M’Liss

AN IDYL OF RED MOUNTAIN

[Pagenote: There are two forms of this tale. The earlier one is that printed originally in The Golden Era and afterward and until this time included in Mr. Harte’s collected writings. It is comprised in four chapters and occupies about thirty pages. When the present edition was under consideration, Mr. Harte called his publishers’ attention to the fact that the editor of the same paper proposed to him some time later to continue it as a serial. In order to do this, he found himself obliged to make some changes in the earlier incidents. Accordingly he republished the story in its first form, but with some interpolations and alterations, and then proceeded with other chapters, making ten in all, “concluding it,” he says, “rather abruptly when I found it was inartistically prolonged.” This was in 1863. But even thus the story was not to be let alone. Ten years later, in 1873, another writer took the tale up at the end of the tenth chapter, added fifty more, and issued the whole in The Golden Era. When the continuation had been running some time, Mr. Harte discovered the fraud, and inserted a card in the same paper, advising the public that he had nothing whatever to do with this further amplification of his story. Afterward, when the whole was published in book form, he instituted legal proceedings and suppressed the sale.

The present form is Mr. Harte’s revision and extension of his first, and is reprinted from The Golden Era with his consent. EDITOR.]

Chapter I

SMITH’S POCKET

Just where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside in gentle undulations, and the rivers grow less rapid and yellow, on the side of a great red mountain stands Smith’s Pocket. Seen from the red road at sunset, in the red light and the red dust, its white houses look like the outcroppings of quartz on the mountain side. The red stage, topped with red-shirted passengers, is lost to view half a dozen times in the tortuous descent, turning up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way places, and vanishing altogether within a hundred yards of the town. It is probably owing to this sudden twist in the road that the advent of a stranger at Smith’s Pocket is usually attended with a peculiar circumstance. Dismounting from the vehicle at the stage office the too-confident traveler is apt to walk straight out of town under the impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, “Harper’s Magazine,” and other evidences of “civilization and refinement,” plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of Smith’s Pocket.

Had he been an observant traveler he might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elementary upheaval than the work of man; while, halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their shallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below. Here and there the ruins of some cabin, with the chimney alone left intact and the hearthstone open to the skies, gave such a flat contradiction to the poetic delusion of Lares and Penates that the heart of the traveler must have collapsed as he gazed, and even the bar-room of the National Hotel have afterward seemed festive, and invested with preternatural comfort and domesticity.

The settlement of Smith’s Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a “pocket” on its site by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars were taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith. Three thousand dollars were expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling. And then Smith’s Pocket was found to be only a pocket, and subject like other pockets to depletion. Although Smith pierced the bowels of the great red mountain, that five thousand dollars was the first and the last return of his labor. The mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets, and the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of Smith’s fortune. Then Smith went into quartz mining. Then into quartz milling. Then into hydraulics and ditching, and then by easy degrees into saloon keeping. Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a good deal; then it was known that Smith was an habitual drunkard; and then people began to think, as they are apt to, that he had never been anything else. But the settlement of Smith’s Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected tunnels and found pockets. So Smith’s Pocket became a settlement with its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling street was overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions, imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the population to whom the Sabbath, with a change of linen, brought merely the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment. Then there was a Methodist church, and hard by a monte bank, and a little beyond, on the mountain side, a graveyard; and then a little schoolhouse.

“The master,” as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as “Riches are deceitful,” and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof, during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the opening of the door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty, and shabbily clad. Still her great black eyes, her coarse uncombed lusterless black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him. It was Melissa Smith—Smith’s motherless child.

“What can she want here?” thought the master. Everybody knew “M’liss,” as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain. Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl. Her fierce, ungovernable disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character, were in their way as proverbial as the story of her father’s weakness, and as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She followed the trails with woodman’s craft, and the master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded on the mountain road. The miners’ camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms. Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to M’liss. The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, “stated” preacher, had placed her in the hotel as servant, by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced her to his scholars at Sunday-school. But she threw plates occasionally at the landlord, and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the guests, and created in the Sabbath-school a sensation that was so inimical to the orthodox dullness and placidity of that institution, that, with a decent regard for the starched frocks and unblemished morals of the two pink-and-white-faced children of the first families, the reverend gentleman had her ignominiously expelled. Such were the antecedents and such the character of M’liss, as she stood before the master. It was shown in the ragged dress, the unkempt hair and bleeding feet, and asked his pity. It flashed from her black fearless eyes, and commanded his respect.

“I come here to-night,” she said rapidly and boldly, keeping her hard glance on his, “because I knew you was alone. I wouldn’t come here when them gals was here. I hate ’em and they hates me. That’s why. You keep school,—don’t you? I want to be teached!”

If to the shabbiness of her apparel and uncomeliness of her tangled hair and dirty face she had added the humility of tears the master would have extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and nothing more. But with the natural though illogical instincts of his species, her boldness awakened in him something of that respect which all original natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade. And he gazed at her the more fixedly as she went on still rapidly, her hand on the door-latch and her eyes on his.

“My name is M’liss—M’liss Smith! You can bet your life on that. My father’s Old Smith—Old Bummer Smith—that’s what’s the matter with him. M’liss Smith—and I’m comin’ to school!”

“Well?” said the master.

Accustomed to be thwarted and opposed, often wantonly and cruelly, for no other purpose than to excite the violent impulses of her nature, the master’s phlegm evidently took her by surprise. She stopped. She began to twist a lock of her hair between her fingers; and the rigid line of upper lip, drawn over the wicked little teeth, relaxed and quivered slightly. Then her eyes dropped, and something like a blush struggled up to her cheek, and tried to assert itself through the splashes of redder soil and the sunburn of years. Suddenly she threw herself forward, calling on God to strike her dead, and fell quite weak and helpless, with her face on the master’s desk, crying and sobbing as if her heart would break.

The master lifted her gently, and waited for the paroxysm to pass. When, with face still averted, she was repeating between her sobs the mea culpa of childish penitence—that “she’d be good, she didn’t mean to,” etc., it came to him to ask her why she had left Sabbath-school.

Why had she left Sabbath-school? Why? Oh, yes. What did he (McSnagley) want to tell her she was wicked for? What did he tell her that God hated her for? If God hated her, what did she want to go to Sabbath school for? She didn’t want to be beholden to anybody who hated her.

Had she told McSnagley this?

Yes, she had.

The master laughed. It was a hearty laugh, and echoed so oddly in the little schoolhouse, and seemed so inconsistent and discordant with the sighing of the pines without, that he shortly corrected himself with a sigh. The sigh was quite as sincere in its way, however, and after a moment of serious silence he asked about her father.

Her father. What father? Whose father? What had he ever done for her? Why did the girls hate her? Come, now! What made the folks say, “Old Bummer Smith’s M’liss” when she passed? Yes; oh, yes. She wished he was dead—she was dead—everybody was dead; and her sobs broke forth anew.

The master then, leaning over her, told her, as well as he could, what you or I might have said after hearing such unnatural theories from childish lips, only bearing in mind perhaps better than you or I the unnatural facts of her ragged dress, her bleeding feet, and the omnipresent shadow of her drunken father. Then raising her to her feet, he wrapped his shawl around her, and bidding her come early in the morning he walked with her down the road. Then he bade her “good-night.” The moon shone brightly on the narrow path before them. He stood and watched the bent little figure as it staggered down the road, and waited until it had passed the little graveyard and reached the curve of the hill, where it turned and stood for a moment, a mere atom of suffering outlined against the far-off patient stars. Then he went back to his work. But the lines of the copybook thereafter faded into long parallels of never-ending road, over which childish figures seemed to pass sobbing and crying to the night. Then, the little schoolhouse seeming lonelier than before, he shut the door and went home.

The next morning M’liss came to school. Her face had been washed, and her coarse black hair bore evidence of recent struggles with the comb, in which both had evidently suffered. The old defiant look shone occasionally in her eyes, but her manner was tamer and more subdued. Then began a series of little trials and self-sacrifices in which master and pupil bore an equal part, and which increased the confidence and sympathy between them. Although obedient under the master’s eye, at times during recess, if thwarted or stung by a fancied slight, M’liss would rage in ungovernable fury, and many a palpitating young savage, finding himself matched with his own weapons of torment, would seek the master with torn jacket and scratched face, and complaints of the dreadful M’liss. There was a serious division among the townspeople on the subject; some threatening to withdraw their children from such evil companionship, and others as warmly upholding the course of the master in his work of reclamation. Meanwhile, with a steady persistence that seemed quite astonishing to him on looking back afterward, the Master drew M’liss gradually out of the shadow of her past life, as though it were but her natural progress down the narrow path on which he had set her feet the moonlight night of their first meeting. Remembering the experience of the evangelical McSnagley, he carefully avoided that Rock of Ages on which that unskillful pilot had shipwrecked her young faith. But if, in the course of her reading, she chanced to stumble upon those few words which have lifted such as she above the level of the older, the wiser, and the more prudent,—if she learned something of a faith that is symbolized by suffering, and the old light softened in her eyes, it did not take the shape of a lesson. A few of the plainer people had made up a little sum by which the ragged M’liss was enabled to assume the garments of respect and civilization, and often a rough shake of the hand and words of commendation from a red-shirted and burly figure, sent a glow to the cheek of the young master and set him to thinking if it was altogether deserved.

Three months had passed, from the time of their first meeting, and the master was sitting late one evening over the moral and sententious copies, when there came a tap at the door, and again M’liss stood before him. She was neatly clad and clean-faced, and there was nothing perhaps but the long black hair and bright black eyes to remind him of his former apparition. “Are you busy?” she asked; “can you come with me?” and on his signifying his readiness, in her old willful way she said, “Come, then, quick!”

They passed out of the door together and into the dark road. As they entered the town, the master asked her whither she was going. She replied, “to see her father.”

It was the first time he had heard her use that filial expression, or, indeed, allude to him in any other way than “Old Smith” or the “Old Man.” It was the first time in many weeks that she had spoken of him at all. He had been missed from the settlement for the past fortnight, and the master had credited the rumors of the townsfolk that Smith had “struck something rich” on the “North Fork,” about ten miles from the village. As they neared the settlement, the master gathered from M’liss that the rumor was untrue, and that she had seen her father that day. As she grew reticent to further questioning, and as the master was satisfied from her manner that she had some definite purpose beyond her usual willfulness, he passively resigned himself and followed her.

Through remote groggeries, restaurants, and saloons; in gambling-hells and dance-houses, the master, preceded by M’liss, passed and repassed. In the reeking smoke and blasphemous outcries of noisome dens, the child, holding the master’s hand, pursued her search with a strange familiarity, perfect self-possession, and implied protection of himself, that even in his anxiety seemed ludicrous. Some of the revelers, recognizing M’liss, called to her to sing and dance for them, and would have forced liquor upon her but for the master’s interference. Others mutely made way for them. So an hour slipped by, and as yet their search was fruitless. The master had yawned once or twice and whistled,—two fatal signs of failing interest,—and finally came to a full stop.

“It’s half past eleven, Melissa,” said he, consulting his watch by a broad pencil of light from an open shutter,—“half past eleven; and it strikes me that our old friends, the woodpeckers, must have gone to bed some hours ago, unless they are waiting up for us. I’m much obliged to you for the evening’s entertainment, but I’m afraid that even the pretext of looking for a parent won’t excuse further dissipation. We’d better put this off till to-morrow. What do you say, Melissa? Why! what ails the child? What’s that noise? Why, a pistol!—You’re not afraid of that?”

Few children brought up in the primeval seclusion of Smith’s Pocket were unfamiliar with those quick and sharp notes which usually rendered the evening zephyrs of that locality vocal; certainly not M’liss, to have started when that report rang on the clear night air. The echoes caught it as usual, and carried it round and round Red Mountain, and set the dogs to barking all along the streams. The lights seemed to dance and move quickly on the outskirts of the town for a few moments afterward, the stream suddenly rippled quite audibly behind them, a few stones loosened themselves from the hillside and splashed into the stream, a heavy wind seemed to suage the branches of the funereal pines, and then the silence fell again, heavier, deadlier than ever.

When the last echo had died away, the master felt his companion’s hand relax its grasp. Taking advantage of this outward expression of tractability, he drew her gently with him until they reached the hotel, which—in her newer aspect of a guest whose board was secured by responsible parties—had forgivingly opened its hospitable doors to the vagrant child. Here the master lingered a moment to assure her that she might count upon his assistance to-morrow; and having satisfied his conscience by this anticipated duty, bade her good-night. In the darkness of the road—going astray several times on his way home, and narrowly escaping the yawning ditches in the trail—he had reason to commend his foresight in dissuading M’liss from a further search that night, and in this pleasant reflection went to hed and slept soundly.

For some hours after a darkness thick and heavy brooded over the settlement. The sombre pines encompassing the village seemed to close threateningly about it as if to reclaim the wilderness that had been wrested from them. A low rustling as of dead leaves, and the damp breath of forest odors filled the lonely street. Emboldened by the darkness other shadows slipped by, leaving strange footprints in the moist ditches for people to point at next day, until the moon, round and full, was lifted above the crest of the opposite hill, and all was magically changed.

The shadows shrank away, leaving the straggling street sleeping in a beauty it never knew by day. All that was unlovely, harsh, and repulsive in its jagged outlines was subdued and softened by that uncertain light. It smoothed the rough furrows and unsightly chasms of the mountain with an ineffable love and tenderness. It fell upon the face of the sleeping M’liss, and left a tear glittering on her black lashes and a smile on her lip, which would have been rare to her at any other time; and fell also on the white upturned face of “Old Smith,” with a pistol in his hand and a bullet in his heart, lying dead beside his empty pocket.

Chapter II

WHICH CONTAINS A DREAM OF THE JUST ARISTIDES

The opinion which McSnagley expressed in reference to a “change of heart,” as experienced by M’liss, was more forcibly described in the gulches and tunnels. It was thought there that M’liss had struck a “good lead.” And when there was a new grave added to the little inclosure, and—at the expense of the master—a little board and inscription put above it, the “Red Mountain Banner” came out quite handsomely and did the correct thing for the memory of one of “our oldest pioneers,” alluding gracefully to that “bane of noble intellects,” touching slightly on the “vicissitudes of fortune,” and otherwise assisting our dear brother into genteel obscurity. “He leaves an only child to mourn his loss,” said the “Banner,” “who is now an exemplary scholar, thanks to the efforts of the Rev. J. McSnagley.” That reverend gentleman, in fact, made a strong point of M’liss’s conversion, and, indirectly attributing to her former bad conduct the suicide of her father, made affecting allusions in Sunday-school to the beneficial effects of the “silent tomb,” and in that cheerful contemplation froze most of the children into speechless horror, and caused the fair-complexioned scions of the first families to howl dismally and refuse to be comforted.

Of the homes that were offered to M’liss when her conversion became known, the master had preferred that of Mrs. Morpher, a womanly and kind-hearted specimen of Southwestern efflorescence, known in her maidenhood as the “Per-ra-rie Rose.” By a steady system of struggle and self-sacrifice, she had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition to principles of “order,” which as a pious woman she considered, with Pope, as “Heaven’s first law.” But she could not entirely govern the orbits of her satellites, however regular her own movements, and her old nature asserted itself in her children. Lycurgus dipped in the cupboard “between meals,” and Aristides came home from school without shoes, leaving those important articles at the threshold, for the delights of a barefooted walk down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were “keerless” of their clothes. So that with but one exception, however the “Prairie Rose” might have trimmed, pruned, and trained her own natural luxuriance, the little shoots came up defiantly wild and straggling. That one exception was Clytemnestra Morpher, aged fifteen. She was the realization of her mother’s most extravagant dream. I stay my hand with difficulty at this moment, for I long to describe this model of deportment; but the progress of my story just at present supplants Clytemnestra in the larger prominence it gives to another member of the family,—the just Aristides.

The long dry summer had come. As each fierce day seemed to burn itself out in little whiffs of pearl gray smoke on the mountain summits, and as the upspringing breeze scattered what might have been its red embers over the landscape, the green wave which, in early spring, had upheaved above Smith’s grave grew sere and dry and hard. In those days, the master, strolling in the little churchyard of a Sabbath afternoon, was sometimes surprised to find a few wild flowers, plucked from the damp pine forest, scattered there, and oftener rude wreaths hung upon the little pine cross. Most of these wreaths were formed of a sweet-scented grass which the children loved to keep in their desks, entwined with the pompon-like plumes of the buckeye and syringa, the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the dark blue cowl of the monk’s-hood or deadly aconite. One day, during a walk, in crossing a wooded ridge, he came upon M’liss in the heart of the forest, perched upon a prostrate pine, on a fantastic throne, formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless branches, her lap full of grasses and pine burrs, and crooning to the just Aristides, who sat humbly at her feet, one of the negro melodies of her younger life. It was perhaps the influence of the season, or the memory of this sylvan enjoyment, which caused Aristides, one midsummer day, to have a singular vision.

The just Aristides had begun that morning with a serious error. Loitering on his way to school, occasionally stopping to inspect the footprints of probable bears, or indulging in cheerful badinage with the tunnel men,—to whom the apparition of a short-legged boy weighed down by a preternaturally large satchel was an object of boisterous solicitude,—Aristides suddenly found that he was an hour and a half too late for school. Whether this circumstance was purely accidental or not is a question of some uncertainty, for Aristides, on finding himself occupying this criminal position, at once resolved to play truant. I shall not stop to inquire by what system of logic this result presented itself to that just youth as a consistent deduction, or whether some indistinct apprehension of another and a better world beyond the settlement, where there were no schools and blackberries were plenty, had not influenced him in taking this fatal step. Enough that he entered on his rash career by instantly eating the dinner which he carried with him, and having propitiated that terrible god whose seat is every small boy’s stomach, with a feeling of inexpressible guiltiness creeping over him, he turned his back upon the schoolhouse and ran into the woods.

Away from the glare of the red road, how deliciously cool was the damp breath and twilight dimness of the stately pines. How they seemed to welcome him in their deepest recesses, ranging themselves silently around him as he ran, shutting out the world and its schoolhouses, and the pursuit of indignant parents and vindictive teachers. How in the forest depths the blue jay called to him mockingly, and the kingbird, spreading his tail like a crimson pennant, beckoned him onward. How there was recognition and greeting even in the squirrel that scampered past him, mischievously whisking his ridiculous tail within an inch of his outstretched fingers. And how Aristides, at last flinging away hat, shoes, and satchel, uttered a shrill whoop and dashed forward like a youthful savage. But are not these things written in the dog’s-eared pages of every boy’s memory, even though they seemed afterward to the just Aristides a part and parcel of his own strange vision?

Yet even such delights had their hour of culmination, and Aristides found himself at high noon back on the road again in a state of feverish excitement, carrying a ravished jay’s nest, two pine cones, a dead hare, and a plume of the white syringa. Somewhat overpowered by the weight of these trophies, which he had collected in the vague belief that they would be of future service to him, he began to look about for some convenient place to bestow his booty. It was nearly time for the great Wingdam stage to go by, and when it came at last with a sharp rattle of wheels and prancing of horses, and a red pillar of dust hanging over it that partook of both the fiery and cloudy attributes of the Israelitish sign, Aristides exchanged epithets with the driver, and, although standing knee-deep in red dust, felt a thrill of joy in the recognition which no future honor or dignity might ever give him.

Retracing his steps, the truant presently came to a semicircular opening in the side of Red Mountain, which inclosed, like the walls of some vast amphitheatre, what had been the arena of the early struggles of the gladiators of fortune. There were terrible traces of that struggle still—in the rock blasted by fire—in the bank furrowed by water—and in the debris of Red Mountain scattered along the gulch two miles in extent. Their forgotten engines were lying half buried in the ditches—the primeval structure which had served them for a banking-house was roofless, and held the hoards of field-mice and squirrels. The unshapely stumps of ancient pines dotted the ground, and Aristides remembered that under the solitary redwood, which of all its brothers remained still standing, one of those early pioneers lay buried. No wonder that, as the gentle breeze of that summer day swept through its branches, the just Aristides might have heard, as part of his wonderful dream, some echo of its far off brothers of Lebanon, saying, “Since thou art fallen, no feller has risen up against us!”

But the short legs of Aristides were aching, and he was getting thirsty. There was a rough cavern close at hand; and as most of these openings condensed their general dampness somewhere in quiet pools, Aristides turned into the first one. When he had slaked his thirst, he looked around him and recognized Smith’s Pocket.

It had undergone little change in the last two years. The winter rains had detached those portions of the wall which were not upheld by decaying timbers. It was certainly a dirty pocket—a pocket filled with rubbish—a shabby pocket—a worn-out and ragged pocket. It was so unpromising in its present exterior, so graphic in its story of misfortune, and so terrible in its recent memories, that the most sanguine prospector would have passed it by, as though the hopeless sentence of Dante had been written over its ragged portal.

The active mind of Aristides, however, saw in the lurking shadows of its arches much promise as a future play-room, to which he intended to induct hereafter his classical brother Lycurgus. In this reflection he threw himself on the ground, and luxuriously burying his bare feet in the cool, loose soil, gave himself up to serene meditation. But the heat and exertion were beginning to exert a certain influence over him, and once or twice his eyes closed. The water rippled beside him with a sleepy sound. The sunlight on the hill without made him wink. The long-drawn cawing of a crow on the opposite hillside, and the buzzing of a bluebottle fly who had sought retreat in the cavern, had a like effect, and he felt himself falling asleep. How long he slept, or if he slept at all, he could not remember, for he started suddenly, and, listening a moment, sprang to his feet. The low, heavy blows of a pick came deadened and muffled from the extremity of the cavern.

At first a terrible fear took possession of him; for an instant the white, rigid face of Smith, as he had seen it on the day of the inquest, when an irresistible curiosity led him to creep into the room where the dead man was lying—for an instant only, this fearful remembrance seemed to rise before him out of the gloom of the pit. The terror passed away.

Ghosts were historically unknown to Aristides, and even had his imaginative faculty been more prominent, the education of Smith’s Pocket was not of a kind to foster such weaknesses. Except a twinge of conscience, a momentary recollection of the evil that comes to bad boys through the severe pages of Sunday-school books—with this exception, Aristides was not long in recovering his self-possession. He did not run away, for his curiosity was excited. The same instinct which prompted an examination of bear-tracks gave a fascination to the situation, and a nervous energy to his frame.

The regular blows of the pick still resounded through the cavern. He crept cautiously to the deepest recesses of the pocket, and held his breath and listened. The sound seemed to come from the bowels of the mountain. There was no sign of opening or ingress; an impenetrable veil of quartz was between him and the mysterious laborer. He was creeping back, between the displaced rafters, when a light glanced suddenly in his face, and flashed on the wet roof above him. Looking fearfully down, Aristides beheld between the interstices of the rafters, which formed a temporary flooring, that there was another opening below, and in that opening a man was working. In the queer fantasy of Aristides’s dream, it took the aspect of a second pocket and a duplicate Smith!

He had no time to utter his astonishment, for at that moment an ominous rattling of loose soil upon his back made him look up, and he had barely time to spring away before a greater portion of the roof of Smith’s Pocket, loosened by the displacement of its supports in his search, fell heavily to the ground. But in the fall a long-handled shovel which had been hidden somewhere in the crevices of the rock above came rattling down with it, and, seizing this as a trophy, Aristides emerged from Smith’s Pocket, at a rate of speed which seemed singularly disproportionate with his short legs and round stomach.

When he reached the road the sun was setting. Inspecting his prize by that poetic light, he found that the shovel was a new one, and bore neither mark of use nor exposure. Shouldering it again, with the intention of presenting it as a peace-offering to propitiate the just wrath of his parents, Aristides had gone but a few rods when an unexpected circumstance occurred which dashed his fond hope, and to the conscientious child seemed the shadow of an inevitable Nemesis. At the curve of the road, as the settlement of Smith’s Pocket came into view, with its straggling street, and its church spire that seemed a tongue of flame in the setting sun, a broad-shouldered figure sprang, apparently, from out of the bank, and stood in the path of that infelix infant.

“Where are you going with that shovel, you young devil?”

Aristides looked up and saw that his interlocutor was a man of powerful figure, whose face, though partially concealed by a red handkerchief, even in that uncertain light was not prepossessing. Children are quick physiognomists, and Aristides, feeling the presence of evil, from the depths of his mighty little soul then and there took issue with the giant.

“Where are you going with that shovel; d—n you, do you hear?” said he of the red handkerchief impatiently.

“Home,” said Aristides stoutly.

“Home, eh!” said the stranger sneeringly. “And where did you steal it, you young thief?”

The Morpher stock not being of a kind to receive opprobrious epithets meekly, Aristides slowly, and with an evident effort, lifted the shovel in a menacing attitude.

A single step was all that separated six feet of Strength from three feet of Valor. The stranger eyed Aristides with an expression of surly amazement, and hesitated. The elephant quailed before the gad-fly. As that precocious infant waved the threatening shovel, his youthful lips slowly fashioned this tremendous sentence:—

“You let me pass and I won’t hit you!”

And here I must pause. I would that for the sake of poetry I could leave my hero, bathed in that heroic light, erect and menacing. But alas, in this practical world of ours, the battle is too often to the strong. And I hasten over the humiliating spectacle of Aristides, spanked, cuffed, and kicked, and pick him from the ditch into which he was at last ignominiously tossed, a defeated but still struggling warrior, and so bring him, as the night closes charitably around him, in contrite tears and muddy garments to his father’s door.

When the master stopped at Mrs. Morpher’s to inquire after his errant pupil that night, he found Aristides in bed, smelling strongly of soap and water, and sinking into a feverish sleep. As he muttered from time to time some incoherent sentence, tossing restlessly in his cot, the master turned to those about him and asked what it was he said.

It was nothing. Aristides had been dreaming, and that was his dream.

That was all. Yet a dream that foreshadowed a slow-coming but unerring justice, that should give the little dreamer in after years some credit to the title of Aristides the Just.

Chapter III

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE

It was an amiable weakness of Mrs. Morpher to imagine that, of all her classical progeny, Clytemnestra was particularly the model for M’liss. Following this fallacy she threw “Clytie” at the head of M’liss when she was “bad,” and set her up before the child for adoration in her penitential moments. It was not therefore surprising to the master to hear that Clytie was coming to school, obviously as a favor to the master and as an example for M’liss and others. For Clytie was quite a young lady. Inheriting her mother’s physical peculiarities, and in obedience to the climatic laws of the Red Mountain region, she was an early bloomer. The youth of Smith’s Pocket, to whom this kind of flower was rare, sighed for her in April and languished in May. Enamored swains haunted the schoolhouse at the hour of dismissal. A few were jealous of the master.

Perhaps it was this latter circumstance that opened the master’s eyes to another. He could not help noticing that Clytie was romantic; that in school she required a great deal of attention; that her pens were uniformly bad and wanted fixing; that she usually accompanied the request with a certain expectation in her eye that was somewhat disproportionate to the quality of service she verbally required; that she sometimes allowed the curves of a round plump white arm to rest on his when he was writing her copies; that she always blushed and flung back her blond curls when she did so. I don’t remember whether I have stated that the master was a young man—it’s of little consequence, however. He had been severely educated in the school in which Clytie was taking her first lesson, and on the whole withstood the flexible curves and facetious glance like the fine young Spartan that he was. Perhaps an insufficient quality of food may have tended to this asceticism. He generally avoided Clytie; but one evening when she returned to the schoolhouse after something she had forgotten,—and did not find it until the master walked home with her,—I hear that he endeavored to make himself particularly agreeable, partly from the fact, I imagine, that his conduct was adding gall and bitterness to the already overcharged hearts of Clytemnestra’s admirers.

The morning after this affecting episode, M’liss did not come to school. Noon came, but not M’liss. Questioning Clytie on the subject, it appeared that they had left for school together, but the willful M’liss had taken another road. The afternoon brought her not. In the evening he called on Mrs. Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed. Mr. Morpher had spent all day in search of her, without discovering a trace that might lead to her discovery. Aristides was summoned as a probable accomplice, but that equitable infant succeeding in impressing the household with his innocence, Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that the child would yet be found drowned in a ditch, or—what was almost as terrible—mud-dyed and soiled beyond the redemption of soap and water. Sick at heart, the master returned to the schoolhouse. As he lit his lamp and seated himself at his desk, he found a note lying before him, addressed to himself in M’liss’s handwriting. It seemed to be written on a leaf torn from some old memorandum-book, and, to prevent sacrilegious trifling, had been sealed with six broken wafers. Opening it almost tenderly, the master read as follows:—

RESPECTED SIR: When you read this, I am run away. Never to come back. Never Never NEVER. You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my Amerika’s Pride [a, highly colored lithograph from a tobacco box] to Sally Flanders. But don’t you give anything to Clytie Morpher. Don’t you dair to. Do you know what my opinion is of her, it is this, she is perfekly disgustin. That is all and no more at present from MELISSA SMITH.

The master mused for some time over this characteristic epistle. As he was mechanically refolding it his eye caught a sentence written on the back in pencil, in another handwriting, somewhat blurred and indistinct from the heavy incisive strokes of M’liss’s pen on the other side. It seemed to be a memorandum belonging to the book from which the leaf was originally torn:—

July 17th. 5 hours in drift—dipping west—took out 20 oz.; cleaned up 40 oz. Mem.—saw M. S.

“July 17th,” said the master, opening his desk and taking out a file of the “Red Mountain Banner.” “July 17th,” he repeated, running over the pages till he came to a paragraph headed “DISTRESSING SUICIDE.” “July 17th—why, that’s the day Smith killed himself. That’s funny!”

In a strict etymological sense there was nothing so very ludicrous in this coincidence, nor did the master’s face betray any expression of the kind. Perhaps the epithet was chosen to conceal the vague uneasiness which it produced in his mind. We are all of us more affected by these coincidences than we care to confess to one another. If the most matter-of-fact reader of these pages were to find a hearse standing in front of his door for three consecutive mornings, although the circumstance might be satisfactorily explained,—shall I go further and say, because the circumstance might be satisfactorily explained,—he would vaguely wish it hadn’t happened. Philosophize as we may, the simple fact of two remote lines crossing each other always seems to us of tremendous significance, and quite overshadows the more important truth that the real parallels of life’s journey are the lines that never meet. It will do us good to remember these things, and look more kindly on our brothers of Borrioboola-Gha and their fetich superstitions, when we drop our silver in the missionary box next Sabbath.

“I wonder where that memorandum came from,” said the master, as he rose at last and buttoned up his coat. “Who is ‘M. S.’? M. S. stands for manuscript and Melissa Smith. Why don’t”—But checking an impulsive query as to why people don’t make their private memoranda generally intelligible, the master put the letter in his pocket and went home.

At sunrise the next morning he was picking his way through the palm-like fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hare from its form, and awakening a querulous protest from a few dissipated crows, who had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge where he had once found M’liss. There he found the prostrate pine and tessellated branches, but the throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch, and sheltered itself in some friendly foliage. The master, reaching the old seat, found the nest still warm; looking up in the intertwining branches, he met the black eyes of the errant M’liss. They gazed at each other without speaking. She was first to break the silence.

“What do you want?” she asked curtly.

The master had decided on a course of action. “I want some crab apples,” he said humbly.

“Shan’t have ’em! go away! Why don’t you get ’em of Clytemnerestera?” It seemed to be a relief to M’liss to express her contempt in additional syllables to that classical young woman’s already long-drawn title. “Oh, you wicked thing!”

“I am hungry, Lissy. I have eaten nothing since dinner yesterday. I am famished!” and the young man, in a state of remarkable exhaustion, leaned against the tree.

Melissa’s heart was touched. In the bitter days of her gypsy life she had known the sensation he so artfully simulated. Overcome by his heartbroken tone, but not entirely divested of suspicion, she said:—

“Dig under the tree near the roots, and you’ll find lots: but mind you don’t tell,” for M’liss had her hoards as well as the rats and squirrels.

But the master of course was unable to find them, the effects of hunger probably blinding his senses. M’liss grew uneasy. At length she peered at him through the leaves in an elfish way, and questioned:—

“If I come down and give you some, you’ll promise you won’t touch me?”

The master promised.

“Hope you’ll die if you do?”

The master accepted instant dissolution as a forfeit. M’liss slid down the tree. The duties of hospitality fulfilled, she seated herself at a little distance and eyed the master with extreme caution.

“Why didn’t you eat your breakfast, you bad man?”

“Because I’ve run away.”

“Where to?” said M’liss, her eyes twinkling.

“Anywhere—anywhere, away from here!” responded that deceitful wretch with tragic wildness of demeanor.

“What made you?—bad boy!” said M’liss, with a sudden respect of conventionalities, and a rare touch of tenderness in her tones. “You’d better go back where your vittals are.”

“What are victuals to a wounded spirit?” asked the young man dramatically. He had reached the side of M’liss during this dialogue, and had taken her unresisting hand. He was too wise to notice his victory, however; and drawing Melissa’s note from his pocket, opened it before her.

“Couldn’t you find any paper in the schoolhouse without tearing a leaf out of my memorandum book, Melissa?” he asked.

“It ain’t out of your memorandum book,” responded M’liss fiercely.

“Indeed,” said the master, turning to the lines in pencil; “I thought it was my handwriting.”

M’liss, who had been looking over his shoulder, suddenly seized the paper and snatched it out of his hand.

“It’s father’s writing!” she said, after a pause, in a softer tone.

“Where did you get it, M’liss?”

“Aristides gave it to me.”

“Where did he get it?”

“Don’t know. He had the book in his pocket when I told him I was going to write to you, and he tore the leaf out. There now—don’t bother me any more.” M’liss had turned her face away, and the black hair had hid her downcast eyes.

Something in her gesture and expression reminded him of her father. Something, and more that was characteristic to her at such moments, made him fancy another resemblance, and caused him to ask impulsively, and less cautiously than was his wont:—

“Do you remember your mother, M’liss?”

“No.”

“Did you never see her?”

“No—didn’t I tell you not to bother, and you’re a-goin’ and doin’ it,” said M’liss savagely.

The master was silent a moment. “Did you ever think you would like to have a mother, M’liss?” he asked again.

“No-o-o-o!”

The master rose; M’liss looked up.

“Does Aristides come to school to-day?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going back? You’d better,” she said.

“Well!—perhaps I may. Good-by!”

He had proceeded a few steps when, as he expected, she called him back. He turned. She was standing by the tree, with tears glistening in her eyes. The master felt the right moment had come. Going up to her, he took both her hands in his, and looking in her tearful eyes, said gravely:—

“M’liss, do you remember the first evening you came to see me?”

M’liss remembered.

“You asked me if you might come to school, and I said—”

“Come!” responded the child softly.

“If I told you I was lonely without my little scholar, and that I wanted her to come, what would you say?”

The child hung her head in silence. The master waited patiently. Tempted by the quiet, a hare ran close to the couple, and raising her bright eyes and velvet fore paws, gazed at them fearlessly. A squirrel ran halfway down the furrowed bark of the fallen tree, and there stopped.

“We are waiting, Lissy,” said the master in a whisper, and the child smiled. Stirred by a passing breeze, the treetops rocked, and a slanting sunbeam stole through their interlaced boughs and fell on the doubting face and irresolute little figure. But a step in the dry branches and a rustling in the underbrush broke the spell.

A man dressed as a miner, carrying a long-handled shovel, came slowly through the woods. A red handkerchief tied around his head under his hat, with the loose ends hanging from beneath, did not add much favor to his unprepossessing face. He did not perceive the master and M’liss until he was close upon them. When he did, he stopped suddenly and gazed at them with an expression of lowering distrust. M’liss drew nearer to the master.

“Good-mornin’—picknickin’, eh?” he asked, with an attempt at geniality that was more repulsive than his natural manner.

“How are you—prospecting, eh?” said the master quietly, after the established colloquial formula of Red Mountain.

“Yes—a little in that way.”

The stranger still hesitated, apparently waiting for them to go first, a matter which M’liss decided by suddenly taking the master’s hand in her quick way. What she said was scarcely audible, but the master, parting her hair over her forehead, kissed her, and so, hand in hand, they passed out of the damp aisles and forest odors into the open sunlit road. But M’liss, looking back, saw that her old seat was occupied by the hopeful prospector, and fancied that in the shadows of her former throne something of a gratified leer overspread his face. “He’ll have to dig deep to find the crab apples,” said the child to the master, as they came to the Red Mountain road.

When Aristides came to school that day he was confronted by M’liss. But neither threats nor entreaties could extract from that reticent youth the whereabout of the memorandum book nor where he got it. Two or three days afterward, during recess, he approached M’liss, and beckoned her one side.

“Well,” said M’liss impatiently.

“Did you ever read the story of ‘Ali Baba’?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe it?”

“No.”

“Well,” said that sage infant, wheeling around on his stout legs, “it’s true!”

Chapter IV

WHICH HAS A GOOD MORAL TENDENCY

Somewhat less spiteful in her intercourse with the other scholars, M’liss still retained an offensive attitude toward Clytemnestra. Perhaps the jealous element was not entirely stilled in her passionate little breast. Perhaps it was that Clytemnestra’s round curves and plump outlines afforded an extensive pinching surface. But while these ebullitions were under the master’s control, her enmity occasionally took a new and irresponsible form.

In his first estimate of the child’s character he could not conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning, for M’liss had a doll. But then it was a peculiar doll,—a frightful perversion of wax and sawdust,—a doll fearfully and wonderfully made,—a smaller edition of M’liss. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher. It had been the oldtime companion of M’liss’s wanderings, and bore evident marks of suffering. Its original complexion was long since washed away by the weather, and anointed by the slime of ditches. It looked very much as M’liss had in days past. Its one gown of faded stuff was dirty and ragged as hers had been. M’liss had never been known to apply to it any childish term of endearment. She never exhibited it in the presence of other children. It was put severely to bed in a hollow tree near the schoolhouse, and only allowed exercise during M’liss’s rambles. Fulfilling a stern duty to her doll—as she would to herself—it knew no luxuries.

Now, Mrs. Morpher, obeying a commendable impulse, bought another doll and gave it to M’liss. The child received it gravely and curiously. The master, on looking at it one day, fancied he saw a slight resemblance in its round red cheeks and mild blue eyes to Clytemnestra. It became evident before long that M’liss had also noticed the same resemblance. Accordingly she hammered its waxen head on the rocks when she was alone, and sometimes dragged it with a string round its neck to and from school. At other times, setting it up on her desk, she made a pincushion of its patient and inoffensive body. Whether this was done in revenge of what she considered a second figurative obtrusion of Clytie’s excellencies upon her; or whether she had an intuitive appreciation of the rites of certain other heathens, and indulging in that “fetich” ceremony imagined that the original of her wax model would pine away and finally die, is a metaphysical question I shall not now consider.

In spite of these moral vagaries, the master could not help noticing in her different tasks the workings of a quick, restless, and vigorous perception. She knew neither the hesitancy nor the doubts of childhood. Her answers in class were always slightly dashed with audacity. Of course she was not infallible. But her courage and daring in venturing beyond her own depth and that of the floundering little swimmers around her, in their minds outweighed all errors of judgment. Children are no better than grown people in this respect, I fancy; and whenever the little red hand flashed above her desk, there was a wondering silence, and even the master was sometimes oppressed with a doubt of his own experience and judgment.

Nevertheless, certain attributes which at first amused and entertained his fancy began to affect him with grave doubts. He could not but see that M’liss was revengeful, irreverent, and willful. But there was one better quality which pertained to her semi-savage disposition—the faculty of physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another—though not always an attribute of the noble savage—truth. M’liss was both fearless and sincere—perhaps in such a character the adjectives were synonymous.

The master had been doing some hard thinking on this subject, and had arrived at that conclusion quite common to all who think sincerely, that he was generally the slave of his own prejudices, when he determined to call on the Rev. Mr. McSnagley for advice. This decision was somewhat humiliating to his pride, as he and McSnagley were not friends. But he thought of M’liss, and the evening of their first meeting; and perhaps with a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with a complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked back his dislike and went to McSnagley.

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed that the master was looking “peartish” and hoped he had got over the “neuralgy” and “rheumatiz.” He himself had been troubled with a dumb “ager” since last conference. But he had learned to “rastle and pray.”

Pausing a moment to enable the master to write this certain method of curing the dumb “ager” upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. “She is an adornment to Christewanity, and has a likely, growin’ young family,” added Mr. McSnagley; “and there is that mannerly young gal—so well behaved—Miss Clytie.” In fact, Clytie’s perfections seemed to affect him to such an extent that he dwelt for several minutes upon them. The master was doubly embarrassed. In the first place, there was an enforced contrast with poor M’liss in all this praise of Clytie. Secondly, there was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Morpher’s earliest born. So that the master, after a few futile efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another engagement and left without asking the information required, but in his after reflections somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley the full benefit of having refused it.

But the master obtained the advice in another and unexpected direction.

The resident physician of Smith’s Pocket was a Dr. Duchesne, or as he was better known to the locality, “Dr. Doochesny.” Of a naturally refined nature and liberal education, he had steadily resisted the aggressions and temptations of Smith’s Pocket, and represented to the master a kind of connecting link between his present life and the past. So that an intimacy sprang up between the two men, involving prolonged interviews in the doctor’s little back shop, often to the exclusion of other suffering humanity and their physical ailments. It was in one of these interviews that the master mentioned the coincidence of the date of the memoranda on the back of M’liss’s letter and the day of Smith’s suicide.

“If it were Smith’s own handwriting, as the child says it is,” said the master, “it shows a queer state of mind that could contemplate suicide and indite private memoranda within the same twenty-four hours.”

Dr. Duchesne removed his cigar from his lips and looked attentively at his friend.

“The only hypothesis,” continued the master, “is that Smith was either drunk or crazy, and the fatal act was in a measure unpremeditated.”

“Every man who commits suicide,” returned the doctor gravely, “is in my opinion insane, or, what is nearly the same thing, becomes through suffering an irresponsible agent. In my professional experience I have seen most of the forms of mental and physical agony, and know what sacrifices men will make to preserve even an existence that to me seemed little better than death, so long as their intellect remained unclouded. When you come to reflect on the state of mind that chooses death as a preferable alternative, you generally find an exaltation and enthusiasm that differs very little from the ordinary diagnosis of delirium. Smith was not drunk,” added the doctor in his usual careless tone; “I saw his body.”

The master remained buried in reflection. Presently the doctor removed his cigar.

“Perhaps I might help you to explain the coincidence you speak of.”

“How?”

“Very easily. But this is a professional secret, you understand.”

“Yes, I understand,” said the master hastily, with an ill-defined uneasiness creeping over him.

“Do you know anything of the phenomena of death by gunshot wounds?”

“No!”

“Then you must take certain facts as granted. Smith, you remember, was killed instantly! The nature of his wound and the manner of his death were such as would have caused an instantaneous and complete relaxation of all the muscles. Rigidity and contraction would have supervened of course, but only after life was extinct and consciousness fled. Now Smith was found with his hand tightly grasping a pistol.”

“Well?”

“Well, my dear boy, he must have grasped it after he was dead, or have prevailed on some friend to stiffen his fingers round it.”

“Do you mean that he was murdered?”

Dr. Duchesne rose and closed the door. “We have different names for these things in Smith’s Pocket. I mean to say that he didn’t kill himself—that’s all.”

“But, doctor,” said the master earnestly; “do you think you have done right in concealing this fact? Do you think it just—do you think it consistent with your duty to his orphan child?”

“That’s why I have said nothing about it,” replied the doctor coolly,—“because of my consideration for his orphan child.”

The master breathed quickly, and stared at the doctor.

“Doctor! you don’t think that M’liss”—

“Hush!—don’t get excited, my young friend. Remember I am not a lawyer—only a doctor.”

“But M’liss was with me the very night he must have been killed. We were walking together when we heard the report—that is—a report—which must have been the one”—stammered the master.

“When was that?”

“At half past eleven. I remember looking at my watch.”

“Humph!—when did you meet her first?”

“At half past eight. Come, doctor, you have made a mistake here at least,” said the young man with an assumption of ease he was far from feeling. “Give M’liss the benefit of the doubt.”

Dr. Duchesne replied by opening a drawer of his desk. After rummaging among the powders and mysterious looking instruments with which it was stored, he finally brought forth a longitudinal slip of folded white paper. It was appropriately labeled “Poison.”

“Look here,” said the doctor, opening the paper. It contained two or three black coarse hairs. “Do you know them?”

“No.”

“Look again!”

“It looks something like Melissa’s hair,” said the master, with a fathomless sinking of the heart.

“When I was called to look at the body,” continued the doctor with the deliberate cautiousness of a professional diagnosis, “my suspicions were aroused by the circumstance I told you of. I managed to get possession of the pistol, and found these hairs twisted around the lock as though they had been accidentally caught and violently disentangled. I don’t think that any one else saw them. I removed them without observation, and—they are at your service.”

The master sank back in his seat and pressed his hand to his forehead. The image of M’liss rose before him with flashing eye and long black hair, and seemed to beat down and resist defiantly the suspicion that crept slowly over his heart.

“I forbore to tell you this, my friend,” continued the doctor slowly and gravely, “because when I learned that you had taken this strange child under your protection I did not wish to tell you that which—though I contend does not alter her claims to man’s sympathy and kindness—still might have prejudiced her in your eyes. Her improvement under your care has proven my position correct. I have, as you know, peculiar ideas of the extent to which humanity is responsible. I find in my heart—looking back over that child’s career—no sentiment but pity. I am mistaken in you if I thought this circumstance aroused any other feeling in yours.”

Still the figure of M’liss stood before the master as he bent before the doctor’s words, in the same defiant attitude, with something of scorn in the great dark eyes, that made the blood tingle in his cheeks, and seemed to make the reasoning of the speaker but meaningless and empty words. At length he rose. As he stood with his hand on the latch he turned to Dr. Duchesne, who was watching him with careful solicitude.

“I don’t know but that you have done well to keep this from me. At all events it has not—cannot, and should not alter my opinion toward M’liss. You will of course keep it a secret. In the mean time you must not blame me if I cling to my instincts in preference to your judgment. I still believe that you are mistaken in regard to her.”

“Stay, one moment,” said the doctor; “promise me you will not say anything of this, nor attempt to prosecute the matter further till you have consulted with me.”

“I promise. Good-night.”

“Good-night;” and so they parted.

True to that promise and his own instinctive promptings the master endeavored to atone for his momentary disloyalty by greater solicitude for M’liss. But the child had noticed some change in the master’s thoughtful manner, and in one of their long post-prandial walks she stopped suddenly, and mounting a stump, looked full in his face with big searching eyes.

“You ain’t mad?” said she, with an interrogative shake of the black braids.

“No.”

“Nor bothered?”

“No.”

“Nor hungry?” (Hunger was to M’liss a sickness that might attack a person at any moment.)

“No.”

“Nor thinking of her?”

“Of whom, Lissy?”

“That white girl.” (This was the latest epithet invented by M’liss, who was a very dark brunette, to express Clytemnestra.)

“No.”

“Upon your word?” (A substitute for “Hope you’ll die!” proposed by the master.)

“Yes.”

“And sacred honor?”

“Yes.”

Then M’liss gave him a fierce little kiss, and hopping down, fluttered off. For two or three days after that she condescended to appear like other children and be, as she expressed it, “good.”

When the summer was about spent, and the last harvest had been gathered in the valleys, the master bethought him of gathering in a few ripened shoots of the young idea, and of having his Harvest Home, or Examination. So the savans and professionals of Smith’s Pocket were gathered to witness that time-honored custom of placing timid children in a constrained position, and bullying them as in a witness-box. As usual in such cases, the most audacious and self-possessed were the lucky recipients of the honors. The reader will imagine that in the present instance M’liss and Clytie were preeminent and divided public attention: M’liss with her clearness of material perception and self-reliance, and Clytie with her placid self-esteem and saintlike correctness of deportment. The other little ones were timid and blundering. M’liss’s readiness and brilliancy, of course, captivated the greatest number, and provoked the greatest applause, and M’liss’s antecedents had unconsciously awakened the strongest sympathies of the miners, whose athletic forms were ranged against the walls, or whose handsome bearded faces looked in at the window. But M’liss’s popularity was overthrown by an unexpected circumstance.

McSnagley had invited himself, and had been going through the pleasing entertainment of frightening the more timid pupils by the vaguest and most ambiguous questions, delivered in an impressive, funereal tone; and M’liss had soared into astronomy, and was tracking the course of our “spotted ball” through space, and defining the “tethered orbits” of the planets, when McSnagley deliberately arose.

“Meelissy, ye were speaking of the revolutions of this yer yearth, and its movements with regard to the sun, and I think you said it had been a-doin’ of it since the creation, eh?”

M’liss nodded a scornful affirmative.

“Well, was that the truth?” said McSnagley, folding his arms.

“Yes,” said M’liss, shutting up her little red lips tightly.

The handsome outlines at the windows peered further into the schoolroom, and a saintly, Raphael-like face, with blond beard and soft blue eyes, belonging to the biggest scamp in the diggings, turned toward the child and whispered:—

“Stick to it, M’liss! It’s only a big bluff of the parson.”

The reverend gentleman heaved a deep sigh, and cast a compassionate glance at the master, then at the children, and then rested his eye on Clytemnestra. That young woman softly elevated her round, white arm. Its seductive curves were enhanced by a gorgeous and massive specimen bracelet, the gift of one of her humblest worshipers, worn in honor of the occasion. There was a momentary pause. Clytie’s round cheeks were very pink and soft. Clytie’s big eyes were very bright and blue. Clytie’s low-necked white book-muslin rested softly on Clytie’s white, plump shoulders. Clytie looked at the master, and the master nodded. Then Clytie spoke softly:

“Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and it obeyed him.”

There was a low hum of applause in the schoolroom, a triumphant expression on McSnagley’s face, a grave shadow on the master’s, and a comical look of disappointment reflected from the windows. M’liss skimmed rapidly over her astronomy, and then shut the book with a loud snap. A groan burst from McSnagley, an expression of astonishment from the schoolroom, and a yell from the windows, as M’liss brought her red fist down on the desk, with the emphatic declaration:—

“It’s a d—n lie. I don’t believe it!”

Chapter V

“OPEN SESAME”

The long wet season had drawn near its close. Signs of spring were visible in the swelling buds and rushing torrents. The pine forests exhaled a fresher spicery. The azaleas were already budding; the ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland which climbed the Red Mountain at its southern aspect, the long spike of the monk’s-hood shot up from its broad-leaved stool and once more shook its dark blue bells. Again the billow above Smith’s grave was soft and green, its crest just tossed with the foam of daisies and buttercups. The little graveyard had gathered a few new dwellers in the past year, and the mounds were placed two by two by the little paling until they reached Smith’s grave, and there, there was but one. General superstition had shunned the enforced companionship. The plot beside Smith was vacant.

It was the custom of the driver of the great Wingdam stage to whip up his horses at the foot of the hill, and soenter Smith’s Pocket at that remarkable pace which the woodcuts in the hotel bar-room represented to credulous humanity as the usual rate of speed of that conveyance. At least, Aristides Morpher thought so as he stood one Sunday afternoon, uneasily conscious of his best jacket and collar, waiting its approach. Nor could anything shake his belief that regularly on that occasion the horses ran away with the driver, and that that individual from motives of deep policy pretended not to notice it until they were stopped.

“Anybody up from below, Bill?” said the landlord as the driver slowly descended from his perch.

“Nobody for you,” responded Bill shortly. “Dusenberry kem up as usual, and got off at the old place. You can’t make a livin’ off him, I reckon.”

“Have you found out what his name is yet?” continued the landlord, implying that “Dusenberry” was simply a playful epithet of the driver.

“He says his name is Waters,” returned Bill. “Jake said he saw him at the North Fork in ’50—called himself Moore then. Guess he ain’t no good, nowhow. What’s he doin’ round here?”

“Says he’s prospectin’,” replied the landlord. “He has a claim somewhere in the woods. Gambles a little too, I reckon. He don’t travel on his beauty anyhow.”

“If you had seen him makin’ up to a piece of calico inside, last trip, and she a-makin’ up to him quite confidential-like, I guess you’d think he was a lady-killer. My eye, but wasn’t she a stunner! Clytie Morpher wasn’t nowhere to begin with her.”

“Who was she, Bill?” asked half a dozen masculine voices.

“Don’t know. We picked her up this side of ‘Coyote.’ Fancy? I tell you!—pretty little hat and pink ribbings—eyes that ud bore you through at a hundred yards—white teeth—brown gaiters, and such an ankle! She didn’t want to show it,—oh, no!” added the sarcastic Bill with deep significance.

“Where did you leave her, Bill?” asked a gentle village swain who had been fired by the glowing picture of the fair unknown.

“That’s what’s the matter. You see after we picked her up, she said she was goin’ through to Wingdam. Of course there wasn’t anything in the stage or on the road too good to offer her. Old Major Spaffler wanted to treat her to lemonade at every station. Judge Plunkett kep’ a-pullin’ down the blinds and a-h’istin’ of them up to keep out the sun and let in the air. Blest if old McSnagley didn’t want to carry her travelin’-bag. There wasn’t any attention, boys, she didn’t get—but it wasn’t no use—bless you! She never so much as passed the time of day with them.”

“But where did she go?” inquired another anxious auditor.

“Keep your foot off the drag, and I’ll tell you. Arter we left Ring Tail Canon, Dusenberry, as usual, got on. Presently one of the outsides turned round to me, and says he, ‘D—d if Ugly Mug ain’t got the inside track of all of you this time!’ I looked down, and dern my skin if there wasn’t Dusenberry a-sittin’ up alongside of the lady, quite comfortable, as if they had ben children together. At the next station Dusenberry gets off. So does the lady. ‘Ain’t you goin’ on to Wingdam,’ says I. ‘No,’ says she. ‘Mayn’t we have the pleasure of your kempany further?’ says the judge, taking off his hat. ‘No, I’ve changed my mind,’ says she, and off she got, and off she walked arm in arm with him as cool as you please.”

“Wonder if that wa’n’t the party that passed through here last July?” asked the blacksmith, joining the loungers in front of the stage-office. “Waters brought up a buggy to get the axle bolted. There was a woman setting in the buggy, but the hood was drawn down, and I didn’t get to see her face.” During this conversation Aristides, after a long, lingering glance at the stage, had at last torn himself away from its fascinations, and was now lounging down the long straggling street in a peculiarly dissipated manner, with his hat pushed on the back part of his head, his right hand and a greater portion of his right arm buried in his trousers pocket. This might have been partly owing to the shortness of his legs and the comparative amplitude of his trousers, which to the casual observer seemed to obviate the necessity of any other garment. But when he reached the bottom of the street, and further enlivened his progress by whistling shrilly between his fingers, and finally drew a fragment of a cigar from his pocket and placed it between his teeth, it was evident that there was a moral as well as physical laxity in his conduct. The near fact was that Aristides had that afternoon evaded the Sunday-school, and was open to any kind of infant iniquity.

The main street of Smith’s Pocket gradually lost its civilized character, and after one or two futile attempts at improvement at its lower extremity, terminated impotently in a chaos of ditches, races, and trailings. Out of this again a narrow trail started along the mountain side, and communicated with that vast amphitheatre which still exhibited the pioneer efforts of the early settlers. It was this trail that Aristides took that Sunday afternoon, and which he followed until he reached the hillside a few rods below the yawning fissure of Smith’s Pocket. After a careful examination of the vicinity, he cleared away the underbrush beside a fallen pine that lay near, and sat down in the attitude of patient and deliberate expectancy.

Five minutes passed—ten, twenty—and finally a half-hour was gone. Aristides threw away his cigar, which he had lacked determination to light, and peeled small slips from the inner bark of the pine-tree, and munched them gravely. Another five, ten, and twenty minutes passed, and the sun began to drop below the opposite hillside. Another ten minutes, and the whole of the amphitheatre above was in heavy shadow. Ten minutes more, and the distant windows in the settlement flamed redly. Five minutes, and the spire of the Methodist church caught the glow—and then the underbrush crackled.

Aristides, looking up, saw the trunk of the prostrate pine slowly lifting itself before him.

A second glance showed the fearless and self-possessed boy that the apparent phenomenon was simply and easily explained. The tree had fallen midway and at right angles across the trunk of another prostrate monarch. So accurately and evenly was it balanced that the child was satisfied, from a liberal experience of the application of these principles to the game of “seesaw,” that a very slight impulse to either end was sufficient to destroy the equilibrium. That impulse proceeded from his end of the tree, as he saw when the uplifted trunk disclosed an opening in the ground beneath it, and the head and shoulders of a man emerging therefrom.

Aristides threw himself noiselessly on his stomach. The thick clump of an azalea hid him from view, though it did not obstruct his survey of the stranger, whom he at once recognized as his former enemy,—the man with the red handkerchief,—the hopeful prospector of Red Mountain, and the hypothetical “Dusenberry” of the stage-driver.

The stranger looked cautiously round, and Aristides shrank close behind the friendly azalea.

Satisfied that he was unobserved, the subterranean proprietor returned to the opening and descended, reappearing with a worn black enameled traveling-bag which he carried with difficulty. This he again enveloped in a blanket and strapped tightly on his back, and a long-handled shovel, brought up from the same mysterious storehouse, completed his outfit. As he stood for a moment leaning on the shovel, it was the figure of the hopeful prospector in the heart of the forest. A very slight effort was sufficient to replace the fallen tree in its former position. Raising the shovel to his shoulder, he moved away, brushing against the azalea bush which hid the breathless Aristides. The sound of his footsteps retreating through the crackling brush presently died out, and a drowsy Sabbath stillness succeeded.

Aristides rose. There was a wonderful brightness in his gray eyes, and a flush on his sunburned cheek. Seizing a root of the fallen pine he essayed to move it. But it defied his endeavors. Aristides looked round.

“There’s some trick about it, but I’ll find it yet,” said that astute child. Breaking off the limb of a buckeye, he extemporized a lever. The first attempt failed. The second succeeded, and the long roots of the tree again, ascended. But as it required prolonged effort to keep the tree up, before the impetus was lost Aristides seized the opportunity to jump into the opening. At the same moment the tree slowly returned to its former position.

In the sudden change from the waning light to complete darkness, Aristides was for a moment confounded. Recovering himself, he drew a match from his capacious pocket, and striking it against the sole of his shoe, by the upspringing flash perceived a candle stuck in the crevices of the rock beside him. Lighting it, he glanced curiously around him. He was at the entrance of a long gallery at the further extremity of which he could faintly see the glimmering of the outer daylight. Following this gallery cautiously he presently came to an antechamber, and by the glimmering of the light above him at once saw that it was the same he had seen in his wonderful dream.

The antechamber was about fourteen feet square, with walls of decomposed quartz, mingling with flaky mica that reflected here and there the gleam of Aristides’s candle with a singular brilliancy. It did not need much observation on his part to determine the reason of the stranger’s lonely labors. On a rough rocker beside him were two fragments of ore taken from the adjacent wall, the smallest of which the two arms of Aristides could barely clasp. To his dazzled eyes they seemed to be almost entirely of pure gold. The great strike of ’56 at Ring Tail Canon had brought to the wonderful vision of Smith’s Pocket no such nuggets as were here.

Aristides turned to the wall again, which had been apparently the last scene of the stranger’s labors, and from which the two masses of ore were taken. Even to his inexperienced eye it represented a wealth almost incalculable. Through the loose, red soil everywhere glittering star points of the precious metal threw back the rays of his candle. Aristides turned pale and trembled.

Here was the realization of his most extravagant fancy. Ever since his strange dream and encounter with the stranger, he had felt an irresistible desire to follow up his adventure, and discover the secrets of the second cavern. But when he had returned to Smith’s Pocket, a few days after, the wreck of the fallen roof had blocked up that part of the opening from which he had caught sight of the hidden workman below. During his visit he had picked up from among the rubbish the memorandum book which had supplied M’liss with letter paper. Still haunting the locality after school hours, he had noticed that regularly at sunset the man with the red handkerchief appeared in some mysterious way from the hillside below Smith’s Pocket, and went away in the direction of the settlement. By careful watching, Aristides had fixed the location of his mysterious appearance to a point a few rods below the opening of Smith’s Pocket. Flushed by this discovery, he had been betrayed from his usual discretion so far as to intimate a hinting of the suspicion that possessed him in the few mysterious words he had whispered to M’liss at school. The accident we have described above determined the complete discovery of the secret.

Who was the stranger, and why did he keep the fact of this immense wealth hidden from the world? Suppose he, Aristides, were to tell? Wouldn’t the schoolboys look up at him with interest as the hero and discoverer of this wonderful cavern, and wouldn’t the stage-driver feel proud of his acquaintance and offer him rides for nothing?

Why hadn’t Smith discovered it—who was poor and wanted money, whom Aristides had liked, who was the father of M’liss, for whom Aristides confessed a secret passion, who belonged to the settlement and helped to build it up—instead of the stranger? Had Smith never a suspicion that gold was so near him, and if so, why had he killed himself? But did Smith kill himself? And at this thought and its correlative fancy, again the cheek of Aristides blanched, and the candle shook in his nerveless fingers.

Apart and distinct from these passing conjectures one idea remained firm and dominant in his mind: the man with the red handkerchief had no right to this treasure! The mysterious instinct which directed this judicial ruling of Aristides had settled this fact as indubitably as though proven by the weight of the strongest testimony. For an instant a wild thought sprang up in his heart, and he seized the nearest mass of ore with the half-formed intention of bearing it directly to the feet of M’liss as her just and due inheritance. But Aristides could not lift it, and the idea passed out of his mind with the frustrated action.

At the further end of the gallery a few blankets were lying, and with some mining implements, a kettle of water, a few worn flannel shirts, were the only articles which this subterranean habitation possessed. In turning over one of the blankets Aristides picked up a woman’s comb. It was a tortoise-shell, and bright with some fanciful ornamentation. Without a moment’s hesitation Aristides pocketed it as the natural property of M’liss. A pocketbook containing a few old letters in the breast pocket of one of the blue shirts was transferred to that of Aristides with the same coolness and sentiment of instinctive justice.

Aristides wisely reflected that these unimportant articles would excite no suspicion if found in his possession. A fragment of the rock, which, if he had taken it as he felt impelled, would have precipitated the discovery that Aristides had decided to put off until he had perfected a certain plan. The light from the opening above had gradually faded, and Aristides knew that night had fallen. To prevent suspicion he must return home. He reentered the gallery and reached the opening of the egress. One of the roots of the tree projected into the opening.

He seized it and endeavored to lift it, but in vain. Panting with exertion, he again and again exerted the fullest power of his active sinews, but the tree remained immovable—the opening remained sealed as firmly as with Solomon’s signet. Raising his candle towards it, Aristides saw the reason of its resistance. In his hurried ingress he had allowed the tree to revolve sufficiently to permit one of its roots to project into the opening, which held it firmly down. In the shock of the discovery the excitement which had sustained him gave way, and with a hopeless cry the just Aristides fell senseless on the floor of the gallery.

Chapter VI

THE TRIALS OF MRS. MORPHER

“Now, where on earth can that child be?” said Mrs. Morpher, shading her eyes with her hand, as she stood at the door of the “Mountain Ranch,” looking down the Wingdam road at sunset. “With his best things on; too. Goodness!—what were boys made for?”

Mr. Morpher, without replying to this question, apparently addressed to himself as an adult representative of the wayward species, appeared at the door, and endeavored to pour oil on the troubled waters.

“Oh, he’s all right, Sue! Don’t fuss about him,” said Mr. Morpher with an imbecile sense of conveying comfort in the emphasized pronoun. “He’s down the gulch, or in the tunnel, or over to the claim. He’ll turn up by bedtime. Don’t you worry about him. I’ll look him up in a minit,” and Mr. Morpher, taking his hat, sauntered down the road in the direction of the National Hotel.

Mrs. Morpher gazed doubtfully after her liege. “Looking up” Aristides, in her domestic experience, implied a prolonged absence in the bar-room of the hotel, the tedium whereof was beguiled by seven-up or euchre. But she only said: “Don’t be long, James,” and sighed hopelessly as she turned back into the house.

Once again within her own castle walls Mrs. Morpher dropped her look of patient suffering and glanced defiantly around for a fresh grievance.

The decorous little parlor offered nothing to provoke the hostility of her peculiar instincts. Spotless were the white curtains; the bright carpet guiltless of stain or dust. The chairs were placed arithmetically in twos, and added up evenly on the four sides with nothing to carry over. Two bunches of lavender and fennel breathed an odor of sanctified cleanliness through the room. Five daguerreotypes on the mantelpiece represented the Morpher family in the progressive stages of petrifaction, and had the Medusa-like effect of freezing visitors into similar attitudes in their chairs. The walls were further enlivened with two colored engravings of scenes in the domestic history of George Washington, in which the Father of his Country seemed to look blandly from his own correct family circle into Morpher’s, and to breathe quite audibly from his gilt frame a dignified blessing.

Lingering a moment in this sacred inclosure to readjust the tablecloth, Mrs. Morpher passed into the dining-room, where the correct Clytie presided at the supper-table, at which the rest of the family were seated. Mrs. Morpher’s quick eyes caught the spectacle of M’liss with her chin resting on her hands, and her elbows on the table, sardonically surveying the model of deportment opposite to her.

“M’liss!”

“Well?”

“Where’s your elbows?”

“Here’s one and there’s the other,” said M’liss quietly, indicating their respective localities by smartly tapping them with the palm of her hand.

“Take them off the table, instantly, you bold, forward girl—and you, sir, quit that giggling and eat your supper, if you don’t want to be put to bed without it!” added Mrs. Morpher to Lycurgus, to whom M’liss’s answer had afforded boundless satisfaction. “You’re getting to be just as bad as her, and mercy knows you never were a seraphim!”

“What’s a seraphim, mother, and what do they do?” asked Lycurgus, with growing interest.

“They don’t ask questions when they should be eating their supper, and thankful for it,” interposed Clytie, authoritatively, as one to whom the genteel attributes and social habits of the seraphim had been a privileged revelation.

“But, mother”—

“Hush—and don’t be a heathen—run and see who is coming in,” said Mrs. Morpher, as the sound of footsteps was heard in the passage.

The door opened and McSnagley entered.

“Why, bless my soul—how do you do?” said Mrs. Morpher, with genteel astonishment. “Quite a stranger, I declare.”

This was a polite fiction. M’liss knew the fact to be that Mrs. Morpher was reputed to “set the best table” in Smith’s Pocket, and McSnagley always called in on Sunday evenings at supper to discuss the current gossip, and “nag” M’liss with selected texts. The verbal McSnagley as usual couldn’t stop a moment—and just dropped in “in passin’.” The actual McSnagley deposited his hat in the corner, and placed himself, in the flesh, on a chair by the table.

“And how’s Brother James, and the fammerly?”

“They’re all well—except ‘Risty;’ he’s off again,—as if my life weren’t already pestered out with one child,” and Mrs. Morpher glanced significantly at M’liss.

“Ah, well, we all of us have our trials,” said McSnagley. “I’ve been ailin’ again. That ager must be in my bones still. I’ve been rather onsettled myself to-day.”

There was the appearance of truth in this statement; Mr. McSnagley’s voice had a hollow resonant sound, and his eyes were nervous and fidgety. He had an odd trick, too, of occasionally stopping in the middle of a sentence, and listening as though he heard some distant sound. These things, which Mrs. Morpher recalled afterwards, did not, in the undercurrent of uneasiness about Aristides which she felt the whole of that evening, so particularly attract her notice.

“I know something,” said Lycurgus, during one of these pauses, from the retirement of his corner.

“If you dare to—Kerg!” said M’liss.

“M’liss says she knows where Risty is, but she won’t tell,” said the lawgiver, not heeding the warning. The words were scarcely uttered before M’liss’s red hand flashed in the air and descended with a sounding box on the traitor’s ear. Lycurgus howled, Mrs. Morpher darted into the corner, and M’liss was dragged defiant and struggling to the light.

“Oh, you wicked, wicked child—why don’t you say where, if you know?” said Mrs. Morpher, shaking her, as if the information were to be dislodged from some concealed part of her clothing.

“I didn’t say I knew for sure,” at last responded M’liss. “I said I thought I knew.”

“Well, where do you think he is?”

But M’liss was firm. Even the gloomy picture of the future state devised by McSnagley could not alter her determination. Mrs. Morpher, who had a wholesome awe for this strange child, at last had recourse to entreaty. Finally M’liss offered a compromise.

“I’ll tell the master, but I won’t tell you—partikerly him,” said M’liss, indicating the parson with a bodkin-like dart of her forefinger.

Mrs. Morpher hesitated. Her maternal anxiety at length overcame her sense of dignity and discipline.

“Who knows where the master is, or where he is to be found to-night?” she asked hastily.

“He’s over to Dr. Duchesne’s,” said Clytie eagerly; “that is,” she stammered, a rich color suddenly flushing from her temples to her round shoulders, “he’s usually there in the evenings, I mean.”

“Run over, there’s a dear, and ask him to come here,” said Mrs. Morpher, without noticing a sudden irregularity of conduct in her firstborn. “Run quick!”

Clytie did not wait for a second command. Without availing herself of the proffered company of McSnagley she hastily tied the strings of her school hat under her plump chin, and slipped out of the house. It was not far to the doctor’s office, and Clytie walked quickly, overlooking in her haste and preoccupation the admiring glances which several of the swains of Smith’s Pocket cast after her as she passed. But on arriving at the doctor’s door, so out of breath and excited was this usual model of deportment that, on finding herself in the presence of the master and his friend, she only stood in embarrassed silence, and made up for her lack of verbal expression by a succession of eloquent blushes.

Let us look at her for a moment as she stands there. Her little straw hat, trimmed with cherry-colored ribbons, rests on the waves of her blonde hair. There are other gay ribbons on her light summer dress, clasping her round waist, girdling her wrist, and fastening her collar about her white throat. Her large blue eyes are very dark and moist—it may be with excitement or a tearful thought of the lost Aristides—or the tobacco smoke, with which I regret to say the room is highly charged. But certainly as she stands leaning against the doorway, biting her moist scarlet lip, and trying to pull down the broad brim of her hat over the surging waves of color that will beat rhythmically up to her cheeks and temples, she is so dangerously pretty that I am glad for the masters sake he is the philosopher he has just described himself to his friend the doctor, and that he prefers to study human physiology from the inner surfaces.

When Clytie had recovered herself sufficiently to state her message, the master offered to accompany her back. As Clytie took his arm with some slight trepidation Dr. Duchesne, who had taken sharp notes of these “febrile” symptoms, uttered a prolonged whistle and returned thoughtfully to his office.

Although Clytie found the distance returning no further than the distance going, with the exhaustion of her first journey it was natural that her homeward steps should be slower, and that the master should regulate his pace to accommodate her. It was natural, too, that her voice should be quite low and indistinct, so that the master was obliged to bring his hat nearer the cherry-colored ribbons in the course of conversation. It was also natural that he should offer the sensitive young girl such comfort as lay in tenderly modulated tones and playful epithets. And if in the irregularities of the main street it was necessary to take Clytie’s hand or to put his arm around her waist in helping her up declivities, that the master saw no impropriety in the act was evident from the fact that he did not remove his arm when the difficulty was surmounted. In this way Clytie’s return occupied some moments more than her going, and Mrs. Morpher was waiting anxiously at the door when the young people arrived. As the master entered the room, M’liss called him to her. “Bend down your head” she said, “and I’ll whisper. But mind, now, I don’t say I know for truth where Risty is, I only reckon.”

The master bent down his head. As usual in such cases, everybody else felt constrained to listen, and McSnagley’s curiosity was awakened to its fullest extent. When the master had received the required information, he said quietly:—

“I think I’ll go myself to this place which M’liss wishes to make a secret of and see if the boy is there. It will save trouble to any one else, if she should be mistaken.”

“Hadn’t you better take some one with you?” said Mrs. Morpher.

“By all means. I’ll go!” said Mr. McSnagley, with feverish alacrity.

The master looked inquiringly at M’liss.

“He can go if he wants to, but he’d better not,” said M’liss, looking directly into McSnagley’s eyes.

“What do you mean by that, you little savage?” said McSnagley quickly.

M’liss turned scornfully away. “Go,” she said,—“go if you want to,” and resumed her seat in the corner.

The master hesitated. But he could not withstand the appeal in the eyes of the mother and daughter, and after a short inward struggle he turned to McSnagley and bade him briefly “Come.”

When they had left the house and stood in the road together, McSnagley stopped.

“Where are you goin’?”

“To Smith’s Pocket.”

McSnagley still lingered. “Do you ever carry any weppings?” he at length asked.

“Weapons? No. What do you want with weapons to go a mile on a starlit road to a deserted claim. Nonsense, man, what are you thinking of? We’re hunting a lost child, not a runaway felon. Come along,” and the master dragged him away.

Mrs. Morpher watched them from the door until their figures were lost in the darkness. When she returned to the dining-room, Clytie had already retired to her room, and Mrs. Morpher, overruling M’liss’s desire to sit up until the master returned, bade her follow that correct example. “There’s Clytie, now, gone to bed like a young lady, and do you do like her,” and Mrs. Morpher, with this one drop of balm in the midst of her trials, trimmed the light and sat down in patience to wait for Aristides, and console herself with the reflection of Clytie’s excellence. “Poor Clytie!” mused that motherly woman; “how excited and worried she looks about her brother. I hope she’ll be able to get to sleep.”

It did not occur to Mrs. Morpher that there were seasons in the life of young girls when younger brothers ceased to become objects of extreme solicitude. It did not occur to her to go upstairs and see how her wish was likely to be gratified. It was well in her anxiety that she did not, and that the crowning trial of the day’s troubles was spared her then. For at that moment Clytie was lying on the bed where she had flung herself without undressing, the heavy masses of her blond hair tumbled about her neck, and her hot face buried in her hands.

Of what was the correct Clytie thinking?

She was thinking, lying there with her burning cheeks pressed against the pillow, that she loved the master! She was recalling step by step every incident that had occurred in their lonely walk. She was repeating to herself his facile sentences, wringing and twisting them to extract one drop to assuage the strange thirst that was growing up in her soul. She was thinking—silly Clytie!—that he had never appeared so kind before, and she was thinking—sillier Clytie!—that no one had ever before felt as she did then.

How soft and white his hands were! How sweet and gentle were the tones of his voice! How easily he spoke—so unlike her father, McSnagley, or the young men whom she met at church or on picnics! How tall and handsome he looked as he pressed her hand at the door! Did he press her hand, or was it a mistake? Yes, he must have pressed her hand, for she remembers now to have pressed his in return. And he put his arm around her waist once, and she feels it yet, and the strange perfume as he drew her closer to him. (Mem.—The master had been smoking. Poor Clytie!)

When she had reached this point she raised herself and sat up, and began the process of undressing, mechanically putting each article away in the precise, methodical habit of her former life. But she found herself soon sitting again on the bed, twisting her hair, which fell over her plump white shoulders, idly between her fingers, and patting the carpet with her small white foot. She had been sitting thus some minutes when she heard the sound of voices without, the trampling of many feet, and a loud rapping at the door below. She sprang to the door and looked out in the passage. Something white passed by her like a flash and crouched down at the head of the stairs. It was M’liss.

Mrs. Morpher opened the door.

“Is Mr. Morpher in?” said a half dozen strange, hoarse voices.

“No!”

“Where is he?”

“He’s at some of the saloons. Oh, tell me, has anything happened? Is it about Aristides? Where is he—is he safe?” said Mrs. Morpher, wringing her hands in agony.

“He’s all right,” said one of the men, with Mr. Morpher’s old emphasis; “but”—

“But what?”

M’liss moved slowly down the staircase, and Clytie from the passage above held her breath.

“There’s been a row down to Smith’s old Pocket—a fight—a man killed.”

“Who?” shouted M’liss from the stairs.

“McSnagley—shot dead.”

Chapter VII

THE PEOPLE vs. JOHN DOE WATERS. Before Chief Justice LYNCH.

The hurried statement of the messenger was corroborated in the streets that night. It was certain that McSnagley was killed. Smith’s Pocket, excited but skeptical, had seen the body, had put its fingers in the bullethole, and was satisfied. Smith’s Pocket, albeit hoarse with shouting and excitement, still discussed details with infinite relish in bar-rooms and saloons, and in the main street in clamorous knots that in front of the jail where the prisoner was confined seemed to swell into a mob. Smith’s Pocket, bearded, blue-shirted, and belligerent, crowding about this locality, from time to time uttered appeals to justice that swelled on the night wind, not unfrequently coupling these invocations with the name of that eminent jurist—Lynch.

Let not the simple reader suppose that the mere taking off of a fellow mortal had created this uproar. The tenure of life in Smith’s Pocket was vain and uncertain at the best, and as such philosophically accepted, and the blowing out of a brief candle here and there seldom left a permanent shadow with the survivors. In such instances, too, the victims had received their quietus from the hands of brother townsmen, socially, as it were, in broad day, in the open streets, and under other mitigating circumstances. Thus, when Judge Starbottle of Virginia and “French Pete” exchanged shots with each other across the plaza until their revolvers were exhausted, and the luckless Pete received a bullet through the lungs, half the town witnessed it, and were struck with the gallant and chivalrous bearing of these gentlemen, and to this day point with feelings of pride and admiration to the bulletholes in the door of the National Hotel, as they explain how narrow was the escape of the women in the parlor. But here was a man murdered at night, in a lonely place, and by a stranger—a man unknown to the saloons of Smith’s Pocket—a wretch who could not plead the excitement of monte or the delirium of whiskey as an excuse. No wonder that Smith’s Pocket surged with virtuous indignation beneath the windows of his prison, and clamored for his blood.

And as the crowd thickened and swayed to and fro, the story of his crime grew exaggerated by hurried and frequent repetition. Half a dozen speakers volunteered to give the details with an added horror to every sentence. How one of Morpher’s children had been missing for a week or more. How the schoolmaster and the parson were taking a walk that evening, and coming to Smith’s Pocket heard a faint voice from its depths which they recognized as belonging to the missing child. How they had succeeded in dragging him out and gathered from his infant lips the story of his incarceration by the murderer, Waters, and his enforced labors in the mine. How they were interrupted by the appearance of Waters, followed by a highly colored and epithet-illustrated account of the interview and quarrel. How Waters struck the schoolmaster, who returned the blow with a pick. How Waters thereupon drew a derringer and fired, missing the schoolmaster, but killing McSnagley behind him. How it was believed that Waters was one of Joaquin’s gang, that he had killed Smith, etc., etc. At each pause the crowd pushed and panted, stealthily creeping around the doors and windows of the jail like some strange beast of prey, until the climax was reached, and a hush fell, and two men were silently dispatched for a rope, and a critical examination was made of the limbs of a pine-tree in the vicinity.

The man to whom these incidents had the most terrible significance might have seemed the least concerned as he sat that night but a few feet removed from the eager crowd without, his hands lightly clasped together between his knees, and the expression on his face of one whose thoughts were far away. A candle stuck in a tin sconce on the wall flickered as the night wind blew freshly through a broken pane of the window. Its uncertain light revealed a low room whose cloth ceiling was stained and ragged, and from whose boarded walls the torn paper hung in strips; a lumber-room partitioned from the front office, which was occupied by a justice of the peace. If this temporary dungeon had an appearance of insecurity, there was some compensation in the spectacle of an armed sentinel who sat upon a straw mattress in the doorway, and another who patrolled the narrow hall which led to the street. That the prisoner was not placed in one of the cells in the floor below may have been owing to the fact that the law recognized his detention as only temporary, and while providing the two guards as a preventive against the egress of crime within, discreetly removed all unnecessary and provoking obstacles to the ingress of justice from without.

Since the prisoner’s arrest he had refused to answer any interrogatories. Since he had been placed in confinement he had not moved from his present attitude. The guard, finding all attempts at conversation fruitless, had fallen into a reverie, and regaled himself with pieces of straw plucked from the mattress. A mouse ran across the floor. The silence contrasted strangely with the hum of voices in the street.

The candle-light, falling across the prisoner’s forehead, showed the features which Smith’s Pocket knew and recognized as Waters, the strange prospector. Had M’liss or Aristides seen him then they would have missed that sinister expression which was part of their fearful remembrance. The hard, grim outlines of his mouth were relaxed, the broad shoulders were bent and contracted, the quick, searching eyes were fixed on vacancy. The strong man—physically strong only—was breaking up. The fist that might have felled an ox could do nothing more than separate its idle fingers with childishness of power and purpose. An hour longer in this condition, and the gallows would have claimed a figure scarcely less limp and impotent than that it was destined to ultimately reject.

He had been trying to collect his thoughts. Would they hang him? No, they must try him first, legally, and he could prove—he could prove—But what could he prove? For whenever he attempted to consider the uncertain chances of his escape, he found his thoughts straying wide of the question. It was of no use for him to clasp his fingers or knit his brows. Why did the recollection of a school-fellow, long since forgotten, blot out all the fierce and feverish memories of the night and the terrible certainty of the future? Why did the strips of paper hanging from the wall recall to him the pattern of a kite he had flown forty years ago. In a moment like this, when all his energies were required and all his cunning and tact would be called into service, could he think of nothing better than trying to match the torn paper on the wall, or to count the cracks in the floor? And an oath rose to his lips, but from very feebleness died away without expression.

Why had he ever come to Smith’s Pocket? If he had not been guided by that hell-cat, this would not have happened. What if he were to tell all he knew? What if he should accuse her? But would they be willing to give up the bird they had already caught? Yet he again found himself cursing his own treachery and cowardice, and this time an exclamation burst from his lips and attracted the attention of the guard.

“Hello, there! easy, old fellow; thar ain’t any good in that,” said the sentinel, looking up. “It’s a bad fix you’re in, sure, but rarin’ and pitchin’ won’t help things. ’T ain’t no use cussin’—leastways, ’t ain’t that kind o’ swearing that gets a chap out o’ here”, he added, with a conscientious reservation. “Now, ef I was in your place, I’d kinder reflect on my sins, and make my peace with God Almighty, for I tell you the looks o’ them people outside ain’t pleasant. You’re in the hands of the law, and the law will protect you as far as it can,—as far as two men can stand agin a hundred; sabe? That’s what’s the matter; and it’s as well that you knowed that now as any time.”

But the prisoner had relapsed into his old attitude, and was surveying the jailor with the same abstracted air as before. That individual resumed his seat on the mattress, and now lent his ear to a colloquy which seemed to be progressing at the foot of the stairs. Presently he was bailed by his brother turnkey from below.

“Oh, Bill,” said fidus Achates from the passage, with the usual Californian prefatory ejaculation.

“Well?”

“Here’s M’liss! Says she wants to come up. Shall I let her in?”

The subject of inquiry, however, settled the question of admission by darting past the guard below in this moment of preoccupation, and bounded up the stairs like a young fawn. The guards laughed.

“Now, then, my infant phenomenon,” said the one called Bill, as M’liss stood panting before him, “wot ’s up? and nextly, wot’s in that bottle?”

M’liss whisked the bottle which she held in her hand smartly under her apron, and said curtly, “Where’s him that killed the parson?”

“Yonder,” replied the man, indicating the abstracted figure with his hand. “Wot do you want with him? None o’ your tricks here, now,” he added threateningly.

“I want to see him!”

“Well, look! make the most of your time, and his too, for the matter of that; but mind, now, no nonsense, M’liss, he won’t stand it!” repeated the guard with an emphasis in the caution.

M’liss crossed the room, until opposite the prisoner. “Are you the chap that killed the parson?” she said, addressing the motionless figure.

Something in the tone of her voice startled the prisoner from the reverie. He raised his head and glanced quickly, and with his old sinister expression, at the child.

“What’s that to you?” he asked, with the grim lines setting about his mouth again, and the old harshness of his voice.

“Didn’t I tell you he wouldn’t stand any of your nonsense, M’liss?” said the guard testily.

M’liss only repeated her question.

“And what if I did kill him?” said the prisoner savagely; “what’s that to you, you young hell-cat? Guard!—damnation!—what do you let her come here for? Do you hear? Guard!” he screamed, rising in a transport of passion, “take her away! fling her downstairs! What the h—ll is she doing here?”

“If you was the man that killed McSnagley,” said M’liss, without heeding the interruption, “I’ve brought you something;” and she drew the bottle from under her apron and extended it to Waters, adding, “It’s brandy—Cognac—A1.”

“Take it away, and take yourself with it,” returned Waters, without abating his angry accents. “Take it away! do you hear?”

“Well, that’s what I call ongrateful, dog-gone my skin if it ain’t,” said the guard, who had been evidently struck with M’liss’s generosity. “Pass the licker this way, my beauty, and I’ll keep it till he changes his mind. He’s naturally a little flustered just now, but he’ll come round after you go.”

But M’liss didn’t accede to this change in the disposition of the gift, and was evidently taken aback by her reception and the refusal of the proffered comfort.

“Come, hand the bottle here!” repeated the guard. “It’s agin rules to bring the pris’ner anything, anyway, and it’s confiscated to the law. It’s agin the rules, too, to ask a pris’ner any question that’ll criminate him, and on the whole you’d better go, M’liss,” added the guard, to whom the appearance of the bottle had been the means of provoking a spasm of discipline.

But M’liss refused to make over the coveted treasure. Bill arose half jestingly and endeavored to get possession of the bottle. A struggle ensued, good-naturedly on the part of the guard, but characterized on the part of M’liss by that half-savage passion which any thwarted whim or instinct was sure to provoke in her nature. At last with a curse she freed herself from his grasp, and seizing the bottle by the neck aimed it with the full strength of her little arm fairly at his head. But he was quick enough to avert that important object, if not quick enough to save his shoulder from receiving the strength of the blow, which shattered the thin glass and poured the fiery contents of the bottle over his shirt and breast, saturating his clothes, and diffusing a sharp alcoholic odor through the room.

A forced laugh broke from his lips, as he sank back on the mattress, not without an underlying sense of awe at this savage girl who stood panting before him, and from whom he had just escaped a blow which might have been fatal. “It’s a pity to waste so much good licker,” he added, with affected carelessness, narrowly watching each movement of the young pythoness, whose rage was not yet abated.

“Come, M’liss,” he said at last, “we’ll say quits. You’ve lost your brandy, and I’ve got some of the pieces of yonder bottle sticking in my shoulder yet. I suppose brandy is good for bruises, though. Hand me the light!”

M’liss reached the candle from the sconce and held it by the guard as he turned back the collar of his shirt to lay bare his shoulder. “So,” he muttered, “black and blue; no bones broken, though no fault of yours, eh? my young cherub, if it wasn’t. There—why, what are you looking at in that way, M’liss, are you crazy?—Hell’s furies, don’t hold the light so near! What are you doing; Hell—ho, there! Help!”

Too late, for in an instant he was a sheet of living flame. When or how the candle had touched his garments, saturated with the inflammable fluid, Waters, the only inactive spectator in the room, could never afterward tell. He only knew that the combustion was instantaneous and complete, and before the cry had died from his lips, not only the guard, but the straw mattress on which he had been sitting, and the loose strips of paper hanging from the walls, and the torn cloth ceiling above were in flames.

“Help! Help! Fire! Fire!”

With a superhuman effort, M’liss dragged the prisoner past the blazing mattress, through the doorway into the passage, and drew the door, which opened outwardly, against him. The unhappy guard, still blazing like a funeral pyre, after wildly beating the air with his arms for a few seconds, dashed at the broken window, which gave way with his weight, and precipitated him, still flaming, into the yard below. A column of smoke and a licking tongue of flame leaped from the open window at the same moment, and the cry of fire was reechoed from a hundred voices in the street. But scarcely had M’liss closed the open door against Waters, when the guard from the doorway mounted the stairs in time to see a flaming figure leap from the window. The room was filled with smoke and fire. With an instinct of genius, M’liss, pointing to the open window, shouted hoarsely in his ear:—

“Waters has escaped!”

A cry of fury from the guard was echoed from the stairs, even now crowded by the excited mob, who feared the devastating element might still cheat them of their intended victim. In another moment the house was emptied, and the front street deserted, as the people rushed to the rear of the jail—climbing fences and stumbling over ditches in pursuit of the imagined runaway. M’liss seized the hat and coat of the luckless “Bill,” and dragging the prisoner from his place of concealment hurriedly equipped him, and hastened through the blinding smoke of the staircase boldly on the heels of the retiring crowd. Once in the friendly darkness of the street, it was easy to mingle with the pushing throng until an alley crossing at right angles enabled them to leave the main thoroughfare. A few moments’ rapid flight, and the outskirts of the town were reached, the tall pines opened their abysmal aisles to the fugitives, and M’liss paused with her companion. Until daybreak, at least, here they were safe!

From the time they had quitted the burning room to that moment, Waters had passed into his listless, abstracted condition, so helpless and feeble that he retained the grasp of M’liss’s hand more through some instinctive prompting rather than the dictates of reason. M’liss had found it necessary to almost drag him from the main street and the hurrying crowd, which seemed to exercise a strange fascination over his bewildered senses. And now he sat down passively beside her, and seemed to submit to the guidance of her superior nature.

“You’re safe enough now till daylight,” said M’liss, when she had recovered her breath, “but you must make the best time you can through these woods to-night, keeping the wind to your back, until you come to the Wingdam road. There! do you hear?” said M’liss, a little vexed at her companion’s apathy.

Waters released the hand of M’liss, and commenced mechanically to button his coat around his chest with fumbling, purposeless fingers. He then passed his hand across his forehead as if to clear his confused and bewildered brain; all this, however, to no better result than to apparently root his feet to the soil and to intensify the stupefaction which seemed to be creeping over him.

“Be quick, now! You’ve no time to lose! Keep straight on through the woods until you see the stars again before you, and you’re on the other side of the ridge. What are you waiting for?” And M’liss stamped her little foot impatiently.

An idea which had been struggling for expression at last seemed to dawn in his eyes. Something like a simpering blush crept over his face as he fumbled in his pocket. At last, drawing forth a twenty-dollar piece, he bashfully offered it to M’liss. In a twinkling the extended arm was stricken up, and the bright coin flew high in the air, and disappeared in the darkness.

“Keep your money! I don’t want it. Don’t do that again!” said M’liss, highly excited, “or I’ll—I’ll—bite you!”

Her wicked little white teeth flashed ominously as she said it.

“Get off while you can. Look!” she added, pointing to a column of flame shooting up above the straggling mass of buildings in the village, “the jail is burning; and if that goes, the block will go with it. Before morning these woods will be filled with people. Save yourself while you can!”

Waters turned and moved away in the darkness. “Keep straight on, and don’t waste a moment,” urged the child, as the man seemed still disposed to linger. “Trot now!” and in another moment he seemed to melt into the forest depths.

M’liss threw her apron around her head, and coiled herself up at the root of a tree in something of her old fashion. She had prophesied truly of the probable extent of the fire. The fresh wind, whirling the sparks over the little settlement, had already fanned the single flame into the broad sheet which now glowed fiercely, defining the main street along its entire length. The breeze which fanned her cheek bore the crash of falling timbers and the shouts of terrified and anxious men. There were no engines in Smith’s Pocket, and the contest was unequal. Nothing but a change of wind could save the doomed settlement.

The red glow lit up the dark cheek of M’liss and kindled a savage light in her black eyes. Relieved by the background of the sombre woods, she might have been a red-handed Nemesis looking over the city of Vengeance. As the long tongues of flame licked the broad colonnade of the National Hotel, and shot a wreathing pillar of fire and smoke high into the air, M’liss extended her tiny fist and shook it at the burning building with an inspiration that at the moment seemed to transfigure her.

So the night wore away until the first red bars of morning light gleamed beyond the hill, and seemed to emulate the dying embers of the devastated settlement. M’liss for the first time began to think of the home she had quitted the night before, and looked with some anxiety in the direction of “Mountain Ranch.” Its white walls and little orchard were untouched, and looked peacefully over the blackened and deserted village. M’liss rose, and, stretching her cramped limbs, walked briskly toward the town. She had proceeded but a short distance when she heard the sound of cautious and hesitating footsteps behind her, and, facing quickly about, encountered the figure of Waters.

“Are you drunk?” said M’liss passionately, “or what do you mean by this nonsense?”

The man approached her with a strange smile on his face, rubbing his hands together, and shivering as with cold. When he had reached her side he attempted to take her hand. M’liss shrank away from him with an expression of disgust.

“What are you doing here again?” she demanded.

“I want to go with you. It’s dark in there,” he said, motioning to the wood he had just quitted, “and I don’t like to be alone. You’ll let me be with you, won’t you? I won’t be any trouble;” and a feeble smile flickered on his lips.

M’liss darted a quick look into his face. The grim outlines of his mouth were relaxed, and his lips moved again impotently. But his eyes were bright and open,—bright with a look that was new to M’liss—that imparted a strange softness and melancholy to his features,—the incipient gleam of insanity!

Chapter VIII

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER—EXPLANATORY

If I remember rightly, in one of the admirable tragedies of Tsien Tsiang at a certain culminating point of interest an innocent person is about to be sacrificed. The knife is raised and the victim meekly awaits the stroke. At this moment the author of the play appears on the stage, and, delivering an excellent philosophical dissertation on the merits of the “situation,” shows that by the purest principles of art the sacrifice is necessary, but at the same time offers to the audience the privilege of changing the denouement. Such, however, is the nice aesthetic sense of a Chinese auditory, and so universal the desire of bloodshed in the heathen breast, that invariably at each representation of this remarkable tragedy the cause of humanity gives way to the principles of art.

I offer this precedent as an excuse for digressing at a moment when I have burned down a small settlement, dispatched a fellow being, and left my heroine alone in the company of an escaped convict who has just developed insanity as a new social quality. My object in thus digressing is to confer with the reader in regard to the evolution of this story,—a familiarity not without precedent, as I might prove from most of the old Greek comedies, whose parabasis permits the poet to mingle freely with the dramatis personae, to address the audience and descant at length in regard to himself, his play, and his own merits.

The fact is that, during the progress of this story, I have received many suggestions from intimate friends in regard to its incidents and construction. I have also been in the receipt of correspondence from distant readers, one letter of which I recall signed by an “Honest Miner,” who advises me to “do the right thing by M’liss,” or intimates somewhat obscurely that he will “bust my crust for me,” which, though complimentary in its abstract expression of interest, and implying a taste for euphonism, evinces an innate coarseness which I fear may blunt his perceptions of delicate shades and Greek outlines.

Again, the practical nature of Californians and their familiarity with scenes and incidents which would be novel to other people have occasioned me great uneasiness. In the course of the last three chapters of M’liss I have received some twenty or thirty communications from different parts of the State corroborating incidents of my story, which I solemnly assure the reader is purely fictitious. Some one has lately sent me a copy of an interior paper containing an old obituary of Smith of Smith’s Pocket. Another correspondent writes to me that he was acquainted with the schoolmaster in the fall of ’49, and that they “grubbed together.” The editors of the serial in which this story appears assure me that they have received an advertisement from the landlord of the “National Hotel” contingent upon an editorial notice of its having been at one time the abode of M’liss; while an aunt of the heroine, alluding in excellent terms to the reformed character of her niece M’liss, clenches her sincerity by requesting the loan of twenty dollars to buy clothes for the desolate orphan.

Under these circumstances I have hesitated to go on. What were the bodiless creatures of my fancy—the pale phantoms of thought, evoked in the solitude of my chamber, and sometimes even midst the hum of busy streets—have suddenly grown into flesh and blood, living people, protected by the laws of society, and having their legal right to actions for slander in any court. Worse than that, I have sometimes thought with terror of the new responsibility which might attach to my development of their characters. What if I were obliged to support and protect these Frankenstein monsters? What if the original of the principal villain of my story should feel impelled through aesthetic principles of art to work out in real life the supposititious denouement I have sketched for him?

I have therefore concluded to lay aside my pen for this week, leaving the catastrophe impending, and await the suggestion of my correspondents. I do so the more cheerfully as it enables the editors of this weekly to publish twenty-seven more columns of Miss Braddon’s “Outcasts of Society” and the remainder of the “Duke’s Motto,”—two works which in the quiet simplicity of their home-like pictures and household incidents are attended with none of the difficulties which beset my unhappy story.

Chapter IX

CLEANING UP

As the master, wan-eyed and unrefreshed by slumber, strayed the next morning among the blackened ruins of the fire, he was conscious of having undergone some strange revulsion of sentiment. What he remembered of the last evening’s events, though feverish and indistinct as a dream, and though, like a dream, without coherency or connected outline, had nevertheless seriously impressed him. How frivolous and trifling his past life and its pursuits looked through the lightning vista opened to his eyes by the flash of Waters’s pistol! “Suppose I had been killed,” ruminated the master, “what then? A paragraph in the ‘Banner,’ headed ‘Fatal Affray,’ and my name added to the already swollen list of victims to lawless violence and crime! Humph! A pretty scrape, truly!” And the master ground his teeth with vexation.

Let not the reader judge him too hastily. In the best regulated mind, thankfulness for deliverance from danger is apt to be mingled with some doubts as to the necessity of the trial.

In this frame of mind the last person he would have cared to meet was Clytie. That young woman’s evil genius, however, led her to pass the burnt district that morning. Perhaps she had anticipated the meeting. At all events, he had proceeded but a few steps before he was confronted by the identical round hat and cherry colored ribbons. But in his present humor the cheerful color somehow reminded him of the fire and of a ruddy stain over McSnagley’s heart, and invested the innocent Clytie with a figurative significance. Now Clytie’s reveries at that moment were pleasant, if the brightness of her eyes and the freshened color on her cheeks were any sign, and, as she had not seen the master since then, she naturally expected to take up the thread of romance where it had been dropped. But it required all her feminine tact to conceal her embarrassment at his formal greeting and constrained manner.

“He is bashful,” reasoned Clytie to herself.

“This girl is a tremendous fool,” growled the master inwardly.

An awkward pause ensued. Finally, Clytie loquitur:—

“M’liss has been missing since the fire!”

“Missing?” echoed the master in his natural tone.

Clytie bit her lip with vexation. “Yes, she’s always running away. She’ll be back again. But you look interested. Do you know,” she continued with exceeding archness, “I sometimes think, Mr. Gray, if M’liss were a little older”—

“Well?”

“Well, putting this and that together, you know!”

“Well?”

“People will talk, you know,” continued Clytie, with that excessive fondness weak people exhibit in enveloping in mystery the commonest affairs of life.

“People are d——d fools!” roared the master.

The correct Clytie was a little shocked. Perhaps underneath it was a secret admiration of the transgressor. Force even of this cheap quality goes a good way with some natures.

“That is,” continued the master, with an increase of dignity in inverse proportion to the lapse he had made, “people are apt to be mistaken, Miss Morpher, and without meaning it, to do infinite injustice to their fellow mortals. But I see I am detaining you. I will try and find Melissa. I wish you good-morning.” And Don Whiskerandos stalked solemnly away.

Clytie turned red and white by turns, and her eyes filled with tears. This denouement to her dreams was utterly unexpected. While a girl of stronger character and active intelligence would have employed the time in digesting plans of future retaliation and revenge, Clytie’s dull brain and placid nature were utterly perplexed and shaken.

“Dear me!” said Clytie to herself, as she started home, “if he don’t love me, why don’t he say so?”

The master, or Mr. Gray, as we may now call him as he draws near the close of his professional career, took the old trail through the forest, which led to M’liss’s former hiding-place. He walked on briskly, revolving in his mind the feasibility of leaving Smith’s Pocket. The late disaster, which would affect the prosperity of the settlement for some time to come, offered an excuse to him to give up his situation. On searching his pockets he found his present capital to amount to ten dollars. This increased by forty dollars, due him from the trustees, would make fifty dollars; deduct thirty dollars for liabilities, and he would have twenty dollars left to begin the world anew. Youth and hope added an indefinite number of ciphers to the right hand of these figures, and in this sanguine mood our young Alnaschar walked on until he had reached the old pine throne in the bank of the forest. M’liss was not there. He sat down on the trunk of the tree, and for a few moments gave himself up to the associations it suggested. What would become of M’liss after he was gone? But he quickly dropped the subject as one too visionary and sentimental for his then fiercely practical consideration, and, to prevent the recurrence of such distracting fancies, began to retrace his steps toward the settlement. At the edge of the woods, at a point where the trail forked toward the old site of Smith’s Pocket, he saw M’liss coming toward him. Her ordinary pace on such occasions was a kind of Indian trot; to his surprise she was walking slowly, with her apron thrown over her head,—an indication of meditation with M’liss and the usual way in which she excluded the outer world in studying her lessons. When she was within a few feet of him he called her by name. She started as she recognized him. There was a shade of seriousness in her dark eyes, and the hand that took his was listless and totally unlike her old frank, energetic grasp.

“You look worried, M’liss,” said Mr. Gray soothingly, as the old sentimental feeling crept over his heart. “What’s the matter now?”

M’liss replied by seating herself on the bank beside the road, and pointed to a place by her side. Mr. Gray took the proffered seat. M’liss then, fixing her eyes on some distant part of the view, remained for some moments in silence. Then, without turning her head or moving her eyes, she asked:—

“What’s that they call a girl that has money left her?”

“An heiress, M’liss?”

“Yes, an heiress.”

“Well?” said Mr. Gray.

“Well,” said M’liss, without moving her eyes, “I’m one,—I’m a heiress!”

“What’s that, M’liss?” said Mr. Gray laughingly.

M’liss was silent again. Suddenly turning her eyes full upon him, she said:—

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gray, beginning to be impressed by the child’s manner. “Listen, then.”

In short quick sentences, M’liss began. How Aristides had several times hinted of the concealed riches of Smith’s Pocket. How he had last night repeated the story to her of a strange discovery he had made. How she remembered to have heard her father often swear that there was money “in that hole,” if he only had means to work it. How, partly impressed by this statement and partly from curiosity and pity for the prisoner, she had visited him in confinement. An account of her interview, the origin of the fire, her flight with Waters. (Questions by Mr. Gray: What was your object in assisting this man to escape? Ans. They were going to kill him. Ques. Hadn’t he killed McSnagley. Ans. Yes, but McSnagley ought to have been killed long ago.) How she had taken leave of him that morning. How he had come back again “silly.” How she had dragged him on toward the Wingdam road, and how he had told her that all the hidden wealth of Smith’s Pocket had belonged to her father. How she had found out, from some questions, that he had known her father. But how all his other answers were “silly.”

“And where is he now?” asked Mr. Gray.

“Gone,” said M’liss. “I left him at the edge of the wood to go back and get some provisions, and when I returned he was gone. If he had any senses left, he’s miles away by this time. When he was off I went back to Smith’s Pocket. I found the hidden opening and saw the gold.”

Mr. Gray looked at her curiously. He had, in his more intimate knowledge of her character, noticed the unconcern with which she spoke of the circumstances of her father’s death and the total lack of any sentiment of filial regard. The idea that this man whom she had aided in escaping had ever done her injury had not apparently entered her mind, nor did Mr. Gray think it necessary to hint the deeper suspicion he had gathered from Dr. Duchesne that Waters had murdered her father. If the story of the concealed treasures of Smith’s Pocket were exaggerated he could easily satisfy himself on that point. M’liss met his suggestion to return to the Pocket with alacrity, and the two started away in that direction.

It was late in the afternoon when Mr. Gray returned. His heightened color and eager inquiry for Dr. Duchesne provoked the usual hope from the people that he met “that it was nothing serious.” No, nothing was the matter, the master answered with a slight laugh, but would they send the doctor to his schoolhouse when he returned? “That young chap’s worse than he thinks,” was one sympathizing suggestion; “this kind of life’s too rough for his sort.”

To while away the interim, Mr. Gray stopped on his way to the schoolhouse at the stage office as the Wingdam stage drew up and disgorged its passengers. He was listlessly watching the passengers as they descended when a soft voice from the window addressed him, “May I trouble you for your arm as I get down?” Mr. Gray looked up. It was a singular request, as the driver was at that moment standing by the door, apparently for that purpose. But the request came from a handsome woman, and with a bow the young man stepped to the door. The lady laid her hand lightly on his arm, sprang from the stage with a dexterity that showed the service to have been merely ceremonious, thanked him with an elaboration of acknowledgment which seemed equally gratuitous, and disappeared in the office.

“That’s what I call a dead set,” said the driver, drawing a long breath, as he turned to Mr. Gray, who stood in some embarrassment. “Do you know her?”

“No,” said Mr. Gray laughingly, “do you?”

“Nary time! But take care of yourself, young man; she’s after you, sure!”

But Mr. Gray was continuing his walk to the schoolhouse, unmindful of the caution. For the momentary glimpse he had caught of this woman’s face, she appeared to be about thirty. Her dress, though tasteful and elegant, in the present condition of California society afforded no criterion of her social status. But the figure of Dr. Duchesne waiting for him at the schoolhouse door just then usurped the place of all others, and she dropped out of his mind.

“Now then,” said the doctor, as the young man grasped his hand, “you want me to tell you why your eyes are bloodshot, why your cheeks burn, and your hand is dry and hot?”

“Not exactly! Perhaps you’ll understand the symptoms better when you’ve heard my story. Sit down here and listen.”

The doctor took the proffered seat on top of a desk, and Mr. Gray, after assuring himself that they were entirely alone, related the circumstances he had gathered from M’liss that morning.

“You see, doctor, how unjust were your surmises in regard to this girl,” continued Mr. Gray. “But let that pass now. At the conclusion of her story, I offered to go with her to this Ali Baba cave. It was no easy job finding the concealed entrance, but I found it at last, and ample corroboration of every item of this wild story. The pocket is rich with the most valuable ore. It has evidently been worked for some time since the discovery was made, but there is still a fortune in its walls, and several thousand dollars of ore sacked up in its galleries. Look at that!” continued Mr. Gray, as he drew an oblong mass of quartz and metal from his pocket. “Think of a secret of this kind having been intrusted for three weeks to a penniless orphan girl of twelve and an eccentric schoolboy of ten, and undivulged except when a proper occasion offered.”

Dr. Duchesne smiled. “And Waters is really clear?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gray.

“And M’liss assisted him to escape?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you are an innocent one! And you see nothing in this but an act of thoughtless generosity? No assisting of an old accomplice to escape?”

“I see nothing but truth in her statement,” returned Mr. Gray stoutly. “If there has been any wrong committed, I believe her to be innocent of its knowledge.”

“Well, I’m glad at least the money goes to her and not to him. But how are you to establish her right to this property?”

“That was my object in conferring with you. At present the claim is abandoned. I have taken up the ground in my own name (for her), and this afternoon I posted up the usual notice.”

“Go on. You are not so much of a fool, after all.”

“Thank you! This will hold until a better claim is established. Now, if Smith had discovered this lead, and was, as the lawyers say, ‘seized and possessed’ of it at the time of his death, M’liss, of course, as next of kin, inherits it.”

“But how can this be proved? It is the general belief that Smith committed suicide through extreme poverty and destitution.”

Mr. Gray drew a letter from his pocket.

“You remember the memorandum I showed you, which came into my possession. Here it is; it is dated the day of his death.”

Dr. Duchesne took it and read:—

“July 17th. Five hours in drift—dipping west. Took out 20 oz.—cleaned up 40 oz.—Mem. Saw M. S.”

“This evidently refers to actual labor in the mine at the time,” said Dr. Duchesne. “But is it legally sufficient to support a claim of this magnitude? That is the only question now. You say this paper was the leaf of an old memorandum, torn off and used for a letter by M’liss; do you know where the orignal book can be found?”

“Aristides has it, or knows where it is,” answered Mr. Gray.

“Find it by all means. And get legal advice before you do anything. Go this very evening to Judge Plunkett and state your case to him. The promise of a handsome contingent fee won’t hurt M’liss’s prospects any. Remember, our ideas of abstract justice and the letter of the law in this case may be entirely different. Take Judge Plunkett your proofs; that is,” said the Doctor, stopping and eying his friend keenly, “if you have no fears for M’liss if this matter should be thoroughly ventilated.”

Mr. Gray did not falter.

“I go at once,” said he gayly, “if only to prove the child’s claim to a good name if we fail in getting her property.”

The two men left the schoolhouse together. As they reached the main street, the doctor paused:—

“You are still determined?”

“I am,” responded the young man.

“Good-night, and God speed you, then,” and the doctor left him.

The fire had been particularly severe on the legal fraternity in the settlement, and Judge Plunkett’s office, together with those of his learned brethren, had been consumed with the courthouse on the previous night. The judge’s house was on the outskirts of the village, and thither Mr. Gray proceeded. The judge was at home, but engaged at that moment. Mr. Gray would wait, and was ushered into a small room evidently used as a kitchen, but just then littered with law books, bundles of papers, and blanks that had been hastily rescued from the burning building. The sideboard groaned with the weight of several volumes of New York Reports, that seemed to impart a dusty flavor to the adjoining victual. Mr. Gray picked up a volume of supreme court decisions from the coal-scuttle, and was deep in an interesting case, when the door of the adjoining room opened and Judge Plunkett appeared.

He was an oily man of about fifty, with spectacles. He was glad to see the schoolmaster. He hoped he was not suffering from the excitement of the previous evening. For his part, the spectacle of sober citizens rising in a body to vindicate the insulted majesty of the laws of society, and of man, had always something sublime in it. And the murderer had really got away after all. And it was a narrow escape the schoolmaster had, too, at Smith’s Pocket.

Mr. Gray took advantage of the digression to state his business. He briefly recounted the circumstances of the discovery of the hidden wealth of Smith’s Pocket, and exhibited the memorandum he had shown the doctor. When he had concluded, Judge Plunkett looked at him over his spectacles, and rubbed his hands with satisfaction.

“You apprehend,” said the judge eagerly, “that you will have no difficulty in procuring this book from which the leaf was originally torn?”

“None,” replied Mr. Gray.

“Then, sir, I should give as my professional opinion that the case was already won.”

Mr. Gray shook the hand of the little man with great fervor, and thanked him for his belief. “And so this property will go entirely to M’liss?” he asked again.

“Well—ah—no—not exactly,” said Judge Plunkett, with some caution. “She will benefit by it undoubtedly—undoubtedly,” and he rubbed his hands again.

“Why not M’liss alone? There are no other claimants!” said Mr. Gray.

“I beg your pardon—you mistake,” said Judge Plunkett, with a smile. “You surely would not leave out the widow and mother?”

“Why, M’liss is an orphan,” said Mr. Gray in utter bewilderment.

“A sad mistake, sir,—a painful though natural mistake. Mr. Smith, though separated from his wife, was never divorced. A very affecting history—the old story, you know—an injured and loving woman deserted by her natural protector, but disdaining to avail herself of our legal aid. By a singular coincidence that I should have told you, I am anticipating you in this very case. Your services, however, I feel will be invaluable. Your concern for her amiable and interesting daughter Narcissa—ah, no, Melissa—will, of course, make you with us. You have never seen Mrs. Smith? A fine-looking, noble woman, sir,—though still disconsolate,—still thinking of the departed one. By another singular coincidence that I should have told you, she is here now. You shall see her, sir. Pray, let me introduce you;” and still rubbing his hands, Judge Plunkett led the way to the adjoining room.

Mr. Gray followed him mechanically. A handsome woman rose from the sofa as they entered. It was the woman he assisted to alight from the Wingdam stage.

Chapter X

THE RED ROCK

In the strong light that fell upon her face, Mr. Gray had an opportunity to examine her features more closely. Her eyes, which were dark and singularly brilliant, were half closed, either from some peculiar conformation of the lids, or an habitual effort to conceal expression. Her skin was colorless with that satin-like lustre that belongs to some brunettes, relieved by one or two freckles that were scarcely blemishes. Her face was squared a little at the lower angles, but the chin was round and soft, and the curves about the mouth were full and tender enough to destroy the impression left by contemplation of those rigid outlines. The effect of its general contour was that of a handsome woman of thirty. In detail, as the eye dwelt upon any particular feature, you could have added a margin of ten years either way.

“Mrs. Smith—Mr. Gray,” said the lawyer briskly. “Mr. Gray is the gentleman who, since the decease of your husband, has taken such a benevolent interest in our playful Narcissa—Melissa, I should say. He is the preceptor of our district school, and beside his relation as teacher to your daughter has, I may say in our legal fashion, stood in loco parentis—in other words, has been a parent, a—a—father to her.”

At the conclusion of this speech Mrs. Smith darted a quick glance at Mr. Gray, which was unintelligible to any but a woman. As there were none of her own keen-witted sex present to make an ungracious interpretation of it, it passed unnoticed, except the slight embarrassment and confusion it caused the young man from its apparent gratuity.

“We have met before, I believe,” said Mrs. Smith, with her bright eyes half hid and her white teeth half disclosed. “I can easily imagine Mr. Gray’s devotion to a friend from his courtesy to a stranger. Let me thank you again for both my daughter and myself.”

In the desperate hope of saying something natural, Mr. Gray asked if she had seen Melissa yet.

“Oh, dear, no! Think how provoking! Judge Plunkett says it is absolutely impossible till some tiresome formalities are over. There are so many stupid forms to go through with first. But how is she? You have seen her, have you not? you will see her again to-night, perhaps? How I long to embrace her again! She was a mere baby when she left me. Tell her how I long to fly to her.”

Her impassioned utterance and the dramatic gestures that accompanied these words afforded a singular contrast to the cool way with which she rearranged the folds of her dress when she had finished, folding her hands over her lap and settling herself unmistakably back again on the sofa. Perhaps it was this that made Mr. Gray think she had, at some time, been an actress. But the next moment he caught her eye again and felt pleased,—and again vexed with himself for being so,—and in this mental condition began to speak in favor of his old pupil. His embarrassment passed away as he warmed with his subject, dwelling at length on M’liss’s better qualities, and did not return until in a breathless pause he became aware that this woman’s bright eyes were bent upon him. The color rose in his cheek, and with a half-muttered apology for his prolixity he offered his excuses to retire.

“Stay a moment, Mr. Gray,” said the lawyer. “You are going to town, and will not think it a trouble to see Mrs. Smith safely back to her hotel. You can talk these things over with our fair friend on the way. To-morrow, at ten, I trust to see you both again.”

“Perhaps I am taxing Mr. Gray’s gallantry too much,” interposed the lady with a very vivid disclosure of eyes and teeth. “Mr. Gray would be only too happy.” After he had uttered this civility, there was a slight consciousness of truth about it that embarrassed him again. But Mrs. Smith took his proffered arm, and they bade the lawyer good-night and passed out in the starlit night together.

Four weeks have elapsed since the advent of Mrs. Smith to the settlement,—four weeks that might have been years in any other but a California mining camp, for the wonderful change that has been wrought in its physical aspect. Each stage has brought its load of fresh adventurers; another hotel, which sprang up on the site of the National, has its new landlord, and a new set of faces about its hospitable board, where the conventional bean appears daily as a modest vegetable or in the insincerer form of coffee. The sawmills have been hard at work for the last month, and huge gaps appear in the circling files of redwood where the fallen trees are transmuted to a new style of existence in the damp sappy tenements that have risen over the burnt district. The “great strike” at Smith’s Pocket has been heralded abroad, and above and below, and on either side of the crumbling tunnel that bears that name, as other tunnels are piercing the bowels of the mountain, shafts are being sunk, and claims are taken up even to the crest of Red Mountain, in the hope of striking the great Smith lead. Already an animated discussion has sprung up in the columns of the “Red Mountain Banner” in regard to the direction of the famous lead,—a discussion assisted by correspondents who have assumed all the letters of the alphabet in their anonymous arguments, and have formed the opposing “angle” and “dip” factions of Smith’s Pocket. But whatever be the direction of the lead, the progress of the settlement has been steadily onward, with an impetus gained by the late disaster. That classical but much abused bird, the Phoenix, has been invoked from its ashes in several editorials in the “Banner,” to sit as a type of resuscitated Smith’s Pocket, while in the homelier phrase of an honest miner “it seemed as if the fire kem to kinder clean out things for a fresh start.”

Meanwhile the quasi-legal administration of the estate of Smith is drawing near a termination that seems to credit the prophetic assertion of Judge Plunkett. One fact has been evolved in the process of examination, viz., that Smith had discovered the new lead before he was murdered. It was a fair hypothesis that the man who assumed the benefit of his discovery was the murderer, but as this did not immediately involve the settlement of the estate it excited little comment or opposition. The probable murderer had escaped. Judicial investigations even in the hands of the people had been attended with disastrous public results, and there was no desire on the part of justice to open the case and deal with an abstract principle when there was no opportunity of making an individual example. The circumstances were being speedily forgotten in the new excitement; even the presence of Mrs. Smith lost its novelty. The “Banner,” when alluding to her husband, spoke of him as the “late J. Smith, Esq.,” attributing the present activity of business as the result of his lifelong example of untiring energy, and generally laid the foundation of a belief, which thereafter obtained, that he died comfortably in the bosom of his family, surrounded by disconsolate friends. The history of all pioneer settlements has this legendary basis, and M’liss may live to see the day when her father’s connection with the origin of the settlement shall become apocryphal, and contested like that of Romulus and Remus and their wolfish wet-nurse.

It is to the everlasting credit and honor of Smith’s Pocket that the orphan and widow meet no opposition from the speculative community, and that the claim’s utmost boundaries are liberally rendered. How far this circumstance may be owing to the rare personal attractions of the charming widow or to M’liss’s personal popularity, I shall not pretend to say. It is enough that when the brief of Judge Plunkett’s case is ready there are clouds of willing witnesses to substantiate and corroborate doubtful points to an extent that is more creditable to their generosity than their veracity.

M’liss has seen her mother. Mr. Gray, with his knowledge of his pupil’s impulsiveness, has been surprised to notice that the new relationship seems to awaken none of those emotions in the child’s nature that he confidently looked for. On the occasion of their first meeting, to which Mr. Gray was admitted, M’liss maintained a guarded shyness totally different from her usual frank boldness,—a shyness that was the more remarkable from its contrast with the unrepressed and somewhat dramatic emotions of Mrs. Smith. Now, under her mother’s protection and care, he observes another radical change in M’liss’s appearance. She is dressed more tastefully and neatly—not entirely the result of a mother’s influence, but apparently the result of some natural instinct now for the first time indulged, and exhibited in a ribbon or a piece of jewelry, worn with a certain air of consciousness. There is a more strict attention to the conventionalities of life; her speech is more careful and guarded; her walk, literally, more womanly and graceful. Those things Mr. Gray naturally attributes to the influence of the new relation, though he cannot help recalling his meeting with M’liss in the woods, on the morning of the fire, and of dating many of these changes from thence.

It is a pleasant morning, and Mr. Gray is stirring early. He has been busied in preparation the night previous, for this is his last day in Smith’s Pocket. He lingers for some time about the schoolhouse, gathering up those little trifles which lie about his desk, which have each a separate history in his experience of Smith’s Pocket, and are a part of the incrustations of his life. Lastly, a file of the “Red Mountain Banner,” is taken from the same receptacle and packed away in his bag. He walks to the door and turns to look back. Has he forgotten anything? No, nothing. But still he lingers. He wonders who will take his place at the desk, and for the first time in his pedagogue experience, perhaps, feels something of an awful responsibility as he thinks of his past influence over the wretched little beings who used to tremble at his nod, and whose future, ill or good, he may have helped to fashion. At last he closes the door, almost tenderly, and walks thoughtfully down the road. He has to pass the cabin of an Irish miner, whose little boy is toddling in the ditch, with a pinafore, hands, and face in a chronic state of untidiness. Mr. Gray seizes him with an hilarious impulse, and after a number of rapid journeys to Banbury Cross, in search of an old woman who mounted a mythical white horse, he kisses the cleanest place on his broad expanse of cheek, presses some silver into his chubby fist, tells him to be a good boy, and deposits him in the ditch again. Having in this youthful way atoned for certain sins of omission a little further back, he proceeds, with a sense of perfect absolution, on his way to the settlement.

A few hours lie between him and his departure, to be employed in friendly visits to Mrs. Morpher, Dr. Duchesne, M’liss, and her mother. The Mountain Ranch is nearest, and thither Mr. Gray goes first. Mrs. Morpher, over a kneading-trough, with her bare arm whitened with flour, is genuinely grieved at parting with the master, and, in spite of Mr. Gray’s earnest remonstrances, insists upon conducting him into the chill parlor, leaving him there until she shall have attired herself in a manner becoming to “company.” “I don’t want you to go at all—no more I don’t,” says Mrs. Morpher, with all sincerity, as she seats herself finally on the shining horsehair sofa. “The children will miss you. I don’t believe that any one will do for Risty, Kerg, and Clytie what you have done. But I suppose you know best what’s best. Young men like to see the world, and it ain’t expected one so young as you should settle down yet. That’s what I was telling Clytie this morning. That was just the way with my John afore he was married. I suppose you’ll see M’liss and her before you go. They say that she is going to San Francisco soon. Is it so?”

Mr. Gray understands the personal pronoun to refer to Mrs. Smith, a title Mrs. Morpher has never granted M’liss’s mother, for whom she entertains an instinctive dislike. He answers in the affirmative, however, with the consciousness of uneasiness under the inquiry; and as the answer does not seem to please Mrs. Morpher, he is constrained to commend M’liss’s manifest improvement under her mother’s care.

“Well” says Mrs. Morpher, with a significant sigh, “I hope it’s so; but bless us, where’s Clytie? You mustn’t go without saying ‘good-by’ to her” and Mrs. Morpher starts away in search of her daughter.

The dining-room door scarcely closes before the bedroom door opens, and Clytie crosses the parlor softly with something in her hands. “You are going now?” she says hurriedly.

“Yes.”

“Will you take this?” putting a sealed package into his hand, “and keep it without opening it until”—

“Until when, Clytie?”

“Until you are married.”

Mr. Gray laughs.

“Promise me,” repeats Clytie.

“But I may expire in the mean time, through sheer curiosity.”

“Promise!” says Clytie gravely.

“I promise, then.”

Mr. Gray receives the package. “Good-by,” says Clytie softly.

Clytie’s rosy cheek is very near Mr. Gray. There is nobody by. He is going away. It is the last time. He kisses her just before the door opens again to Mrs. Morpher.

Another shake of hands all around, and Mr. Gray passes out of the Mountain Ranch forever.

Dr. Duchesne’s office is near at hand; but for some reason, that Mr. Gray cannot entirely explain to himself, he prefers to go to Mrs. Smith’s first. The little cottage which they have taken temporarily is soon reached, and as the young man stands at the door he re-knots the bow of his cravat, and passes his fingers through his curls,—trifles that to Dr. Duchesne or any other critical, middle-aged person might look bad.

M’liss and Mrs. Smith are both at home. They have been waiting for him so long. Was it that pretty daughter of Mrs. Morpher—the fair young lady with blond curls,—who caused the detention? Is not Mr. Gray a sly young fellow for all his seeming frankness? So he must go to-day? He cannot possibly wait a few days, and go with them? Thus Mrs. Smith, between her red lips and white teeth, and under her half-closed eyes; for M’liss stands quietly apart without speaking. Her reserve during the interview contrasts with the vivacity of her mother as though they had changed respective places in relationship. Mr. Gray is troubled by this, and as he rises to go, he takes M’liss’s hand in his.

“Have you nothing to say to me before I go?” he asks.

“Good-by,” answers M’liss.

“Nothing more?”

“That’s enough,” rejoins the child simply.

Mr. Gray bites his lips. “I may never see you again, you know, Melissa,” he continues.

“You will see us again,” says M’liss quietly, raising her great dark eyes to his.

The blood mounted to his cheek and crimsoned his forehead. He was conscious, too, that the mother’s face had taken fire at his own, as she walked away toward the window.

“Good-by, then,” said Mr. Gray pettishly, as he stooped to kiss her.

M’liss accepted the salute stoically. Mr. Gray took Mrs. Smith’s hand; her face had resumed its colorless, satin-like sheen.

“M’liss knows the strength of your good will, and makes her calculations accordingly. I hope she may not be mistaken,” she said, with a languid tenderness of voice and eye. The young man bent over her outstretched hand, and withdrew as the Wingdam stage noisily rattled up before the National Hotel.

There was but little time left to spend with Dr. Duchesne, so the physician walked with him to the stage office. There were a few of the old settlers lounging by the stage, who had discerned, just as the master was going away, how much they liked him. Mr. Gray had gone through the customary bibulous formula of leave-taking; with a hearty shake of the doctor’s hand, and a promise to write, he climbed to the box of the stage. “All aboard!” cried the driver, and with a preliminary bound, the stage rolled down Main Street.

Mr. Gray remained buried in thought as they rolled through the town, each object in passing recalling some incident of his past experience. The stage had reached the outskirts of the settlement when he detected a well-known little figure running down a by-trail to intersect the road before the stage had passed. He called the driver’s attention to it, and as they drew up at the crossing Aristides’s short legs and well-known features were plainly discernible through the dust. He was holding in his hand a letter.

“Well, my little man, what is it?” said the driver impatiently.

“A letter for the master,” gasped the exhausted child.

“Give it here!—Any answer?”

“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Gray.

“Look sharp, then, and get your billet duxis before you go next time.”

Mr. Gray hurriedly broke the seal and read these words:

Judge Plunkett has just returned from the county seat. Our case is won. We leave here next week. J.S. P.S. Have you got my address in San Francisco?

“Any answer?” said the driver.

“None.”

“Get up!”

And the stage rolled away from Smith’s Pocket, leaving the just Aristides standing in the dust of its triumphal wheels.