Sterling looked mystified, but his companion laughed.
"Oh, is that it? Well, turn some water from the sand-box into the old flume and run it down to your new ditch until I get back. I presume the ownership won't affect the taste. It isn't necessary to say anything about it; that is, unless you think best." He looked toward Melissa doubtfully.
"M'lissy won't blab," returned her brother-in-law laconically.
The young girl blushed, in the security of her sunbonnet, at the attention which this delicately turned compliment drew upon her, and continued to make intaglios of her bare toes in the mud of the ditch.
It occurred to Sterling for the first time that she might represent a personality. He went around the other two men, who had fallen into some talk about the flume, and stood in the path beside her.
"I have not seen you since you were up the cañon," he said kindly. "I hope your arm did not pain you."
Melissa shook her head without looking up.
"It was only a scratch; it didn't even swell up. I never said nothin' about it," she added in a lower tone.
The young man entered into the situation with easy social grace, and lowered his own voice.
"You didn't want to alarm your mother"—
"M'lissy," interrupted Lysander, "I guess I'll go on up to the sand-box with Mr. Poindexter and turn on some water. I wish you'd go 'long down to the orchard andlook after the basins till I git back. I won't be gone but a minute."
Sterling lifted his hat with a winsome smile that seemed to illuminate the twilight of poor Melissa's wilted sunbonnet, and the three men started up the cañon, the bay that they pushed aside on the path sending back a sweet, spicy fragrance.
Melissa shouldered her hoe and proceeded homeward.
"He does act awful pullite," she mused, "an' he had on a ring: I didn't know men folks ever wore rings. I wish I hadn't 'a' been barefooted."
Poor Melissa! Sterling remembered nothing at all about her except a certain unconsciously graceful turn she had given her brown ankle as she stood pressing her bare foot in the sand.
On Sunday morning the Withrow establishment wore that air of inactivity which seems in some households intended to express a mild form of piety. Mother Withrow, it is true, had not yielded to the general weakness, and stood at the kitchentable scraping the frying-pan in a resounding way that might have interfered with the matin hymn of a weaker-lunged man than Lysander. That stentorian musician seemed rather to enjoy it, as giving him something definite to overcome vocally, and roared forth his determination to "gather at the river" from the porch, where he sat with his splint-bottomed chair tipped back, and his eyes closed in a seeming ecstasy of religious fervor.
Old Withrow sat on the step, with his chin in his hands, smoking, and two dove-colored hounds stood, in mantel-ornament attitude, before him, looking up with that vaguely expectant air which even a long life of disappointment fails to erase from the canine countenance. Five or six half-clad chickens, huddling together in the first strangeness of maternal desertion, were drinking from an Indian mortar under the hydrant, and mother Withrow, coming to the door to empty her dish-pan, stood a moment looking at them.
"That there hydrant's quit drippin' again," she said gruffly, turning toward the old man. "Them young ones turned it onto get a drink, and then turned it clear off. 'Pears to me they drink most o' the time. I'd think they come by it honestly, if 't wuzn't water. If you ain't too tired holdin' your head up with both hands, s'posin' you stir your stumps and turn it on a drop fer them chickens."
The old man got up with confused, vinous alacrity and started toward the hydrant.
"There's no need o' savin' water on this ranch," he blustered feebly, "I kin tell you that. You'd ought to go up to the spring and see what a good trade you made. I'm a-goin' myself by 'n' by. I knowed"—
He broke off abruptly, as the old woman threw the dish-water dangerously near him.
"If water's so plenty, some folks had ought to soak their heads," she retorted, disappearing through the door.
The old man regulated the hydrant somewhat unsteadily, and returned to a seat on the porch. Lysander's musical efforts had subsided to a not very exultant hum at the first mention of the water supply. Evidently his reflections on that subject were not conducive to religious enthusiasm.Old Withrow assumed a confidential attitude and touched his son-in-law on the knee.
"She's always so full of her prejudisms," he said, pointing toward the kitchen door with his thumb. "Now 'f she'd go 'long o' me up to the spring and see what a tremenjus flow o' water there is, she'd be pleased as Punch. Now wouldn't she?"
Lysander brought his chair to the floor with a bang that made the loose boards of the porch rattle.
"Come 'round the house, pap," he said anxiously.
The hounds followed, dejected, but hopeful, as became believers in special providence.
When the two men were out of hearing of the kitchen, Lysander took his father-in-law by the shoulders and shook him, as if by shaking down the loose contents of his brain he might make room for an idea.
"You want to shut up about the spring. It's give out,—dried up. The blastin' and diggin' in the cañon done it, I s'pose, an' Poindexter—that's the engineer—thinks Forrester'll make it all right; butyou don't want to be coaxin' the old woman up there, not if the court knows herself, and you want to keep your mouth purty ginerally shut. D' y' understand?"
The old man's face worked in a feeble effort at comprehension.
"Give out,—dried up? Oh, come now, Lysander," he faltered.
"Yes, dried up, and you want to do the same. Don't you think this 'ud be a purty good time fer you to take a trip off somer's fer your health, pap?"
The old man stood a moment wrestling with the hopelessness of the situation. Besotted as he was, he could still realize the calamity that had overtaken them: could realize it without the slightest ability to suggest a remedy. As the direfulness of it all crept over him, something very like anger gleamed through the blear of his faded eyes.
"I'm a-goin' to see," he muttered sullenly, turning toward the cañon. "Damn their blastin'! Forrester said it was a good trade. He'd ought to know."
A little later, Melissa started on her much dreamed of visit to the camp. Shehad on her shoes now, and a comfortable sense of the propriety of her appearance induced by this fact, and an excess of starch in the skirt of her pink calico dress, brought a little flush of expectation to her cheek. She had even looked longingly at her best hat in its glory of green and purple millinery, and nothing but the absence of any excuse to offer her mother and sister for such lavish personal adornment had saved her from this final touch to the pathetic discord of her attire.
The silk handkerchief was in her pocket, properly "done up" and wrapped in a bit of newspaper, and she had rehearsed her part in the dialogue that a flattered imagination assured her must ensue upon its presentation until she felt it hardly possible that she could blunder.
"Somehow you don't feel so bashful when you're all dressed up," she reflected, contemplating the angular obtrusiveness of her drapery with the satisfaction that fills the soul of the averagedébutante. "You feel so kind o' sheepish when you're barefooted and your dress is all slimpsy."
Poor Melissa! how could she know thatyesterday, in all the limp forlornness that had made her hang her head when Sterling spoke to her, she had been a part of the beauty of the cañon, while to-day, in all her pink and rigid glory, she was a garish spot of discordant color in the landscape? How, indeed, do any of us know that we are not at our worst in our most triumphant moments?
The camp was well-nigh deserted, that morning. Poindexter had gone to Santa Elena to consult his employer, and most of the workmen had preferred the convivial joys of the Mexican saloon at San Gabriel to the stillness of the cañon. Sterling had written a few letters after breakfast, and then, taking his rifle from the rack, sauntered along the little path that led from the camp to the tunnel. The Chinese cook was dexterously slipping the feathers from a clammy fowl at the door of the kitchen tent.
"Hello, John," the young man called cheerfully. "What for you cook chicken? I go catchee venison for dinner."
The Chinaman smiled indulgently. Evidently the deer hunts of the past had not been brilliantly successful.
"I fly one lit' chicken," he said composedly. "He no velly big. By 'm by you bling labbit, I fly him too."
"Rabbit!" laughed back the hunter contemptuously, breaking his rifle and peering into the breech to see that it was loaded. "I'll not waste a cartridge on a rabbit, John."
He lapsed from pigeon English with an ease that betokened a newcomer. The Chinaman looked after him pensively.
"Mist' Stellin' heap velly nice man," he said, with gentle condescension; "all same heno sabeshoot. By 'm by he come home, he heap likee my little flied looster."
He held his "little rooster" rigidly erect by its elongated legs, and patiently picked the pin-feathers from its back. He had finished this process, and, suspending it by one wing in an attitude of patient suffering, was singeing it with a blazing paper, when Melissa appeared.
"What you want, gell?" he demanded autocratically, noticing that she carried no pail.
"Where is the young man,—the tall one?" asked Melissa.
"Young man? Mist' Stellin'? He take 'im gun an' go catchee labbit."
He waved his torch in the direction of the path, and then dropped it on the ground and stamped it out with his queerly shod foot.
Melissa hesitated a moment. She could not risk the precious handkerchief in the hands of the cook. No one else was visible. Two or three workmen were sleeping in the large tent under the wild grapevine. She could hear them breathing in loud nasal discord. It was better to go on up the cañon, she persuaded herself with transparent logic.
"It's purty hard walkin' when you've got your shoes on," she said, justifying her course by its difficulties, with the touch of Puritanism that makes the whole theological world kin, "but if I give it to him myself I'll know he's got it."
She glanced in at the door of the engineer's tent, as she passed. The banjo was there, a point of dazzling light to her eyes, but otherwise the disorder was far from elegant; resulting chiefly from that reckless prodigality in head and foot gear which seems to be a phase of masculine culture.
"I don't see what they want of so many hats and shoes," commented Melissa. "I sh'd think they could go barefooted sometimes, to rest their feet; an' I didn't know folks' heads ever got tired." The thought recalled her own disappointment in the matter of millinery. She put her hand up to the broken rim of her hat. "I've a notion to take it off when I ketch up to him," she soliloquized. "I would if my hair wasn't so awful red."
Old Withrow had preceded his daughter, stumbling along the flume path, muttering sullenly. All his groundless elation had suddenly turned to equally groundless wrath. Having allied himself in a stupid, servile way with Forrester, he clung to the alliance and its feeble reflected glory with all the tenacity of ignorance. There were not many connected links of cause and effect in the old man's muddled brain, but the value of water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester.
"They're blastin', be they? Forrester never said nothin' 'bout blastin'. He'll give it to 'em when he knows it. He'll blast 'em!"
He staggered on past the cut-off that led to the camp, keeping well up on the bank along the path beside the ditch that Lysander had dug from Flutterwheel Spring. Once there, the sight of the ruin that had befallen his plans seemed to strike him dumb for a little. The slime still clung to the rocks, and a faint trickle of water oozed into the pool. He sat down a moment, mumbling sullen curses, and then staggered to his feet and wandered aimlessly up the cañon.
Sterling had idled along, crossing and recrossing the restless stream that appeared to be hurrying away from the quiet of the mountains. He was really not a very enthusiastic hunter, as the Chinaman had discovered. He liked the faint, sickening odor of the brakes and the honey-like scent of the wild immortelles that came in little warm gusts from the cliffs above far better than the smell of powder. He stopped where the men had been at work the day before,and looked about with that impartial criticism that always seems easier when nothing is being done.
Some idea must have suggested itself suddenly, for he hurried across to the opening of the tunnel and went in, leaving his rifle beside the entrance. When he turned to come out, he heard a sound of muttered curses, and in another instant he was confronted by the barrel of a gun in the hands of a man he had never seen,—a man with wandering, bloodshot eyes, which the change from the half-light of the tunnel's mouth magnified into those of an angry beast.
"You've been a-blastin', have ye, an' a-dryin' up other folks's springs? Damn ye, I'll blast ye!"
The old man was striving in vain to hold the rifle steadily, and fumbling with the lock. Sterling did not stop to note that the weapon was his own, and might easily be thrust aside. He did what most young men would have done—drew his revolver from his pocket and fired.
The report echoed up and down the cañon. By the time it died away life had changed for the younger man. Old Withrow hadfallen forward, still clutching the rifle, and was dead.
Melissa, standing among the sycamores below, had seen it all as a sudden, paralyzing vision. She stood still a brief, terrified instant, and then turned and ran down the cañon, keeping in the bed of the stream, and climbing over the boulders.
She was conscious of nothing but a wild dismay that she had seen it. She had a vague hope that she might run away from her own knowledge. The swift, unreasoning notion had lodged itself in her brain that it would be better if no one knew what had happened. Perhaps no one else need be told. She avoided the camp, scrambling through the chaparral on the opposite bank, and, reaching the flume path at last, hurried on breathlessly.
Suddenly Melissa stopped. It would not do to approach the house in that way. She must rest a little and cool her flushed face before any one should see her. She leaned against the timbers that supported the flume across the gully, and fanned herself with her hat. The tumult of her brain had not shaped itself into any plan. She onlywished she had not seen. It was such a dreadful thing to know, to tell. Insensibly she was preparing herself to dissemble. She was cooling her cheeks, and getting ready to saunter lazily toward the house and speak indifferently. She did not realize that after that she could not tell. There would be an instant in which to decide, and then a dreary stretch of dissimulation.
At this moment she heard the quick hoofbeats of a galloping horse on the road that led down the mountain-side. He was going away! Then certainly she must not speak. They would never find him, and she would keep the secret forever. She listened until the hoof-beats died away. The flush faded out of her poor little face, leaving it wan and hopeless. After all, it was a dreary thing for him to ride away, and leave her nothing but a dismal secret such as this. A shred of cloud drifted across the sun, and the cañon suddenly became a cold, cheerless place. She stepped into the path, and came face to face with Lysander.
"Have yuh seen anything of yer paw, M'lissy? Why, what ails yuh, child? Y'r as white as buttermilk. Has anything bit yuh?"
"No," faltered the girl, looking down at her wretched finery; "my shoes 'a' been a-hurtin' my feet. I'm goin' back to the house to take 'em off. I'm tired."
"I wish y'd set right down here and take off y'r shoes, M'lissy," said her brother-in-law anxiously. "We'll have to kind o' watch yer paw. I had to tell 'im about the spring, an' he struck off right away an' said he was goin' up there. I reckoned he'd go away an' furgit it, but he hain't come back yit. I'm afraid he'll git to talkin' when he comes back to the house, and tell yer maw. It won't do no good, an' there ain't no use in her workin' herself up red-headed about it,—'t enny rate not till Poindexter comes back. We must git hold o' yer paw before he gits to see her, and brace 'im up ag'in. If you'll set here an' call to me if you see 'im below, I'll go on up an' look fer 'im."
Melissa had stood quite still, looking down at the uncompromising lines of her drapery. It was rapidly becoming a pink blur to her gaze. The ghastliness of what she had undertaken to conceal came over her like a chill, insweeping fog. Sheshivered as she spoke, trying in vain to return Lysander's honest gaze.
"I'll come back an' set here when I've took off my shoes. You kin go on. I'll come in a minute."
Lysander looked into her face an instant as he started.
"The seam o' yer stockin' 's got over the j'int, M'lissy," he said kindly; "it's made you sick at yer stummick; y'r as white as taller."
Old Withrow entered his own house with dignity at last.
Strangely enough, when the spiritual and presumably the better part of us is gone, the world stands in awe of what remains. If the bleared eyes could have opened once more, and the dead man could have known that it was for fear of him the children were gathered in a whispering, awestricken group at the window, that respect for him caused the lowering of voices and baring of heads on the part of the household and curious neighbors, he would suddenly have found the world he had left a stranger place than any world to come.
There was no great pretense of grief. Mother Withrow looked at the dead face a while, supporting her elbow with one knotted hand, and grasping her weather-beaten jaw with the other. Perhaps her silence would have been the strangest feature of it all to him, if he could have known. If the years hid any romance that had been theirs, and was now hers, the old woman's face told no more of it than the flinty outside of a boulder tells of the leaf traced within.
"He wuzn't no great shakes of a man," she said to Minerva, "but I don't 'low to have him stood up an' shot at by any o' Nate Forrester's crowd without puttin' the law on the man that done it."
Lysander's attempt at concealment had melted away in the heat of the excitement occasioned by the murder. The drying up of the spring had been no secret in camp. The men who had carried Withrow's body to the house had talked of it unrebuked. Mother Withrow had heard them with a tightening of the muscles of her face and an increased angularity in her tall figure, but she had proudly refrained from the faintest manifestation of surprise. Nor had sheasked any questions of Minerva or Lysander. This unexpected reserve had been a great relief to the latter, who found himself not only released from an unpleasant duty, but saved from any reproaches for concealment.
The coroner had come up from Los Angeles, and there had been an inquest. Sterling had not been present, having ridden to Los Angeles to give himself up; but the men to whom he had told the story when he came to the camp had testified, and there had been a verdict that deceased came to his death from a wound made by a revolver in the hands of Frederick Sterling.
Some of the jury still hung about the place with cumbrous attempts at helpfulness, and Minerva moved tearfully to and fro in the kitchen, wearing her husband's hat with a reckless assumption of masculine rights and feminine privileges, while she set out a "bite of something" for the coroner, who must ride back to Los Angeles in hot haste.
Ulysses had denied himself the unwonted pleasure of listening longer to the men's whispered talk, to follow the stranger into the kitchen and watch him eat; his curiosity concerning the habits of that dignitary being considerably heightened by the official's haste, which pointed strongly to a rapid succession of murders requiring his personal attention, and marking him as a man of dark and bloody knowledge.
The hounds shared the boy's curiosity, and stood beside the table waving their scroll-like tails, and watching with expectant eagerness the unerring precision with which the stranger conveyed a knife-load of "frijoles" from his plate to his mouth. When he had finished his repast, gulping the last half-glass of buttermilk, and wiping the white beads from his overhanging mustache with quick horizontal sweeps of his gayly bordered handkerchief, he leaned back and flipped a bean at Ulysses, whose expression of intent and curious awe changed instantly to the most sheepish self-consciousness. The familiarity loosened his tongue, however, and he asked, with a little explosive gasp,—
"Do yuh think they'll ketch 'im?"
"Ketch who?"
"The man that shot gran'pap."
"They've got 'im now."
"Hev they? How'd they ketch 'im?"
"He gave himself up."
"Will they hang 'im?"
The coroner's eyes twinkled.
"Don't you think they'd ought to?"
"You bet!" Ulysses wagged his head with bloodthirsty vehemence.
The great man got up, laughing, and went toward the door, rubbing the boy's hair the wrong way as he passed him. The hounds followed languidly, and Ulysses darted up the creaking staircase, and tumbled into the little attic room where Melissa sat gazing drearily out of the window.
"They've got 'im!'" he said breathlessly. "They're a-go'n' to hang 'im!"
The girl got up and backed toward the wall, gasping and dizzy.
"Who said so?" she faltered.
"The man downstairs,—the one that came from Loss Anglus."
Melissa put the palms of her outstretched hands against the wall behind her to steady herself. In the half-light she seemed crowding away from some terror that confronted her.
"I don't believe it. They won't do anything to him right away; it wouldn't befair. They don't know what paw done. I"—
Her voice broke. She looked about piteously, biting her lip and trying to remember what she had said.
Ulysses was not a critical listener. He had enjoyed his little sensation, and was ready for another. From the talk downstairs he knew that Sterling had acknowledged the killing to the men at the camp. His excitement made him indifferent as to the source of Melissa's information.
"I'm go'n' to the hangin'," he said, doggedly boastful.
Melissa looked at him vacantly.
"How'd they find out who done it?" she asked, dropping her hands and turning toward the window.
"He told it hisself,—blabbed it right out to the men at the camp; then he went on down to Loss Anglus, big as life, an' blowed about it there. He's cheeky."
Melissa turned on him with a flash of contempt.
"You said they ketched him."
The boy felt his importance as the bearer of sensational tidings ebbing away.
"I don't care," he replied sullenly. "They'll hang 'im, anyway: the cor'ner said so."
He clutched his throat with his thumbs and forefingers, thrusting out his tongue and rolling his eyes in blood-curdling pantomime.
His companion turned away drearily. The boy's first words had called up a vaguely outlined picture of flight, pursuit, and capture, possibly violence. This faded away, leaving her brain numb under its burden of uncertainty and deceit. She had an aching consciousness of her own ignorance. Others knew what might happen to him, but she must not even ask. She shrank in terror from what her curiosity might betray. She must stand idly by and wait. Perhaps Lysander would know; if she could ask any one, she could ask Lysander. There had sprung up in her mind a shadowy, half-formed doubt concerning the wisdom of her silence. He had told it himself, Ulysses had said; and this had chilled the little glow at her heart that came from a sense of their common secret. If she could only see him and ask what he wouldhave her do; but that was impossible. Perhaps, if he knew she had seen it, he might say she must tell, even if—even if— She gave a little moan, and leaned her forehead against the sash. Below she could hear the subdued voices of the men, and the creaking of the kitchen floor as Minerva walked to and fro, putting away the remnants of the coroner's repast. Already the children were beginning to recover from their awestricken silence, and Melissa could see them darting in and out among the fig-trees, firing pantomimic revolvers at each other with loud vocal explosions.
The gap that the old man's death had made in the household was very slight indeed; not half the calamity that the drying up of the spring had been. Melissa acknowledged this to herself with the candor peculiar to the very wise and the very ignorant, who alone seem daring enough to look at things as they are.
"They hadn't ought to do anything to 'im; it ain't fair," she said to herself stoutly; "an' he just stood up an' told on hisself because he knowed he hadn't done anything bad. I sh'd think they'd beashamed of themselves to do anything to 'im after that."
"M'lissy!" Mrs. Sproul called from the foot of the stairs, her voice dying away in a prolonged sniffle. "I wish 't you'd come down and help Lysander hook up the team. He's got to go down t' the Mission, and it'll be 'way into the night before he gets back."
The girl stood still a moment, biting her lip, and then hurried across the floor and down the staircase as if pursued. Minerva had left the kitchen, and there was no one to notice her unusual haste. Out at the barn, Lysander, almost disabled by the accession of a stiff white shirt and collar, was perspiring heavily in his haste to harness the mules.
"Minervy's got 'er heart set on havin' the Odd Fellers conduct the funer'l," he said apologetically. "Strikes me kind o' onnecessary, but 't won't do no harm, I s'pose. She says yer paw was an Odd Feller 'way back, but he ain't kep' it up. I dunno if they'll bury 'im or not."
The girl listened to him absently, straightening the mule's long ear which was caughtin the headstall, and fastening the buckles of the harness. Her face was hidden by her drooping sunbonnet, and Lysander could not see its pinched, quivering whiteness. They led the mules out of the stable and backed them toward the wagon standing under a live oak. Melissa bent over to fasten the tugs, and asked in a voice steadied to lifeless monotony,—
"Do you think they'll do anything to him for it, Lysander?"
"I dunno, M'lissy," said the man. "He told the men at the camp it was self-defense, and mebbe he can prove it; but bein' no witnesses, they may lock 'im up fer a year or two, just to give 'im time to cool off. It'll be good fer 'im. He oughtn't to be so previous with his firearms."
"But paw was—they don't know—mebbe"—panted the girl brokenly.
"Yes, yes, M'lissy, I don't doubt yer paw was aggravatin'; but we don't know, and we'd better not take sides. The young feller ain't nothin' to us, an' yer paw was—well, he was yerpaw, we've got to remember that."
Lysander put his foot on the hub andmounted to the high seat, gathering up the reins and putting on the brake. The mules started forward, and then held back in a protesting way, and the wagon went creaking and scraping through the sand down the mountain road.
In the days that passed wearisomely enough before the trial, Melissa heard much that did not tend to soothe her harassed little soul. Lysander, having taken refuge behind the assertion that it "wasn't becomin' fer the fam'ly to take sides," bore his mother-in-law's stinging sarcasms in virtuous silence.
"Seems to me it depends on which side you take," sneered the old woman. "I don't see anything so very impullite in gettin' mad when yer pap's shot down like a dog."
Lysander braced himself judicially.
"We don't none of us know nothin' about it," he contended. "If I'd 'a' been there and 'a' seen the scrimmage, I'd 'a' knowed what to think. As 'tis, I dunno what to think, and there's no law that kin makeyou think when you don't hev no fax to base your thinkun' on."
"Some folks lacks other things besides fax to base their thinkun' on," the old woman jerked out sententiously.
Lysander pressed the tobacco into his cob pipe, and scratched a match on the sole of his boot.
"I think they've been middlin' fair," he said, between puffs, "fixin' up that water business. It's my opinion the young feller's at the bottom of it,—they say his father's well off; 't enny rate, it'sfixed, an' you're better off 'n you wuz,—exceptin', uv course, your affliction, an' that can't be helped." The man composed his voice very much as he would have straightened a corpse in which he had no personal interest. "I'm in fer shuttin' up."
"They don't seem to want you to shut up," fretted his mother-in-law. "They've s'peeniedyou."
"They're welcome to all I know; 'tain't much, an' 't won't help nor hender, as I c'n see, but such as it is, they kin hev it an' welcome."
Lysander stood in the doorway, with hishat on the back of his head. He tilted it over his eyes, as he made this avowal, and sauntered toward the stable, with his head thrown back, peering from under the brim, as if its inconvenient position were a matter entirely beyond his control.
Melissa was washing dishes at a table in the corner of the kitchen. She hurried a little, trembling in her eagerness to speak to Lysander alone. She carried the dishpan to the kitchen door to empty it, and the chickens came scuttling with half-flying strides from the shade of the geraniums where they were dusting themselves, and then fled with a chorus of dismayed squawks as the dish-water splashed among them. The girl hung the pan on a nail outside, and flung her apron over her head. She could see Lysander's tilted hat moving among the low blue gums beside the shed. She drew the folds of her apron forward to shade her face, and went down the path with a studied unconcern that sat as ill upon her as haste. Lysander was mending the cultivator; he looked up, but not as high as her face.
"'Llo, M'lissy," he said, as kindly as wascompatible with a rusty bit of wire between his teeth.
The girl leaned against the shaded side of a stack of baled barley hay.
"Lysander," she began quaveringly, "Lysander, if you'd seen paw shot, an' knowed all about it, could they make you tell—would you think you'd ought to tell?" She hurried her questions as they had been crowding in her sore conscience. "I mean, of course, if you'd seen it, Lysander."
Her brother-in-law straightened himself, and set his hat on the back of his head without speaking. Melissa could feel him looking at her curiously.
"Of course, that's all I mean, Lysander,—just if you'd seen it; would you tell?" she faltered.
"M'lissy," said the man impressively, "if I'd seen my own paw killed, an' nobody asked me to tell, I'd keep my mouth most piously shut; that's what I'd do."
"But if he was mad, Sandy, an' tried to kill somebody else, and, oh,"—her voice broke into a piteous wail,—"if they wuz thinkun' o' hangin' 'im!"
"They ain't a-goin' to hang nobody,M'lissy," said Lysander confidently,—"hangin' has gone out o' fashion. And I don't think it's becomin' fer the fam'ly to interfere, especially the women folks; besides, we don't none of us know nothin' about it, you see. Don't you fret about things you don't know nothin' about. The law'll have to take its course, M'lissy. That young feller's goin' to git off reasonable,—very reasonable, indeed, considerin'."
Melissa rubbed her feet in the loose straw, restless and uncomforted.
"When's the trial, Lysander?" she asked, after a little pause, during which her companion resumed his encounter with the rusty wire he was straightening.
"The trial, M'lissy, is set for tuhmorruh," Lysander replied, a trifle oracularly. "I'm a-goin' down because they've sent fer me; if they hadn't 'a' sent, I wouldn't 'a' gone. I don't know nothin' exceptin' that yer paw had one of his spells,"—inebriety was always thus decorously cloaked in Lysander's domestic conversation,—"an' went off up the cañon that mornin' r'arin' mad about the spring. Of course they don't know that'sall I know,—if they knowed it, perhaps they wouldn't want me; but if they hadn't sent fer me, you can bet I'd stick at home closer'n a scale-bug to an orange-tree, Melissy, perticular if I was a young girl, an' didn't know nothin' whatever about the hull fracas. An' young girls ain't expected to know about such things; it ain't proper fer 'em, especially when they're members of the fam'ly."
This piece of highly involved wisdom quieted Melissa very much as a handkerchief stuffed into a sufferer's mouth allays his pain. She went about the rest of the day silent and distressed.
At daybreak the next morning, Lysander harnessed the dun-colored mules and drove to Los Angeles.
The sun rose higher, and the warm dullness of a California summer day settled down upon the little mountain ranch. Heat seemed to rise in shimmering waves from the yellow barley stubble. The orange-trees cast dense shadows with no coolness in them, and along the edge of the orchard the broad leaves of the squash-vines hung in limp dejection upon their stalks. The heated airwas full of pungent odors: tar and honey and spice from the sage and eucalyptus, with now and then a warmer puff of some new wild fragrance from far up the mountain-side.
"We're a-goin' to have three hot days," said Mrs. Sproul, looking anxiously over the valley from the shelter of her husband's hat. "Sandy'll swelter, bein' dressed up so. I do hope they won't keep him long. He don't know nothin' about it, noway. Seems to me they might 'a' believed him, when he said so."
Mother Withrow had fallen into a silence full of the eloquence of offended dignity, when Lysander disappeared. Like all tyrannical souls, she was beginning to feel a bitterness worse than that of opposition,—the bitterness of deceit. She knew that Lysander had deceived her, and the knowledge was bearing its fruit of humiliation and chagrin. The evident liberality of Forrester's course in deeding her a share of the cañon, greater, it was said, than the loss occasioned by the drying up of Flutterwheel Spring, had struck at the root of hatreds and preconceptions that were far more vital to herthan the mere proprietorship of the water right. She felt hampered and defrauded by the circumstances that forbade her to turn and fling the gift back in his face. To this grim, gray-haired tyrant, dying of thirst seemed sweet compared with the daily bitterness of hearing her enemy praised for his generosity. She sat in the doorway fanning herself with her apron, and made no reply to her daughter's anxious observation.
"I calc'lated to rub out a few things this mornin'," continued Mrs. Sproul, "but somehow I don't feel like settlin' down to washin' or anythin'; an' the baby's cross, bein' all broke out with the heat. I wonder what's become of M'lissy."
"She's up in the oak-tree out at the barn," called William T. Sherman, who with other fraternal generals was holding a council of war over a gopher caught in a trap. "Letterlone; she's as cross as Sam Patch."
"M'lissy takes her paw's death harder 'n I calc'lated she'd do," commented Minerva, virtuously conventional; "she's a good deal upset."
The old woman sniffed audibly.
"I reckon you'll all live through it," she said frostily.
Melissa, swinging her bare feet from a branch of the dense live oak in the barnyard, had watched Lysander's departure with wistful eagerness, entirely unaware that he had divined her secret, and was mannishly averse to having the "women folks" of his family mixed up in a murder trial. Now that he was really gone, and she was left to the dreariness of her own reflections, she grew wan and white with misery.
"I had ought to 'a' told it," she moaned. "If they don't hang 'im, they may put 'im in jail, and that's awful." She thought of him, so straight and lithe and gay, grown pale and wretched; manacled, according to Ulysses's graphic description, with iron chains so heavy that he could not rise; kept feebly alive on bread and water, and presided over by a jailer whose ingenious cruelty knew no limit but the liveliness of the boy's fiendish imagination.
"A year or two," Lysander had said, as if it were a trifle. She looked back a year, and tried to measure the time, losing herself in the hazy monotony of her past, and conscious only of the remoteness of certain events that served as landmarks in her simple experience,—events not yet two years distant.
"Orange-pickun' before last ain't nigh two years ago," she mused, "an' 't ain't a year yet sence Lysander hauled grapes from the Mission to the winery; an' the year before that he was over to Verdugo at the bee-ranch, an' come home fer the grape-haulin' at Santa Elena. That's when Hooker was born; he'll be two years old this fall; it's ever so long ago. He couldn't stand bein' in jail that long; some folks could, but he couldn't. He sings, and laughs out loud, and goes tearin' around so lively. It 'ud kill 'im."
She slipped down from the tree, and started toward the house. The path was hot to her bare feet, and the wind came in heated gusts from the mountains. The young turkeys panted, with uplifted wings, in the shade of the dusty geraniums, whose scarlet blossoms were glowing in fierce tropical enjoyment of the glaring sun. The hounds went languidly, with lolling tongues, from one shaded spot to another, blinkingtheir comments on the weather at their human companions, and snapping in a half-hearted way at unwary flies.
Mrs. Sproul and her mother were still seated on the little porch when Melissa appeared.
"Why don't you come in out of the heat, child?" called her sister, as reproachfully as if Melissa were going in the opposite direction. "We hain't had such a desert wind for more 'n a year. I keep thinkin' about Lysander. I've heern of people bein' took down with the heat, and havin' trouble ever afterward with their brains."
"Lysander ain't a-goin' to have any trouble with his brains," said her mother significantly.
Mrs. Sproul turned a highly insulted gaze upon the old woman's impassive face, and tilted her husband's hat defiantly above her diminutive, freckled countenance.
"Lysander kin have as much trouble with his brains as anybody," she said, with bantam-like dignity, straightening her limp calico back, and tightening her grasp on the baby in her arms.
The old woman elevated her shaggybrows, and made a half-mocking sound in imitation of the spitting of an angry kitten.
Mrs. Sproul's pale blue eyes filled with indignant tears, and she turned toward Melissa, who looked up from the step, a gleam of sisterly sympathy lighting up the wan dejection of her young face.
"I wouldn't fret, Minervy," she said kindly; "Lysander don't mind the heat. People never get sunstruck here; it's only back East. I don't think it's so very warm, nohow."
"Oh, it's hot enough," sniffled Mrs. Sproul, relaxing her spine under Melissa's sympathy; "but it ain't altogether the heat. I don't like Lysander bein' mixed up with murderers and dangerous characters; not but what he's able to pertect himself, havin' been through the war, but it seems as if the harmlessest person wuzn't safe when folks go 'round shootin' right an' left without no provocation whatever. I think we'll all be safer when that young feller's locked up in San Quentin,—which they'll do with him, Lysander thinks."
Mrs. Sproul drew a corner of her apron tight over her finger, and carefully wiped aspeck from the corner of the baby's eye, gazing intently into the serene vacuity of its sleeping countenance as she spoke.
Melissa caught her breath, and turned and gazed fixedly through the shimmering haze of the valley toward Los Angeles. The girl herself did not know the resolution that was shaping itself from all the tangled facts and fancies of her brain. Perhaps, if she had been held to strict account, she would have said it was an impulse, "a sudden notion" in her parlance, that prompted her to arise the next morning, before the faintest thrill of dawn, and turn her steps toward the town in the valley. It was not a hopeful journey, and she could not analyze the motive that lashed her into making it; nevertheless she felt relieved when the greasewood shut the cabin, with its trailing pepper-trees and dusty figs and geraniums, from her sight, and she was alone on the mountain road. It was not a pleasure to go, but it was an undeniable hardship to stay. There had been no fog in the night, and from the warm stillness of the early morning air the girl knew that the heat had not abated. She was quite unmindful of the landscape, gray and brown and black in the waning light of the misshapen and belated moon, and she was far from knowing that the man she was making this journey to save would have thought her a fitting central figure in the soft blur of the Millet-like etching of which she formed a part.
She threw back her sunbonnet and trudged along, carrying her shoes tied together by their leathern strings and hung across her arm,—an impediment to progress, but a concession to urban prejudices which she did not dream of disregarding. She meant to put them on in the seclusion of the Arroyo Seco, where she could bathe her dusty feet and rest awhile; but remembering the heat of yesterday, she wished to make the most of the early morning, deadly still and far from refreshing though it was. The sea-breeze would come up later, she hoped, not without misgivings; and the grapes were beginning to turn in the vineyards along the road; she would have something to eat with the bit of corn-bread in her pocket. Altogether she was not greatly concerned about herself or the difficulties ofher journey, so absorbed was she in the vague uncertainty that lay at its end.
The sun rose hot and pitiless, and the dust and stones of the road grew more and more scorching to her feet. The leaves of the wild gourd, lying in great star-shaped patches on the ground, drooped on their stems, and the spikes of dusty white sage by the road hung limp at the ends, and filled the air with their wilted fragrance. The sea-breeze did not come up, and in its stead gusts of hot wind from the north swept through the valley as if from the door of a furnace. People talked of it afterward as "the hot spell of 18—," but in Melissa's calendar it was "the day I walked to Loss Anjelus,"—a day so fraught with hopes and fears, so full of dim uncertainties and dread and longing, that the heat seemed only a part of the generally abnormal conditions in which she found herself.
It was afternoon before she reached the end of her journey, entering the town between rows of low, soft-tinted adobes, on the steps of which white-shirted men and dusky, lowbrowed women and children ate melons and laughed lazily at their neighbors, showing their gleaming teeth. She knew where the courthouse stood, its unblushing ugliness protected by the rusty Frémont cannon, and made her way wearily toward it through the more modern and busier streets.
The men who sat in front of the stores in various degrees of undress, slapping each other resoundingly on their thinly clad backs, and discussing the weather with passers-by in loud, jocular tones, were, to Melissa's sober country sense, a light-minded, flippant crowd, to whom life could have no serious aspect. She looked at them indifferently, as they sat and joked, or ran in and out of open doors where there was a constant fizz as of something perpetually boiling over, and made her way among them, quite unmindful of her dusty shoes and wilted sunbonnet, and yet vaguely conscious that at another time she might have cared.
At the door of the courthouse, two of this same loosely clad, noisy, perspiring species were slapping their thighs and choking in hilarious appreciation of something which a third was reading from an openpaper. The reader made way for Melissa, backing and reading at the same time, and the sound of their strangely incongruous mirth followed her up the narrow, unswept, paper-strewn staircase into the stifling heat of the second floor. She stopped there an instant, leaning against the railing, uncertain what to do.
One of a pair of double doors opened, and a young man, swinging an official-looking document, crossed the hall as if he might be walking in his sleep, and went into a room beyond; kicking the door open, catching it with his foot, and kicking it to behind him with a familiarity that betokened long acquaintance, and inspired Melissa with confidence in his probable knowledge of the intricate workings of justice. She stood still a moment, clutching the limp folds of her skirt, until the young man returned; then she took a step forward.
"I've come to tell what I know about the shootin'. I saw it," she faltered.
The somnambulistic young man shut one eye, and inclined his ear toward her without turning his head.
"Shooting? What shooting?"
"Up in Sawpit Cañon—Mr. Sterling done it—but I saw it—nobody knows it, though." The words came in short, palpitating sentences that died away helplessly.
Her listener hesitated for an instant, scratching the blonde plush of his cropped scalp with his lead-pencil. Then he stepped forward and kicked one of the double doors open, holding it with his automatic foot.
"Bawb! oh,Bawb!" he called; "'m yer."
A short fat man, with an unbuttoned vest and a general air of excessive perspiration, waddled past the bailiff and confronted Melissa. He smiled when he saw her, displaying an upper row of teeth heavily trimmed with gold, a style of personal adornment which impressed Melissa anew with the vagaries of masculine city taste.
"Witness in the Withrow murder case, pros'cuting 'torney," said the bailiff over his shoulder, by way of introduction, as he disappeared through the door.
Melissa looked at the newcomer, trembling and dumb.
"Come in here, my girl," he said, steaming ahead of her through a door in front ofthem; "come right in here. Is it pretty hot up your way?"
"Yes, sir," she quavered, not taking the chair he cleared for her. "I come down to tell about the shootin': I'd ought to 'a' told before, but I was scared. Mr. Sterling done it, but paw was mad; he picked up Mr. Sterling's gun and tried to kill 'im,—I saw it all. I was hid in the sycamores. You hadn't ought to hang 'im or do anything to 'im: he couldn't help it."
The prosecuting attorney smiled his broad, gilt-edged, comfortable smile, and laid his pudgy hand reassuringly on Melissa's shoulder.
"It's all right, my little girl," he said. "We're not going to hang Mr. Sterling this time; he was discharged this afternoon; but he'll be obliged to you, all the same. He's over at the hotel taking a nap. You just run along home, and the next time don't be afraid to tell what you know."
The girl turned away silently, and went down the stairs and out into the street. She stood still a moment on the hot pavement, looking in the direction of the hotel in which the man for whom she had madeher fruitless journey was sleeping. Then she set her face patiently toward home. The reflection from the pavement seemed to blind her; she felt suddenly faint and tired, and it was with a great throb of relief that she heard a familiar voice at her elbow, and turned with a little tearless sob to Lysander.
The Worthingtons' private parlor in the Rideau House was hot and close, although a fog had drifted in at nightfall and cooled the outside air. Two of its occupants, however, were totally unmindful of the heat and the mingled odors of upholstery, gas, and varnish that prevailed within its highly decorated walls. The third, a compact, elderly, prosperous-looking gentleman, whose face wore a slight cloud ofennui, stood by the open window gazing out, not so much from a desire to see what was going on outside as from a good-natured unwillingness to see what was taking place within.
Mr. Frederick Sterling, a shade paler and several shades graver than of old, was looking at the elderly gentleman's daughter inan unmistakable way; and the daughter herself, a fair creature, with the fairness of youth and health and plenty, was returning his gaze with one that was equally unmistakable.
"Do you mean to tell me, Frederick, that the poor thingwalkedall that distance in that intolerable heat?"
The young man nodded dismally.
"That's what they say, Annette. It makes one feel like a beast."
"I don't see why you need say that, Frederick. I'm sure they ought to have done something, after the awful danger you were in." The young woman swept toward him, with one arm outstretched, and then receded, and let her hand fall on the back of a chair, as her father yawned audibly.
"Of course there was danger, Annette; but that doesn't remove the fact that I was a hot-headed idiot."
"You mustn't talk so. It is not polite to me. I am not going to marry an idiot."
"But you've promised."
The young people laughed into each other's eyes.
"Frederick," said the young girl, after alittle silence, during which they drifted into the rigid plush embrace of a sofa, "I'm going up to see that girl and thank her."
The young man leaned forward and caught her wrists.
"You—angel!"
"Yes, I'm going to-morrow. Of course you can't go."
"Oh, good Lord, no," groaned her lover.
"But papa can. There will be plenty of time; we don't leave until evening. And in spite of what her father did, I feel kindly toward the girl. There must be some good in her; she seemed to want to do you justice. How does she look, Frederick?"
The soft-voiced inquisitor drew her wrists from the young fellow's grasp, and flattened his palms between hers by way of an anæsthetic.
"Did you ever see her?"
"Oh, yes, once or twice. A lank, forlorn, little red-headed thing,—rather pretty. Oh, my God, Annette!"
The girl raised the tips of his imprisoned fingers to her lips.
"Couldn't you send her something, Frederick, some little keepsake, something shewould like, if she would like anything that wasn't too dreadful?"
The young fellow's face brightened.
"Annette, youarean angel."
"No, I'm not; there are no brunette angels. I am a very practical young woman, and I'm going with you to buy something for that poor girl; men don't know how to buy things." She dropped her lover's hands, and went out of the room, returning with her hat and gloves, and, going to her father's side, she said: "Papa, Frederick and I are going out for awhile. He wants to get a little present for a poor young girl, the daughter of that awful wretch who—that—you know. It seems she saw it all, and came down to say that Frederick was not to blame. Of course it was unnecessary, for the judge and every one saw at once that he did perfectly right; but itwaskind of her, and it was averyhot day. Do you mind staying here alone?—or you can go with us, if you like."
"No, thank you; I don't mind, and I don't like," said the elderly gentleman dryly.
"And you'll not be lonely?"
"No, I think not; I've been gettingacquainted with myself this trip, and I find I'm a very interesting though somewhat unappreciated old party."
The young girl put down her laughing face, and her father swept a kiss from it with his gray mustache. Then the two young creatures went out into the lighted streets, laughing and clinging to each other in the sweet, selfish happiness that is the preface to so large a part of the world's misery.
They came back presently with their purchase, a somewhat obtrusively ornate piece of jewelry, which Annette pronounced semi-barbarous; being, she said, a compromise between her own severely classical taste and that of Sterling, which latter, she assured her father, was entirely savage.
She fastened the trinket at her throat, where it acquired a sudden and hitherto unsuspected elegance in the eyes of her lover, and then unclasped it, and held it at arm's-length in front of her before she laid it in its pink cotton receptacle.
"I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft, contented little sigh.
And the young man set his teeth, andsmiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him.
Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all.
The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs. Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his shoulder.
"I want to see your daughter, the young girl,—the one that walked to Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman.
"M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if M'lissy's about?"
Her husband nodded backward.
"She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll"—
The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand.
"May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone."
Lysander bent his tall figure and moved along the rows of orange-trees, until he caught a glimpse of Melissa's blue drapery.
"She's right down there," he said, pointing between the smooth trunks with his hoe. "It's rough walkin',—I've just been a-throwin' up a furrow fer the irrigatin'; but I guess you c'n make it."
She went down the shaded aisle between the orange-trees, Mrs. Sproul looking after her dubiously, as a person guilty of a serious breach of decorum in asking to see any one alone.
Melissa leaned on her hoe, and watched her approach with listless amazement. She took in every detail of her daintily clad loveliness,—the graceful sway of her drapery as she walked, the cluster of roses in her belt, and the wide hat with its little forest of curling plumes.
"You are Melissa?" The stranger put out her softly gloved hand, and Melissa took it in limp, rustic acquiescence. "Mr. Sterling wished me to come,—and I wanted to come myself,—to thank you for what you did; it was very kind, and you were very brave to undertake it, and for one you scarcely knew—it was very,verygood of you."
Melissa colored to the little ripples of vivid hair about her temples.
"Is he gone away?" she asked, rubbing her hands up and down on the worn handle of the hoe.
"No, but he is going this evening. Of course he could not stay. It would be very painful for him, for all of you. Is there anything he can do for you? He will be so glad if he can be of use to you in any way"— She hesitated, watching the pained look grow in her listener's face.
"Ain't he never comin' back?" asked Melissa wistfully.
Annette opened her brown eyes wide, and fixed them on the girl's face.
"I don't know," she faltered.
"I'd like to keep his hankecher," Melissa broke out tremulously. "I hurt my arm oncet up where they was blastin', and he tied it up fer me with his hankecher. I wastakin' it to 'im that Sunday. I had it all washed and done up. I'd like to keep it, though,—if you think he wouldn't care." Her eyes filled, and her voice broke treacherously. "That's all. Tell 'im good-by."
Annette was gazing at her breathlessly. It came over her like a cloud, the poverty, the hopelessness, the dreariness of it all. She made a little impetuous rush forward.
"Oh, yes, yes," she said eagerly, through her tears; "and he is so sorry, and he sent you these,"—she took the roses from her belt, her lover's roses, and thrust them into Melissa's nerveless grasp,—"and I—oh,Ishall love you always!"
Then she turned, and hurried through the sun and shadow of the orchard back to the carriage.
"I am ready to go now," she said, somewhat stiffly, to her father.
All the way down the dusty mountain road, over which Melissa had traveled so patiently, she kept murmuring to herself, "Oh, the poor thing,—the poor, poor thing!"
Some years afterwards, when Mr. Frederick Sterling's girth and dignity had noticeably increased, he saw among his wife's ornaments a gaudy trinket that brought a curious twinge of half-forgotten pain into his consciousness. He was not able to understand, nor is it likely that he will ever know, how it came there, or why there came over him at sight of it a memory of sycamores and running water, and the smell of sage and blooming buckthorn and chaparral.