CHAPTER VIIIPRIZES OF ACCIDENT
It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the hour on his face the Colonel passed along the hushed street and then out into the red road between its clumps of dusty foliage.
As he skirted what yesterday had been his own land he looked on it with a new eye. It could be made to support them well. No matter how low Allen might sink they need never want again. The hilly part, where the spring was, could be sold or leased to some of the enterprising city hotel men. Or, if they objected to that, they could increase their market gardening to the dimensions of a large agricultural enterprise. They could rent to a rancher a portion of the rich, uncultivated land now lying idle, and thus gain an income sufficient for them to develop their own particular domain. To people of thrift and energy the possibilities of the tract were large. Alice could die in peace. Her girls were provided for.
As the cottage came into view the rider reined up and gazed at it. No smoke issued from the chimney.They all still slept. In the crystal stillness of the morning it looked peacefully picturesque, half veiled in its greenery of shrubs and vines. The air about it was impregnated with the delicate breath of the roses that lined the path from the gate to the balcony.
He gave a slight shake to his rein, and Kit Carson, who had been impatiently pawing with a proud forefoot, moved forward. The rider’s glance wandered to a window under the sloping roof, veiled by a blue curtain. Was that the girls’ room? The girls! The two faces rose before his mental vision and he turned his eyes from the window and let them pierce, far-seeing and steady—into the distance, into the future. Before he came to Foleys he had not cared, he had not dared, to look into the future. He had cowered before its emptiness. Now the faces of the sisters rose softly bright in its melancholy obscurity, the faces of Alice’s daughters—daughters that should have been his.
A week after he reached San Francisco he had a letter from June, a childish, incoherent letter, full of impassioned terms of gratitude, broken into by distressed comments on her mother’s health. Then, in more sprightly vein, she told him of how Mr. Barclay was stopping over at Foleys for a few days and came nearly every day and helped them in the garden, and Mr. Rion Gracey, riding back from Foleys to the Buckeye Belle one evening, had dropped in for a visit, and stayed to supper.
The Colonel seemed to see her as she wrote, laughing at one moment and then stopping to dash the tears off her cheek as she had done at the spring. He heardfrom no one else. Beauregard Allen had accepted the transfer of the property as a business transaction, the manner in which his adversary had desired him to accept it. To his friends in San Francisco the Colonel explained his speedy return and the dropping of the case as he had done to Cusack. It was not worth the time and trouble. The land was remote, the spring a disappointment; he was glad to be rid of it all.
Three weeks after this, sitting alone in his office, he received by the afternoon mail a newspaper. It was theDaily Clarion, an organ which molded public opinion and supported a precarious existence in Foleys. Unfolding the flimsy sheet he found a marked paragraph, and turning to it he saw it to be Alice’s death notice. She had died three days before “at the residence of her husband, John Beauregard Allen.” The paper slipped from his hand to the floor and his head sank. He sat thus till the twilight fell, alone in the dim office where the golden letters that spelled his name—the name of the successful man—shone faintly on the window.
That same afternoon the dead woman’s husband and children returned to the cottage after having committed all that remained of her to the grave. Rosamund had succumbed to the strain and sorrow of the last few days, and gone to bed prostrated with a headache. Allen, morose and speechless, had flung himself in a chair in the living-room and there sat, a heavy, inert figure. He had drunk heavily during the last few days of his wife’s illness, for he had always loved her, and in his weakness of heart hadfled from the sight of her suffering, and tried to find surcease for his own.
It was left to June to prepare their supper and accomplish the toilsome domestic tasks that Rosamund shared with her. With a dead heart she set out the meal, watered the garden, and finally set forth in a flare of sunset to find Bloss and drive her home.
The cow had evidently strayed far. June’s search led her to the spots which Bloss was known to frequent, but she could find no trace of her. Sometimes the girl’s voice, broken and hoarse with weeping, rose on the rich stillness of the hour, calling to the truant. She became irritable, exasperated against the animal, who, on such a night as this, while her heart was bursting with sorrow, ended the bitterness of the day with so wearisome a hunt. Finally, exhausted by long hours of watching and the fatigue of grief, she burst into unrestrained sobs. With her face shining with tears, her breast convulsed, she tore her way through thickets and scrambled over rocky spurs, every now and then sending up a quavering cry for the strayed cow. At length, brushing through a copse of bay and alder, she came on the torn face of the hill where the landslide had taken place. The ground was covered with a debris of stones and dead trees. Nature, to repair the damage, was already hiding the rawness of the lacerated expanse under a veil of small sprouting vegetation. Here, through a screen of leaves, she at last caught sight of Bloss’ red and white side.
She cried to the cow, who gave a lazy flip of her tail but no other sign of movement. June’s irritatedmisery gave way to a spasm of rage, and stooping, she picked up a handful of the loose pieces of stone strewn about her, and threw one at the runaway. It struck with a thud. Bloss gave a surprised snort, and, wheeling, brushed through the thicket. June followed her, the stones pressed in a clutching hand against her breast, one now and then launched in the direction of the cow. These missiles, combined with the thought of home, appeared to animate Bloss’ leisurely movements, and she hastened forward through brush and over rock at a lolloping, uncouth trot.
The dusk was settling into night when they reached the shed. June’s tears had ceased, but the abstraction of grief held her. She fastened the shed door on the cow, and still absently clasping three or four pieces of stone, entered the house. The door from the balcony gave directly into the living-room. Here, just as she had left him, she found her father.
The daughters of Beauregard Allen did not love him with the same fond blindness to his faults that had marked his wife. In the grinding poverty of their later years they could not but see his apathy, the selfishness of his heavy discouragement, the weakness of his tendency to drink. Though the filial sense was strong in them and the example of their mother’s uncomplaining devotion one that they obediently followed, they realized that their father was more a tottering pillar to support than a staff upon which to lean.
Now, a vague, dark bulk in the deserted room, so filled with memories of the dead woman, he was afigure of heart-piercing desolation. His daughter moved to the table and said gently:
“Why, father dear, are you still sitting in the dark? Why didn’t you light the lamp?”
He answered with an inarticulate sound and did not move. Setting the stones on the table June drew the lamp toward her and lit it. The sudden flood of light seemed to rouse him. The chair creaked under his weight as he turned. His haggard eyes absently traveled over the lamp and the table near it and finally rested on the scattered fragments of rock. June had bent down to look at the wick which she was carefully adjusting, when she heard him give a suppressed exclamation, and his long brown hand entered the circle of lamplight and gathered up the stones. The wick satisfactorily arranged, she settled the shade and turned away. Her father drew his chair closer to the slanting torrent of light, and holding the stones directly under it, leaned forward, scrutinizing them as he turned them about.
“Where did you get these?” he said without looking up.
She told him, turning again toward the table, absently watching him.
“Near the hillside? Just there where the piece of the hill came down?” he queried.
“Yes, along the ground there. It’s all strewed with stones and earth and roots. There’s quite a wall of rock left bare and these bits of it are all over. New weeds are sprouting everywhere. I suppose that’s what took Bloss there.”
He rose and going to a book-case took out a handmagnifying glass, and returning to the light, studied the fragments through it. Something in his face as he bent over them, struck through the lethargy of her dejection.
“Father,” she said, drawing near, “what are they? What’s odd about them?”
He lifted a face transfigured with excitement, and leaning forward, laid a trembling hand on hers.
“It’s float,” he said, “undeniable float! If I’m not mistaken we’ve got the ledge at last.”
END OF BOOK I