THE PIONEER

June

THE PIONEER

A TALE OF TWO STATES

By
GERALDINE BONNER
Author of Tomorrow’s Tangle

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HARRISON FISHER

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

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

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PIONEER

BOOK I
THE COUNTRY

THE PIONEER

CHAPTER I
THE SQUATTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II
THE GRACEY BOYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, they will—both of ’em.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I think I did.”

“Do you suppose they’re real diamonds?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III
THE NAME OF ALLEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young man laughed, a deep, jolly laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t seem to be dancing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was immediately at her ease again.

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

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

“Here,” she answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Some of them occasionally get drunk!”

“Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She Smiled Faintly at Him

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

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

Gracey frowned and said demurringly,

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

The other answered,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV
O, MINE ENEMY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V
THE SUMMONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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