The first half of the night he spent moving the money to the marshes' edge. Its weight was like the weight of millstones but disposed about him, in the basket, in the gunny sacks slung from his shoulders, in the newspaper carried in his hands, he dragged it across. When he reached the bank he fell like one dead. Outstretched beside his treasure he lay on his back and looked with half-closed eyes at the black vault and the cold satiric stars.
Before the dawn came he wrapped part of it in the paper and buried it among the sedge; the rest he put in his basket and his pockets. Early morning saw him, an inconspicuous, frowsy figure, slouching up to a way station on the line to Sacramento.
In the train he found a newspaper left by a departed traveler, and on its front page, featured with black headlines, the latest news of the Knapp and Garland holdup. After he had read it he sat very still. He knew what he had found and was relieved. It cleared the situation if it added to its danger. But he was intrigued by the difficulty of disposing of the money. To bank it was out of the question; he must rouse no curiosity and he could give no references. To leave it on the marshes' edge was impracticable. He had heard of men who kept their loot buried, but he feared the perils of a cache, to be dug and redug, ungettable, in a solitary place, hard to find and dangerous to visit. He must put it somewhere not too remote, secure against discovery, where he could come and go unnoticed and free from question. By the time the train reached Sacramento he had formulated a plan.
He knew the city well, had footed the streets of its slums before he went South. In a men's lodging house, kept by a Chinese, he engaged a room, left what gold he had there—he had to take his chance against theft—and in the afternoon took a down train to the marsh. He was back with the rest of the money that night, buying a secondhand suitcase on his way from the depot. In this he packed it, still in the canvas sacks, the newspaper folded over it. He saw to it that the suitcase had a lock, and lead-heavy he laid it flat under the bed.
The next morning he rose, nerved to a day of action. He was out early, his objective the small, mean stores of the poorer quarter. In these he bought shoes, the coarse brogans of the workman, and a hat, a rusty, sweat-stained Stetson. A barber's shop in a basement was his next point of call. Here he was shaved and his hair cut. When he emerged into the light of day the tramp had disappeared. The ragged growth gone, the proud almost patrician character of his face was strikingly apparent. It matched so illy with his wretched clothes that passersby looked at him. He saw it and slunk along the walls, his hat on his brows, uneasily aware of the glances of women which usually warmed him like wine. At a secondhand dealer's, a dark den with coats and trousers hanging in layers about the entrance, he bought a suit of clothes and an overcoat. Carrying these in a bundle he went back to his room and put them on.
The transformation was now complete. He studied himself in the blotched and wavy mirror and nodded in grave approval. He might have been an artisan, a small clerk, or a traveling salesman routed through the country towns.
Half an hour later saw him at the desk of the Whatcheer House. This was a third-rate men's hotel, a decent enough place where the transient male population from the interior met the restless influx from the coast. Here floated in, lodged a space, then drifted out a tide of men, seekers of work, of pleasure, of change, of nothing at all. The majority were of the world's rovers impelled by an unquenchable wanderlust, but among them were the industrious and steady, quartered in the city or shifting to a new center of activity. He registered as Harry Romaine of Vancouver and described himself as a traveling man who would use Sacramento as a base of operations. He took a room in the back—No. 19—said he would probably keep it all winter and paid a month's rent in advance.
By afternoon he had the money there and with it a chisel and hammer. It was intensely hot, the sun beating on the wall and sloping in through the one window. Complete silence from the rooms on either side reassured him, and in the scorching stillness he worked with a noiseless, capable speed. In one corner under the bed he pulled up the carpet and pried loose the boards. Some of the money went there, some below the pipes in the cupboard under the stationary washstand, the rest behind a piece of the baseboard.
Before he replaced the boards in the corner cache—the largest and least difficult to disturb—he glanced about for anything overlooked or forgotten for which the hole would be a convenient hiding-place. On the floor, outspread and crumpled, lay the newspaper. The outer sheets were brown and disintegrated from contact with the mud, but the two inner ones were whole and clean. Probably it would be better to take no chances and hide it; someone might notice it and wonder how it came to be in such a state. He picked it up, looked it over, and saw it was theSacramento Courierof August 25. That would make it only three days old, the issue of the day before the holdup. If anything was needed to convince him that the cache was Knapp and Garland's this was it. He opened it on the table to fold, brushing out the creases, when suddenly his hand dropped and his glance became fixed. A marked paragraph had caught his attention.
The light was growing dim and he took the paper to the window. The paragraph was at the end of a column, was encircled by two curved pencil strokes, and on the edge of clean paper below it was written, also in pencil, "Hello, Panchita. Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of you."
He pulled a chair to the window, folded back the page and read the marked item. The column was headed "C. C.'s San Francisco Letter," was dated August 21, and was mainly concerned with social and business news of the coast city. That part of it outlined by the pencil strokes ran as follows:
As to matters theatrical there's nothing new in sight, except that Pancha Lopez—our Pancha—made a hit this week in "The Zingara," the gypsy operetta produced on Sunday night at the Albion. I can't tell much about "The Zingara"—maybe it was good and maybe it wasn't. I couldn't reckon with anything but Pancha; she was the whole show. She's never done anything so well, was as dainty as a pink, as brilliant as a humming bird, danced like a fairy, and sang—well, she sang way beyond what she's led us to expect of her. Can I say more? The public evidently agrees with me. The S.R.O. sign has been out at the cozy little home of comic opera ever since Sunday. C.C., who can't keep away from the place, has seen so many dress shirt fronts and plush cloaks that he's rubbed his eyes and wondered if he hasn't made a mistake and it's the grand opera season come early with a change of dates. But he hasn't. Pacific and Van Ness avenues are beginning to understand that we've got a little song bird right here in our midst that they can hear for half a dollar and who gives them more for that than the Metropolitans do for a V. Saluda, Pancha! Here's looking at you. Some day the East is going to call you and you're going to make a little line of footsteps across the continent. But for our sakes postpone it as long as you can. Remember that you belong to us, that we discovered you and that we can't get on without you.
He read it twice and then studied the penciled words, "Hello, Panchita! Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of you." In the dying light he murmured them over as if their sound delighted him and as he murmured a slight, sardonic smile broke out on his face.
His sense of humor, grim and cynical, was tickled. He, the picaroon, companion of rogues and small marauders, had seen many and diverse love affairs. On the shady bypaths he had followed, edging along the rim of the law, he had met all sorts of couples, men and women incomprehensibly attracted, ill-assorted, mysterious, picturesque. This seemed to him one of the most piquant combinations he had ever encountered—a bandit and a comic opera singer. It amused him vastly and he crooned over the paper, grinning in the dusk. The fellow had evidently marked the item and written his congratulations, intending to send it to her, then needed it to wrap round the money, and confident in the security of his cache, left it there against his return. That thought increased his amusement, and he laughed, a low, smothered chuckle.
It was dark and he rose and lit the lamp. Then he tore out the piece of the paper and put it in the pocket of his suitcase. The rest he folded and placed in the hole under the money. As he knelt, fitting the boards back, he thought of the singing woman, Pancha Lopez. The beloved of a highwayman, with a Spanish name, he pictured her as a dark, flashing creature, coarsely opulent and mature. It was evident that she too belonged to the world of rogues and social pirates, and he laughed again as he saw himself, swept back by a turn of fate, into the lives of the outlawed. He must see Pancha Lopez; she promised to be interesting.
A week later, at eleven at night, a large audience was crowding out of the Albion Opera House. If you know San Francisco—the San Francisco of before the fire—you will remember the Albion. It stood on one of those thoroughfares that slant from the main stem of Market Street near Lotta's Fountain. That part of the city is of dubious repute; questionable back walls look down on the alley that leads to the stage door, and after midnight there is much light of electricity and gas and much unholy noise round its darkened bulk.
But that is not the Albion's fault. It did not plant itself in the Tenderloin; it was the Tenderloin that grew. Since it first opened its doors as a temple of light opera—fifty cents a seat and a constant change of bill—its patrons have been, if not fashionable, always respectable. Smoking was permitted, also the serving of drinks—the seat in front had a convenient shelf for the ladies' lemonade and the gentleman's beer—but even so, no one could say that a strict decorum did not prevail in the Albion's audiences even as it did in the Albion's productions.
A young man with a cheerful, ugly face stood in a side aisle, watching the crowd file out. He had a kindly blue eye, a merry thick-lipped mouth, and blonde hair sleeked back across his crown, one lock, detached from the rest, falling over his forehead. He had a way of smoothing back this lock with his palm but it always fell down again and he never seemed to resent it. Of all that pertained to his outward appearance, he was indifferent. Not only his patience with the recalcitrant lock, but his clothes showed it—dusty, carelessly fitting, his collar too large for his neck, his cravat squeezed up into a tight sailor's knot and shifted to one side. He was Charlie Crowder, not long graduated from Stanford and now a reporter on theDespatch, where he was regarded with interest as a promising young man.
His eye, exploring the crowd, was the journalist's, picking salient points. It noted fur collars and velvet wraps, the white gloss of shirt bosoms, women's hair, ridged with artificial ripples—more of that kind in the audience than he'd seen yet. "The Zingara" had made a hit; he'd just heard at the box office that they would extend the run through the autumn. It pleased him for it verified his prophecy on the first night and it was a bully good thing for Pancha.
He stepped out of a side entrance, edged through the throngs on the pavement, dove up an alley and reached the stage door. A single round lamp burned over it and already dark shapes were issuing forth, mostly women, Cinderellas returned to their dingy habiliments. There was a great chatter of feminine voices as they skirmished off, some in groups, some alone, some on the arms of men who emerged from the darkness with muttered greetings.
Crowder crossed the back of the large stage where supers were pulling scenery about; weights and ropes, forest edges, bits of sky and parlor ceilings, hanging in layers from the flies. The brick wall at the back was whitewashed and against it a line of men and girls passed scurrying to the exit, throwing remarks back and forth, laughing, pulling on their coats. Some of them hailed him and got a cheery word in reply. Then, skirting the wings, he turned down a passage and brought up at a door on which a small star was drawn in chalk. He knocked, and a woman's voice called from inside:
"Who is it?"
"Your faithful press agent."
The woman's voice answered:
"Enter Charlie, rear, smiling."
He opened the door, went in. The place was the Albion's best dressing room. It was small, with white-washed walls, and lighted by a gas jet inclosed in a wire shield. A mirror, its frame dotted with artificial flowers, bits of ribbon, notes and favors, surmounted the dressing table. This was a litter of paint pots, hair pins, toilet articles, powder rags, across which, like a pair of strayed snakes, lay two long braids of black hair. A powerful scent of cosmetics and stale perfumery mingled with the faint, thrilling breath of roses.
Seated in front of the glass in a soiled red satin kimono embroidered in storks, was Pancha Lopez, leading woman of the Albion. She was wiping off her make-up, a large jar of cold cream on the table before her, a grease rag in her hand. The kimono, falling richly, outlined a thin, lithe body, flat-backed, muscular and supple. The make-up still on her face turned her brown skin to a meerschaum pallor and the dusky brick-red of her cheeks to an unnatural rose. A long neck upheld a small, finely shaped head, the hair now drawn back and twisted in a tight knot to which the two long braids had been pinned. The Indian strain in her revealed itself in the flattened cheek-bones, the wide-cut, delicate nostrils and the small, high-set eyes as clearly black and white as if made of enamel. They were now outlined and elongated with lamp black which still clung to her lashes in flakes. She was twenty-two years old, and had been on the stage for six years.
After a glance over her shoulder and a flashing smile she returned to her work, pushing her hair still further off her forehead with one hand, and sweeping the greasy cloth over her face with the other.
"Well," said Crowder, standing beside her and looking at her reflection, "how's the baby-grand Patti tonight?"
"Fine!" She drew down her upper lip and slowly rubbed round her mouth, Crowder, as if fascinated, watching the process in the mirror. "Just sit down on something. Hang up my costume and take that chair if there isn't any other. I got to get this thing off before I can talk comfortably."
Her costume, a glittering heap of red and orange, lay across a chair, the pile surmounted by an open cardboard box whence the heads of roses protruded from tissue paper. He feared to touch that, and finding another chair against the wall, drew it to the side of the dressing table and sat down.
"Have you been in front?" she asked, rubbing along her jaw.
"Yes, it's packed. But I only came in just before the curtain. How was the house?"
She threw a radiant look at him.
"Ate it up, dearie. Couldn't get enough. Six encores for my Castanet song. Oh, Charlie," she dropped the hand with its rag to the edge of the table and looked at him, solemnly earnest, "you don't know how I feel—you don't know. It's hard to believe and yet it's true. I can see the future stretching up like a ladder, and me mounting, step by step, on rungs made of gold."
Pancha Lopez, unlettered, almost illiterate, child of the mountains and the ditches, wandering vagabond of the stage, would sometimes indulge in unexpected felicities of phrase. Her admirers said it was another expression of that "temperament" with which she was endowed. Crowder, who knew her better than most, set it down to the Indian blood. From that wild blend had come all that lifted her above her fellows, her flashes of deep intelligence, her instinct for beauty, her high-mettled, invincible spirit. He even maintained to his friend Mark Burrage—Mark was the only person he ever talked her over with—that it was the squaw in her which had kept her pure, made her something more than "a good girl," a proud virgin, self-sufficing, untamable, jealous of her honor as a vestal.
"That's what you ought to see," he said in answer to her serious eyes. "Haven't I always said it? Didn't I tell you so up there in Portland when we first met and you were doing a turn between six saxaphone players and a bunch of trained cockatoos?"
She nodded, laughing, and returned to her rubbing.
"You surely did, and fanned up the flame that was just a tiny spark then. Dear old press agent, I guess I'll have to change your name to the Bellows."
"A. 1. Have you read the last blast I've given out?" She shook her head and he thrust his hand into his overcoat pocket. "I've brought it along, though I thought your father might have sent it to you."
"Pa's in the mountains." Drawing down her upper lip she pressed on her cheeks with painted finger tips, scrutinizing her face in the mirror. "I haven't heard from him for weeks. He's off on the lode somewhere."
"Then he hasn't seen it. It's the best I've done yet, and it's true, every word."
He had drawn from his pocket a paper which he now opened. As he folded it back, Pancha took out her hairpins and shook down her hair. It extended to her shoulders, a thick, curly bush, through which she pulled the comb with short, quick sweeps.
"Read that," said the young man and handed her the paper. "SacramentoCourier—'C. C's San Francisco Letter.'"
She took it and read while he watched her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ambition, that had landed her in the Albion six months before.
As she read she began to smile, then squeals of delight broke from her.
"You old press agent!" she cried, hitting at him with the comb and still reading, and then: "You pet, you precious pet!"
She finished on a little cry and cast the paper to the floor.
"Oh, Charlie, oh, my good,dearCharlie!" Her face was suddenly stirred with an upswelling of emotion. No other man in her hard and sordid experience had been to her what Charlie Crowder had, never a lover, always a friend.
"Now, Pancha," he said pleadingly, "don't look at me like that or I'll burst into sobs."
She rose and, putting her hands on his shoulders, kissed him on the forehead with a sexless tenderness. Her eyes were wet and to hide it she turned to where her costume lay on the chair. Crowder had nothing to say; these bursts of gratitude from his friend made him embarrassed.
"Look," she cried suddenly and snatched up the box of roses, "even a Johnny at the stage door. That's going some," and thrusting her hand into the box, she plucked up by their heads a handful of blossoms. Their pure sweet breath flowed out on the coarse scents with which the small place reeked.
Crowder affected a shocked surprise.
"What's this? A lover at last and I kept in ignorance."
"This is his first appearance, not a yap till tonight. And look at the yap." She dropped the box and took out from under the paper a card which she held toward him, "Some style aboutthatyap."
It was the square of pasteboard furnished by the florist. On it was written in a small, upright hand, "Let me offer you these roses, sweet as your voice, delicate as your art, and lovely as yourself. An admirer."
Crowder raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in exaggerated amazement.
"Well, well, well! I must look into this. Whoisthe gentleman ?"
"I haven't a guess." She took the card and dwelt on it delightedly. "Ain't it stylish writing—scratchy and yet you can read it? And the words, they're almost poetry. I never got flowers before with a sentiment as swell as that."
"Don't you honest know who it is?" said Crowder, impressed by the flowery profusion of "the sentiment."
"Not me. Jake brought 'em in after the second curtain. They were left by a messenger boy. Whoever he is he certainly does things in a classy way. Maybe he's a newspaper man to write like that."
Crowder opined he was not. He could hardly imagine one of his fellows—even secure in his anonymity—permitting his pen such florid license.
"When you break through the dark secret let me know. Then I'll come round and cast my searchlight eye over him and see if he's a proper companion for little Panchita."
"No fear," she cried, throwing the card back in the box. "Little Panchita's got a searchlight eye of her own. Believeme, it's a good, trained, old eye. Now skiddoo. I've got to slip into my togs and then me for home and a glass of milk. If he comes to the surface with another gasp I'll tell you."
When he had gone she dropped the kimono and put on a blouse and skirt, both old and shabby. Her actions were quick and harmonious, no unnecessary moves made, the actions of one trained to an economy of time and labor. On a wall hook behind a curtain she hung her gypsy dress, touching it lightly, flicking off dust, settling the folds. Poverty had taught her this care, as ambition was teaching her a thrift that made her associates call her mean.
What they thought was a matter of indifference to her. Before she had reached the Albion she knew herself superior and had plans that stretched far. About these she was secret. Not one, not even her father, knew the amount of money she had saved, or that, when she had accumulated enough, she intended going East and to Europe. She felt her powers and dreamed of a future on stages far finer than the Albion's. Once she had thought her father could help her. Two years ago hehadsold a prospect for four thousand dollars, but he had lost the money in an unlucky mining venture in Oregon. That ended all hopes of his assistance. Even if he did make another strike he needed what he got for himself; he was getting on, he wanted to buy a ranch and settle down. If she was to reach the summit of her desire—and she would reach it or die—she must do it herself. So she worked doggedly, nursed her voice, hoarded her earnings and said nothing.
She was ready to leave, her hat, a little black velvet toque, pulled down over her hair, a long shaggy ulster clothing her to the ankles. As she went to the dressing table to put out the light she saw her image in the glass and paused, eyeing it. So far her appearance had had no value for her save as a stage asset. Now she looked at herself with a new, critical interest. Behind the footlights she was another person, blossomed into an exotic brilliance, took on fire and beauty with the music and excitement. Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different angles, judging it by the standards of her world. By these she found it wanting, and with a wistful sigh she stretched out her hand and turned off the light.
It was nearly midnight when she walked down the side streets that led to the car line which took her home. Overhead the fog hung, covering the city with a luminous rack which here and there parted, showing segments of dark, star-dotted sky. Passing men looked at her, some meeting a defiant stare, others a face so chastely unresponsive that they averted their eyes as if rebuked. On the car she took an outside seat, for she loved the swift passage through the night with the chill air on her face. The grip man knew her and smiled a greeting, and as she mounted the step she answered cheerily. Now and then as the car stopped he spoke to her, leaning over his lever, and she twisted round to reply, friendly, frank, intimate. Until she came to San Francisco his class was the best she had ever known.
It was part of her economy to live in the Mission. She had two rooms there in the old Vallejo Hotel, a hostelry once fashionable, now fallen on dreary days. It fronted on a wide street where new business buildings rose beside gabled houses, detached and disconsolate in the midst of withered lawns. The Vallejo was a connecting link between these samples of the new and the old. It belonged to the ornate bay-windowed period of the seventies. Each of its "front suites" had the same proud bulge, and its entrance steps were flanked by two pillars holding aloft ground glass globes upon which its name was painted in black. Tall buildings were unknown in those days; the Vallejo boasted only three stories and its architect had never dreamed of such an effete luxury as an elevator. Built on the filled-in ground of Mission Creek, it had developed a tendency to sag in the back, and when you walked down the oil-clothed hall to the baths, you were conscious of a list to starboard.
The Vallejo patrons did not mind these drawbacks, or if they did, thought of the low rates and were uncomplaining. All things considered, you got a good deal for your money. The place was quiet and respectable; even in its downfall it clung desperately to its traditions. It took no transients, required a certain standard of conduct in its lodgers, and still maintained a night clerk in the office of its musty front hall.
Pancha thought it quite regal. If it was a proud elevation for her to reign at the Albion, it was a corresponding one for her to have two rooms to herself in a real hotel. As she ascended the stairs—her apartment was on the second floor—she looked about her, taking in satisfactory details, the worn moquette carpet, the artificial palm on a pedestal in the corner, the high, gilt-topped mirror at the turn on the stairs. It all seemed to her what she would have called "refined"; she need never be ashamed to have a visitor come there.
In her parlor she lit the light and surveyed her surroundings with an increasing satisfaction. It was a startlingly ugly room, but she thought it a bower of elegance. What gave her authority on the stage, what had already lifted her above the mass, seemed to fall from her with her costume. That unwavering sense of beauty and grace, that instinctive taste which lent her performance poetry and distinction, left her at the wings. Now her eye dwelt, complacent, on the red plush chairs, the coarse lace curtains, the sofa pillows of etched leather and dissonant colors, the long mirror between the windows, and each and all received her approval. As she had thought on the stairs, she thought again—no one would be ashamed to receive a visitor, no matter how stylish, in such a room.
She put her roses in a vase and then fetched a bottle of milk from the window sill and a box of crackers from the bureau drawer. Setting these on the marble-topped table beside the droplight she sat and ate. It was too cold to take off her coat and from its pocket she drew the card that had come with the flowers. As she sipped and munched, the shadows of the room hovering on the light's circular edge, she read over the words, murmuring them low, her voice lingering on them caressingly.
It was the first knock at the door of her dreams, the first prismatic ray of romance that had penetrated the penumbra of brutal realities in which she had lived.
The Argonaut Hotel—all San Franciscans will remember it—had, like the Vallejo, started life with high expectations and then declined. But not to so complete a downfall. Fashion had left it, but it still did a good business, was patronized by commercial travelers and old customers from the interior, and had a solid foundation of residentials, married couples beaten by the servant question and elderly men with no ties. Its position had been against it—on that end of Montgomery Street where the land begins to rise toward Telegraph Hill, with the city's made ground behind, and in front "the gore" where Dr. Coggeswell's statue used to stand. People who lived there were very loyal to it—not much style, but comfort, quiet and independence.
Three days before the events in the last chapter a man entered its office and asked for rooms. He was an impressive person, of the kind who usually went to the Palace or the St. Francis. Ned Murphy, the clerk, sized him up as an Easterner or maybe a foreigner. There was something foreign-looking about him—you couldn't just tell what; it might be the way he wore his hair, brushed back straight from his forehead, or an undemocratic haughtiness of bearing. He looked as if he was used to the best, and he acted that way; had to be shown four suites before he was satisfied and then took the most expensive, second floor front, two rooms and bath, and you could see he didn't think much of it. Ned Murphy lived up to him with an unbroken spirit, languidly whistled as he slid the register across the counter, looked up the hall with a bored air, and then winked at the bell boy holding the bags. But when the stranger had followed the boy up the stairs—the Argonaut had no elevator—he pulled the register round and eagerly read the entry—"Boyé Mayer, New York." A foreign name all right; you couldn't fool him.
He told the switchboard girl, who had been taking it all in from her desk, and she slid over to size up the signature. She thought he mightn't be foreign—just happened to have that sort of name—he didn't talk with any dialect. When the bell boy came back they questioned him, but he was grouchy—feller'd only given him a dime. And say, one of them suit cases was all battered and wore out, looked like the kind the hayseeds have when they come up from the country.
In his room the man went to the window, hitched back the lace curtains and threw up the sash. Life in the open had made these shut-in places stifling, and he drew in the air with a deep relish. Evening was falling, a belated fog drifting in, wreathing in soft whorls over the hills, feeling its way across their summits and through their hollows. It made the prospect depressing, everything enveloped in a universal, dense whiteness. He surveyed it, frowning—the looming shapes of the high land beyond, the line of one-story hovels sprawled on the gore. To the right the street slanted upward toward Telegraph Hill whence smaller streets would decline to the waterfront and the Barbary Coast. He knew that section well and smiled a little as he thought of it and of himself, a ragged vagrant, exploring its byways.
His thoughts stopped at that memory—the lowest point of his fall—hung there contemplative and then turned backward. They passed beyond his arrival in California, his days of decay before that, the first gradual disintegration, back over it all to the beginning.
Thirty-six years ago he had been born in New York, a few months after the arrival of his parents. They were Austrians, his father an officer in the Royal Hungarian Guards, his mother a dancer at the Grand Opera House in Vienna. When Captain Ruppert Heyderich, of a prosperous Viennese family, had, in a burst of passionate chivalry, married Kathi Mayer, end coryphée on the second row, he had deserted the army, his country and his world and fled to America. Captain Heyderich had not committed so radical a breach of honor and convention without something to do it on, and the early part of the romance had moved smoothly in a fitting environment. Their only child, Lothar, could distinctly recall days of affluence in an apartment on the Park. He had had a governess, he had worn velvet and furs.
Then a change came; the governess disappeared, also the velvet and furs, and they began moving. There was a period when to move was a feature of their existence, each habitat showing a decrease in size and splendor. Lothar was nine, a lanky boy with his hair wornen brosse,in baggy knickerbockers and turn-over white collars, when they were up on the West Side in six half-lighted rooms, with a sloppy Hungarian servant to do all the work. That was the time when his father taught languages and his mother dancing. Buthewent to a private school. Captain Heyderich never got over his European ideas.
Those lean years came to a sudden end; Captain Heyderich's mother died in Vienna and left him a snug little fortune. They moved once more, but this time it was a hopeful, jubilant move, also a long one—to Paris. They settled there blithely in an apartment on the Rue Victor Hugo, Lothar, placed at a Lycée, coming home for weekends. He remembered the apartment as ornate and over-furnished, voluble guests coming and going, a great many parties, his mother, elaborately dressed, always hurrying off to meet people in somebody's else house or hurrying home to meet them in her own. Several times Austrian relations visited them, and Lothar had a lively recollection of a fight one Sunday evening, when an uncle, a large, bearded man, had accused his mother of extravagance and she had flown into a temper and made a humiliating scene.
He was seventeen when his father died, and it was discovered that very little money was left. Some of the relations came from Vienna and there was a family conclave at which it was suggested to Lothar that he return to Vienna with them and become a member of the clan. Separation from his mother was a condition and he refused. He did this not so much from love of her as from fear of them. They represented a world of which he was already shy, of high standards, duties rigorously performed, pledges to thrift and labor. Life with Kathi was more to his taste. He loved its easy irresponsibility, its lack of routine, its recognition of amusement as a prime necessity. He delivered his dictum, his mother wept triumphant tears, and the relations departed washing their hands of him.
After that they went to London and Lothar made his first attempts at work. They were fitful; the grind of it irked him, the regular hours wore him to an ugly fretfulness. He tried journalism—could have made his place for he was clever—but was too unreliable, and dropped to a space writer, drifting from office to office. In his idle hours, which were many, he gambled. That was more to his taste, done in his own way, at his own time—no cramping restrictions to bind and stifle him. He was often lucky and developed a passion for it.
He was twenty-three when they returned to New York, Kathi having begged some more money from Vienna. She was already a worn, old witch of a woman, dressed gayly in remnants of past grandeur and always painting her face. She and her son held together in a partnership strained and rasping, but unbreakable, united by the mysterious tie of blood and a deep-rooted moral resemblance. They led a wandering life, following races, hanging on the fringes of migrating fashion, sometimes hiding from creditors, then reestablished by a fortunate coup. But in those days he was still careful to pick his steps along the edges of the law, just didn't go over though it was perilous balancing. When she died he was relieved and yet he grieved for her. He felt free, no longer subject to her complaints and bickerings, but in that freedom there was a chill, empty loneliness—no one was beside him in that gingerly picking of his steps.
It was when he was twenty-seven—not quite lost—that the news came from Vienna of an unexpected legacy. His uncle, dying at the summit of a successful career, had relented and left him fifty thousand dollars. He assured himself he would be careful—poverty had taught him—and at first he tried. But the habits of "the years that the locust had eaten" were too strong. Augmented by several successful speculations it lasted him for six years. At the end of that time he was ruined, worn in body, warped in mind, his mold finally set.
After that he ceased to pick his way along the edges of the law, he slipped over. He followed many lines of endeavor, knew the back waters and hinterlands of many cities, ceased to be Lothar Heyderich and was known by other names. It was in Chicago, the winter before this story begins, that an attack of pneumonia brought him to the public ward of a hospital. Before his discharge, a doctor—a man who had noticed and been interested in him—gave him a word of warning:
"A warm climate—no more lake breezes for you. If you stay here and keep on swinging round the circle it won't be long before you swing back here to us—swing back to stay. Do you get me?"
He did, his face gone gray at this sudden vision of the end of all things. The doctor, in pity for what he was now and evidently once had been, gave him his fare to California.
It had been hell there. The climate had done its work, he was well, but he had felt himself more a pariah than ever before. He had seemed like a fly crawling over a glass shield under which tempting dainties are clearly visible and maddeningly unattainable. A man wanted money in California—with money could lead the life, half vagabondage, half lazy luxury, that was meat to his longing. Never had he been in a place that allured him more and that held him more contemptuously at arm's length.
He had sunk to his lowest depth in this tantalizing paradise, tramped the streets of cattle towns, herded with outcasts lower than himself. In Los Angeles he had washed dishes in a cafeteria, in Fresno polished the brasses in a saloon. And all around him was plenty, an unheeding prodigal luxuriance, Nature rioting in a boundless generosity. Her message came to him from sky and earth, from sweep of flowered land, from embowered village and thronging town—that life was good, to savor it, plunge in it, live it to the full. At times he felt half mad, struggling to exist in the midst of this smiling abundance.
When he began that upward march through the state he had no purpose, his mind was empty as a dried nut, the terrible lethargy of the tramp was invading him. From down-drawn brows he looked, morose, at a world which refused him entrance, and across whose surface he would drift aimless as a leaf on the wind. Then, the strength regained by exercise and air, the few dollars made by fruit picking, gave a fillip to his languishing spirit and an objective point rose on his vision. He would go to San Francisco—something might turn up there—and with his hoarded money buy cleanliness and one good meal. It grew before him, desirable, dreamed of, longed for—the bath, the restaurant, the delicate food, the bottle of wine. He was obsessed by it; the deluge could follow.
The wind, blowing through the open casement, brought him back to the present. The night had fallen, the street below a misty rift, its lights smothered in swimming vapor. There was brightness about it, blotted and obscured but gayly intentioned, even the sheds on the gore sending out golden gushes that suffused the milky currents with a clouded glow. He lighted the gas and looked at his watch—nearly seven. He would go out and dine—that dinner at last—and afterward drop in at the Albion and see Pancha Lopez, "the bandit's girl."
The Alstons were finishing dinner. From over the table, set with the glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen Tisdale's gnarled old visage—she was over seventy and for several years now had given up all tiresome thought processes—but the girls were so smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the rounded freshness of their youthful faces.
The Alstons were conservative, clung to the ways of their parents. This was partly due to inheritance—mother and father were New Englanders—and partly to a reserved quality, a timid shyness, that marked Lorry who, as Aunt Ellen ceased to exert her thought processes and relapsed into a peaceful torpor, had assumed the reins of government. They conformed to none of those innovations which had come from a freer intercourse with the sophisticated East. The house remained as it had been in their mother's lifetime, the furniture was the same and stood in the same places, the table knew no modern enhancement of its solidly handsome fittings. Fong, the Chinese cook—he had been with George Alston before he married—ruled the kitchen and the two "second boys." No women servants were employed; women servants had not been a feature of domestic life in Bonanza days.
That was why the house was lit by chandeliers instead of lamps, that was why dinner was at half past six instead of seven, that was why George Alston's daughters had rather "dropped out." They would not move with the times, they would not be brought up to date. Friends of their mother's had tried to do it, rustled into the long drawing-room and masterfully attempted to assist and direct. But they had found Lorry unresponsive, listening but showing no desire to profit by the chance. They asked her to their houses—replenished, modern, object lessons to rich young girls—and hinted at a return of hospitalities. It had not been a success. She was disappointing, no snap, no go to her; the young men who sat beside her at dinner were bored, and the house on Pine Street had not opened its doors in reciprocal welcome. By the time she was twenty they shrugged their shoulders and gave her up—exactly like Minnie, only Minnie had always had George to push her along.
As the women friends of Minnie did their duty, the men friends of George—guardians of the estate—did theirs. They saw to it that the investments were gilt-edged, and the great ranch in Mexico that George had bought a few years before his death was run on a paying basis. At intervals they asked their wives with sudden fierceness if they had called on "those girls of George's," and the wives, who had forgotten all about it, looked pained and wanted to know the reason for such an unnecessary question. Within the week, impelled by a secret sense of guilt, the ladies called and in due course Lorry returned the visits. She suffered acutely in doing so, could think of nothing to say, was painfully conscious of her own dullness and the critical glances that wandered over her best clothes.
But she did not give much thought to herself. That she lacked charm, was the kind to be overlooked and left in corners, did not trouble her. Since her earliest memories—since the day Chrystie was born and her mother had died—she had had other people and other claims on her mind. Her first vivid recollection—terrible and ineffaceable—was of her father that day, catching her to him and sobbing with his face pressed against her baby shoulder. It seemed as if the impression made then had extended all through her life, turned her into a creature of poignant sympathies and an unassuagable longing to console and compensate. She had not been able to do that for him, but she had been able to love—break her box of ointment at his feet.
From that day the little child became the companion of the elderly man, her soft youth was molded to suit his saddened age, her deepest desire was a meeting of his wishes. Chrystie, whose birth had killed her mother, became their mutual joy, their shared passion. Chrystie-worship was inaugurated by the side of the blue and white bassinet, the nursery was a shrine, the blooming baby an idol installed for their devotion. When George Alston died, Lorry, thirteen years old, had dedicated herself to the service, held herself committed to a continuance of the rites. He had left her Chrystie and she would fulfill the trust even as he would have wished.
Probably it was this enveloping idolatry that had made Christie so unlike parents and sister. She was neither retiring nor serious, but social and pleasure-loving, ready to dance through life as irresponsibly enjoying as a mote in a sunbeam. And now Lorry had wakened to the perplexed realization that it was her affair to provide the sunbeam and she did not know how to do it. They were rich, they had a fine house, but nothing ever happened there and it was evident that Chrystie wanted things to happen. It was a situation which Lorry had not foreseen and before which she quailed, feeling herself inadequate. That was why, at twenty-three, a little line had formed between her eyebrows and her glance dwelt anxiously on Chrystie as an obligation—her great obligation—that she was not discharging worthily.
The glare of the chandelier revealed the girls as singularly unlike—Lorry—her full name was Loretta—was slender and small with nut-brown hair and a pale, pure skin. The richest note of color in her face was the rose of her lips, clearly outlined and smoothly pink. She had "thrown back" to her New England forbears. On the elm-shaded streets of Vermont villages one often sees such girls, fragile, finely feminine, with no noticeable points except a delicate grace and serenely honest eyes.
Chrystie was all California's—tall, broad-shouldered, promising future opulence, her skin a warm cream deepening to shades of coral, her hair a blonde cloud, hanging misty round her brows. She was as unsubtle as a chromo, as fragrantly fresh as a newly wakened baby. Her hands, large, plump, with flexible broad-tipped fingers, were ivory-colored and satin-textured, and her teeth, narrow and slightly overlapping, would go down to the grave with her if she lived to be eighty. Two months before she had passed her eighteenth birthday and was now of age and in possession of more money than she knew how to spend. She was easily amused, overflowing with good nature and good spirits as a healthy puppy, but owing to her sheltered environment and slight contact with the world was, like her sister, shy with strangers.
The meal was drawing to its end when the doorbell rang.
"A visitor," said Chrystie, lifting her head like a young stag. Then she addressed the waiting Chinaman, "Lee, let Fong open the door, I want more coffee."
Lee went to fetch the coffee and direct Fong. Everybody in the house always did what Chrystie said.
Aunt Ellen laid her old, full-veined hand on the table and pushed her chair back.
"Maybe it isn't a visitor," she said, looking tentatively at Lorry—she hated visitors, for she had to sit up. "Do you expect someone?"
Lorry shook her head. She rarely expected anyone; evening callers were generally school friends of Chrystie's.
Fong, muttering, was heard to pass from the kitchen.
"I do hope," said Christie, "if it's some horrible bore Fong'll have sense enough to shut them in the reception room and give us a chance to escape."
Chrystie, like Aunt Ellen, was fond of going to bed early. She had tried to instruct Fong in an understanding of this, but Fong, having been trained in the hospitable ways of the past, could not be deflected into more modern channels.
In his spotless white, his pigtail wound round his head, his feet in thick-soled Chinese slippers, he passed up the hall to the front door. Another chandelier hung there but in this only one burner was lit. At five in winter and at six in summer Fong lit this as he had done for the last twenty-four years. No one, no matter what the argument, could make him light it any earlier, any later, or turn the cock at a lesser or greater angle.
The visitor was Mark Burrage, and seeing this Fong broke into smiles and friendly greeting:
"Good evening, Mist Bullage—Glad see you, Mist Bullage. Fine night,Mist Bullage."
Fong was an old man—just how old nobody knew. For thirty-five years he had served the Alstons, had been George Alston's China boy in Virginia City, and then followed him, faithful, silent, unquestioning to San Francisco. There he had been the factotum of his "boss's" bachelor establishment, and seen him through his brief period of married happiness. On the day when Minnie Alston's coffin had passed through the front door, he had carefully swept up the flower petals from the parlor carpet, his brown face inscrutable, his heart bleeding for his boss.
Now his devotion was centered on the girls; "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist," he called them. He ruled them and looked out for their welfare—refused to buy canvasbacks till they fell to the price he thought proper, economized on the kitchen gas, gave them costly presents on the New Year, and inquired into the character of every full-grown male who crossed their threshold.
Mark Burrage he liked, found out about him through the secret channels of information that make Chinatown one of the finest detective bureaus in the land, and set the seal of his approval on the young man's visits. He would no more have shown him into the reception room and gone to see if "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist" were receiving, than he would have permitted them to change the dinner hour.
"You bin away, Mist Bullage," he said, placing the card the young man gave him on the hall table—cards were only presented in the case of strangers.
"How did you know that?" Mark asked, surprised.
Fong's face suggested intense, almost childish amusement.
"I dunno—I hear some place—I forget."
"I've been up in Sacramento County with my people—maybe Crowder told you."
"Maybe—I not good memly, I get heap old man." He made a move for the parlor door, his face wrinkled with his innocent grin. "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist here; awful glad see you," and he threw the door open.
Mark took a deep breath and strode forward, pulling his cuffs over his hands, which at that moment seemed to him to emerge from his sleeves large and unlovely as two hams. The place always abashed him, its sober air of wealth, its effortless refinement, its dainty feminine atmosphere. No brutal male presence—one never thought of Chinese servants as men—seemed ever to have disturbed with a recurring, habitual foot its almost cloistral quietude. Now with memories of his own home fresh in his mind, dinner in the kitchen, the soiled tablecloth, the sizzling pans on the stove, he felt he had no place there and was an impostor. Their greeting increased his discomfort. They were so kind, so hospitable, making him come into the dining room and take a cup of coffee. It was an uprush of that angry loyalty, that determination to hold close to his own, which made him say as soon as he was seated,
"I've been home for two weeks."
"Home?" said Lorry gently.
And, "Whereisyour home?" came from Aunt Ellen, as if she had just recognized the fact that he must have one somewhere but had never thought about it before.
The sound of his voice, gruff as a day laborer's after these flute-sweet tones, increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless he determined that he would tell them about his home.
"Up in Sacramento County not far from the tules. My father's a rancher, has a little bit of land there."
"Yes, Charlie Crowder told us," said Lorry. She didn't seem to notice the "little bit of land," it was just as if he'd said four or five thousand acres and described a balconied house with striped awnings and cushioned chairs.
He cast a glance of gratitude toward her, met her eyes and dropped his own to his cup. There they encountered his hand, holding the coffee spoon, the little finger standing out from the others in a tricksy curve. With an inward curse he straightened it, sudden red dyeing his face to the temples. He began to hate himself and didn't know how to go on.
Chrystie unexpectedly came to the rescue.
"Sacramento County," she exclaimed with sudden animation, "not far from the tules! There was a holdup round there two or three weeks ago. I read it in the papers."
Aunt Ellen moved restlessly. She wanted to get to her chair in the drawing-room.
"Holdup?" she murmured. "They're always having holdups somewhere."
"Not like this," said Chrystie. "It was a good one—Knapp andGarland—and they shot Wells Fargo's messenger."
"It was while I was there," said Mark, "up toward the foothills above our ranch."
The young ladies were immensely interested. They wanted to hear all about it and moved into the parlor to be settled and comfortable. They tried to make Mark sit in a massive, gold-trimmed armchair, but he had his wits about him by this time and took a humbler seat beside Lorry. Aunt Ellen sank into her rocker with a sigh of achievement and Chrystie perched on the piano stool. Then he told them the story, forgetting his bashfulness under the spell of their attentive eyes.
"Why can't they catch them," said Chrystie, "if they know their names?"
He couldn't help laughing at that.
"Why, of course they have other names," Lorry explained. "They don't go about as Knapp and Garland."
"But people must see them," Chrystie insisted, "somebody must know what they look like."
Mark had to straighten it out for her.
"Their friends do—ranchers up in the hills, and their pals in the towns. But the sheriffs and the general public don't. When they're out for business they cover their faces, tie handkerchiefs or gunny sacks round them."
Chrystie shuddered delightedly.
"How awful they must be! I'd love to be held up just to see them."
Mark and Lorry looked at one another and smiled, as age and experience smile at the artlessness of youth. It was an interchange of mutual understanding, a flash of closer intimacy, and as such lifted the young man to sudden heights.
"Where do they put the money?" said Aunt Ellen, her thought processes, under the unusual stimulus of a conversation on bandits, stirred to energy.
"That's what we'd like to know, Mrs. Tisdale. They have a cache somewhere but nobody's been able to find it. I saw the sheriff before I left andhethinks it's up in the hills among the chaparral."
"Is the messenger dead?" asked Lorry.
"Oh, no—he's getting on all right. They don't shoot to kill, just put him out of business for the time being."
"That's merciful," Aunt Ellen announced in a sleepy voice.
Chrystie, finding no more delicious shudders in the subject, twirled round on the stool and began softly picking out notes on the piano. For a space Mark and Lorry talked—it was about the ranch near the tules—rather dull as it came to Chrystie through her picking. The young man kept looking at Lorry's face, then dropping his glance to the floor, abashed before the gentle attention of her eyes, fearful his own might say too much. He thought it was just her sweetness that made her ask about his people, but everything about Mark Burrage interested her. Had he guessed it he would have been as much surprised as she had she known that he thought her beautiful.
Presently Chrystie's notes took form and became a tinkling tune. She tried it over once then whirled round on the stool.
"There—I've got it! Listen. Isn't it just like it, Lorry?"
Lorry immediately ceased talking and listened while the tune ran a halting course through several bars.
"Like what?" she said. "I don't know what it's meant to be."
"Oh!" Chrystie groaned, then shook her head at Mark. "Trust your relations to take down your pride. Why, it's the Castanet song from 'The Zingara!' Tum-tum-tum, tum-tum-tum," and she began swaying her body in time, humming an air and banging out the accompaniment, "'With my castanets, with my castanets.' That's exactly the way it goes only I don't know the words." She whirled again to Mark. "It's the mostdeliciousthing! Have you seen it?"
He hadn't, and Chrystie sank together on the stool in reproachful surprise.
"Oh, Mr. Burrage, youmustgo. Don't lose a minute, this very night."
Lorry breathed an embarrassed "Chrystie!"
"I didn't meanthatand he knows it. I mean the soonest nightaftertonight. We went yesterday and even Aunt Ellen loved it. Didn't you, Aunt Ellen?"
Aunt Ellen, startled from surreptitious slumber, gave an unnaturally loud assent to which Chrystie paid no attention.
"It's the new opera at the Albion and Pancha Lopez is—" She threw out her hands and looked at the ceiling, words inadequate.
"She's never done anything so good before," Lorry said.
"All in red and orange, and coins everywhere. Orange stockings and cute little red slippers, and two long braids of black hair. Oh, down to there," Chrystie thrust out her foot, her skirt drawn close over a stalwart leg, on which, just above the knee, she laid her finger tips. Her eyes on Mark were as unconscious as a baby's. "I don't think it's all her own, it's too long—I'll ask Charlie Crowder."
Aunt Ellen had not gone off again and to prove it said,
"How would he know?"
"Well he'd see it, wouldn't he? He'd see it when she took off her hat, all wound round her head, yards and yards of it. No, it's false, it was pinned on under that little cap thing. And after the second act when she came on to bow she carried a bunch of flowers—oh, that big," her arms outlined a wide ellipse, "the same colors as her dress, red carnations and some sort of yellowish flower I couldn't see plainly."
Mark, seeing some comment was expected of him, hazarded a safe,
"You don't say!"
"And just as she was going off"—Lorry took it up now—"she looked at someone in a box and smiled and—"
But Chrystie couldn't bear it. She leaned toward her sister imploringly.
"Now, Lorry, let me tell that—youknowI noticed it first." Then to Mark, "She was close to the side where they go off and I was looking at her through the glasses, and I saw her just as plain give a sort of quick look into the box and then smile and point to the flowers. It was as if she said to the person in there, 'You see, I've got them.'"
"Who was in the box?"
Chrystie bounced exuberantly on the stool.
"That's the joke. None of us could see. Whoever he was he was far back, out of sight. It was awfully exciting to me for I simply adore Pancha Lopez and Charlie Crowder, who knows her so well, says she hasn't an admirer of any kind."
Aunt Ellen came to the surface with,
"Perhaps she's going to get one now."
And Lorry added,
"I hope, if she is, he'll be somebody nice. Mr. Crowder says she's had such a hard life and been so fine and brave all along."
Soon after that Mark left. There had been a time when the first move for departure was as trying as the ordeal of entrance, but he had got beyond that. Tonight he felt that he did it in quite an easy nonchalant way, the ladies, true to a gracious tradition, trailing after him into the hall. It was there that an unexpected blow fell; Chrystie, the _enfant terrible, _delivered it. Gliding about to the hummed refrain of the Castanet song her eye fell on his card. She picked it up and read it:
"Mark D.L. Burrage. What does D.L. stand for?"
It was Mark's habit, when this was asked, to square his shoulders, look the questioner in the eye, and say calmly, "Daniel Lawrence."
But now that fierce loyalty to his own, that chafed pride, that angry rebellion which this house and these girls roused in him, made him savagely truthful. A dark mahogany-red stained his face to the forehead and he looked at Chrystie with a lowering challenge.
"It stands for de Lafayette."
"De Lafayette!" she stared, amazed.
"Yes. My given name is Marquis de Lafayette."
There was a moment's pause. He saw Chrystie's face, blank, taking it in, then terrible rising questions began to show in her eyes. He went on, glaringly hostile, projecting his words at her as if she was a target and they were missiles:
"My mother liked the name. She thought it was unusual. It was she who gave it to me."
Chrystie's lips opened on a comment, also on laughter. He could see both coming and he braced himself, then Lorry's voice suddenly rose, quiet, unastonished, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have such a name:
"What a fine thing for her to do! She admired Lafayette and called you after him. I think it was splendid of her."
Outside, in the darkness of the street, he could almost have wept, in rage with himself, in the smart of her kindness.
He wished his mother had been there, in that hall, in her old clothes. He would have hugged her to him, protested that his name was the crowning glory of his life. He would have liked to face them down, show them his pride in her, let them hear him tell her that whatever she had done was in his opinion right.
The place where he lived was not far, a lodging house on one of the steep streets that sloped to the city's hollow. As he swung down the hills he thought of the hour of work he had promised himself, looked forward to with relish. Now his enthusiasm was gone, extinguished like a spark trodden out by a haughty foot. All he had done looked suddenly trivial, his rise from a farm hand a petty achievement, he himself a rough, uncultured boor. What right had he at the house of Lorry Alston, breaking himself against unsurmountable barriers? In the beginning he had only thought to enthrone her as an ideal, lovely, remote, unaspired to. She would be a star fixed in his sky, object of his undesiring worship. But it had not been that way. The star had not changed but he had ceased to bow in contemplation—looked up, loved and longed.
The back wall of his dwelling rose above the trees and he saw the darkling panes of his own windows. Soon his lamplight would glow through them, and he would be in the armchair with his book and his pipe. The picture brought back a surge of his conquering spirit. Nothing he had set his hand to had beaten him yet. If he fought as he had fought for his education, was fighting now for his place, he could fight up to her side. There was no rival in sight; Crowder, who knew them well, had told him so. He could put out all his energies, do more than man had ever done before, climb, if not to her proud place, at least where he did not come as a beggar to a queen. Then, on his feet, the future clearing before him, he could go to her and try and win. He drew a deep breath and looked up at the stars, remote as she had seemed that evening. The lift of his passion swept him aloft on a wave of will and he murmured, "If she were there among you, I'd try and get to her and carry her away in my arms."
Meantime he would not go to her house any more—at least not for a long time. There was no good; he was not the man to sit round in parlors looking and acting like a fool. He could only work, blaze the trail, make the clearing, raise the homestead, and when it was ready go and tell her so.