RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

“Oh, Rose, if I could see you now and then—only
for a moment like this” Page [282]

RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

By
GERALDINE BONNER
Author of
The Pioneer, Tomorrow’s Tangle, etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
C. M. RELYEA

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1906
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
October
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

CHAPTER I
THE BONANZA KING

The cold of foot-hill California in the month of January held the night. The occupants of the surrey were too cramped and stiffened by it, and too uncomfortably enwrapped against it, to speak. Silence as complete as that which lay like a spell on the landscape brooded over them. At the last stopping place, Chinese Gulch, a scattering of houses six miles behind them on the mountain road, they had halted at the main saloon, and whisky and water had been passed to the driver and to the burlier figure on the back seat. The watchers that thronged to the saloon door had eyed the third occupant of the carriage with the intent, sheepish curiosity of the isolated man in presence of the stranger female. Afterward, each one was voluble in his impressions of her face, pale in the smoky lamplight, and the hand that slid, small and white, out of its loose glove when the warming glass was offered her.

Since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several corners and preserved an unbroken silence. Even the driver’s tongue had showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his fares, gradually languished and died.

The surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. The solemn loneliness of the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars, seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing stillness. There was not a sign of human life. The gray patches of fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. The domes of the live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces. Steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. Over all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions and Nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown telegraphy, from illimitable distances.

The larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion.

“Hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars.

“Fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited the more diminutive bulk.

“Get a move on, Jake,” to the driver. “This girl’s most famished.”

“Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”

At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.

“So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?”

The driver chuckled.

“That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.”

“No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”

“Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from New York?”

“She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before she was ever thought of.”

A loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached houses of the settlement. Shapes appeared at the lighted doorways, and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads was seen in the windows. The entire population of Rocky Bar spent its evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting and smoking in cheery sociability. But at this hour the great event of Rocky Bar’s day was over. The eight stages, the passengers of which dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the Sierra. That the nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a late arrival in a surrey, driven by Jake McVeigh, the proprietor of the San Jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational event not often awarded to Rocky Bar, even in the heyday of summer-time.

The occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed themselves against the windows. They saw that the man who alighted was a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. Of the lady, shown but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline and a glint of fair hair were discernible. But, anyway, it was a woman, and of a kind unusual in Rocky Bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful admiration.

The hotel proprietor, an ancient man with a loosened vest, and trousers tucked into long boots, dispersed them as he ushered the strangers into the office. That they were travelers of distinction was obvious, as much from their own appearance as from the fact that Jake McVeigh was driving them himself, in his best surrey and with his finest team. But just how important they were no one guessed till McVeigh followed them in, and into ears stretched for the information dropped the sentence, half-heard, like a stage aside:

“It’s Bill Cannon and his daughter Rose.”

Upon the proprietor it had an electric effect. He sped from the room with the alertness of youth, promising “a cold lunch” in a minute. To the others it came as a piece of intelligence that added awe to the lighter emotions of the occasion. By common consent their eyes focused on the great man who stood warming his hands at the stove. Even the rare, unusual woman, revealed now as sufficiently pretty to be an object of future dreams, was interesting only to the younger and more impressionable members of the throng. All but these gazed absorbed, unblinking, at Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King.

He was used to it. It had been a part of his life for years. Eying his admirers with a genial good humor, he entered into conversation with them, his manner marked by an easy familiarity, which swept away all shades of embarrassment, and drew the men around the stove, eager to respond to his questions as to the condition and prospects of the locality. The talk was becoming general and animated, when the ancient man returned and announced that the “cold lunch” was ready and to please “step after him into the dining-room.”

This gaunt apartment, grimly unadorned and faintly illumined, an occasional lantern backed by a tin reflector projecting a feeble light into its echoing emptiness, was swept of all intruders, and showed a barn-like bareness of wall and loftiness of roof. Lines of tables, uncovered between flanking wooden benches, were arranged down its length. Across the end of one of these a white cloth was spread and three places set. Jake McVeigh, less innocently democratic than the hotel proprietor, was about to withdraw from the society of his distinguished patron and seat himself in seemly loneliness at an adjacent table, when Bill Cannon’s voice arrested him.

“What are you going off there for, sonny, as if you were a leper? Come over here and sit side of us.”

The driver, greatly pleased, not only to enjoy the companionship of the richest man in California but to let the peeping heads in the doorway see him in this moment of proud apotheosis, took the third seat with modest complacence. Like most of his kind, the sense of social inferiority was unknown to him. He was simply and naturally himself as he would be anywhere in any company. Even the proximity of Miss Cannon did not abash him, and he dexterously propelled the potatoes into his mouth with his knife and cut fiercely at his meat with a sawing motion, talking the while with all the freedom and more than the pleasure with which he talked to his wife in the kitchen at San Jacinto.

Cannon, his overcoat removed, was seen to be a powerful, thick-set man, with a bulkiness that was more a matter of broad build and muscular development than fat. His coat set ill upon him and strained at the buttons. It had the effect of having worked up toward the shoulders, noticeable in the clothes of men who are deep-chested and sit bunchily. He had a short neck which he accommodated with a turn-down collar, a gray beard, clipped close to his cheeks and square on the chin, and gray hair, worn rather long and combed sleekly and without parting back from his forehead. In age he was close to seventy, but the alertness and intelligence of a conquering energy and vitality were in his glance, and showed in his movements, deliberate, but sure and full of precision. He spoke little as he ate his dinner, leaning over his plate and responding to the remarks of his daughter with an occasional monosyllable that might have sounded curt, had it not been accompanied with a lazy cast of his eye upon her that was as full of affection as a caress.

The young lady, who had also put off her outer wraps, still wore her hat, which was wide-brimmed and cast a shadow over the upper part of her face. Below it her hair showed a fine, bright blonde, giving forth silky gleams in the lamplight. To the peeping heads in the doorway she seemed a creature instinct with romantic charm, which was expressed in such delicacies of appearance as a pearl-white throat, a rounded chin, and lips that smiled readily. These graces, eagerly deciphered through dimness and distance, had the attraction of the semi-seen, and imagination, thus given an encouraging fillip, invested Bill Cannon’s girl with a haunting beauty. It was remarked that she bore no resemblance to her father in coloring, features, or build. In talking it over later, Rocky Bar decided that she must favor her mother, who, as all California knew, had been a waitress in the Yuba Hotel at Marysville, when Bill Cannon, then a miner in the Freeze-Out, had wooed and won her.

The conversation between the diners was desultory. They were beyond doubt hungry. Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semicircle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught McVeigh’s, and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.

It was toward the end of the meal, that, looking at the opposite wall, her glance was caught by a large clock to which she drew her father’s attention:

“Half-past nine! How fashionable we are! And when are you going to get us up to Antelope, Mr. McVeigh?”

McVeigh studied the clock ponderingly as he felt in his breast pocket for his toothpick.

“Well,” he said, “if we leave here at ten and make good time the hull way—it’s up hill pretty much without a break—I’ll get you there about midnight.”

She made a little grimace.

“And it will be much colder, won’t it?”

“Colder ’n’ colder. You’ll be goin’ higher with every step. Antelope’s on the slope of the Sierra, and you can’t expect to be warm up there in the end of January.”

“If you hadn’t wanted to come,” said her father, “you’d have been just about getting ready for Mrs. Ryan’s ball. Isn’t this about the magic hour when you begin to lay on the first layer of war-paint?”

The girl looked at the clock, nodding with a faint, reminiscent smile.

“Just about,” she said. “I’d have been probably looking at my dress laid out on the bed and saying to myself, ‘Now I wonder if it’s worth while getting into that thing and having all the bother of going to this ball.’ On the evenings when I go out, there’s always a stage when that happens.”

McVeigh, with his toothpick in full operation, looked at her, admiring and half comprehending, for the first time feeling himself an outsider. She caught his eye, read its meaning, and with the quick tact of a delicate nature, said:

“It’s Mrs. Cornelius Ryan in San Francisco. She has a ball to-night and I was going, but I came up here with papa instead. I don’t care for balls.”

“Sort of late to be primping up for a ball,” said McVeigh, restoring the toothpick to his pocket and pushing back his chair. “I’ll go and have a look at the horses. And, Governor, if you’ll be ready in fifteen minutes I’ll be round at the porch waiting.”

Cannon nodded, and, as the driver clumped off over the board floor, said to his daughter,

“I wonder if Dominick Ryan’ll be there—at the ball, I mean. His mother’s made up her mind not to recognize the woman he’s married, and to freeze her out, but I wonder if she’ll have the nerve not to ask her to-night.”

“I don’t see how she could do that,” said the girl. “This is one of the largest balls ever given in San Francisco. She can’t leave her son out, and she couldn’t ask him without his wife.”

“Couldn’t she?” said the old man, with a narrowing of his eyes and a knowing wag of his head. “You don’t know Delia Ryan. I do. I’ve known her forty years, ever since she was first married and did washing on the back porch of her shanty in Virginia City. She was a good deal of a woman then, a strong, brainy woman, and she’s the same to-day, but hard as nails. I’ll bet a hat she hasn’t asked Dominick’s wife to that ball.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do?” asked the daughter, somewhat aghast at this glimpse of the Ryan family skeleton.

“Don’t ask me such conundrums. I’m glad I’m not in it, that’s all I know. When two women lock horns I’m ready to step quietly down and out. I never to my knowledge saw Dominick’s wife, but I’ve heard about her, and take it she’s a pretty hard kind of a proposition. They say she married the boy for money and position, and hasn’t got either. Delia, who has the money, hasn’t given them a cent since the marriage; made up her mind, people say, to force Mrs. Dominick out. She doesn’t seem to have done it, and I guess it’s been sort of aggravating to her. Just the same I’d like to know if she’s had the nerve not to send the woman an invitation to the ball. That would be pretty tough.”

“I’ve never seen either Dominick or his wife,” said the girl. “It seems odd when I know Mrs. Ryan and Cornelia so well. But he married the year I came back from Europe, and he’s never been anywhere since. I don’t believe he ever goes to his mother’s. There’s Mr. McVeigh in the doorway; we’d better be going.”

Once again in the carriage they were soon clear of the last straggling shanty, and speeding along the pale, ascending road. The silence that held the trio before their arrival at Rocky Bar again fell on them. Wrapped in overcoats and rugs, Bill Cannon appeared to slumber, every now and then—as the wheels jolted over a piece of rough road-bed—shaken into growling wakefulness. McVeigh also rolled sleepily in his seat, occasionally leaning sidewise to spit over the wheel. Only the girl seemed alert and wide-awake, her face craning out from the shadowed back seat, her eyes strained to pierce the obscurity and see for the first time the landscape of foot-hill California, of which her father had so often told her.

Now it was all a dark, formless background of broken blacknesses, where the light, open spaces of fields alternated with blotches of woods and trees. At intervals they passed a lone cabin, solitary in its pale clearing, the red eye of a stove sending a gleam through an uncurtained pane. Once they woke the echoes in the single street of a tiny town, sleeping behind its shuttered windows. Dogs barked, the shout of a belated reveler rose from a congeries of gaudily-bright doorways, and over all, imposing its mighty voice on the silence, came the roar of the stamp-mill on the hill above. It rose into the night like a fortress, a black mass looming from the slant of vast dumps, lines of lit windows puncturing its sides. The thunder of its stamps was loud on the night, fierce and insistent, like the roar of a monster round whose feet the little town cowered.

McVeigh looked back over his shoulder, saw the bright eyes under the hat-brim, and said softly,

“The Silver Crescent stamp-mill. The last big mine we’ll see.”

It was the last town they passed; even the groups of buildings that marked embryo mines grew rare. The dimly-seen country became wilder, seemed to shake off the signs of man’s encroachment and to be sweeping up into mountain majesty. The ascending road crept along the edges of ravines whence the sound of running water came in a clear clinking, dived down into black caverns of trees unlighted by the feeblest ray of star-shine, and then climbed in slow, laborious loops the bare bulwarks of the mountain. Had the girl been able to see plainly she would have noticed the change in the foliage, the disappearance of the smaller shrubs and delicate interlacement of naked boughs, and the mightier growth of the pines, soaring shafts devoid of branches to a great height. Boulders appeared among their roots, straight falls of rock edged the road like the walls of a fort.

McVeigh turned again, and again caught the bright eye.

“Seems like your paw must think a lot of what he’s heard about the new strike at Greenhide to come all this way,” he whispered.

“I guess he does,” came the response in the same key.

“It sort of stumps me to know why you came along with him,” he continued, his eyes on the horses, but leaning back to catch her answer.

“Mightn’t I just want to see the country?”

“Well, mebbe you might, but it don’t seem to me that you’re seein’ much of it to-night.”

He heard her smothered laugh, shot his glance back to see her face, and laughed himself, turning to his horses, and then turning back to her.

“You’re a lively girl, ain’t you?” he said.

“I don’t feel very lively just at this minute. I’m a cold girl, the coldest in California, I think.”

That made him laugh, too, but he turned back to his horses, saying with quick consideration:

“I guess you are. Come boys,” to the horses, “we’ve got to get a move on. We can’t let this young lady catch cold.”

The horses quickened their pace and there was no more talk. An hour later the first broken lights of Antelope sparkled along the road. The old mining camp, in a hollow between two buttresses of the Sierra, lay shuttered and dreaming under the starlight. A lamp-lit window, here and there, showed the course of its straggling main street, and where the hotel stood, welcoming rays winked between the boughs of leafless trees.

As the thud of the approaching hoof-beats woke the echoes a sudden violent barking of dogs broke out. Antelope was evidently not as sound asleep as it looked. At the hotel, especially, there was life and movement. The bar disgorged a throng of men, and Perley, the proprietor, had to push his way through them to welcome his midnight guests. Antelope, though remote, was in telegraphic communication with the world, and the operator at Rocky Bar had wired Perley to be ready for the distinguished arrivals,—news that in a half-hour was known throughout the town and had brought most of the unattached male population into the hotel.

Jake McVeigh was pulling the luggage from under the seats and Cannon was interchanging the first greetings with his landlord, when the girl, who had gone to the balcony railing and was looking out into the darkness, cried:

“Why, papa, snow!”

The information seemed to startle every one. The men crowded from the doorway and balcony into the street. McVeigh set down the bags, and, turning his weather-beaten face to the sky, uttered a smothered ejaculation of a profane character. Cannon came forward to where his daughter stood and looked into the blackness beyond. The girl had drawn off her glove and held her bare hand out, then stepping back to the light of the window, she showed it to her father. The white skin was sprinkled with snow crystals.

“Sure enough,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve been snowed up at Antelope.”

CHAPTER II
A YOUNG MAN MARRIED

That same evening, at the hour when Bill Cannon and his daughter were setting out from Rocky Bar, Dominick Ryan was walking up Van Ness Avenue toward his mother’s house.

Dominick did not know at what hours balls of the kind Mrs. Ryan was giving that evening were supposed to begin. It was nearly three years since he had been a participant in such festal gatherings. He had not been at a dance, or a dinner, or a theater party since his marriage. He had heard that these “functions,” as people now called them, began later than they did in his day. Stopping by a lamp he drew out his watch—ten o’clock. It was later than he expected. In truth, as he had seen the house looming massively from its less imposing neighbors, his foot had lagged, his approach had grown slower and slower. It was his mother’s home, once his own, and as he drew nearer to it his reluctance to enter grew stronger, more overpoweringly oppressive.

In the clear, lamp-dotted night it looked much larger and more splendid than by day. When Cornelius Ryan had built it he had wanted to have the finest house in San Francisco, and he certainly had achieved the most spacious and ornate. Its florid ornamentation was now hidden by the beautifying dark, and on its vast façade numerous windows broke the blackness with squares of light. In the lower ones the curtains were drawn, but slivers and cracks of radiance slipped out and penetrated the dusk of a garden, where they encountered the glossy surfaces of leaves and struck into whispering darknesses of shrubbery.

The stimulating unquiet of festival was in the air. Round the mouth of the canvas tunnel that stretched from the door a dingy crowd was assembled, staring in at nothing more inspiring than the blank visage of the closed portal. At every passing footstep each face turned to the street, hopefully expectant of the first guest. The whining of catgut strings, swept by tentative bows, struck on Dominick’s ear as he pushed his way through the throng and passed up the tunnel. Before he touched the bell the door swung back and a man-servant he had never seen before murmured in politely low tones,

“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right.”

Dominick stood uncertain. He was only a rare, occasional visitor at his mother’s house, and to-night the hall stripped for revelry looked strangely unfamiliar. The unexpectedness of a great, new mirror, surmounted by gold heraldic devices, confused him. The hall chairs were different. The music, loud now and beginning to develop from broken chords and phrases into the languorous rhythm of a waltz measure, came from behind a grove of palms that stood back under the stairs, where the organ was built into the wall. Both to the right and left, wide, unencumbered rooms opened, brilliantly lighted, with flowers banked in masses on the mantels and in the corners. The scent of these blossoms was rich on the air and seemed to blend naturally—like another expression of the same sensuous delightfulness—with the dreamy sweetness of the music.

“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right,” repeated the servant, and Dominick became aware of the man’s eyes, fixed on him with a gleam of uneasy scrutiny shining through cultivated obsequiousness.

“Where is my——” he was going to say “mother,” but checked himself, amending it with, “Where is Mrs. Ryan?”

The servant indicated the open doorway to the right and Dominick passed in. Through the vista of two rooms, their connecting archways uncurtained, he saw the shining spaciousness of the ball-room, the room his mother had added to the house when Cornelia, his sister, had “come out.” It seemed empty and he walked toward it, stepping softly on rugs of tiger skin and polar bear. He noticed the ice-like polish of the oak floor, the lines of gilt chairs, and a thick, fat garland of roses—leaves and blossoms combined—that was festooned along the wall and caught up at each sconce.

As he entered he saw his mother and Cornelia. They had been standing in one corner, Cornelia adjusting the shade of an electric light. One white arm was raised, and her skirt of lace was reflected clearly in the parquet. The light shone along her bare shoulders, having a gloss like old marble. From the nape of her neck her hair, a bright, coarse red, was drawn up. She seemed all melting shades of cream color and ivory, but for this flaming crest of copper color.

Her mother was standing beside her watching the arranging hand. She was sixty-eight years of age and very stout, but her great wealth made it possible for her to employ dressmakers who were artists and experts, and her Parisian costume made her look almost shapely. It fell about her in dignified black folds, sparkling discreetly with some jetted garnishings. With their shifting gleam the glint of diamonds mingled. She also wore pearls round her neck and some diamond ornaments in her elaborately-dressed gray hair.

The coarseness of her early beginnings could not be hidden by the most proficient artificers in millinery or jewels. Delia Ryan had come from what are vulgarly called “the lower orders,” having, in her ragged childhood, crossed the plains at the tail-board of an ox cart, and in her girlhood been a general servant in a miners’ boarding-house at Sonora. Now, as she stood watching her daughter’s moving hand, her face, set in a frowning rigidity of observation, was strong but unbeautiful. Her small eyes, shrewd and sharp, were set high in her head under brows almost rubbed away. The nose was short, with an undeveloped bridge and keen, open nostrils. Her mouth had grown thinner with years; the lips shut with a significant firmness. They had never been full, but what redness and ripeness they had had in youth were now entirely gone. They were pale, strong lips, the under one a little more prominent than the upper.

“There!” said Cornelia. “Now they’re all even,” and she wheeled slowly, her glance slipping along the veiled lights of the sconces. In its circuit it encountered Dominick’s figure in the doorway.

“Dominick!” she cried, and stood staring, naïvely astonished and dismayed.

Mrs. Ryan turned with a start, her face suffused with color. The one word seemed to have an electrifying effect upon her, joyous, perturbing—unquestionably exciting.

“My boy!” she said, and she rustled across the room with her hands out.

Dominick walked toward her. He was grave, pale, and looked thoroughly miserable. He had his cane in one hand, his hat in the other. As he approached her he moved the hat to his left hand and took hers.

“You’ve come!” she said fondly, “I knew you would. That’s my boy. I knew you’d come when your mother asked you.”

“Yes, I’ve come,” he said slowly, and looking down as if desiring to avoid her eyes. “Yes, I’ve come, but——”

He stopped.

His mother’s glance fell from his face to his figure and saw under the loose fronts of his overcoat that he wore his business suit. Her countenance instantly, with almost electric suddenness, stiffened into antagonism. Her eye lost its love, and hardened into a stony look of defiant indignation. She pulled her hand from his and jerked back the front of his coat with it.

“What’s this mean?” she said sharply. “Why aren’t you dressed? The people will be here in a minute. You can’t come this way.”

“I was going home to dress,” he said. “I am not sure yet that I can come.”

“Why?” she demanded.

His face grew red. The mission on which he had come was more difficult, more detestable, than he had supposed it would be. He looked down at the shining strip of floor between them and said, trying to make his voice sound easy and plausible:

“I came to ask you for an invitation for Berny.”

“Hah!” said his mother, expelling her breath in an angry ejaculation of confirmed suspicion. “That’s it, is it? I thought as much!”

“Mama!” said the girl who had been standing by, uneasily listening. “Mama dear——”

Her voice was soft and sweet, a placating woman’s voice. And as she drew nearer to them, her figure seeming to float over the shining parquet in its pale spread of gauzy draperies, her tone, her face, and her bearing were instinct with a pleading, feminine desire to soothe.

“Keep quiet, Cornie,” said her mother, “you’re not in this”—turning to Dominick. “And so your wife sent you up here to beg for an invitation? She’s got you under her thumb to that extent? Well, go back to her and tell her that she can send you forty times and you’ll not get it. She can make you crawl here and you’ll not get it—not while this is my house. When I’m dead you can do what you like.”

She turned away from him, her face dark with stirred blood, her body quivering. Anger was not the only passion that shook her. Deeper than this went outraged pride, love turned to gall, impotent fury that the woman her son had married had power over him so to reduce his pride and humble his manhood—her only son, the joy and glory of her old age, her Benjamin.

He looked after her, uncertain, frowning, desperate.

“It’s not right,” he protested. “It’s not fair. You’re unjust to her and to me.”

The old woman moved across the room to the corner where she had been standing when he entered. She did not turn, and he continued:

“You’re asking people to this ball that you hardly know. Everybody in San Francisco’s going. What harm has Berny done that you should leave her out this way?”

“I don’t want women with that kind of record in my house. I don’t ask decent people here to meet that sort,” said his mother over her shoulder.

He gave a suppressed exclamation, the meaning of which it was difficult to read, then said,

“Are you never going to forget the past, mother?”

She wheeled round toward him almost shouting,

“No—no—no! Never! Never! Make your mind up to that.”

They looked at each other across the open space, the angry defiance in their faces not hiding the love and appeal that spoke in their eyes. The mother longed to take her son in her arms; the son longed to lay his head on her shoulder and forget the wretchedness and humiliations of the last two years. But they were held apart, not only by the specter of the absent woman, but on the one side by a fierce, unbendable pride, and on the other by an unforgettable sense of obligation and duty.

“Oh, mother!” he exclaimed, half-turning away with a movement of despair.

His mother looked at him from under her lowered brows, her under lip thrust out, her face unrelenting.

“Come here whenever you like,” she said, “as often as you want. It’s your home, Dominick, mine and yours. But it’s not your wife’s. Understand that.”

She turned away and again moved slowly toward the corner, her rich skirts trailing fanwise over the parquet. He stood, sick at heart, looking at the tip of his cane as it rested on the floor.

“Dominick,” said his sister’s voice beside him, “go; that’s the only thing to do. You see it’s no use.” She made a backward jerk of her head toward their mother, and then, struck by the misery of the eyes he lifted to her face, said tenderly, “I’m so sorry. You know I’d have sent it if I could. But it’s no use. It’s just the same old fight over again and nothing gained. Tell your wife it’s hopeless. Make her give it up.”

He turned slowly, his head hanging.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell her. Good-night, mother.”

“Good-night, Dominick,” came the answer.

“Good-night, Cornie,” he said in a muffled voice and left the room.

He passed through the brilliantly bright, flower-scented parlors and was shown out by the strange man-servant. The crowd at the mouth of the canvas tunnel had increased. Clumps of staring white faces edged the opening and presented themselves to his eye, not like reality, but like a painting of pale visages executed on the background of the night. They drew away as he approached them, making a lane of egress for him, then turned and eyed him—a deserter from the realms of joy—as he stopped by a lamp-post to look at his watch. A quarter past ten. He had been in the house only fifteen minutes. He did not need to go home for a while yet. He could walk about and think and arrange how he would tell Berny.

He was a man in the full vigor of his youth, strong and brave, yet at this moment he feared, feared as a child or a timid woman might fear, the thought of his wife. He dreaded to meet her; he shrank from it, and to put it off he wandered about the familiar streets, up one and down the other, trying to overcome his sick reluctance, trying to make up his mind to go to her, trying to conquer his fear.

CHAPTER III
THE DAUGHTER OF HETH

He walked for nearly an hour, along quiet, lamp-lit streets where large houses fronted on gardens that exhaled moist earth scents and the breaths of sweet, unseen blossoms, up hills so steep that it seemed as if an earthquake might have heaved up the city’s crust and bent it crisply like a piece of cardboard. From these high places he looked down on the expanse of the bay, a stretch of ink surrounded by black hills, here and there spangled with the clustered sparklings of little towns. In the hollows below him he saw the lights of the city swimming on its darkness, winking and trembling on receding depths of blackness, like golden bubbles seething on the surface of thick, dense wine.

He looked down unseeing, thinking of the last three years.

When he had first met Bernice Iverson, she had been a typewriter and stenographer in the office of the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company. He was twenty-four at the time, the only son of Cornelius Ryan, one of the financial magnates of the far West. The career of Con Ryan, as he was familiarly called, had been as varied as the heart of a public, who loves to dwell on the sensational fortunes of its great men, could have wished. In the early days of Virginia City, Con Ryan had been a miner there, had a claim of his own and lost all he had in it before the first Crown Point excitement, had run a grocery store in Shasta, moved to Sacramento, speculated successfully in mining stock and real estate, and in the bonanza days had had money to play the great game which made millionaires of the few and beggars of the many. He had played it daringly and with profit. When he died he left his widow complete control of a fortune of ten millions.

She had been a sturdy helpmeet—it was generally said that she was the best man of the two—and would keep the fortune safe for the two children, Dominick and Cornelia. Neither she nor Con believed in young men having control of large fortunes. They had seen what came of it in the sons of their bonanza friends. Dominick was sent to the East to college, and on his return, being then twenty-three years of age, was placed in the Oregon and California Bank, of which his father had been one of the founders. He was soon promoted to a position where he earned a salary of three thousand a year. This was all he had when he met Bernice Iverson.

She was seven years older than he, but told him they were the same age. It was not a wasted lie, as she undoubtedly looked much younger than she was, being a slight, trimly-made woman who had retained a girlish elasticity of figure and sprightliness of manner. She came of respectable, hard-working people, her father, Danny Iverson, having been a contractor in a small way of business, and her two sisters being, one a teacher in the primary school department, the other a saleswoman in a fashionable millinery. She herself was an expert in her work, in office hours quiet, capable and businesslike, afterward lively, easy-going and companionable. The entrapping of young Ryan was a simple matter. He had never loved and knew little of women. He did not love her, but she made him think he did, threw herself at him, led him quickly to the point she wished to reach, and secretly, without a suspicion on the part of her family, became his mistress. Six months later, having driven him to the step by her upbraidings and her apparent sufferings of conscience under the sense of wrong-doing, she persuaded him to marry her.

The marriage was a bombshell to the world in which young Ryan was a planet of magnitude. His previous connection with her—though afterward discovered by his mother—was at the time unknown. Bernice had induced him to keep the marriage secret till its hour of accomplishment, for she knew Mrs. Ryan would try to break it off and feared that she might succeed. Once Dominick’s wife she thought that the objections and resentment of the elder woman could be overcome. But she underrated the force and obstinacy of her adversary and the depth of the wound that had been given her. Old Mrs. Ryan had been stricken in her tenderest spot. Her son was her idol, born in her middle-age, the last of four boys, three of whom had died in childhood. In his babyhood she had hoarded money and worked late and early that he might be rich. Now she held the great estate of her husband in trust for him, and dreamed of the time when he should marry some sweet and virtuous girl and she would have grandchildren to love and spoil and plan for. When the news of his marriage reached her and she saw the woman he had made his wife, she understood everything. She knew her boy through and through and she knew just how he had been duped and entangled.

She was of that race of pioneer Californians who had entered an uninhabited country, swept aside Indian and Spaniard, and made it their own. They were isolated figures in a huge landscape, their characters, uncramped and bold, developing unrestricted in an atmosphere of physical and moral liberty. They grew as their instincts dictated; the bough was not bent into convenient forms by expediency or pressure from without. Public opinion had little or no weight with them, for there was none. It was the pleasure of this remote group in this rich and exuberant land to do away with tradition and be a law and precept unto themselves. What other people thought and did did not influence them. They had one fixed, dominating idea in a fluctuating code of morals—they knew what they wanted and they were determined to get it. They were powerful individualities whether for good or evil, and they resented with a passion any thwarting of their plans or desires, whether by the interposition of man or the hand of God.

Delia Ryan’s life had been a long, ascending series of hardly-won triumphs. She had surmounted what would have seemed to a less bold spirit unsurmountable obstacles; gone over them, not around them. She had acquired the habit of success, of getting what she wanted. Failure or defiance of her plans amazed her as they might have amazed the confident, all-conquering, pagan gods. The center of her life was her family; for them she had labored, for them she would have died. Right and wrong in her mind were clearly defined till it came to her husband or children, and then they were transmuted into what benefited the Ryans and what did not. Rigidly fair and honorable in her dealings with the outside world, let a member of that world menace the happiness of one of her own, and she would sacrifice it, grind the ax without qualms, like a priestess grimly doing her duty.

The marriage of her son was the bitterest blow of her life. It came when she was old, stiffened into habits of dominance and dictatorship, when her ambitions for her boy were gaining daily in scope and splendor. A blind rage and determination to crush the woman were her first feelings, and remained with her but slightly mitigated by the softening passage of time. She was a partizan, a fighter, and she instituted a war against her daughter-in-law which she conducted with all the malignant bitterness that marks the quarrels of women.

Dominick had not been married a month when she discovered the previous connection between him and his wife, and published it to the winds. A social power, feared and obeyed, she let it be known that to any one who received Mrs. Dominick Ryan her doors would be for ever closed. Without withdrawing her friendship from her son she refused ever to meet or to receive his wife. In this attitude she was absolutely implacable. She imposed her will upon the less strong spirits about her, and young Mrs. Ryan was as completely shut off from her husband’s world as though her skirts carried contamination. With masculine largeness of view in other matters, in this one the elder woman exhibited a singular, unworthy smallness. The carelessly large checks she had previously given Dominick on his birthday and anniversaries ceased to appear, and masculine gifts, such as pipes, walking-sticks, and cigar-cases, in which his wife could have no participating enjoyment, took their place. She had established a policy of exclusion, and maintained it rigidly.

Young Mrs. Ryan had at first believed that this rancor would melt away with the flight of time. But she did not know the elder woman. She was as unmeltable as a granite rock. The separation from her son, now with age growing on her, ate like an acid into the mother’s heart. She saw him at intervals, and the change in him, the growth of discouragement, the dejection of spirit that he hid from all the world, but that her eye, clairvoyant from love, detected, tore her with helpless wrath and grief. She punished herself and punished him, sacrificed them both, in permitting herself the indulgence of her implacable indignation.

Bernice, who had expected to gain all from her connection with the all-powerful Ryans, at the end of two years found that she was an ostracized outsider from the world she had hoped to enter, and that the riches she had expected to enjoy were represented by the three thousand a year her husband earned in the bank. Her attempts to force her way into the life and surroundings where she had hoped her marriage would place her had invariably failed. If her feelings were not of the same nature as those of the elder Mrs. Ryan, they were fully as poignant and bitter.

The effort to get an invitation to the ball had been the most daring the young woman had yet made. Neither she nor Dominick had thought it possible that Mrs. Ryan would leave her out. So confident was she that she would be asked that she had ordered a dress for the occasion. But when Dominick’s invitation came without her name on the envelope, then fear that she was to be excluded rose clamorous in her. For days she talked and complained to her husband as to the injustice of this course and his power to secure the invitation for her if he would. By the evening of the ball she had brought him to the point where he had agreed to go forth and demand it.

It was a hateful mission. He had never in his life done anything so humiliating. In his shame and distress he had hoped that his mother would give it to him without urging, and Bernice, placated, would be restored to good humor and leave him at peace. She could not have gained such power over him, or so bent him to her bidding, had she not had in him a fulcrum of guilty obligation to work on. She continually reminded him of “the wrong” he had done her, and how, through him, she had lost the respect of her fellows and her place among them. All these slights, snubs and insults were his fault, and he felt that this was true. To-night he had gone forth in dogged desperation. Now in fear, frank fear of her, he went home, slowly, with reluctant feet, his heart getting heavier, his dread colder as he neared the house.

It was one of those wooden structures on Sacramento Street not far from Van Ness Avenue where the well-to-do and socially-aspiring crowd themselves into a floor of seven rooms, and derive satisfaction from the proximity of their distinguished neighbors who refuse to know them. It contained four flats, each with a parlor bay-window and a front door, all four doors in neighborly juxtaposition at the top of a flight of six marble steps.

Dominick’s was the top flat; he had to ascend a long, carpeted stairway with a turn half-way up to get to it. Now, looking at the bay-window, he saw lights gleaming from below the drawn blinds. Berny was still up. A lingering hope that she might have gone to bed died, and his sense of reluctance gained in force and made him feel slightly sick. He was there, however, and he had to go up. Fitting his key into the lock he opened the hall door.

It was very quiet as he mounted the long stairs, but, as he drew near the top, he became aware of a windy, whistling noise and looking into the room near the stair-head saw that all the gas-jets were lit and turned on full cock, and that the gas, rushing out from the burner in a ragged banner of flame, made the sound. He was about to enter and lower it when he heard his wife’s voice coming from the open door of her room.

“Is that you, Dominick?” she called.

Her voice was steady and high. Though it was hard, with a sort of precise clearness of utterance, it was not conspicuously wrathful.

“Yes,” he answered, “it’s I,” and he forgot the gas-jets and walked up the hall. He did not notice that in the other rooms he passed the gas was turned on in the same manner. The whistling rush of its escape made a noise like an excited, unresting wind in the confined limits of the little flat.

The door of Berny’s room was open, and under a blaze of light from the chandelier and the side lights by the bureau she was sitting in a rocking-chair facing the foot of the bed. She held in her hand a walking-stick of Dominick’s and with this she had been making long scratches across the foot-board, which was of walnut and was seamed back and forth, like a rock scraped by the passage of a glacier. As Dominick entered, she desisted, ceased rocking, and turned to look at him. She had an air of taut, sprightly impudence, and was smiling a little.

“Well, Dominick,” she said jauntily, “you’re late.”

“Yes, I believe I am,” he answered. “I did not come straight back. I walked about for a while.”

He slowly crossed the room to the fireplace and stood there looking down. There were some silk draperies on the mantel matched by those which were festooned over the room’s single window. He fastened his eyes on the pattern stamped on the looped-up folds, and was silent. He thought Berny would realize from the fact that he had not come directly home that the invitation had been denied. This was his bungling, masculine way of breaking the news.

“Took a walk,” she said, turning to the bed and beginning to rock. “It’s a queer sort of hour to choose for walking,” and lifting the cane she recommenced her occupation of scratching the foot-board with it, tracing long, parabolic curves across the entire expanse, watching the cane’s tip with her head tilted to one side. Dominick, who was not looking at her, did not notice the noise.

“I thought,” she said, tracing a great arc from one side to the other, “that you were with your loving family—opening the ball, probably.”

He did not move, but said quietly,

“It was impossible to get the invitation, Berny. I tried to do it and was refused. I want you to understand that as long as I live I’ll never do a thing like that again.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” she said, laughing and shaking her head like an amused child. “Oh, yes, you will.” She threw her head back and, looking at the ceiling, laughed still louder with a note of fierceness in the sound. “You’ll do it and lots more things like it. You’ll do it if I want you to, Dominick Ryan.”

He did not answer. She hitched her chair closer to the bed as if to return to an engrossing pastime, and, leaning back luxuriously, resumed her play with the cane. This time Dominick noticed the noise and turned. She was conscious that he was looking at her, and began to scratch with an appearance of charmed absorption, such as an artist might display in his work. He watched her for a moment in silent astonishment and then broke out sharply,

“What are you doing?”

“Scratching the bed,” she responded calmly.

“You must be mad,” he said, striding angrily toward her and stretching a hand for the cane. “You’re ruining it.”

She whipped the cane to the other side, out of his reach.

“Am I?” she said, turning an eye of fiery menace on him. “Maybe I am, and what’s that matter?” Then, turning back to the bed, “Too bad, isn’t it, and the set not paid for yet.”

“Not paid for!” he exclaimed, so amazed by the statement that he forgot everything else. “Why, I’ve given you the money for it twice!”

“Three times,” she amended coolly, “and I spent it on things I liked better. I bought clothes, and jewelry with it, and little fixings I wanted. Yes, the bedroom set isn’t all paid for yet and we’ve had it nearly two years. Who would have thought that the son of Con Ryan didn’t pay his bills!”

She rose, threw the cane into the corner, and, turning toward him, leaned back, half-sitting on the foot-board, her hands, palm downward, pressed on its rounded top. The chandelier was directly over her head and cast a powerful light on her face. This was small, pointed, and of that sallow hue which is often noticeable in the skins of brunette women who are no longer in their first youth. She had a nose that drooped a little at the tip and an upper lip which was long and closed firmly and secretively on the lower one. Her dark eyes, large and brilliant, had the slightest tendency toward a slanting setting, the outer corners being higher than the inner ones. Under the shower of light from above, her thick hair, bleached to a reddish auburn and worn in a loose knot on top of her head, cast a shadow over her forehead, and below this her eyes blazed on her husband. Many men would have thought her an unusually pretty woman, but no man, save one of her own sort, could have faced her at this moment without quailing.

Dominick and she had had many quarrels, ignominious and repulsive, but he had never before seen her in so savage a mood. Even yet he had not lost the feeling of responsibility and remorse he felt toward her. As he moved from the mantelpiece his eye had fallen on the ball-dress that lay, a sweep of lace and silver, across the bed, and on the bureau he had seen jewels and hair ornaments laid out among the powder boxes and scent bottles. The pathos of these futile preparations appealed to him and he made an effort to be patient and just.

“It’s been a disappointment,” he said, “and I’m sorry about it. But I’ve done all I could and there’s no use doing any more. You’ve got to give it up. There’s no use trying to make my mother give in. She won’t.”

“Won’t she?” she cried, her voice suddenly loud and shaken with rage. “We’ll see! We’ll see! We’ll see if I’ve married into the Ryan family for nothing.”

Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly swept away. In a moment she was that appalling sight, a violent and vulgar woman in a raging passion. She ran round the bed and, seizing the dress, threw it on the floor and stamped on it, grinding the delicate fabric into the carpet with her heels.

“There!” she cried. “That’s what I feel about it! That’s the way I’ll treat the things and the people I don’t like! That dress—it isn’t paid for, but I don’t want it. I’ll get another when I do. Have I married Con Ryan’s son to need money and bother about bills? Not on your life! Did you notice the gas? Every burner turned on. Well, I did it just to have a nice bright house for you when you came home without the invitation. We haven’t paid the bill for two months—but what does that matter? We’re related to the Ryans. We don’t have to trouble about bills.”

He saw that she was beyond arguing with and turned to leave the room. She sprang after him and caught him by the arm, pouring out only too coherent streams of rage and abuse. It was the old story of the “wrongs” she had suffered at his hands, and his “ruin” of her. To-night it had no power to move him and he shook her off and left the room. She ran to the door behind him and leaning out, cried it after him.

He literally fled from her, down the hallway, with the open doorways sending their lurid light and hissing noise across his passage. As he reached the dining-room he heard her bang the door and with aggressive noise turn the key in the lock and shoot the bolt. Even at that moment the lack of necessity for such a precaution caused a bitter smile to move his lips.

Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly
swept away Page [41]

He entered the dining-room and sat down by the table, his head on his hands. It was very quiet; no noise came from the street outside, sinking into the deep restfulness of midnight, and from within there was only the tearing sound of the flaring gases and an occasional cool dropping from the filter in the pantry. He sat thus for some hours, trying to think what he should do. He found it impossible to come to any definite conclusion for the future; all he could decide upon now was the necessity of leaving his wife, getting a respite from her, withdrawing himself from the sight of her. He had never loved her, but to-night the pity and responsibility he had felt seemed to be torn from his life as a morning wind tears a cobweb from the grass.

The dawn was whitening the window-panes when he finally got pen and paper and wrote a few lines. These, without prefix or signature, stated that he would leave the city for a short time and not to make any effort to find where he had gone or communicate with him. He wrote her name on the folded paper and placed it in front of the clock. Then he stole into his bedroom—they had occupied separate rooms for over six months—and packed a valise with his oldest and roughest clothes. After this he waited in the dining-room till the light was bright and the traffic of the day loud on the pavement, before he crept down the long stairway and went out into the crystal freshness of the morning.

CHAPTER IV
OUT OF NIGHT AND STORM

When Rose Cannon woke on the morning after her arrival at Antelope, a memory of the snowflakes of the evening before made her jump out of bed and patter barefooted to the window. It seemed to her it would be “lots of fun” to be snowed up at Antelope, and when she saw only a thin covering of white on the hotel garden and the diminishing perspective of roofs, she drew her mouth into a grimace of disappointment.

With hunched-up shoulders, her hands tucked under her arms, she stood looking out, her breath blurring the pane in a dissolving film of smoke. It was a cold little world. Below her the garden—the summer pride of Perley’s Hotel—lay a sere, withered waste, its shrubs stiff in the grip of the cold. The powdering of snow on its frost-bitten leaves and grizzled grass added to its air of bleakness. Beyond rose the shingled roofs of Antelope’s main street. From their white-coated slopes black stovepipes sent aloft spirals of smoke, a thinner, fainter gray than the air into which they ascended. The sky lowered, low-hanging and full of menace. The snowflakes that now and then idly circled down were dark against its stormy pallor. Rose, standing gazing up, wondered if her father would go on to Greenhide, the new camp twenty miles from Antelope, where an important strike had recently been made.

Half an hour later when they met at breakfast he told her he would not leave for Greenhide that morning. Perley had warned him not to attempt it, and he for his part knew the country well enough to realize that it would be foolhardy to start under such a threatening sky. It would be all right to stop over at Antelope till the weather made up its mind what it meant to do. It might not be fun for her, but then he had warned her before they left San Francisco that she would have to put up with rough accommodations and unaccustomed discomforts.

Rose laughed. Her father did not understand that the roughness and novelty of it all was what she enjoyed. He was already a man of means when she was born, and she had known nothing of the hardships and privations through which he and her mother had struggled up to fortune. Rocky Bar the night before and Antelope this morning were her first glimpses of the mining region over which the pioneers had swarmed in ’49, Bill Cannon, only a lad in his teens, among them.

Now she sat sidewise in her chair, sweeping with animated eyes the primitive dining-room, its walls whitewashed, its low ceiling hung with strands of pinked-out, colored paper, its board floor here and there crossed by strips of cocoanut matting. At one end a hole in the wall communicated with the kitchen and through this the naked arms of the Chinaman, brown against the uprolled ends of his white sleeves, protruded, offering dishes to the single waitress who was not always there to receive them.

The girl, Cora by name, was particularly delinquent this morning. Several times the Chinaman was forced to remove his arms and substitute his face in the opening while he projected an enraged yell of “Corla!” among the hotel guests. Her dereliction of duty was caused by an overpowering interest in the Cannons, round whom she hovered in enchanted observation. On ordinary occasions Cora was content to wait on the group of men, local bachelors whose lonely state made it more convenient for them “to eat” at the hotel, and who sat—two bending lines of masculine backs—at either side of a long table. Cora’s usual method was to set the viands before them and then seat herself at the end of the table and enliven the meal with light conversation. To-day, however, they were neglected. She scarcely answered their salutations, but, banging the dishes down, hasted away to the Cannon table, where she stood fixedly regarding the strange young lady.

Perley’s warnings of bad weather were soon verified. Early in the afternoon the idle, occasional snowflakes had begun to fall thickly, with a soft, persistent steadiness of purpose. The icy stillness of the morning gave place to a wind, uncertain and whispering at first, but, as the day advanced, gathering volume and speed. The office and bar filled with men, some of them—snow powdered as if a huge sugar-sifter had been shaken over them—having tramped in from small camps in the vicinity. Clamor and vociferations, mixed with the smell of strong drinks and damp woolens, rose from the bar. Constant gusts of cold air swept the lower passages, and snow was tramped into the matting round the hall stove.

At four o’clock, Willoughby, the Englishman who had charge of the shut-down Bella K. mine, came, butting head down against the wind, a group of dogs at his heels, to claim the hospitality of the hotel. His watchman, an old timer, had advised him to seek a shelter better stored with provisions than the office building of the Bella K. Willoughby, whose accent and manner had proclaimed him as one of high distinction before it was known in Antelope that he was “some relation to a lord,” was made welcome in the bar. His four red setter dogs, shut out from that hospitable retreat by the swing door, grouped around it and stared expectantly, each shout from within being answered by them with plaintive and ingratiating whines.

The afternoon was still young when the day began to darken. Rose Cannon, who had been sitting in the parlor, dreaming over a fire of logs, went to the window, wondering at the growing gloom. The wind had risen to a wild, sweeping speed, that tore the snow fine as a mist. There were no lazy, woolly flakes now. They had turned into an opaque, slanting veil which here and there curled into snowy mounds and in other places left the ground bare. It seemed as if a giant paint-brush, soaked in white, had been swept over the outlook. Now and then a figure, head down, hands in pockets, the front of the body looking as though the paint-brush had been slapped across it, came into view, shadowy and unsubstantial in the mist-like density.

Rose looked out on it with an interest that was a little soberer than the debonair blitheness of her morning mood. If it kept up they might be snowed in for days, Perley had said. That being the case, this room, the hotel’s one parlor, would be her retreat, her abiding place—for her bedroom was as cold as an ice-chest—until they were liberated. With the light, half-whimsical smile that came so readily to her lips, she turned from the window and surveyed it judicially.

Truly it was not bad. Seen by the light of the flaming logs pulsing on the obscurity already lurking in the corners, it had the charm of the fire-warmed interior, tight-closed against outer storm. A twilight room lit only by a fire, with wind and snow outside, is the coziest habitation in the world. It seemed to Rose it would make a misanthrope feel friendly, prone to sociable chat and confidence. When the day grew still dimmer she would draw the curtains (they were of a faded green rep) and pull up the old horsehair arm-chairs that were set back so demurely in the corners. Her eyes strayed to the melodeon and then to the wall above it, where hung a picture of a mining millionaire, once of the neighborhood, recently deceased, a circlet of wax flowers from his bier surrounding his head, and the whole neatly incased in glass. Washington crossing the Delaware made a pendent on the opposite wall. On the center-table there were many books in various stages of unrepair and in all forms of bindings. These were the literary aftermath left by the mining men, who, since the early sixties, had been stopping at Antelope on their hopeful journeys up and down the mineral belt.

She was leaving the window to return to her seat by the fire when the complete silence that seemed to hold the outside world in a spell was broken by sudden sounds. Voices, the crack of a whip, then a grinding thump against the hotel porch, caught her ear and whirled her back to the pane. A large covered vehicle, with the whitened shapes of a smoking team drooping before it, had just drawn up at the steps. Two masculine figures, carrying bags, emerged from the interior, and from the driver’s seat a muffled shape—a cylinder of wrappings which appeared to have a lively human core—gave forth much loud and profane language. The isolation and remoteness of her surroundings had already begun to affect the town-bred young lady. She ran to the door of the parlor, as ingenuously curious to see the new arrivals and find out who they were as though she had lived in Antelope for a year.

Looking down the hall she saw the front door open violently inward and two men hastily enter. The wind seemed to blow them in and before Perley’s boy could press the door shut the snow had whitened the damp matting. No stage passed through Antelope in these days of its decline, and the curiosity felt by Rose was shared by the whole hotel. The swing door to the bar opened and men pressed into the aperture. Mrs. Perley came up from the kitchen, wiping a dish. Cora appeared in the dining-room doorway, and in answer to Miss Cannon’s inquiringly-lifted eyebrows, called across the hall:

“It’s the Murphysville stage on the down-trip to Rocky Bar. I guess they thought they couldn’t make it. The driver don’t like to run no risks and so he’s brought ’em round this way and dumped ’em here. There ain’t but two passengers. That’s them.”

She indicated the two men who, standing by the hall stove, were divesting themselves of their wraps. One of them was a tall upright old man with a sweep of grizzled beard covering his chest, and gray hair falling from the dome of a bald head.

The other was much younger, tall also, and spare to leanness. He wore a gray fedora hat, and against its chill, unbecoming tint, his face, its prominent, bony surfaces nipped by the cold to a raw redness, looked sallow and unhealthy. With an air of solicitude he laid his overcoat across a chair, brushing off the snow with a careful hand. Buttoned tight in a black cutaway with the collar turned up about his neck, he had an appearance of being uncomfortably compressed into garments too small for him. His shiny-knuckled, purplish hands, pinching up the shoulders of his coat over the chair-back, were in keeping with his general suggestion of a large-boned meagerly-covered lankness. The fact that he was smooth-shaven, combined with the unusual length of dark hair that appeared below his hat-brim, lent him a suggestion of something interestingly unconventional, almost artistic. In the region where he now found himself he would have been variously set down as a gambler, a traveling clergyman, an actor, or perhaps only a vender of patent medicines who had some odd, attractive way of advertising himself, such as drawing teeth with an electric appliance, or playing the guitar from the tail-board of his showman’s cart.

Now, having arranged his coat to its best advantage, he turned to Perley and said with a curiously deep and resonant voice,

“And, mine host, a stove in my bedroom, a stove in my bedroom or I perish.”

Cora giggled and threw across the hall to Miss Cannon a delighted murmur of,

“Oh, say, ain’t he just the richest thing?”

“You’ve got us trapped and caged here for a spell, I guess,” said the older man. “Any one else in the same box?”

“Oh, you’ll not want for company,” said Perley, pride at the importance of the announcement vibrating in his tone. “We’ve got Willoughby here from the Bella K. with his four setter dogs, and Bill Cannon and his daughter up from the coast.”

“Bill Cannon!”—the two men stared and the younger one said,

“Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King from San Francisco?”

“That’s him all right,” nodded Perley. “Up here to see the diggings at Greenhide and snowed in same as you.”

Here, Rose, fearing the conversation might turn upon herself, slipped from the doorway into the passage and up the stairs to her own room.

An hour later as she stood before the glass making her toilet for supper, a knock at the door ushered in Cora, already curled, powdered and beribboned for that occasion, a small kerosene lamp in her hand. In the bare room, its gloom only partly dispelled by the light from a similar lamp on the bureau and the red gleam from the stove, Miss Cannon was revealed in the becoming half-dusk made by these imperfectly-blending illuminations, a pink silk dressing-gown loosely enfolding her, a lightly brushed-in suggestion of fair hair behind her ears and on her shoulders. Her comb was in her hand and Cora realized with an uplifting thrill that she had timed her visit correctly and was about to learn the mysteries of Miss Cannon’s coiffure.

“I brung you another lamp,” she said affably, setting her offering down on the bureau. “One ain’t enough light to dress decently by. I have three,” and she sank down on the side of the bed with the air of having established an intimacy, woman to woman, by this act of generous consideration.

“Them gentlemen,” she continued, “are along on this hall with you and your pa. The old one’s Judge Washburne, of Colusa, a pioneer that used to know Mrs. Perley’s mother way back in Sacramento in the fifties, and knew your pa real well when he was poor. It’s sort of encouraging to think your pa was ever poor.”

Rose laughed and turned sidewise, looking at the speaker under the arch of her uplifted arm. There were hair-pins in her mouth and an upwhirled end of blond hair protruded in a gleaming scattering of yellow over her forehead. She mumbled a comment on her father’s early poverty, her lips showing red against the hair-pins nipped between her teeth.

“And the other one,” went on Cora, her eyes riveted on the hair-dressing, her subconscious mind making notes of the disposition of every coil, “his name’s J. D. Buford. And I’d like you to guess what he is! An actor, a stage player. He’s been playing all up the state from Los Angeles and was going down to Sacramento to keep an engagement there. It just tickles me to death to have an actor in the house. I ain’t never seen one close to before.”

The last hair-pin was adjusted and Miss Cannon studied the effect with a hand-glass.

“An actor,” she commented, running a smoothing palm up the back of her head, “that’s just what he looked like, now I think of it. Perhaps he’ll act for us. I think it’s going to be lots of fun being snowed up at Antelope.”

The sound of a voice crying “Cora” here rose from the hallway and that young woman, with a languid deliberation of movement, as of one who obeys a vulgar summons at her own elegant leisure, rose and departed, apologizing for having to go so soon. A few minutes later, the hour of supper being at hand, Rose followed her.

She was descending the stairs when a commotion from below, a sound of voices loud, argumentative, rising and falling in excited chorus, hurried her steps. The lower hall, lit with lamps and the glow of its stove, heated to a translucent red, was full of men. A current of cold could be felt in the hot atmosphere and fresh snow was melting on the floor. Standing by the stove was a man who had evidently just entered. Ridges of white lay caught in the folds of his garments; a silver hoar was on his beard. He held his hands out to the heat and as Rose reached the foot of the stairs she heard him say,

“Well, I tell you that any man that started to walk up here from Rocky Bar this afternoon must have been plumb crazy. Why, John L. Sullivan couldn’t do it in such a storm.”

To which the well-bred voice of Willoughby answered,

“But according to the message he started at two and the snow was hardly falling then. He must have got a good way, past the Silver Crescent even, when the storm caught him.”

A hubbub of voices broke out here, and, seeing her father on the edge of the crowd, Rose went to him and plucked his sleeve, murmuring,

“What’s happened? What’s going on?”

He took his cigar out of his mouth and turned toward her, speaking low and keeping his eyes on the men by the stove.

“The telegraph operator’s just had a message sent from Rocky Bar that a man started from there this afternoon to walk up here. They don’t think he could make it and are afraid he’s lost somewhere. Perley and some of the boys are going out to look for him.”

“What a dreadful thing! In such a storm! Do you think they’ll ever find him?”

He shrugged, and replaced his cigar in his mouth.

“Oh, I guess so. If he was strong enough to get on near here they ought to. But it’s just what the operator says. The feller must have been plumb crazy to attempt such a thing. Looks as if he was a stranger in the country.”

“It’s a sort of quiet, respectable way of committing suicide,” said the voice of the actor behind them.

Rose looked over her shoulder and saw his thin, large-featured face, no longer nipped and reddened with cold, but wreathed in an obsequious and friendly smile which furrowed it with deep lines. Her father answered him and she turned away, being more interested in the preparations for the search party. As she watched these she could hear the desultory conversation behind her, the actor’s comments delivered with an unctuous, elaborate politeness which, contrasted with her father’s gruff brevity, made her smile furtively to herself.

A jingle of sleigh bells from without threw the party into the sudden bustle of departure. Men shrugged themselves into their coats and tied comforters over their ears. Perley emerged from the bar, shrouded in outer wrappings, and crowding a whisky flask into his pocket. The hall door was thrown open, and through the powdery thickness of the atmosphere the sleigh with its restive horses could be seen drawn up at the porch steps. Those left behind pressed into the doorway to speed the departure. Shouted instructions, last suggestions as to the best methods for conducting the search filled the air, drowning the despairing whines that Willoughby’s dogs, shut in the bar, sent after their master. With a broken jingle of bells the sleigh started and in a moment was swallowed up in the blackness of the storm.

Supper was an animated meal that evening. The suddenly tragic interest that had developed drew the little group of guests together with the strands of a common sympathy. The judge and the actor moved their seats to the Cannons’ table. Cora was sent to request the doctor—a young man fresh from his graduation in San Francisco who took his meals at the bachelor’s table—to join them and add the weight of medical opinion to their surmises as to the traveler’s chances of survival. These, the doctor thought, depended as much upon the man’s age and physical condition, as upon the search party’s success in finding him. And then they speculated as to the man himself, drawing inferences from the one thing they knew of him, building up his character from this single fact, deducing from it what manner of man he should be, and why he should have done so strangely foolhardy a thing.

After supper they retired to the parlor, piled the fire high and sat grouped before it, the smoke of cigars and cigarettes lying about their heads in white layers. It was but natural that the conversation should turn on stories of the great storms of the past. Rose had heard many such before, but to-night, with the wind rocking the old hotel and the thought of the lost man heavy at her heart, she listened, held in a cold clutch of fascinated attention, to tales of the emigrants caught in the passes of the Sierra, of pioneer mining-camps relieved by mule trains which broke through the snow blockade as the miners lay dying in their huts, of men risking their lives to carry succor to comrades lost in their passage from camp to camp on just such a night as this. Now and then one of Willoughby’s dogs, long since broken from the confinement of the bar, came to the door and put in an inquiring head, the ears pricked, the eyes full of hopeful inquiry, a feathered tail wagging in deprecating friendliness. But its master was not there and it turned away, disappointed, to run up the hall, sniffing under closed doors and whimpering in uneasy loneliness.

Rose sat crouched over the fire, and as the fund of stories became exhausted and silence gradually settled on the group, her thoughts turned again to the traveler. She had been shocked at first, as the others were, by the thought of a fellow creature lost in the storm; but as the evening advanced, and the talk threw round his vague, undefined figure the investiture of an identity and a character, she began to see him less as a nebulous, menaced shape than as a known individuality. He seemed to be advancing out of the swirling blackness of the night into extending circles of the acquainted and the intimate. He was drawing near, drawing out of the limbo of darkness and mystery, into the light of their friendly fire, the grasp of their welcoming hands. He took shape in her imagination; she began to see his outline forming and taking color. With every tick of the clock she felt more keenly that he was some one who needed her help, and whom she must rescue. By ten she was in a ferment of anguished expectancy. The lost traveler was to her a man who had once been her friend, now threatened by death.

The clock hand passed ten, and the periods of silence that at intervals had fallen on the watchers grew longer and more frequent, and finally merged into a stillness where all sat motionless, listening to the storm. It had increased with the coming of the dark and now filled the night with wildness and tumult. The wind made human sounds about the angles of the house, which rocked and creaked to its buffets. The gale was fitful. It died away almost to silence, seeming to recuperate its forces for a new attack, and then came back full of fresh energies. It struck blows on the doors and windows, like those of a fist demanding entrance. Billowing rushes of sound circled round the building, and then a rustling passage of sleet swept across the curtained pane.

It was nearly eleven, and for fifteen minutes no one had spoken a word. Two of the dogs had come in and lain down on the hearth-rug, their noses on their paws, their eyes fixed brightly and ponderingly on the fire. In the midst of the motionless semicircle one of them suddenly raised its head, its ears pricked. With its muzzle elevated, its eyes full of awakened intelligence, it gave a low, uneasy whimper. Almost simultaneously Rose started and drew herself up, exclaiming, “Listen!” The sound of sleigh bells, faint as a noise in a dream, came through the night.

In a moment the lower floor was shaken with movement and noise. The bar emptied itself on to the porch and the hall doors were thrown wide. The sleigh had been close to the hotel before its bells were heard, and almost immediately its shape emerged from the swirling whiteness and drew up at the steps. Rose, standing back in the parlor doorway, heard a clamor of voices, a rising surge of sound from which no intelligible sentence detached itself, and a thumping and stamping of feet as the searchers staggered in with the lost traveler. The crowd separated before them and they entered slowly, four men carrying a fifth, their bodies incrusted with snow, the man they bore an unseen shape covered with whitened rugs from which an arm hung, a limp hand touching the floor. Questions and answers, now clear and sharp, followed them, like notes upon the text of the inert form:

“Where’d you get him?”

“About five miles below on the main road. One of the horses almost stepped on him. He was right in the path, but he was all sprinkled over with snow.”

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“Pretty near, I guess. We’ve pumped whisky into him, but he ain’t shown a sign of life.”

“Who is he?”

“Search me. I ain’t seen him good myself yet. Just as we got him the lantern went out.”

There was a sofa in the hall and they laid their burden there, the crowd edging in on them, horrified, interested, hungrily peering. Rose could see their bent, expressive backs and the craning napes of their necks. Then a sharp order from the doctor drove them back, sheepish, tramping on one another’s toes, bunched against the wall and still avidly staring. As their ranks broke, the young girl had a sudden, vivid glimpse of the man, his head and part of his chest uncovered. Her heart gave a leap of pity and she made a movement from the doorway, then stopped. The lost traveler, that an hour before had almost assumed the features of a friend, was a complete stranger that she had never seen before.

He looked like a dead man. His face, the chin up, the lips parted under the fringe of a brown mustache, was marble white, and showed a gray shadow in the cheek. The hair on his forehead, thawed by the heat, was lying in damp half-curled semicircles, dark against the pallid skin. There was a ring on the hand that still hung limp on the floor. The doctor, muttering to himself, pulled open the shirt and was feeling the heart, when Perley, who had flown into the bar for more whisky, emerged, a glass in his hand. As his eye fell upon the man, he stopped, stared, and then exclaimed in loud-voiced amaze:

“My God—why, it’s Dominick Ryan! Look here, Governor”—to Cannon who was standing by his daughter in the parlor doorway, “come and see for yourself. If this ain’t young Ryan I’m a Dutchman!”

Cannon pushed between the intervening men and bent over the prostrate figure.

“That’s who it is,” he said slowly and unemotionally. “It’s Dominick Ryan, all right. Well, by ginger!” and he turned and looked at the amazed innkeeper, “that’s the queerest thing I ever saw. What’s brought him up here?”

Perley, his glass snatched from him by the doctor who seemed entirely indifferent to their recognition of his patient, shrugged helplessly.

“Blest if I know,” he said, staring aimlessly about him. “He was here last summer fishing. But there ain’t no fishing now. God, ain’t it a good thing that operator at Rocky Bar had the sense to telegraph up!”

CHAPTER V
NURSE AND PATIENT

When Dominick returned to consciousness he lay for a space looking directly in front of him, then moved his head and let his eyes sweep the walls. They were alien walls of white plaster, naked of all adornment. The light from a shaded lamp lay across one of them in a soft yet clear wash of yellow, so clear that he could see that the plaster was coarse.

There were few pieces of furniture in the room, and all new to him. A bureau of the old-fashioned marble-topped kind stood against the wall opposite. The lamp that cast the yellow light was on this bureau; its globe, a translucent gold reflection revealed in liquid clearness in the mirror just behind. It was not his own room nor Berny’s. He turned his head farther on the pillow very slowly, for he seemed sunk in an abyss of suffering and feebleness. On the table by the bed’s head was another lamp, a folded newspaper shutting its light from his face, and here his eyes stopped.

A woman was sitting by the foot of the bed, her head bent as if reading. He stared at her with even more intentness than he had at the room. The glow of the lamp on the bureau was behind her—he saw her against it without color or detail, like a shadow thrown on a sheet. Her outlines were sharply defined against the illumined stretch of plaster,—the arch of her head, which was broken by the coils of hair on top, her rather short neck, with some sort of collar binding it, the curve of her shoulders, rounded and broad, not the shoulders of a thin woman. He did not think she was his wife, but she might be, and he moved and said suddenly in a husky voice,

“What time is it?”

The woman started, laid her book down, and rose. She came forward and stood beside him, looking down, the filaments of hair round her head blurring the sharpness of its outline. He stared up at her, haggard and intent, and saw it was not his wife. It was a strange woman with a pleasant, smiling face. He felt immensely relieved and said with a hoarse carefulness of utterance,

“What time did you say it is?”

“A few minutes past five,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep.”

“Have I?” he said, gazing immovably at her. “What day is it?”

“Thursday,” she replied. “You came here last night from Rocky Bar. Perhaps you don’t remember.”

“Rocky Bar!” he repeated vaguely, groping through a haze of memory. “Was it only yesterday? Was it only yesterday I left San Francisco?”

“I don’t know when you left San Francisco—” the newspaper shade cracked and bent a little, letting a band of light fall across the pillow. She leaned down, arranging it with careful hands, looking from the light to him to see if it were correctly adjusted.

“Whenever you left San Francisco,” she said, “you got here last night. They brought you here, Perley and some other men in the sleigh. They found you in the road. You were half-frozen.”

He looked at her moving hands, then when they had satisfactorily arranged the shade and dropped to her sides, he looked at her face. Her eyes were soft and friendly and had a gentle, kind expression. He liked to look at them. The only woman’s eyes he had looked into lately had been full of wrathful lightenings. There seemed no need to be polite or do the things that people did when they were well and sitting talking in chairs, so he did not speak for what seemed to him a long time. Then he said,

“What is this place?”

“Antelope,” said the woman. “Perley’s Hotel at Antelope.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered with an air of weary recollection, “I was going to walk there from Rocky Bar, but the snow came down too hard, and the wind—you could hardly stand against it! It was a terrible pull. Perley’s Hotel at Antelope. Of course, I know all about it. I was here last summer for two weeks fishing.”

She stretched out her hand for a glass, across the top of which a book rested. He followed the movement with a mute fixity.

“This is your medicine,” she said, taking the book off the glass. “You were to take it at five but I didn’t like to wake you.”

She dipped a spoon into the glass and held it out to him. But the young man felt too ill to bother with medicine and, as the spoon touched his lips, he gave his head a slight jerk and the liquid was spilt on the counterpane. She looked at it for a rueful moment, then said, as if with gathering determination,

“But you must take it. I think perhaps I gave it wrong. I ought to have lifted you up. It’s easier that way,” and before he could answer she slipped her arm under his head and raised it, with the other hand setting the rim of the glass against his lips. He swallowed a mouthful and felt her arm sliding from behind his head. He had a hazy consciousness that a perfume came from her dress, and for the first time he wondered who she was. Wondering thus, his eyes again followed her hand putting back the glass, and watched it, white in the gush of lamplight, carefully replacing the book. Then she turned toward him with the same slight, soft smile.

“Who are you?” he said, keeping his hollowed eyes hard on her.

“I’m Rose Cannon,” she answered. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco.”

“Oh, yes,” with a movement of comprehension, the name striking a chord of memory. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco, daughter of Bill Cannon. Of course I know.”

He was silent again, overwhelmed by indifference and lassitude. She made a step backward from the bedside. Her dress rustled and the same faint perfume he had noticed came delicately to him. He turned his head away from her and said dryly and without interest,

“I thought it was some one else.”

The words seemed to arrest her. She came back and stood close beside him. Looking up he could see her head against the light that ran up from the shaded lamps along the ceiling. She bent down and said, speaking slowly and clearly as though to a child,

“The storm has broken the wires but as soon as they are up, papa will send your mother word, so you needn’t worry about that. But we don’t either of us know your wife’s address. If you could tell us——”

She stopped. He had begun to frown and then shut his eyes with an expression of weariness.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t bother about it. Let her alone.”

Again there was one of those pauses which seemed to him so long. He gave a sigh and moved restlessly, and she said,

“Are your feet very painful?”

“Yes, pretty bad,” he answered. “What’s the matter with them?”

“They were frost-bitten, one partly frozen.”

“Oh—” he did not seem profoundly interested. It was as if they were some one else’s feet, only they hurt violently enough to obtrude themselves upon his attention. “Thank you very much,” he added. “I’ll be all right to-morrow.”

He felt very tired and heard, as in a dream, the rustle of her dress as she moved again. She said something about “supper” and “Mrs. Perley coming,” and the dark, enveloping sense of stupor from which he had come to life closed on him again.

Some time later on he emerged from it and saw another woman, stout and matronly, with sleekly-parted hair, and an apron girt about her. He asked her, too, who she was, for the fear that he might wake and find his wife by his bedside mingled with the pain of his feet, to torment him and break the vast, dead restfulness of the torpor in which he lay.

It broke into gleams of interest and returning consciousness during the next two days. He experienced an acuter sense of illness and pain, the burning anguish of his feet and fevered misery of his body, bitten through with cold, brought him back to a realization of his own identity. He heard the doctor murmuring in the corner of “threatened pneumonia” and understood that he was the object threatened. He began to know and separate the strange faces that seemed continually to be bending over him, asking him how he felt. There was the doctor, Perley, Bill Cannon, and the old judge and three different women, whom he had some difficulty in keeping from merging into one composite being who was sometimes “Miss Cannon,” and sometimes “Mrs. Perley,” and then again “Cora.”

When on the fourth day the doctor told him that he thought he would “pull through” with no worse ailment than a frozen foot, he had regained enough of his original vigor and impatience under restraint to express a determination to rise and “go on.” He was in pain, mental and physical, and the ministrations and attentions of the satellites that so persistently revolved round his bed rasped him into irritable moodiness. He did not know that all Antelope was waiting for the latest bulletins from Mrs. Perley or Cora. The glamour attaching to his sensational entry into their midst had been intensified by the stories of the wealth and position that had been his till he had married a poor girl, contrary to his mother’s wishes. He was talked of in the bar, discussed in the kitchen, and Cora dreamed of him at night. The very name of Ryan carried its weight, and Antelope, a broken congeries of white roofs and black smoke-stacks emerging from giant drifts, throbbed with pride at the thought that the two greatest names of California finance were snow-bound in Perley’s Hotel.

The doctor laughed at his desire to “move on.” The storm was still raging and Antelope was as completely cut off from the rest of the world as if it were an uncharted island in the unknown reaches of the Pacific. Propping the invalid up among his pillows he drew back the curtain and let him look out through a frost-painted pane on a world all sweeping lines and skurrying eddies of white. The drifts curled crisp edges over the angles of roofs, like the lips of breaking waves. The glimpse of the little town that the window afforded showed it cowering under a snow blanket, almost lost to sight in its folds.

“Even if your feet were all right, you’re tied here for two weeks anyway,” said the doctor, dropping the curtain. “It’s the biggest storm I ever saw, and there’s an old timer that hangs round the bar who says it’s as bad as the one that caught the Donner party in forty-six.”

The next day it stopped and the world lay gleaming and still under a frosty crust. The sky was a cold, sullen gray, brooding and cloud-hung, and the roofs and tree-tops stood out against it as though executed in thick white enamel. The drifts lay in suave curves, softly undulating like the outlines of a woman’s body, sometimes sweeping smoothly up to second stories, here and there curdled into an eddy, frozen as it twisted. A miner came in from an outlying camp on skees and reported the cold as intense, the air clear as crystal and perfectly still. On the path as he came numerous fir boughs had broken under the weight of snow, with reports like pistol shots. There was a rumor that men, short of provisions, were snowed up at the Yaller Dog mine just beyond the shoulder of the mountain. This gave rise to much consultation and loud talking in the bar, and the lower floor of Perley’s was as full of people, noise and stir, as though a party were in progress.

That afternoon Dominick, clothed in an old bath-robe of the doctor’s, his swathed feet hidden under a red rug drawn from Mrs. Perley’s stores, was promoted to an easy chair by the window. The doctor, who had helped him dress, having disposed the rug over his knees and tucked a pillow behind his back, stood off and looked critically at the effect.

“I’ve got to have you look your best,” he said, “and you’ve got to act your prettiest this afternoon. The young lady’s coming in to take care of you while I go my rounds.”

“Young lady!” exclaimed Dominick in a tone that indicated anything but pleasurable anticipation. “What young lady?”

“Our young lady,” answered the doctor. “Miss Cannon, the Young Lady of Perley’s Hotel. Don’t you know that that’s the nicest girl in the world? Maybe you don’t, but that’s because your powers of appreciation have been dormant for the last few days. The people here were most scared to death of her at first. They didn’t know how she was going to get along, used to the finest, the way she’s always been. But, bless your heart, she’s less trouble than anybody in the place. There’s twelve extra people eating here, besides you to be looked after, and Mrs. Perley and Cora are pretty near run to death trying to do it. Miss Cannon wanted to turn in and help them. They wouldn’t have it, but they had to let her do her turn here taking care of you.”

“It’s very kind of her,” said the invalid without enthusiasm. “I noticed her here several times.”