight upon the mountainstream, bounding down between the hills with the brightness of the morningon its breast. 

"There should be an idyl or a legend belonging to it, " a pretty, dark-eyedgirl with a Boston accent said to Kirkwood, one moonlight evening late insummer when the river was low, as they drifted softly down between its dimshores. "Poor little Bear River! did nothing human ever happen near you togive you a right to a prettier name?"

The river did not answer as it rippled over the bar, nor did Kirkwood speakfor it; but the wood dove's melancholy tremolo came from the misty willowsby the shore, and in some suddenly illumined place in his memory he sawRuth Mary, sitting on the high bank in the peaceful afternoon, the sunshineresting on her smooth, fair hair, the shadow lending its softness to hershy, down-bent face. 

The pity of it, when he thinks of it sometimes, seems to him more than hecan bear. Yet if Ruth Mary had still been there at the ranch on the hills, she would have been, to him, only "that nice little girl of Tully's whomarried the one-eyed packer. "

THE RAPTURE OF HETTY. 

The dance was set for Christmas night at Walling's, a horse-ranch wherethere were women, situated in a high, watered valley shut in by foothills, sixteen miles from the nearest town. The cabin with its roof of shakes, thesheds and corrals, can be seen from any divide between Packer's ferry andthe Fayette. 

The "boys" had been generally invited, with one exception to the usualcompany. The youngest of the sons of Basset, a pastoral and nomadic house, was socially under a cloud, on the charge of having been "too handy withthe frying-pan brand. "

The charge could not be substantiated, but the boy's name had been roughlyhandled in those wide, loosely defined circles of the range where the forceof private judgment makes up for the weakness of the law, in dealing withcrimes that are difficult of detection and uncertain of punishment. He thathas obliterated his neighbor's brand or misapplied his own, is held as, inthe age of tribal government and ownership, was held the remover of hisneighbor's landmarks. A word goes forth against him potent as the leviticalcurse, and all the people say amen. 

As society's first public and pointed rejection of him the slight hadrankled with the son of Basset, and grievously it wore on him thatHetty Rhodes was going, with the man who had been his earliest and mostpersistent accuser: Hetty, prettiest of all the bunch-grass belles, whonever reproached nor quarreled, but judged people with her smile and letthem go. He had not complained, though he had her promise, --one of herpromises, --nor asked a hearing in his own defense. The sons of Bassetwere many and poor; their stock had dwindled upon the range; her men-folkcondemned him, and Hetty believed, or seemed to believe, as the others. 

Had she forgotten the night when two men's horses stood at her father'sfence, --the Basset boy's and that of him who was afterward his accuser; andthe other's horse was unhitched when the evening was but half spent, andfuriously ridden away, while the Basset boy's stood at the rails till closeupon midnight? Had the coincidence escaped her that from this night, of oneman's rage and another's bliss, the ugly charge had dated? Of these thingsa girl may not testify. 

They met in town on the Saturday before the dance, Hetty buying herdancing-shoes at the back of the store, where the shoe-cases framed in asnug little alcove for the exhibition of a "fit. " The boy, in his belledspurs and "shaps" of goat-hide, was lounging disconsolate and sulkyagainst one of the front counters; she wore a striped ulster, an enchantedgarment his arm had pressed, and a pink crocheted tam-o'-shanter cockedbewitchingly over her dark eyes. 

Her hair was ruffled, her cheeks were red, with the wind she had faced fortwo hours on the spring-seat of her father's "dead axe" wagon. Criticalfeminine eyes might have found her a trifle blowzy; the sick-hearted Bassetboy looked once, --he dared not look again. 

Hetty coquetted with her partner in the shoe bargain, a curly-headed youngHebrew, who flattered her familiarly and talked as if he had known her froma child, but always with an eye to business. She stood, holding back herskirts and rocking her instep from right to left, while she considered theeffect of the new style; patent-leather foxings and tan-cloth tops, andheels that came under the middle of her foot, and narrow toes with tips ofstamped leather;--but what a price! More than a third of her chicken-moneygone for that one fancy's satisfaction. But who can know the joy of areally distinguished choice in shoe-leather like one who in her childhoodhas trotted barefoot through the sage-brush and associated shoes only withcold weather or going to town? The Basset boy tried to fix his strainedattention upon anything rather than upon that tone of high jocosity betweenHetty and the shiny-haired clerk. He tried to summon his own self-respectand leave the place. 

What was the tax, he inquired, on those neck-handkerchiefs; and he pointedwith the loaded butt of his braided leather quirt to a row of daintysilk mufflers, signaling custom from a cord stretched above thegentlemen's-furnishing counter. 

The clerk explained that the goods in question were first class, all silk, brocaded, and of an extra size. Plainly he expected that a casual mentionof the price would cool the inexperienced customer's curiosity, especiallyas the colors displayed in the handkerchiefs were not those commonlyaffected by the cow-boy cult. The Basset boy threw down his last half-eagleand carelessly called for the one with a blue border. The delicate "babyblue" attracted him by its perishability, its suggestion of impossiblerefinements beyond the soilure and dust of his own grimy circumstances. Yethe pocketed his purchase as though it had been any common thing, not toshow his pride in it before the patronizing salesman. 

He waited foolishly for Hetty, not knowing if she would even speak to him. When she came at last, loitering down the shop, with her eyes on the gayChristmas counters and her arms filled with bundles, he silently fell inbehind her and followed her to her father's wagon, where he helped herunload her purchases. 

"Been buying out the store?" he opened the conversation. 

"Buying more than father'll want to pay for, " she drawled, glancing at himsweetly. Those entoiling looks of Hetty's dark-lashed eyes had grown to ahabit with her; even now the little Jewish salesman was smiling over hisbrief portion in them. Her own coolness made her careless, as children arein playing with fire. 

"Here's some Christmas the old man won't have to pay for. " A soft paperparcel was crushed into her hand. 

"Who is going to pay for it, I'd like to know? If it's some of your doings, Jim Basset, I can't take it--so there!"

She thrust the package back upon him. He tore off the wrapper and letthe wind carry his rejected token into the trampled mud and slush of thestreet. 

Hetty screamed and pounced to the rescue. "What a shame! It's a beauty ofa handkerchief. It must have cost a lot of money. I shan't let you use itso. "

She shook it, and wiped away the spots from its delicate sheen, and foldedit into its folds again. 

"_I_ don't want the thing. " He spurned it fiercely. 

"Then give it to some one else. " She endeavored coquettishly to force itinto his hands, or into the pockets of his coat. He could not withstand herthrilling little liberties in the face of all the street. 

"I'll wear it Monday night, " said he. "May be you think I won't be there?"he added hoarsely, for he had noted her look of surprise, mingled with aninfuriating touch of pity. "You kin bank on it I'll be there. "

Hetty toyed with the thought that after all it might be better that sheshould not go to the dance. There might be trouble, for certainly JimBasset had looked as if he meant it when he had said he would be there; andHetty knew the temper of the company, the male portion of it, too well todoubt what their attitude would be toward an inhibited guest who disputedthe popular verdict, and claimed social privileges which it had been agreedthat he had forfeited. But it was never really in her mind to deny herselfthe excitement of going. She and her escort were among the first couplesto cross the snowy pastures stretching between her father's claim and thelights of the lonely horse-ranch. 

It was a cloudy night, the air soft, chill, and spring-like. Snow hadfallen early and frozen upon the ground; the stockmen welcomed the "chinookwind" as the promise of a break in the hard weather. Shadows came out andplayed upon the pale slopes, as the riders rose and dropped past one longswell and another of dim country falling away like a ghostly land seekinga ghostly sea. And often Hetty looked back, fearing, yet half hoping, thatthe interdicted one might be on his way, among the dusky, straggling shapesbehind. 

The company was not large, nor, up to nine o'clock, particularly merry. The women were engaged in cooking supper, or were above in the roof-roombrushing out their crimps by the light of an unshaded kerosene lamp, placedon the pine wash-stand which did duty as a dressing-table. The men's voicescame jarringly through the loose boards of the floor from below. 

About that hour arrived the unbidden guest, and like the others he hadbrought his "gun. " He was stopped at the door and told that he couldnot come in among the girls to make trouble. He denied that he had comewith any such intention. There were persons present, --he mentioned nonames, --who were no more eligible, socially speaking, than himself, and heranked himself low in saying so; where such as these could be admitted, heproposed to show that he could. He offered, in evidence of his good faithand peaceable intentions, to give up his gun; but on the condition that hebe allowed one dance with the partner of his choosing, regardless of herprevious engagements. 

This unprecedented proposal was referred to the girls, who were charmedwith its audacity. But none of them spoke up for the outcast till Hettysaid she could not think what they were all afraid of; a dozen to one, andthat one without his weapon! Then the other girls chimed in and added theirtimid suffrages. 

There may have been some twinges of disappointment, there could hardly havebeen surprise, when the black sheep directed his choice without a lookelsewhere to Hetty. She stood up, smiling but rather pale, and he rushedher to the head of the room, securing the most conspicuous place before hisrival, who with his partner took the place of second couple opposite. 

"Keep right on!" the fiddler chanted, in sonorous cadence to the music, asthe last figure of the set ended with "Promenade all!" He swung into theair of the first figure again, smiling, with his cheek upon his instrumentand his eyes upon the floor. Hetty fancied that his smile meant more thanmerely the artist's pleasure in the joy he evokes. 

"_Keep_ your places!" he shouted again, after the "Promenade all!" a secondtime had raised the dust and made the lamps flare, and lighted with smilesof sympathy the rugged faces of the elders ranged against the walls. Theside couples dropped off exhausted, but the tops held the floor, andneither of the men was smiling. 

The whimsical fiddler invented new figures, which he "called off" in timeto his music, to vary the monotony of a quadrille with two couples missing. 

The opposite girl was laughing hysterically; she could no longer dance norstand. The rival gentleman looked about him for another partner. One girljumped up, then, hesitating, sat down again. The music passed smoothly intoa waltz, and Hetty and her bad boy kept the floor, regardless of shouts andprotests warning the trespasser that his time was up and the game in otherhands. 

Three times they circled the room; they looked neither to right nor left;their eyes were upon each other. The men were all on their feet, the musicplaying madly. A group of half-scared girls was huddled, giggling andwhispering, near the door of the dimly lighted shed-room. Into the midstof them Hetty's partner plunged, with his breathless, smiling dancer in hisarms, passed into the dim outer place to the door where his horse stoodsaddled, and they were gone. 

They crossed the little valley known as Seven Pines; they crashedthrough the thin ice of the creek; they rode double sixteen miles beforedaybreak, Hetty wrapped in her lover's "slicker, " with the blue-borderedhandkerchief, her only wedding-gift, tied over her blowing hair. 

THE WATCHMAN. 

I. 

The far-Eastern company was counting its Western acres under watercontracts. The acres were in first crops, waiting for the water. The waterwas dallying down its untried channel, searching the new dry earth-banks, seeping, prying, and insinuating sly, minute forces which multiplied andinsisted tremendously the moment a rift had been made. And the orders wereto "watch" and "puddle;" and the watchmen were as other men, and some ofthem doubtless remembered they were working for a company. 

Travis, the black-eyed young lumberman from the upper Columbia, had beensent down with a special word from the manager commending him as a triedhand, equal to any post or service. The ditch superintendent was lookingfor such a man. He gave him those five crucial miles between the head-gatesand Glenn's Ferry, the notorious beat that had sifted Finlayson's forcewithout yet finding a man who could keep the banks. Some said it was theArc-light saloon at Glenn's Ferry; some said it was the pretty girl atLark's. 

Whatever it was, Travis raged at it in the silent hours of his one-manwatch; and the report had gone up the line now, three times since he hadtaken hold, of breaks on his division. And the engineer would by no means"weaken" on a question of the work, nor did the loyal watchman ask that anyone should weaken, to spare him. He was all eyes and ears; he watched bydaylight, he listened by dark, and the sounds that he heard in his dreamswere sounds of water searching the banks, swirling and sinking into holes, or of mud subsiding with a wretched flop into the insidious current. 

It was a queer country along the new ditch below the head-gates; as old andsun-bleached and bony as the stony valleys of Arabia Petrea; all but thatstrip of green that led the eye to where the river wandered, and that warmbrown strip of sown land extending field by field below the ditch. 

Lark's ranch was the first one below the head-gates, lying between theriver and the ditch, an old homesteader's claim, sub-irrigated by means ofrude dams ponding the natural sloughs. The worn-out land, never drained, was foul and sour, lapsing into swamps, the black alkali oozing andspreading from pools in its boggy pastures. 

A few pioneer fruit-trees still bloomed and bore, undiscouraged by neglect, and cast homelike shadows on the weedy grass around the cabin and shedsthat slouched at all angles, with nails starting and shingles warping inthe sun. 

Similar weather-stains and odd kicks and bulges the old rancher's personexhibited, when he came out to sun himself of a rimy morning, when cobwebsglittered on the short, late grass, and his joints reminded him that therains were coming. And up and down the cow-trail below the ditch, morningand evening, went his dairy-herd to pasture; and after them loitered Nancy, on a strawberry pony with milk white mane and tail. 

The lights and shadows chased her in and out among the willows and fleecycottonwoods and tall swamp-grasses; but Travis rode in the glare, onthe high ditch-bank, and, although they passed each other daily, he hadnever had a good look at the "pretty girl at Lark's. " But one morning thewhite-faced heifer broke away and bolted up the ditch-bank, and in a cloudof sun-smitten dust Nancy followed, a figure of virginal wrath with scarletcheeks and wind-blown hair. Reining her pony on the narrow bank, she calledacross to Travis in a voice as clear and fresh as her colors:--

"Head her off, can't you? _What_ are you about!" This last to the pony, whowas behaving "mean. "

"Ride to the bridge and head her this way. I can drive her up the bank, "Travis responded. 

Nancy obeyed him, and waited at the bridge while he endeavored to persuadethe heifer of the error of her ways. The heifer was not easily persuaded, and Travis was wet to the waist before he had got her out; but he lostnothing of the bright figure guarding the bridge, a slender shape allpink and blue and dark blue, with hair like the sun on brown water, and a perfect seat, and a ringing voice calling thanks and bewilderingencouragement to her ally in the stream. And this was old Solomon'sdaughter!

But "Oh, my Nancy!" the boys would groan, with excess of appreciationbeyond words, and for that Nancy heeded them not: and now Travis knew thatthe boys were right. 

"Thank you ever so much!" her clear voice lilted, as the discomfitedrunaway dashed down the bank to the path she had forsaken. "I'm ever sosorry she dug all those bad tracks in the ditch. Will they do any harm?"

Travis assured her that nothing did harm if only it were known in time. 

"What is the matter with it, anyhow, --the ditch? Isn't it built right?"

"The ditch is the prettiest I ever saw, " Travis responded, with all thewarmth of his unrequited devotion to that faithless piece of engineering. "All new ditches need watching till the banks get settled. "

"Well, I should say that _you_ watched! Don't you ever stir off that bank?"

"I eat and sleep sometimes. "

"You must have a pretty dry camp up above. Wouldn't you like some milk oncein a while?"

"Thanks; I never happened to fall in with the milkman on my beat. "

"We have lots to spare, and buttermilk too, if you're not too proud to comefor it. The others used to. "

"I guess I don't quite catch on. "

"The other watchmen, the boys who were here before you. "

"Oh, " said Travis coldly. 

"Well, any time you choose to come down I'll save some for you, " said thegirl, as if that matter were settled. 

"I'm afraid it is rather off my beat, " Travis hesitated, "but I'm just asmuch obliged. "

Nancy straightened herself haughtily. "Oh, it is nothing to be obliged for, if you don't care to come. "

"I did not say I didn't care, " Travis protested; but she was gone. The dustflew, and presently her dark blue skirt and the pony's silver tail flashedpast the willows in the low grounds. 

"I shall never see her again, " he mourned. "So much for those other fellowsspoiling her idea of a watchman's duty. Of course she thought I could comeif I wanted to. Did she ask them, I wonder?"

Nancy was piqued, but not resentful. The more he did not come, as eveningafter evening smiled upon the level land; the more she thought of Travis, alone in his dusty camp, alone on his blinding beat; the more she dweltupon the singularity and constancy of his refusal, the more she respectedhim for it. 

So one day he did see her again. She was sitting on the bridge planks, leaning forward, her arms in her lap, her hat tipped back, a star of whitesunlight touching her forehead. She lifted her head when she heard himcoming and put her hand over her eyes, as if she were dizzy with watchingthe water. 

"How's the ditch?" she called in a voice of sweetest cheer. She was on herfeet now, and he saw how entrancing she was, in a blue muslin frock and abroad white hat with a wreath of pink roses bestrewing the tilted brim. Hadthey got company at the ranch? was his jealous reflection. 

"How's the ditch behaving itself these days?" she repeated. 

"Much as usual, thank you, " Travis beamed from his saddle. 

"Breaking, as usual?"

"Yes; it broke night before last. "

"Well, I don't believe it's much of a ditch, anyhow. I wouldn't fret aboutit if I was you. Don't you think I'm very good-natured, after your snubbingme so? Here I've brought you a basket of apples, seeing you wouldn't sparetime from your old ditch to come for them yourself. That in the napkin is alittle pat of fresh butter. " She lifted the grape-leaves that covered thebasket. "I thought it might taste good in camp. "

"Good! Well, I rather guess it will taste good! See here, I can't everthank you for this--for bringing it yourself. " He had few words, but hislooks were moderately expressive. 

Nancy blushed with pleasure. "Well, I had to--when folks are so wrapped upin their business. There, with Susan's compliments! Susan's the heifer yourounded up for me in the ditch. I know she made you a lot of work, trackingholes in your banks you're so fussy about. Do you really think it is a goodditch?"

"I am positive it is. "

"Then if anything goes wrong down here they will lay the blame on you?"

"They are welcome to. That's what I am here for. "

Nancy openly acknowledged her approval of a man that stood right up to hiswork and would take no odds of any one. 

"The other boys were always complaining and saying it was the ditch. Butthere, I know it is mean of me to talk about them. "

"I guess it won't go any further, " said Travis dryly. 

"Well, I hope not. They were good boys enough, but pretty triflingwatchmen, I shouldn't wonder. "

Travis had nothing to say to this, but he made a mental note or two. 

"When will you give me a chance to return your basket?"

"Why, anytime; there's no hurry about the basket. Have you any regulartimes?"

He looked away, dissembling his joy in the question, and answered as if hewere making an official report, --

"I leave camp at six, patrol the line to the ferry and back, lay off anhour, and down again at eleven. Back in camp at three, and two hours fordinner. On again at five, and back in camp at nine. I pass this bridge, forinstance, at seven and nine of a morning, twelve and two afternoons, andsix and eight in the evening. "

"Six and eight, " Nancy mused, with a slight increase of color. "Well, I canstop some evening after cow-time, I suppose; but it isn't any matter aboutthe basket. "

Six evenings, going and coming, Travis delayed in passing the bridge, on the watch for Nancy; six times he filled the basket with such latefield-flowers as he could find, and she never came. On the seventh eveninghis heart announced her, from as far off as his eyes beheld her. Thistime she was in white, without her hat, and she wore a blue ribbon inher gold-brown braids, --a blue ribbon in her braids, and a red, red rosein either cheek; and her colors, and the colors of the sky, floated likeflowers on the placid water. 

"Well, where is the basket, then?" she merrily demanded. 

"I left it behind, for luck. " "For luck? What sort of luck?" "Six times Ibrought it, and you were never here; so to-night I just kicked it into thetent and came off without it. It seems to have been about the right thingto do. "

"What, my basket!"

"Your basket. And it was filled with wild flowers, the prettiest I couldfind. It's your own fault for not coming before. "

"I never set any day that I know of. I have been up to town. "

Travis was not pleased to hear it. 

"Yes; and I saw your company's manager. What a young man he is! I had noidea managers were ever young. And stylish--my! I'm sure I hope he'll knowme when he sees me again, " she added, coloring and dropping her eyes. 

Travis grimly expressed the opinion that he probably would. Nancy continuedto strike the wrong note with cruel precision; she could not have donebetter had she calculated her words; and all the while looking as innocentas the shining water under her feet, --and that last time she had been sokind!

And the ditch was as provoking as Nancy, rewarding his devotion with breaksthat defied all explanation. It was not possible that the patience ofthe management could hold out much longer; and when he should have beendismissed in disgrace from his post, Nancy would lightly class him asanother of those "good boys enough, but trifling watchmen. "

II. 

The first dry moon was just past the full. At nine o'clock the sky began towhiten above the long, bare ridge of the side-hill cut. At half past, theedge of the moon's disk clove the sky-line, and the shadow of the ridgecrept down among the willows and tule-beds of the bottom. At ten the shadowhad shrunk; it lay black on the ditch-bank, but the whispering treetopsbelow were turning in silver light that flickered along the cow-path andcaught the still eye of a dark, shallow pool among the tules. 

Nancy had chosen this night for a stroll to the bridge, where Travis mightbe expected to pass, any time between eight o'clock and moonrise. Insteadof Travis came a man whom she recognized as one of the watchmen from alower division. He saluted her, after the custom of the country, claimingnothing on personal grounds but the privilege to look rather hard at thegirlish figure silhouetted against the water. It was yet early enough forsky-gleams to linger on still pools, or to color the wimpling reaches ofthe ditch. 

Nancy was disappointed; she had not come out to see a strange rider passingon Travis's gray horse. Her little plans were disconcerted. She had waitedfor what she considered a dignified interval, before seeming to takecognizance of her watchman's hours; now it appeared that the part ofdignity might be overdone. Had Travis been superseded on his beat? She wasconscious of missing him already. Her walk home, through the confidentialwillows, struck a chill of loneliness which the aspect of the house did notdispel. All was as dark and empty as she had left it. Was her father stillat work at those tedious dams? This had been his given reason for frequentabsences of late, after his usual working hours; though why he shouldchoose the dark nights for mending his dams Nancy had not asked herself. To-night she wanted him, or somebody, to drive away this queer new achethat made the moonlight too large and still for one little girl to wanderin alone. 

She searched for him. He was in none of the expected places; the dankfields were as empty as the house. She turned back to the ditch; from itshigh bank she could see farther into the shadowy places of the bottom. 

Travis, meanwhile, had been leisurely pursuing his evening beat. He hadovertaken one of his fellow-watchmen, on foot, walking to town, had lenthim his horse for the last two miles to camp, and invited him to helphimself to what he could find for supper, without waiting for his host. 

"It is a still night, " said Travis; "I'll mog along slowly up the ditch, and put in a little extra listening: it's at night the water talks. "

Long after the rider had passed on, the tread of his horse's hoofs washeard, diminishing on the hard-tramped bank; a loosened stone rattled downand splashed into the water; the wind rustled in the tule-beds; then allsurface sounds ceased, and the only talker was the ditch, chuckling anddawdling like an idle child on its errand, which it could not be persuadedto take seriously, to the desert lands. 

Travis came to the ticklish spot near the bridge, and stopped to listen. Here the ditch cut through beds of clean sand, where the water might sinkand work back into the old ground, the sand holding it like a sponge, tillall the bottom became a bog, and the banks sank in one wide-spread, generalwash-out. The first symptom of such deep-seated trouble would be thewater's motion in the ditch, --whirling round and round as if boring a holein the bottom. 

Travis laid his ear to the current, for he could judge of the water'smovement by the sound. All seemed right at the bridge, but far up the ditchhe was aware of a new demonstration. He listened awhile, and then walked onwith long, light steps and gained upon the sound, which persisted, definingitself as a muffled churning at marked intervals, with now and then await between. The prodding was of some tool at work under water, at theditch-bank. 

He crossed to the upper side, and moved forward cautiously along the ridge, crouching that his figure might not be seen against the sky. 

Nancy had gone up the cow-trail, past the low grounds, and was justclimbing the bank when a dark shape, of man or beast, crashed down theopposite slope and shot like a slide of rock into the water. 

A half-choked cry followed the plunge, then ugly sounds of a scuffle underthe ditch-bank--men breathing hard, sighing and snorting; and somebodygasped as if he were being held down till his breath was gone. 

"Get in there, you old muskrat! You shall stop your own breaks if it takesyour cursed carcass to do it! Now then, have you got your breath?"

Nancy stayed only to hear a voice that was her father's, convulsed withterror and the chill of his repeated duckings, begging to be spared theanguish of drowning by night in three feet of ditch-water. 

"Mr. Travis, " she screamed, "you let my father be, whatever you are doingto him! Father, you come right home and get on dry clothes!"

Travis was as much amazed as if Diana with the moon on her forehead hadappeared on the ditch-bank to take old Solomon Lark under her maidenprotection; but no less he stuck to his prize of war. 

"Your father hasn't time to change his clothes just yet, Miss Nancy; he'sgot some work to do first. "

"Who are you, to be setting my father to work? Let go of him this minute!You are drowning him; you are choking him to death!" sobbed the franticgirl. The shadow fortunately withheld the details of her father'scondition, but she had seen enough. Had Travis been drinking? Was the manbereft of his senses?

He was quite himself apparently, --hideously cool, yet roused, and his voicecut like steel. 

"You had better go home, Miss Nancy, and light a fire and warm a blanketfor your father's bed. He'll be pretty cold before he gets through withthis night's work. "

After this cruel speech he took no more notice of Nancy, but leaped uponthe ditch-bank and began hurling earth in great shovelfuls, patting the oldman on the head with his cold tool whenever he tried to clamber up afterhim. 

"You'd better not try _that_, " he roared in a terrible voice that woundedNancy like a blow. "Get in there, now! Puddle, puddle, or I'll have youburied to the ears in five minutes!"

It was shocking, hideous, like a horrible dream. The earth rattled down allabout Solomon, and frequently upon him; the water was thick with mud, andthe wretched old man tramped and puddled for dear life, helping to mend thehole which he had secretly dug where no eye could discover, till the waterhad fingered it and enlarged the mischief to a break. 

It was the work of vermin, and as such Travis had treated his prisoner. Nancy felt the insult as keenly as she abhorred the cruelty. She fled, hysterical with wrath and despair at her own helplessness. But while shemade ready the means of consolation at home, her thinking powers came back, and, between what she suspected and what she remembered, she was not whollyin the dark as to the truth between her father and Travis. 

There was no one to warm Travis's blankets, when he fell back upon campabout daybreak, reeking with cold perspiration, soaked with ditch-water andsore in every muscle from his frenzy of shoveling. He had had no supperthe night before; his guest had eaten all the cooked food, burned all hislight-wood kindlings, and forgotten to cover the bread-pail, and his breadwas full of sand. He didn't think much of those tenderfeet, who calledthemselves ditch-men, on that lower division where there was no work at allto speak of. 

He began--worse comfort--to consider his police work from a daughter'spoint of view. Alas for himself and Nancy! His idyl of the ditch wasshattered like the tender sky-reflections that bloomed on its still waters, and vanished when the waters were troubled. His own thoughts were as thatroily pool where he had ducked the old man in the darkness. He overslepthimself, after thinking he should not sleep at all, and started downhis beat not until noon of the next day. Halfway to the bridge on theditch-bank he met Nancy Lark. She gave him a note, which he dismounted totake, she vouchsafing no greeting, not even a look, and standing apartwhile he read it, with the air of a martyr to duty. 

Mr. Travis [the letter ran], --I am a death-struck man in consequence ofyour outrageous treatment of me last evening. I've took a dum chill, andit has hit me in the vitals through standing in water up to my armpits. Ifyou think your fool ditch is worth more than a Human's life, though yourcompany's enemy, that's for you to settle as you can when the time comesyou'll have to. I don't ask any favors. But if you got anny desency left inyou through working for that fish-livered company of bondholders coming outhere to stomp us farmers into the dirt, you will call this bizness quits. Iaint in no shape to fight ditches no more. You have put me where I be, andthe less said on both sides the better, it looks to me. If that's so youcan say so by word or writing. I should prefer writing as I aint got thatconfidence I might have. Yours truly, SOLOMON LARK. 

"Miss Nancy, " said Travis gently, "is your father very sick this morning?"

"I don't know, " Nancy replied. 

"Have you sent for a doctor?"

"He won't let me. "

"Have you read this letter?" She flashed an indignant look at him. 

"I wish you would, then. "

"It is not my letter. I don't know what's in it, and I don't care to know. "

"Do you know what your father was doing in the ditch last night?"

"Helping you to mend it, at the risk of his life, because you made him, "Nancy answered quickly. 

"Helping to mend a hole he made himself, so there would be a nice littlebreak in the morning. "

The subject rested there, till Travis, forced to take the defensive, asked:--

"Do you believe me?"

"Believe what?"

"What I have just told you about your father?"

"Oh, " she said, "it makes no difference to me. I knew my father pretty wellbefore I ever saw you. If you think he was doing that, why, I suppose youwill have to think so. But even if he was, I don't call that any reason youshould half drown him, and make him work himself to death beside. "

"But the water was warm! And I did the work. What was it to tread dirt foran hour or so on a summer's night? Wasn't he in the ditch when I foundhim?"

"I don't know, I'm sure, " said Nancy. "I know that you kept him there. "

"Well, I hope he'll keep out of the ditch after this. Working at ditchesat night isn't good for his health. But you needn't be alarmed about himthis time; I think he'll recover. But remember this: last night I wasthe company's watchman; I had an ugly piece of work to do and I did it;but, fair play or foul, whatever may happen between your father and me, remember, it is only my work, and you are not in it. "

"Well, I guess I'm in it if my father is, " said Nancy, "and that issomething for you to remember. "

"Oh, hang the work and the ditch and all the ditches!" thought Travis;yet it was the ditch that had put color and soul and meaning into hislife, --that had given him sight of Nancy. And it was not his work norhis convictions about it that stood between them now; it was her woman'scontempt for justice and reason where her feelings were concerned. The casewas simple as Nancy saw it; too simple, for it left him out in the cold. Hewould have had it complicated by a little more feeling in his direction. 

"Well, have I got your answer?" she asked. "Father said I was to bring ananswer, but not to let you come. "

"He need not be afraid, " said Travis bitterly. "If he will leave myditch-banks alone, I shall not meddle with him. Tell him, if there are nomore breaks there will be nothing to report. This break is mended--thebreak in the ditch, I mean. "

"Then you will not tell?" Nancy stole a look at him that was half a plea. 

"You would even promise to like me a little, wouldn't you, if you couldn'tget the old man off any other way?" he mocked her sorrowfully. "Well, I hadrather have you hate me than stoop to coax me, as I've seen girls do"--

He might be satisfied, she passionately answered; she hated him enough. Shehated his work, and the hateful way he did it. 

"You are an unmerciful man!" she accused him, with a sob in her voice. "Youdon't know the trouble my father has had; how many years he has worked, with nothing but his hands; and now your company comes and claims thewater, and turns the river, that belongs to everybody, into their bigditch. I'd like to know how they came to own this river! And when they havegot it all in their ditch, all the little ditches and the ponds will godry. We were here years before any of you ever thought of coming, or knewthere was a country here at all. It's claim-jumping; and not a cent willthey pay, and laugh at us besides, and call us mossbacks. I don't blame myfather one bit, if he did break the ditch. If you are here to watch, thenwatch!--watch me! Perhaps you think I've had a hand in your breaks?"

Travis turned pale. He had made the mistake of trying to reason with Nancy, and now he felt that he must go on, in justice to his case, though shewas far away from all his arguments, rapt in the grief, the wrath, theconviction, of her plea. 

"You talk as women talk who only hear one side, " he replied. "But youpeople down here don't know the company's intentions; they don't ask, andwhen they do they won't believe what they are told. That talk againstcompanies is an old politicians' drive. This country is too big for singlemen to handle; companies save years of waiting. This one will bring therailroads and the markets, and boom up the price of land. The ditch yourfather hates so will make him a rich man in five years, if he does nothingbut sit still and let it come. 

"As for water, why do you cry before you are hurt? Nobody can steal ariver. That is more politicians' talk, to make out they are the settlers'friends. We are the settlers' friends, because we are the friends of thecountry's boom; it can't boom without us. Why should _I_ believe in thiscompany? I'm a poor man, a settler like your father. I've got land of myown, but I can see we farmers can't do everything for ourselves; it'scheaper to pay a company to help us. They are just peddlers of water, andwe buy it. Who owns the other, then? Don't we own them just as much as theyown us?

"Come, if you can't feel it's so, leave hating us at least till we havedone all these things you accuse us of. Wait till we take all the waterand ruin your land. Most of these farmers along the river have got toomuch water; they are ruining their own land. So I tell your father, but hethinks he knows it all. "

"He is some older than you are, anyhow. "

"He is too old to be working nights in ditches. Tell him so from me, willyou?"

"Oh, I'll tell him! I don't think you will be troubled much with us aroundyour ditch, after this. I went to the bridge last night because I thoughtyou were nice, and a friend. I had a respect for you more than for any ofthe others. I might have come to think better of the ditch; but I've hadall the ditch I want, and all the watchmen. Never, till I die, shall Iforget how my father looked, " she passionately returned to the charge. "Anold man like him! Why didn't you put me in and make me tread dirt for you?The water was _warm_; and I'm enough better able than he was!"

"I'll get right down here and let you tread on me, and be proud to haveyou, if it will cure the sight of what you saw me do last night. I was mad, don't you understand? I have to answer for all this foolishness of yourfather's, remember. It had to be stopped. "

"Was there no way to stop it but half drowning him, and insulting himbesides?"

"Yes, there is another way; inform the company, and have him shut up in thePen. _I_ thought I let the old man off pretty easy. But if you prefer theother way, why, next time there's a break, we can try it. "

"I'm sure we ought to thank you for your kindness, " said Nancy. "And if weare Companied out of house and home, and father made a criminal, we shallthank you still more. Good-morning. "

Their eyes met and hers fell. She turned away, and he remounted and rodeon up the ditch, angry, as a man can be only with one he might have loved, down to those dregs of bitterness that lurk at the bottom of the soundestheart. 

III. 

He was but an idle watchman all that day, so sure he was that the ditch wasright and Solomon the author of all his troubles; and Solomon was "fixed"at last. Weariness overcame him, and at the end of his beat he slept, underthe lee of the ditch-bank, instead of returning to his camp. 

Next morning he was riding along at his usual pace when it struck him howincredibly the ditch had fallen. The line of silt that marked the water'snormal depth now stood exposed and dry, full two feet above its running, and the pulse of the current had weakened as though it were ebbing fast. 

He put his horse to a run, and lightened ship as he went, casting off hissack of oats, then his coat and such tools as he could spare; he mighthave been traced to the scene of disaster by his impedimenta strewing theditch-bank. 

The water had had hours the start of him; its work was sickening to behold. A part of the bank had gone clean out, and the ditch was returning to theriver by way of Solomon Lark's alfalfa fields. The homestead itself was indanger. 

He cut sage-brush and tore up tules by the roots, and piled them as awing-dam against the outer bank, and heaped dirt like mad upon the mats;and as he worked, alone, where forty men were needed, came Nancy, withglowing face, flying down the ditch-bank, calling the word of exquisiterelief:--

"I've shut off the water. Was that right?"

Right! He had been wishing himself two men, nay, three: one at the bank, and one at the gates, and one carrying word to Finlayson. 

"Can I do anything else?"

"Yes; make Finlayson's camp quick as you can, " Travis panted over ashovelful of dirt he was heaving. 

"Yes; what shall I tell him?"

"Tell him to send up everything he has got; every man and team andscraper. "

Nancy was gone, but in a few moments she was back again, wringing herhands, and as white as a cherry-blossom. 

"The water is all down round the house, and father is alone in bed cryinglike a child. "

"There's nothing to cry about now. You turned off the water; see, it hasalmost stopped. "

"Can I leave him with you?"

"Great Scott! I'll take care of him! But go, there's a blessed girl. Youwill save the ditch. "

Nancy went, covering the desert miles as a bird flies; she exulted in thischance for reparation. But long after Finlayson's forces had arrived andgone to work, she came lagging wearily homeward, all of a color, herselfand the pony, with the yellow road. She had refused a fresh horse at theditch-camp, and, sparing the whip, reached home not until after dark. 

Her father's excitement in his hours of loneliness had waxed to a pitchof childish frenzy. He wept, he cursed, he counted his losses, and whenhis daughter said, to comfort him, "Why, father, surely they must pay forthis!" he threw himself about in his bed and gave way to lamentations inwhich the secret of his wildness came out. He had done the thing himself;and he dared not risk suspicion, and the investigation that would follow aheavy claim for damages. 

Nancy could not believe him. "Father, do be quiet; you didn't do any suchthing, " she insisted. "How could you, when I know you haven't stirred outof this bed since night before last? Hush, now; you are dreaming; you areout of your head. "

"I guess I know what I done. I ain't crazy, and I ain't a fool. I made thishole first, before he caught me at the upper one. I made this one to keephim busy on his way up, so's the upper one could get a good start. Theupper one wouldn't 'a' hurt us. It's jest like my cussed luck! I knew itwas a-comin', but I didn't think I'd get it like this. It's all his fault, the great lazy loafer, sleepin' at the bottom of his beat, 'stead o' comin'up as he'd ought to have done last evening. He wasted the whole night, --andcalls himself a watchman!"

"Well, I'm glad of it, " Nancy cried excitedly. "I'm just _glad_ we arewashed out, and I hope this will end it!" and she burst into tears, and ranout of the room. 

She sat by herself, weeping and storming, in the dark little shed-room. 

"Nancy!" she heard her father calling, "Nancy, child!. . . Where's that galtaken herself off to?. . . Are you a-settin' up your back on account of thatditch? If you are, you ain't no child of mine. . . . I'm dum sorry I let ona word to her about it. How do I know but she's off with it now, to thatwatchman feller. I'll be put in the papers--an old man informed on by hisdarter, and he on his last sick bed!. . . Nancy, I say, where be you a-hidin'yourself?"

Nancy returned to her forlorn charge, and after a while the old man fellasleep. She put out the lamp, for she could see to move about the room bythe light of the sage-brush bonfires that flared along the ditch, lightingthe men and teams, all Finlayson's force, at work upon the broken banks. 

The sight was wild and alluring; she went out to watch the strange army ofshadows shifting and intermingling against a wall of flame. 

There was a distressful space to cross, of sand and slippery mud anddrowned vegetation, including the remains of her garden; the look ofeverything was changed. Only the ditch-bank against the reddened skysupplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, and upand down in lurid light climbed the scraper-teams; climbed and dumped, anddropped over the bank to climb again, like figures in a stage procession. There was a bedlam roar and crackle of pitchy fires, rattle of harness, clank of scraper-pans, shouts of men to the cattle, oaths and words ofcommand; and this would go forward unceasingly till the banks held water. And what was the use of contending?

Nancy felt bitterly the insignificance of such small scattered folk as herfather, pitiful even in their spite. Their vengeance was like the malice offield-mice or rabbits, which the farmers fenced out of their fields intothe desert where they belonged. What could such as they do either to helpor hinder this invincible march of capital into the country where they, with untold hardships, had located the first claims? And some of them wereready enough, for a little temporary relief, to part with their birthrightto these clever sons of Jacob. 

"Out we go, to find some other wilderness for them to take away from us! Weare only mossbacks, " said the daughter of Esau. 

As she spoke, half aloud to herself, a man rushed past her down the bank, flattened himself on his hands, laid his face to the water, and drank andpaused to pant, and drank again, while she could have counted a score. Thenhe lifted his head, sighed, and stretched himself back with a groan ofcomplete exhaustion. 

The firelight touched his face, and showed her Travis: haggard, hollow-eyed, soaked with ditch-water, and matted with mud, looking as if hehad been dragged bodily through the ditch-bank, like thread through a pieceof cloth. 

Nancy did not try to avoid him. 

"Oh, is it you?" he marveled, softly smiling up at her. "What a splendidride you made! Did nobody thank you? Finlayson said he couldn't find youwhen he was leaving camp. "

Nancy answered not a word; she was trembling so that she feared to betrayherself by speaking. 

"I was coming to say good-by, when I had washed my face, " he continued. "Igot my time to-night. "

"Your time?"

"My time-check. They are going to put another man in my place. So youneedn't hate me any longer on account of the ditch; you can transfer allthat to the next fellow. "

"Isn't that just like them? They never can do anything fair!"

"Like who? Do you suppose I'm going to kick about it? The only wonder isthey kept me on so long. "

Every word of Travis's was a knife in Nancy's conscience, to say nothingof her pride. She hugged her arms in her shawl, and rocked herself to andfro. Travis crawled up the bank a little way further, and stretched himselfhumbly beside her. The dark shadows under his aching eyes started a pang ofpity in the girl's heart, sore beset as she was with troubles of her own. 

"I'm glad it's duskish, " he remarked, "so you can't see the sweet state I'min. I'm all over top-soil. You might rent me to a Chinaman for twenty-fivedollars an acre; and I don't need any irrigating either. "

An irresponsible laugh from Nancy was followed by a sob. Then she gatheredherself to speak. 

"See here, do you want to stay on this ditch?"

"Of course I do. I wanted to stay till I had straightened out my ownrecord, and shown what the ditch can do. But no management under heavencould stand such work as this. "

"Then stay, if you want to. You have only to say the word. You said you'dinform if there was a next time, and there is. Father did it. He made thisbreak, too; he made them both the same night, and didn't dare to tell ofthis one. Now, go and clear yourself and get back your beat. "

"Are you sure of this you are telling me?"

"Well, I guess so. It isn't the sort of thing I'd be likely to make up. AndI say you can tell if you want to. I make you a present of the information. If father isn't willing to take the consequences, I am; and they halfbelong to me. I won't have anybody sheltering us, or losing by us. We havegot no quarrel with you. "

"That is brave of you. I wish it was something more than brave, " sighedTravis. "But I want it all myself. I can't spare this information to thecompany. You didn't do it for them, did you?"

"When I go telling on my father to save a ditch, I guess it will be afternow, " said Nancy. "If that rich company, with all its men and watchmen andteams and money, can't protect itself from one poor old man"--

"Never mind the company, " said Travis. "What's mine is mine. This word yougave to me, it doesn't belong to my employers. You have saved me to myself;now I shall not go kicking myself for sleeping that night on my beat. It'snot so bad--oh, not half so bad--for me!"

"Then go tell them, and get the credit for it. Don't you mean to?"

She could not see him smile. "When I tell, you will hear of it. "

"But you talked about your record. "

"I shall have to go to work and make a new record. Ah, if you would be askind as you are brave! Was it all just for pride you told me this? Don'tyou care, not the least bit, about my part--that I am down and out ofeverything?"

"It's your own fault, then. I have told you how you can clear yourself andstay. "

"And lose my chance with you! I was thinking of coming back, some day, totell you--what you must know already. Nancy, you do know!"

"You forget, " shivered Nancy; "I am the daughter of the man you called"--

"Is that fair--to bring that up now?"

"You mustn't deceive yourself. There are some things that can't beforgotten. "

"How did _I_ know what I was saying? A man isn't always responsible. "

"I heard you, " said Nancy. "There are things we say when we are raging madat a person, and there are things we say when we think them the dirt underour feet. You kept him down with your dirt-shovel, and you called him--whatI can't ever forget. "

"And is this the only hitch between us?"

"I should think it was enough. Who despises my father despises me. "

"But I do not despise him, " Travis did not scruple to assert. "The quarrelwas not mine; and I'm not a ditch-man any longer. I will apologize to yourfather. "

"Oh, I know it costs you nothing to apologize. You don't mind father--anold man like him! You'd take him in, and give him his meals, and pat him onthe head as you would the house-dog that bites because he's old and cross. Well, I'll let you know I don't want you to forgive him, and apologize, andall that stuff. I want you to get even with him. "

"Be satisfied, " said Travis. "The only count I have against your father isthrough his daughter. There is no way for me to get even with you. And whenyou have spoiled a man's life just for one angry word"--

"Not angry, " she interrupted. "I could have forgiven you that. "

"For one word, then. And you call it square when you have given me a pieceof information to use for myself, against you! I will go back now and go towork. They can't say I haven't earned my wages on this beat. "

He looked down at her, longing to gather her, with all her thornysweetness, to his breast; but her attitude forbade him. 

"Can't we shake hands?" he said. They shook hands in silence, and he wentback and finished the night in the ranks of the shovelers, --to work well, to love well, and to get his discharge at last. Yet Travis was not sorrythat he had taken those five miles below Glenn's Ferry: he had foundsomething to work for. 

The company's officials marveled, as the weeks went by, that nothing washeard of Solomon Lark. He had ever been the sturdiest beggar for damages onthe ditch. If he lacked an occasion he could invent one; he was known tobe a fanatic on the subject of the small farmers' wrongs: yet now, with averitable claim to sue for, the old protestant was dumb. Had Solomon turnedthe other cheek? There were jokes about it in the office; they looked tohave some fun with Solomon yet. 

In the early autumn the joking ceased. There was a final reason for theold man's silence, --Solomon was dead. His ranch was rented to a Chinesevegetable-gardener who bought water from the ditch. 

The company, through its officials, was disposed to recognize this unspokenclaim that had perished on the lips of the dead. They made an estimate, andoffered Nancy Lark a fair sum in consideration of her father's losses bythe ditch. 

It was unusual for a company to volunteer a settlement of this kind; itwas still more unusual for the indemnity to be refused. Nancy declined, byletter, first; then the manager asked her to call at the office. She didnot come. He took pains to hunt her up at the house of her friends in town. He might have delegated the call, but he chose to make it in person, andwas struck by an added dignity, a finer beauty in the saddened face of thegirl whom he remembered as a bit of a rustic coquette. 

He went over the business with her. She was perfectly intelligent in thematter; there had been no misunderstanding. Why then would she not takewhat belonged to her? Companies were not in the habit of paying claims thatwere claims of sentiment. 

"I have made no claim, " said Nancy. 

"But you have one. You inherited one. We do not propose to rob"--

She put out her hand with a gesture of appeal. 

"My father had no claim. He never made one, nor meant to make one. I amthe best judge of what belongs to me. I don't want this money, and I willnever take one cent of it. But there is a claim you can settle, if you arehunting up claims. It won't cost you anything, " she faltered, as if someunguarded impulse had hurried her into a subject that she hardly knew howto go on with. She moved her chair back a little from the light. 

"There was one of your watchmen, on the Glenn's Ferry beat, who lost hisplace on account of those breaks coming one after another"--

"Yes, " said the manager; "there were several that did. Which man do yourefer to?"

The name, she thought, was Travis. Then, blushing, she spoke outcourageously:--

"It was Mr. Travis. He was discharged just after the big break. You thoughtit was his carelessness, but it was not. I am the only one that can sayso, and I know it. You lost the best watchman you ever had on the ditchwhen you took his name off your pay-roll. He worked for more than just hismoney's worth, and it hurt him to lose that place. "

"Are you aware that he made the worst record of any man on the line?"

"I don't care what his record was; he kept a good watch. It's no concernof mine to say so, " she said. Trembling and red and white, the tearsshining in her honest eyes, she persisted: "He had his reasons for neverexplaining, and they were nothing to be ashamed of. I think you mightbelieve me!"

"I do, " said the manager, willing to spare her. "I will attend to the caseof Mr. Travis when I see him. I do not think he has left the country. Infact, he was inquiring about you only the other day, in the office, and heseemed very much concerned to hear of your--of the loss you have suffered. Shall I say that you spoke a good word for him?"

"You need not do that, " she answered with spirit. "He knows whether he keptwatch. But you may say that I ask, as a favor, that he will answer all yourquestions; and you need not be afraid to question him. "

Travis was given back his beat, but no more explicit exoneration would heaccept. The reason of his reinstatement was not made public, and naturallythere was gossip about it among other discharged watchmen who had not beeninvited to try again. 

Two of these cynic philosophers, popularly known as sore-heads, foregathered one morning at Glenn's Ferry and began to discuss themanagement and the ditch. 

"Travis don't seem to have so much trouble with the water this year as hehad last, " the first ex-watchman remarked. "Used to get away with him on anaverage once a week, so I hear. "

"He's married his girl, " the other explained sarcastically. "He's got moretime to look after the ditch. "

There is no sand, now, in Travis's bread; the prettiest girl on the ditchmakes it for him, and walks beside him when the lights are fair and theshadows long on the ditch-bank. And it is a pleasure to record that bothNancy and the ditch are behaving as dutifully as girls and water can beexpected to do, when taken from their self-found paths and committed to thesober bounds of responsibility. 

Flowers bloom upon its banks, heaven is reflected in its waters, fair andbroad are the fertile pastures that lie beyond; but the best-trained ditchcan never be a river, nor the gentlest wife a girl again.