Doubtless it is as well so. For he that lies beneath was only a piece of wreckage, with a past that was dead and a future that was empty. The memory of all those turbulent years was heavy upon his gray head, and he wished only that the hills might cover him and give him rest and concealment.

And away on the other side of the continent there is a grave that has known the tears of love and the hand of remembrance. Its flowers are bright and its shining marble is graven fair with name and date and words of praise.



THE STORY, OF A CHINEE KID

"Little Ah Sid Was a Chinee Kid, A cute little cuss, you 'd declare, With eyes full of fun And a nose that begun Right up at the roots of his hair." —M. C. SPEER.

This Chinee Kid was not Ah Sid, but another one whose name was Ah Wing. He was a Chinee Kid only so far as he was n't a Boy, and just how much of him was Chinee Kid and how much was Boy is difficult to say. Sometimes he seemed to be mostly all one, and sometimes just as much the other, and, again, he was a harmonized mixture of the two.

Wing's father and mother were both Chinese, but Wing had been born and had lived all his nine years in the town of Tobin, which is in California, on the overland road, far enough up the Sierra climb for the east-bound trains to have always two engines when they pass its depot. He wore Chinese clothes, except upon his head, whereon invariably reposed the time-honored hat of the American village boy, that always looks the same whether it is one week or one year old—the hat that is dirty gray in color, conical as to crown, sloping as to brim, and dilapidated as to general appearance, the hat that is irrefragable proof that its wearer is a Boy. This head-gear he wore over the queue of his forefathers, braided, ebony, shining, and hanging half-way down his little legs.

Wing could jabber Chinese as shrilly and rapidly as any of his playmates of the Chinese quarter, and with his young friends of the white race he could reel off amazing vocabularies of American slang. And he could swear, and frequently did so, with all the nonchalance of a Chinaman and the intensity and picturesqueness of an American. He could, if the occasion seemed to demand it, drop his eyelids and "No sabe" as stupidly as any Celestial who ever entered the Golden Gate. But with any man, woman, or child whom he chose to favor with his conversation he could talk volubly in fairly good English. And his lungs were just as capable, and just as frequently put to the test, as those of any white boy in Tobin, of the ear-splitting shouts and yells without which boys' games cannot be played and boys' thoughts communicated to one another.

Wing had such an amazing ability to seem to be everywhere at the same time that he was nicknamed "Wings." But no one ever called him that to his face who wanted him to answer a question or pay any attention to what was said to him. The first time it was tried he protested, with all the dignity of George Washington insisting on his title of President, that his name was Wing. After that he merely met the nickname with a blank, solemn, "No sabe" stare, as uncompromising and as impenetrable as a stone wall. It was impossible to look out of doors at any time or in any part of Tobin without seeing Wing. He was always going somewhere and was always in a hurry, but he was always ready to stop and chat for a moment with any one, large or small, who addressed him without giving offence.

Everybody knew him, residents and summer visitors alike. The men all teased him and the women all petted him. Nobody knew or cared in which one of the dozen houses of the Chinese quarter Wing's father and mother lived, nor whether his father had a laundry, a store, or a garden. They were nobodies; but Wing was a public character.

Wing's chief daily function was to assist at the arrival of the east-bound passenger train. The west-bound, having only one engine, was of less consequence. But at the passing of the other he never missed a day, Sundays, holidays, or rainy season. He inspected the engines, counted the wheels, considered the possibility of getting a ride on the pilot of the second engine, dodged around through the crowd, ran against people, had his toes trodden on, saw everybody who went away, stared at all who came, capered up and down the car-steps, put pins on the rail to be flattened by the wheels, stood with one foot inside the track until the train started, and, after it was all over, rode away triumphantly, hanging to the steps of the hotel omnibus.

After a while he began to thrill with the desire to know how it would feel to run backward on the track in front of the moving engine. He had had a brief glimpse of the possibility of that bliss as he crossed the track one day when the train was coming in; and the more he thought about it, the surer he felt that some day he would have to do it. He was well acquainted by that time with the engines, and the engineers too, and his trick of standing astride the rail and looking up with sparkling, defiant eyes at the engine's noble front was only a sort of preparation for other deeds.

One day he had assisted at the dismounting of the passengers, had seen the last departing traveller disappear inside the cars, had had his queue pulled by the news agent, and a narrow escape from being knocked over by the baggage man's trunk van, when he started off at top speed to get in front of the engine before the train should start. A young woman with a baggage check in her hand was standing near an omnibus waiting for the driver to come. Wing's headlong speed would have carried him safely past her, but a big man with two suit-cases was rushing toward him, and as he veered to one side he struck heavily against the girl. The blow knocked her against the steps of the omnibus and sent Wing sprawling in the dust.

A slender, trim-looking young man, who had got off the train and was about to enter the omnibus of another hotel, saw the collision and sprang to her assistance. Helping her to her feet, he asked anxiously if she was hurt, and then seized Wing's arm and gave him a little shaking.

"You young rascal!" he exclaimed. "Why don't you look where you are going?"

"Oh, don't scold him, please!" the girl pleaded. "He did n't intend to do it, and I 'm not hurt at all. Wing, how do you do? Did it hurt you?"

Wing was indignantly tearing himself loose from the young man's hand and was looking wishfully after the departing train and the lost opportunity.

"Lemme go," he demanded. "No, didn't hurt."

The young woman blushingly thanked the stranger as he helped her into the vehicle. Then, instead of returning to the other omnibus, which was waiting for him, he shook his head at the driver and stepped in after her. As they rattled up the street he found it difficult to keep his eyes off her slender, supple figure and the shining glory of golden-red hair that aureoled the clear, soft brilliance of her pink and white complexion. When she looked up once and caught his look of admiration she blushed deeply and endeavored to disguise her embarrassment in lively talk with some people who sat near her. The newcomer saw that they were evidently old friends and inferred that she was a resident of the town. From scraps of their talk that reached his ears he learned that her name was Annie Millner, and that she was a physician's daughter.'

The young man inscribed his name on the hotel register, "Robert Ellison, Worcester, Mass.," and then sauntered out to take a look at the town. He watched the omnibus from which he had just dismounted, as it stopped in front of a pretty cottage set back in some pleasant grounds on the slope of the opposite hill, until he saw Miss Millner enter the gate.

"I guess I 'll like it better here than I expected to," was his thought as his eye followed her figure. "This air feels good, the sunshine is fine, and that's a glorious blue sky. They say I 'm likely to become an invalid if I try to live East any longer, and so that's cut out. Well, a fellow could have plenty of out-door life here, and enjoy it, if there are many days like this. It looks as if there 'd be money in these orchards too. I reckon Dr. Millner must live in that cottage. What an inviting looking place it is! I guess I 'd better go back to the hotel and ask the clerk about the physicians here. I might need one sometime."

Discreet inquiry of the hotel clerk as to the population of the town, resident and floating, its general healthfulness, the number of health-seekers, their success, and the number and relative skill of the physicians it supported finally elicited for Ellison all the information his present interest desired concerning Dr. Millner and his family.

He also learned much about the history of Tobin. In its early days it had been a mining camp and, as Tobin's Gulch, had been rich and famous. Then, as the mines petered out, it had dwindled to poverty and two rows of houses. But, after a long while, new people had begun to come. Some of them had planted miles upon miles of orchards and vineyards, others had come to be cured of bodily ills by its climate, at once bracing and caressing, and still others, there for a brief summer sojourn, had spread the knowledge that it was a pleasant and picturesque retreat. So the town had dropped the plebeian "Gulch" from its name and as "Tobin" counted with ever increasing pride the hundreds of cars that carried its fruit from ocean to ocean and the growing numbers of its health-seekers and summer visitors.

"It looks good to me," was Ellison's inward comment as he walked up the street again. "I think I 'll look into this fruit business. That would give me an out-door life, and there seems to be money in it. That's a neat cottage of Dr. Millner's. I 'll walk past and look at the grounds. Hello, here comes that Chinee Kid—what 'd she call him? Wing, wasn't it? Queer-looking little critter, but she seemed to like him. Hello, Wing! Where are you flying to now? Got over your bumps yet?"

But the Chinee Kid cast one sober, stupid look at Ellison's sociable countenance, opened his mouth just wide enough to grunt "No sabe," and hurried on.

Ellison looked after him with a foolish little smile and exclaimed aloud, "Well, I 'll be hanged! If that is n't a kid!"

He heard the sound of a girl's laugh, and turning quickly, saw a merry face surrounded by golden-red hair disappearing from a window of the Millner cottage. He blushed furiously, frowned and muttered an angry little word, as he thought, "That kid needs to be spanked." But, although he was smarting a little with the feeling that the boy had made him seem ridiculous in her eyes, his glance covertly searched her windows as he walked on, hoping for another glimpse of the girlish figure and the glowing hair.

A year went by, and Ellison, brown and athletic-looking, was building a pretty cottage on the crest of a gently sloping hill just outside the town. Annie Millner, wearing a new ring and carrying a great happiness in her heart, went often to see how the cottage was progressing and how the trees were growing. For the hill-slope was covered with the gray-green of young olive trees, the dense, dark foliage of young oranges, and the stunted, scraggy boughs of the Japanese persimmon. His fruit ranch promised well, the day for their bridal was set, and they were hopeful, glad, and happy.

But Wing was the young man's implacable enemy. He neither forgot nor forgave the shaking he had received at their first meeting, and he revenged himself for it as much as lay in his small power whenever he found opportunity. He succeeded occasionally in making Ellison look foolish in his own eyes; and he, in consequence, disliked the child and disapproved of the universal petting that was given him. It particularly annoyed him that Annie showed his small enemy so much favor, and he would sometimes think angrily, when irritated by some trick of the Chinee Kid, that if she had more regard for his feelings she would not join in the general encouragement that was given to the heathen brat in being a public nuisance.

As for Wing, if he had known, or could have understood what happiness his childish sport had been instrumental in bringing to these two people, it is probable that his antipathy to Ellison would have extended even to Annie, whom, as it was, he considered one of his best friends. But he could not know, nor could they, that he was their kismet and that his small brown hands wound and unwound, tangled and straightened, the threads of their lives.

One day they were all three at the depot again. Wing, of course, was there in the discharge of his usual duties. Annie had walked down to welcome a friend whom she expected, and Ellison had come because it gave him an opportunity to be with her. As the railroad approached the town from the west it passed through a deep cut, from which it came out on a low embankment, and rounded a sharp curve before it reached the station, a few yards beyond. The roar of the oncoming train was borne to them on the wind and before it emerged from the cut a ridiculous little figure darted out of the crowd on the platform and raced down the track to the curve. It was dressed in a Chinese blouse and trousers of faded and dirty blue denim, while a pair of old Chinese slippers, partly covering the feet, left in full view two bare, brown heels.

"There goes Wing!" exclaimed one man to another. "That kid 's going to get killed at this little trick of his some day."

The train rushed at the curve with a shout that was thrown back from the hills, and the people on the platform held their breath—though to many of them it was nothing new—as with flying feet and monkey-like agility the Chinee Kid danced backward on the track. There was a brief vision of a pair of big, blue sleeves waving in the air, of a black, flying queue, and of a pair of twinkling feet, and then with sparkling eyes, a triumphant countenance and a loud "Ki-yi!" Wing leaped to the platform, the engine scarcely a yard behind him.

"Is it lots of fun, Wing?" said Annie, smiling at him indulgently.

"Bet your boots it is!" he shouted as he darted off to inspect the dismounting passengers.

"See here, Wing," said Ellison, putting his hand in a kindly way on the boy's shoulder, "you mustn't do that! You'll get killed at it some day."

Wing looked up at him with an uncomprehending stare, wriggled from under his detaining hand, stopped long enough to shake his head with a stolid "No sabe," and then dodged away.

Annie had heard the little dialogue and now turned to Ellison with a merry laugh. Her friend had not come, and as they walked back together she began to rally him about Wing's refusal to understand anything he said. It nettled him slightly and he replied that people made entirely too much of the little ape, and that if they would teach him better manners instead of petting him so much, it would be a good thing for him as well as for the public comfort.

Then Annie took up his case rather warmly and declared that he was a cute little thing, and that his manners were all right if he was treated with good manners in the first place. The consequence was that by the time they reached her gate they were deep in the lurid entanglements of a lovers' quarrel.

The previous day she had taken a horseback ride with a man of whom Ellison strongly disapproved. He had intended to explain the matter to her calmly and tell her just what kind of man the other was, and why it was unwise for her to accept his attentions. But in the heat of temper engendered by their quarrel about Wing, he lost his bearings, and what he had meant should be a request for her not to show the man any favor again became very like an explicit command.

Annie asked him sarcastically if he thought he had bought with his engagement ring a slave who was never to open her mouth unless he gave her leave. Then, feeling a bit ashamed of his vehemence and mentally fumbling for words of explanation, he began to say something about what "self-respecting girls" should do. Annie flashed a blazing look at him, slammed the gate, and left him alone on the sidewalk. A little later he saw the objectionable man making a bargain with Wing about carrying a note, and with a sore and angry heart he watched the shabby hat and the long queue travel up the hill to the Millner home.

While he was at work among his trees that afternoon he saw them ride past. He noted the defiant poise of Annie's head, which did not turn by so much as a hair's breadth toward the cottage and the trees and him, but he was not near enough to see that her eyes were red and that she bit her lip to control its trembling. So he wrote a letter to her that evening saying that evidently they had made a mistake; and an hour later he had the engagement ring in his pocket and a great bitterness in his heart.

Two days afterward, as Annie sat on the veranda of a friend's house near the depot she saw the hotel omnibus coming down the street with Ellison in it. "Why, there's Robert!" she exclaimed.

"Yes," said her friend, looking at her curiously, "he 's going East. Did n't you know it?"

Instantly all of Annie's pride gave way. She was in the wrong, she told herself, and she would ask him to forgive her. She would send a note to him at the station and ask him not to go away without seeing her.

"I 'll have time," she thought, "for they said the train is a few minutes late to-day and I 'll get Wing to carry it over to the station. There he is now, waiting at the curve."

She hurriedly pencilled a few words upon a scrap of paper and, folding it as she went, ran down the steps and up a side street parallel with the railroad, and then climbed the low embankment upon which the boy stood.

Wing was waiting in the middle of the track for the train and the ecstasy of his daily performance. In the meantime he was holding out at arm's length and considering with proud and satisfied eyes a big, artificial spider and web which had that morning been given to him by one of the ladies at the hotel.

"Wing," she called, "I want you to run back to the station and give this note to Mr. Ellison. You 'll see him there on the platform, or, perhaps, in the baggage room. You 'll have plenty of time, for the train 's late today. Please go quickly, Wing, for I want him to have the note at once."

The train was already rumbling in the deep cut just beyond the turn, but the wind was blowing strongly toward it, and neither of them heard the fateful sound. The high wind caught her dress and blew it against the spider in the boy's hand. It tangled the toy in the folds and wrenched it from his fingers and then caught the hem of her gown upon the splitting edge of a worn rail. As she stooped to loose it the terrible front of the engine appeared, rounding the curve.

Wing looked in blank amazement at his empty fingers and then, as he saw his plaything hanging to the folds of her dress, he sprang after it exclaiming, "My bug! My bug!" As he seized it again he saw the approaching train, and, his mind bent on what he was intending to do, turned to begin his usual backward race. Annie, stooping to loose her dress, with her back to the approaching train, was not yet aware of the oncoming doom. Her gown blew again across his legs, and to free himself he gave her a little push. With the warning shriek of the engine in her ears and darkness surging over her brain she fell just outside the track and rolled down the sloping embankment as far as her skirt, held beneath the wheels of the engine, allowed.

But for the Chinee Kid there was no such escape. The iron hoof of the engine was upon him as he made his first backward leap. When they picked up his little, mangled body the spider was still grasped in his brown fist.

The crowd on the station platform had seen it all—had seen him, as the engine rounded the curve, turn to Annie and push her off the track, thus saving her life at the cost of his own.

The townspeople persuaded his parents to let them give him a public funeral, to which all Tobin turned out, with tears and flowers and resolutions praising the little boy in high-sounding words for his heroic deed. A public subscription was taken up for the benefit of Wing's parents, to which Annie's father and lover and all her friends and everybody who had liked and petted the child contributed so liberally that his father and mother took his remains and sailed back to China.

When Ellison, from the platform, saw Annie's danger everything left his heart save absorbing love for her, and with a white face and alarm-distended eyes he dashed across the track and had her in his arms before the others had recovered from their brief paralysis of horror.

They were married as soon as Wing's obsequies were over. And now, if you ever pass through Tobin and will look for that sunny hillside with the olive and orange trees climbing its slope and the pretty cottage on its crest, you will see a home in which Wing's memory is enshrined with all possible love and honor and gratitude.

You see, they do not know that it was all on account of his "bug." Neither do they know that, small, brown, Chinee Kid though he was, he had stood in their lives for Fate.



OUT OF SYMPATHY

"Sympathy with his kind and well-doing for its welfare, direct or indirect, are the essential conditions of the existence and development of the more complex social organism; and no mortal can transcend these conditions with any success."—HENRY MAUDSLEY.

Our party was going from the Yosemite Valley to Lake Tenaiya—that beautiful bit of shining, liquid sapphire ringed by its mighty setting of granite peaks and domes—by the long and roundabout way of Cloud's Rest. It would be an all-day trip, but we knew that at the end would be the cabin of Henry Moulton, a lone mountaineer, to receive us, with such comfort as it could give, and Henry Moulton himself to cook for us a supper of fresh fish and game. The thoughts of the whole party began to turn longingly in that direction as the afternoon of the late summer day waned, and in straggling, silent file we hurried our horses, with such speed as was possible, over the blind trail. The Artist, who was next in front of me, turned in his saddle and said:

"We ought to get a warm welcome at Moulton's cabin. For this is the first party that has been up here for two months, and it's not likely that he has seen another human being in all that time."

"Does he live all alone, then?"

"Absolutely alone. He has a cabin on the banks of Lake Tenaiya—it is only about three or four miles farther, now—and whenever parties of tourists come up from the Valley to stay a day or two, he cooks for them and lets them sleep in his shanty if they wish. He is a very strange man, and I hope you will be able to draw him into conversation, for I 'm sure you would find him an interesting character. His life story is the queerest thing I 've run across on the Pacific Coast, and if you won't give away to him that you know anything about it, I 'll tell it to you."

At once I scented big game, for the Artist had spent many summers in that region and knew all that was strange or weird or startling in its history. Already he had told me many tales, and if this was to be the strangest of them all I wanted to hear it. So I urged my horse on and by dint of circling around trees and jumping over logs and occasionally falling into single file, we managed to keep within talking distance of each other while he told me this tale of the lone man at Lake Tenaiya:

"I knew Moulton years ago—thirty, yes, thirty-five of them—in Cambridge, where we were boys together. He went to Harvard and was graduated from both the academic and the law departments, and was looked upon as a promising young man. If any prophet had foretold to me, in those days, that Henry Moulton would become a hermit in the Sierras and do cooking for tourists, I would have told him he was the father of lies, and had better retreat to his natural home. Moulton married a handsome young woman of an influential family—his own people were poor—and all his friends were confident that a brilliant future awaited him.

"A few years after his marriage he came West, intending to settle in San Francisco and practise law. His wife stayed behind until he should get a start. The gold fever was n't dead yet in those days, and Moulton had a bad attack of it. When I came to the Coast he was working in some played-out placer mines, and feeling perfectly sure that he was going to strike a fortune almost any day. When a man has once dug gold out of the ground with his own hands, he seems to be unfitted for doing anything else. It's as bad as the gambler's mania. Well, the fever got into Moulton's blood, and he gave himself up to it, drifting about, prospecting, and sometimes striking a good thing, but often quite the contrary.

"Finally his wife came on, and she persuaded him to give up the gold hunt and his roving life and settle down in San Francisco to the practice of his profession. He got on remarkably well, had all the business he could attend to, and was making a heap more money than there was the slightest probability of his ever digging out of the ground. But the fever of his vagrant, irresponsible life was still in his veins, and with all that promise of a successful career before him he was restless and unhappy. He could not forget the camp fire in the mountains and the whispering of the pine trees and the life of the woods. I don't know if you understand—" and the Artist hesitated, turning upon me an uncertain, questioning glance.

"I know what you mean," I answered. "Go on and say what you had in mind. It's a fascinating question."

"That it is," he replied, "and I never can decide whether it is something fine and high in a man's nature which makes him want to yield to that sort of a yearning, or whether it is mere latent savagery, coming out all the stronger for having been long repressed.

"But what's the use of speculating? The bald truth is that if a man has a strong feeling for Nature and once knows the charm of wandering alone in wild places, he 'll have a string tied to him forever after, that will give him some mighty hard jerks.

"Moulton felt all that fascination very keenly, and the mountains and the forests seemed to be always calling him and commanding him to return to them. The follies and the faults of men and the baseness of human nature, of which, of course, the practice of his profession gave him special knowledge, irritated him, and every new case made him more impatient with civilization and more contemptuous of his fellow men.

"I was in the courtroom once when he won a big case which had been bitterly contested. A crowd of lawyers was there, and they were all enthusiastic about the way he had conducted it and the brilliant victory he had won. They pressed around to congratulate him, but he got away from them as soon as he could and went into the street with me. We walked a block or more before he spoke, and then he burst out bitterly:

"'I 've won some thousands of dollars and a lot of prestige in this case, but what is it all worth? I 'd give it all to lie just one night, perfectly free, under the pine trees in the mountains, beside a worthless prospect hole, watching a bear shambling through the brush, and listening to the coyotes yelping in the distance. Even a coyote is better than most men, and a bear is noble company beside them!'

"Moulton's wife was as dissatisfied as he, but in a different way. She was of Puritan stock—and the sturdy moral sense of those old fellows, their rock-ribbed principles, and their determination to make other people think as they thought, came out strong in her character.

"Of course, that kind of a woman was bound to be shocked by the more free and easy life of the Pacific Coast. Her constant mental state was one of stern disapproval. And the gypsy outcropping in her husband's nature filled her with anxiety. It was quite impossible for her to understand it or to sympathize with it in the least.

"Their marriage had been an ardent love match, and notwithstanding the way their natures had been drifting apart they still loved each other devotedly. At home, where she had been in harmony with her surroundings, she had been a very charming woman. And so she was still—only—well, I must admit that she did seem out of place here. She was so uncompromising, you know.

"I did n't wonder, though, that she was amazed and confounded by the change in her husband's character. It would have shocked any of his old friends and it must have been an awful blow to his wife, who was still as ambitious for him as he had once been for himself.

"She had one general name for this unexpected development in him and called it all his 'bearism.' At first she applied it in fun, when he told her how much he had enjoyed watching and hunting the wild animals in the mountains, but she soon decided that it was a pretty good name for his new characteristics. And so his 'bearism' came to be more and more of a division between them. Not that they ever quarrelled—I am sure they did not. They just agonized over the hopeless state of affairs, and each one seemed to be always pained and grieved because it was impossible to come round to the other one's way of thinking.

"Finally, Dorothy—his wife—went home on a visit. I think she did it in a last desperate hope that she might induce him to follow her and stay in the East. For a little while after she left, Moulton braced up and put more heart into his work. He seemed to feel, at last, some pride in his really splendid capacities, and to have some revival of his old ambitions.

"I thought he had overcome the gypsy longing, and had buckled down to work for good. And so I was much surprised one day, when I found him in an unusually gloomy mood, to see him take down both of his diplomas and fling them into the fire.

"'Gewgaws!' he exclaimed, contemptuously. 'Trinkets! No sensible man ought to care a snap of his finger either for them or for what they represent.'

"We had a long talk after that, and he told me fully what shape his thoughts had been taking. It was that same story, which so many people have been telling of late years, of sneering pessimism as to the human race and its possibilities, and of contempt for the labors and rewards of life. We argued the matter for hours, and each one of us convinced himself that the other was entirely wrong.

"Moulton was then finishing up an important case, and as soon as it was concluded, he and some friends went away to have a few days of hunting in the mountains. He did not return with the others, who said that he had not quite finished his hunt, but that he expected to be back within a week. I went East just then and stayed a year, and when I reached San Francisco again I found he had not yet returned. And he has not been back to this day.

"I heard of him occasionally, sometimes in one part of the State, sometimes in another, prospecting, hunting, trapping, roaming about, but always in the mountains, and always keeping pretty well away from signs of civilization.

"Six years ago, when I first came to the Yosemite, I found Moulton here, acting as a guide. The loveliness and the majesty of the place had entranced him, just as they have entranced many another, and he stayed here, working as a guide, for several years. But he let me know at once that he did n't want me to speak about his past life, either to him or to others, and so no one here ever knew that we were anything more than the merest roadside acquaintances.

"Four or five years ago he tired of even the civilization of the Valley, and built a cabin up here at Lake Tenaiya, so that he would not see so many people. He is willing to cook for the occasional parties that go up to the lake, and very glad, I guess, when they leave him alone again with the trees and the mountains. When the snow drives him out in the fall he goes down to the Valley and lives as caretaker during the winter in one of the hotels—which is quite as lonely as his summer life—until it is possible to come up to his cabin again in the spring."

"And his wife?" I asked. "What has become of her?"

"After she found that she could not induce him to return to civilization she got a divorce; and the last I knew of her she was devoting herself to the advancement—Whoa, there! What's the matter with you?"

Both his horse and mine gave a sudden snort and a bound, and started to run. We checked them at the second leap and peered through the underbrush to see what had frightened them. A dark object was rustling the leaves on the ground beside a clump of bushes.

"It's a bear!" the Artist whispered excitedly, drawing his revolver. "I know this is reckless, but—you are n't afraid, are you?—the temptation is too much for my prudence. If he comes for us we 'll give our horses the rein and they 'll outrun him."

I leaned forward, trying to get a better view, and just as I heard the click of the trigger I caught a glimpse of a white human foot.

"Stop!" I cried. "It's a man!"

It was too late to stop the discharge, but a quick turn of his wrist sent the bullet whistling harmlessly through the trees. The creature scrambled hurriedly away through the dead leaves, and our horses, trembling and snorting, tried again to run.

"It is a bear!" he cried as we saw its shaggy bulk awkwardly climbing the slope between two clumps of bushes. "No, by Jove, it's got hands and feet! Now, what in the—"

Then the thing half turned toward us, and we saw that it had a man's head and face, covered with hair and beard.

"Good God! It's Henry Moulton!" cried the Artist. "Moulton! Moulton! Come back here! What's the matter with you!"

At the sound of his name the man sprang to his feet, facing us. The bearskin which wrapped his body slipped down and left him entirely nude. In an instant he dropped upon all fours again, drew the skin over him and shambled away.

We turned our staring eyes upon each other, and there was no need to speak the appalling thought that was in both our minds. With one accord we plied our whips and drove our unwilling and terrified horses in the direction he had taken. We came near enough to see that he was digging among the dry leaves for acorns, and that his beard and mouth were defiled with earth, and full of fragments of leaves and acorn shells. But as soon as he saw us he darted off into the thick underbrush, whither we could not follow him.

We hurried on to his shack, where the rest of the party had already arrived, and the men all started back at once with ropes and lariats for Moulton's capture and garments for his covering.

The cabin was a rough affair, made of logs and chinked with fir boughs, and having an earthen floor. A bunk made of rough timbers and mattressed with twigs of fur was covered with some blankets and clothing, tossed into heaps. Under the blankets at the head of the bunk I found a little pile of books—a Shakespeare, a volume of Emerson's essays, Thoreau's "Walden," and a well-worn "Iliad," in the Greek text.

"How queer," said one of the women, as she looked curiously at the volumes, "that an ignorant creature such as this crazy mountaineer must be should have such books as these in his cabin! They must have been left here by some tourist, and he has put them away and kept them. It shows how much respect even the ignorant have for learning."

Some torn scraps of paper were scattered over the floor, and I picked them all up and tried to piece them together.

When the men returned with the lunatic he was quiet and obedient, except when they tried to substitute proper clothing for his bearskin. Against this he fought with all his strength, striking, scratching, and kicking with hands and feet, snapping and biting viciously, and all the time either roaring with fury, or, when they succeeded in pulling the hide a little away from him, groaning, shrieking, and writhing as if he were being flayed.

So they desisted and left him wrapped in the skin and tied to a tree near the cabin door. There he constantly walked back and forth on all fours, the length of his rope, restlessly and in silence, as caged animals do. If any one approached too near he sprang at the intruder with a savage growl and a snap of his jaws. But otherwise he paid no attention to any of those who had expected to be his guests. He refused to eat, unless they offered him acorns or dry oak leaves. These he devoured voraciously.

There was some scrawled writing on the scraps of paper I had pieced together and the Artist and I made out some disjointed sentences. We agreed that the lunatic must have written them himself, in the first beclouding of his mind, and we thought the words might have some effect upon him. So we went out to where the poor, crazed creature was tied, and, looking him squarely in the eyes, the Artist spoke very slowly:

"Dorothy. Dorothy. She said I am a bear. Where is Dorothy?"

He stopped and stared and a puzzled, human look came into his eyes. He rose slowly to his feet and stood upright, leaning against the tree. For the moment he forgot his bearskin covering and it half fell off. He stared at us, mumbling strange sounds, which presently became incoherent words of human speech. But he spoke thickly and uncertainly, like one long unused to the sound of his voice:

"Where is—Dorothy? I want—she said—Dorothy—Dorothy—she said—I —a bear—I—I—am—a bear."

Then he dropped to all fours again and drew his bearskin closely about him and that was the last flicker of human intelligence that he showed.

The next morning the men made a small platform of some loose boards to which they tied the lunatic. He fought desperately against his bonds, and it required the combined strength of all the men of the party to fasten him securely to the platform. Then the guide improvised a harness of ropes and hitched to this primitive sled the horse which he himself rode. Watching the poor creature closely, our little party went slowly back to the Valley, whence he was sent to an asylum. The Artist wrote to Mrs. Moulton an account of his condition, and told her also its probable cause.

Some months afterward I went to the asylum, purposely to learn what had become of him. The physician said his mental condition was steadily improving, that there was a pretty sure prospect of his recovery, and that he would probably be sane all the rest of his life, if—and the doctor put a significant emphasis upon that little word—"if he lives as a sane man should, among men, and busies himself as other men do."

Then the man of healing took from a shelf a book and read to me the words which I have put at the beginning of this account.

He told me also that Mrs. Moulton was there, that she had been there almost from the first, and that she spent all the time with the unfortunate man that the physicians would allow.

"Her presence," the doctor added, "has had a singularly helpful effect upon him."



AN OLD ROMAN OF MARIPOSA

"I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul." —WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY.

Mariposa, in the days when I first knew it, was still a wreck of the gold fever. The merest skeleton of its former self, it lay there in the gulch between the chaparral-covered foothills and hugged its memories of the days when it was young and lusty and had a murder every morning for breakfast. All around it the gashed and seamed and scarred and furrowed earth bore testimony to the labors of those stirring times, when men dug a fortune out of the ground in a day—and spent it in the town at night.

It was my first visit to the town, but I soon found that the people still lived in the past. The first man with whom I talked made vivid for my eyes the placer mines down the bed of the creek, in his young days as thronged as a city street, but now deserted and blistering in the sun; made me hear the sounds of bar-room frolicking and fighting, and the rolling chorus of "Forty-nine"; made me see, as he had seen, the piles of gold-dust and nuggets upon the gaming tables, and the hundreds of gold-weighted miners trooping into town on Saturday night. And every man and woman with whom I talked did the same thing for me, with new incidents and characters, until the hours became a fast-moving panorama of the "days of gold," and I began to feel as if I myself were living through their excitements and had drawn their delirium into my veins.

My hostess, herself an old-timer, began the entertainment anew as we sat on her porch in the early forenoon of the next day, breathing deep draughts of the honey-scented air blowing down the hills from thousands of pink-flowered manzanita bushes. She told me how she and her sister had alighted from the stage in Mariposa one evening, so many years before, when they were both "just slips of girls." They were the very first white women there, and the men, hundreds of them, who had not seen the form of woman, save Indian squaws, for many months, came to their shanty, called their father outside and begged to be allowed just to look at them. So the two came shyly out, hand in hand, and the men crowded around them with looks of respectful adoration, and then passed on to make way for others. One fell on his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. And presently a voice rose out of the throng, and the whole great crowd quickly joined in the hymn, "Nearer, my God, to Thee."

As we talked, one or another old-timer stopped to greet us and to add for my entertainment still more recollections of the days when they and hope and Mariposa were young. My pulses beat fast with the excitement of that dead life which their stories called into being again and I forgot that they and the century too had grown old since the times of which they spoke—until the Newspaper Man came along, and the sight of him brought me back to the present with a sudden jerk. I had seen him last in San Francisco, only a week previous, but he had been in out-of-the-way, ghost-of-the-past Mariposa, he told me, for several days, reporting a murder trial for his paper.

"Better come to this afternoon's session of the case," he said. "The prisoner is n't much, but his father 's the most interesting old chap I 've run across since I 've been on the Coast. I 'll tell you about him as we walk over."

So we sauntered up the hot, dusty street to the court-house, between the rows of straggling, forlorn little houses, each one with its own thrilling memory of the "days of Forty-nine"; and the Newspaper Man's tale, like everything else in Mariposa, took its being and its beginning from that same boisterous time.

"It's a brutal, ghastly case," he said, "and to my mind the only mystery about it is the prisoner's father. He is a fine-looking man, with the manner and the head of an old Roman. He has the reputation of being the straightest and squarest man in the county; and how he ever came to be the father of such a good-for-nothing scum-of-the-earth as the prisoner I can explain only on the supposition that he is n't.

"The old man is one of the pioneers in Mariposa, and they tell me that he was one of the nerviest men that ever drew a gun in this town. He killed his man in those days, just as lots of other good men did, but it was in self-defence; and everybody was glad that the town was rid of the man he dropped, and so nothing was said about it. There was a coroner's jury, which gave a verdict of suicide, and explained their finding on the ground that it was suicidal for any man to draw on Dan Hopkins and then give Dan the chance to shoot first.

"Along in the latter years of the gold excitement a woman came to the town, who seems to have been part Portuguese, part Mexican, and all bad. She followed some man here from San Francisco, and lived as hard a life as the times and place made possible. And after a while she went to Dan Hopkins and told him that he must marry her. At first he would n't consider seriously either her story or her proposition. But she kept at him, swore by all the saints in the calendar that the child was his, and then swore them all over again that if he did not marry her she would kill the child and herself too as soon as it was born, and their blood would be on his head. And finally he did marry her, and made a home for her.

"Time and again during this trial I 've watched that man's fine, stern old face and wondered what his motives and his feelings were when he took that poor beast of a woman to be his wife—whether he really believed her and thought it was his duty; or whether he feared that if he did not, the blood of a woman and a child would haunt him all the rest of his life; or whether the underside of his nature, under her influence, rose up and dominated all that was best in him and made him love her and be willing to marry her.

"Whatever it was, the deed was done, and the woman of the town became Mrs. Hopkins, with Dan Hopkins's gun at her service, ready to take revenge upon anybody who might offer her the least insult or whisper a slighting word about the past.

"He did not try to crowd her down people's throats—they might let her alone if they wished, and they mostly did, I believe—but they were made to understand that they had to treat her and speak of her with respect.

"He bought a big ranch a little way out of town, and there they lived from that time on. As far as I can find out, the woman lived a straight, respectable kind of life for a dozen years or more, and then she died.

"But all her badness seems to have descended to the boy. It's one of the oddest studies in heredity I ever came across. The people here all tell me that until he was thirteen or fourteen years old he was a manly sort of a lad, and gave promise of being something like his father as he grew up. But about that time the evil in him began to show itself, and the older he grew the less moral principle he seemed to possess. He was courageous, they say, and that was the only good quality he had. It was a sort of dare-devil bravery, and along with it he was cruel, thieving, untruthful, and—well, about as near thoroughly bad as they make 'em. At least, that's the sum of the account of him the people here have given me.

"The old man was universally known to be so honest and square in all his dealings, and so upright and honorable in every way, that the son's depravity seemed all the blacker by contrast. He has stood by the young fellow from the first of his wickedness, so everybody says, and has always shown toward him not only steadfast affection, but just the same sort of spirit that he did toward the boy's mother.

"He has never intimated even to his best friend that the young man was anything but the best and most dutiful son that ever lived. He has kept him supplied with money, so that the fellow's only reason for the petty thievery he did was pure love of stealing. He has paid his fines when he has been arrested, and shielded him from public contempt, and done everything possible to make it easy for him to be honest and respectable.

"But the boy has steadily gone on, they say, from bad to worse; and now he has capped it all with this crime, which, in wilful and unprovoked brutality, was worthy of a criminal hardened by twice his years and experience.

"He and another young blade about as bad as he is (though this one seems to have been the one who planned it and led in its execution), went to the house of an old man, who lived alone a little farther up in the foothills toward the Yosemite Valley, and asked to be allowed to stay all night. The old man took them in, got supper for them, and made them as comfortable as he could. In the night they got up and murdered him, stole all his money—he had just sold some horses and cattle to the prisoner's father—and were preparing to skip the country and go to Australia, when they were arrested.

"The thing 's not been absolutely proved on young Hopkins yet, but the circumstantial evidence is so plain that, even if there is nothing else, I don't see how he 's going to escape the rope. I 've just heard a rumor, though, that there 's to be some new evidence this afternoon that will settle the matter without a doubt."

The room rapidly filled up, and as we waited for court to open, the Newspaper Man pointed out one and another hale old man whose clear eyes and fresh skin belied his years, and told tales of his daring forty years before, of the wealth he had dug from the earth, and of the reckless ways in which he had lost it. And at last came the prisoner and his father. The old man's figure was tall, erect, broad-chested, and muscular, and his bearing proud and reserved.

"I 'm always half expecting to see that old man get up," the Newspaper Man whispered to me, "fold his arms across that great chest of his, and say 'Romanus sum,' and then proudly lead his son away."

He must have been sixty-five years old or more, though he looked twenty years younger. His dark hair and beard were only sifted with gray, and he held himself so erect and with such dignity, and all the lines of his countenance expressed such force and nobleness of character, that the suggestion of his appearance was of the strength of middle age.

But the boy was a painful contrast. His eye was shifty, his expression weak and sensual, and the hard lines of his face and the indifference of his manner told the story of a man old in criminal thoughts if not in years and deeds. For he looked no more than twenty-five, and may have been even younger.

The father sat near him, and although they seldom spoke together he frequently by some small act or apparently unconscious movement showed a tenderness and affection for the wayward son that seemed all the greater by contrast with his own proud reserve and the boy's hardened indifference.

The new testimony was brought in. The sheriff had set a go-between at work with the two prisoners, and with his aid had secured copies of all the notes they had at once begun writing to each other. In these letters, which were all produced in court, they had freely discussed their crime and argued about the points wherein they had made mistakes. Young Hopkins had boasted to the other that they need not fear conviction, because his father would certainly get them clear; and they had planned what they would do after the trial was over, wallowing in anticipations of a course of crime and debauchery.

When the sheriff began to give this testimony the old man's hand was resting affectionately on his son's shoulder. As it went on, laying bare the depravity of the boy's soul, the muscles of his face quivered a little, and presently, with just the suggestion of a flinching shudder in face and figure, he took his hand away and shrank back a little from the young man. I wondered as I watched him whether he was admitting to himself for the first time that this was the evil child of an evil woman, for whom there was no hope, or whether it was a revelation to him of a depth of depravity in his son's heart of which he had not guessed.

Then the prosecution asked for a few minutes' recess, announcing that it had a new witness to bring forward. After much hurrying to and fro, and whispering and consulting among lawyers and court and prison officials, young Hopkins's accomplice appeared on the witness-stand and turned State's evidence. He had learned of the intercepted letters, and, frightened by their probable result for himself, told the whole story of the crime, from the time Hopkins had first broached it to him until they were arrested in San Francisco. And during the entire narration of the cold-blooded, brutal, and cowardly deed, old Dan Hopkins sat with his eyes on the witness, as steady and unflinching in color and nerve and muscle as if he had been listening to a lecture or a sermon.

I think he had decided, even then, what he would do, no matter what the finding of the jury might be.

At last it was all over; the jury listened to the judge's charge, and filed out. "It's hanging, sure," said the Newspaper Man. "After that evidence and that charge there's only one verdict they can bring in. It's a good thing as far as the boy's concerned, but I do feel sorry for his governor."

Every one felt so sure that the jury would soon return that none left their places, and a buzz of conversation soon filled the room. Old Dan Hopkins sat with his arms folded, his head erect, and his eyes, steady and clear, upon the empty witness chair. There were many sympathizing glances sent toward him, though no one approached or spoke to him; for it was evident from his compressed lips and frowning brow that he preferred to be left alone. He had moved a little away from his son, and sat scarcely ten feet distant on my left. When the jury returned, in less than half an hour, he bent upon them the same abstracted gaze and unmoved countenance.

The foreman stood up and glanced sadly toward the man who had been his friend and neighbor for many years. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice broke and trembled as he gave their verdict, "Guilty of murder in the first degree."

Not a sound broke the death-like stillness of the room as he sat down, and I noticed that every face within my view was turned away from the prisoner's chair and the old man who sat near it. The tense strain of the moment was broken by the prisoner's counsel, who arose and began a motion for a new trial.

But the click of a revolver sharply halted his first sentence, as Dan Hopkins jumped to his feet with a sudden, swift movement of his right arm. A dozen men leaped forward with outstretched arms crying, "Stop! Stop!"

But even before they could reach him the report rang through the room, and just as they seized the father's arms the son dropped to the floor, dead. He waved back the men who were pressing around him.

"Stop!" he cried. "Stand back a minute!" And they fell back instinctively.

He walked calmly to the judge's desk and laid down his smoking pistol. Then he folded his arms and faced about, with head thrown back, flashing eyes, and colorless face. He looked at the sheriff, who, with the sense of official duty strong upon him, had stepped out from the huddled crowd and was coming toward him.

"Wait one minute, let me speak," he said. "I believe you are all my friends, for I have lived most of my life here, among you, and I hope I have the respect and confidence and friendship of you all. But that," and his flashing eyes rested for a moment upon the sheriff, the lawyers, and then upon the judge, "must have no influence upon the penalty I shall pay for what I have just done. The knowledge has been bitter enough to me this afternoon that that poor boy there deserved death. For the first time I have been convinced that he was bad from the bottom of his heart, and that there was no hope for him. But with my own hand I have killed him, that he might be saved the last horror and disgrace. Let them, and the law's justice, be my portion, for I deserve them for having given him life in the first place. Mine was the first sin, and it is right that I should suffer the disgrace and the penalty."

He turned to the sheriff, holding out his arms for the handcuffs. "Now, I am ready. Arrest me."



OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BABES

Perhaps it was a mere matter of nerves, but it seemed to me that morning that it was the cliffs of the Valley. Those mighty, overshadowing, everlasting walls and towers of the Yosemite seem to be endowed with the power to produce numberless changes of feeling.

Sometimes you gaze at them, and they lift up your spirit and hold it aloft in the free air, and send it up, and up, and up, until it reaches the very blue of heaven, and you know that you are free and powerful and ennobled, made one with the saints and mighty ones of earth.

The next morning you go forth and look up at those silent granite heights, and expect them to repeat their miracle. But they will not. They frown upon you and crush you down into the earth you are made of. Like an accusing conscience, they lift their stern, forbidding faces above you on all sides and look you steadily in the eyes with their insistence upon your unworthiness, until, in despair, you are ready to shut yourself up to escape their persecutions.

Of course, as I said before, it may not be the cliffs at all. It may be nothing but nerves. But I think it is the walls of the Valley.

On that particular morning they had made me bite the dust until I could no longer endure the sight of them. To escape their solemn, contemptuous faces I ran down a little path which led into a dense thicket of young pines and cedars. The trees grew so close together that they shut out all view of everything beyond a few feet on each side of the path. The ground was brown with their cast-off needles, and the air was pungent with their fragrance. Overhead there were glimpses of a smiling blue sky, and the cool, fragrant shadows of the thicket were brightened by patches of gleaming sunshine. The friendly sounds of woodpeckers hammering the trees, and of birds singing among the branches, pleased my ears and diverted my thoughts.

The only reminder of those towering granite Preachers, with their everlasting "All is vanity," was the roaring and crashing of the Yosemite Falls, which filled the Valley with their thunder and made the air tremble.

The sights, the sounds, the odors, enveloped my senses and filled me with delighted, languorous content. It was very comforting, and I sat down on a log in the edge of a little opening, all pink and fragrant with wild roses, to enjoy the sensuous delight of it all and so take revenge upon the great stone Preachers waiting for me outside the thicket.

Presently there came from beyond the glade a soft, crooning noise, which in an instant more became that sweetest of sounds, the voice of a happy child alone with nature.

A little girl, perhaps four or five years old, came slowly down the path. She was talking to herself and to the trees and birds and squirrels, and even to the brown pine-needles under her feet. Her hat, which she had stuck full of wild roses, hung at the back of her head, the ends of her brown curls just peeping below it. Without the least trace of childish shyness she came straight to where I sat, mounted the log beside me, and asked me to take a thorn from her finger.

"Did it hurt you?" I asked, as I patted the chubby brown fist after the operation. "You are a very brave little girl not to cry."

"Yes, I know it," she replied, looking at me with big violet eyes, frank and confiding. She was a beautiful child, with a glorious perfection of feature and complexion. "I 'm always brave. My papa says so, and my new mamma says so, too. I 've got two mammas—my new mamma and my gone-away mamma. But I like my new mamma best."

"Do you? Why?"

"'Cause she's always and always dust as good as she can be. And she never and never says 'Stop this minute!' er 'at I make her head ache, er 'at I 'm naughty, er anything. She dust puts her arms all 'round me and says, 'Dear little girl.' An' 'en I 'm good. And I love my new mamma, I do, better than my gone-away mamma." And she gave a decided little nod, as if in defiance of some privately urged claim.

"Where has your other mamma gone?" I asked, expecting to hear but the one answer. She raised her long lashes and looked at me seriously.

"You 're a tourist lady, ain't you? That's why you don't know. Well, it was a tourist man, 'at stayed a long time, who tooked my gone-away mamma away."

"A tourist man? Why did he do that?"

"'Cause he did n't want me 'round, I guess. When the flowers was here that other time he comed to the store where my mamma sold all the pretty things my papa made dust every day an' every day. An' I did n't like him a bit, I did n't."

"Why didn't you like him?"

"'Cause he did n't like me, and did n't want me 'round. When my mamma was there and I was there, he would come and talk to my mamma, an' 'en he would tell her to send me away. An' 'en she would put me in the back room; an' if I cried an' kicked the door, she would put me in the closet. If the tourist man wasn't there, she loved me most all the time."

"Did n't she love you all the time, anyway?"

For answer the small maiden shut her eyes tightly and shook her head rapidly and decidedly.

"Why do you think she did n't love you all the time?"

"'Cause sometimes she was n't good to me."

"Did you love her all the time?"

Another decided head-shaking.

"You did n't? Why?"

"I did n't love her when she did n't love me. But my new mamma loves me all the time an' all day an' all night an' every day an' every night an' always. An' we dust have the bestest times togevver, an' I love her dust all I can love anybody." She hugged her chubby arms close up to her breast as if she had them around the loved one's neck, screwed up her pretty face, and gave the little grunt with which childhood expresses the fulness of its affection.

"Did you see the tourist man take your gone-away mamma away?"

"No, I didn't see him, but he did, 'cause once she went to take a walk an' 'en he never came back any more."

"And did n't she ever come back?"

"'Course not!" She looked at me in wide-eyed amazement at my ignorance. "One day she said for me to stay there 'cause she was going to take a walk. An' I cried to go too, an' 'en she picked me up quick an' hugged me tight an' kissed me. An' 'en she put me down an' said no, she was going too far. An' she took off her ring, her pretty gold ring, 'at she never let me have before, an' said to play wif it and when papa come give it to him. An' I did, an' papa readed a letter 'at was on the table, an' 'en he fell down on the bed an' cried. An' I put my hand on his face an' said, 'Poor papa, what's 'e matter?' An' 'en he took me up in his arms, an' we bofe cried, an' cried, an' cried. An' he said, 'Poor little girl!'"

She paused a moment, and then, with the air of one summing up a long discourse, she exclaimed, "An' that's why I 've got a gone-away mamma!"

I stroked the little one's hand, which nestled confidingly in mine, and said, half absently, "And she never came back?"

The child had fallen into a reverie, her big violet eyes fastened on the ground at our feet, but my words roused her into sociability again and she chattered on:

"No, 'course not, she never comed back. But one day 'ere was a letter, all alone dust for me, an' my papa called me an' said, 'Here is a letter for my little girl; now, I wonder who it's from?' She said this with the quaintest imitation of grown-up condescension addressing a child, waited a moment, as if to give to suspense its proper effect, and then went on:

"He tored it open an' inside the en'lope was dust a tiny bit of a letter wif just a little bit of reading and writing on it. An' 'en my papa dropped it 's if it was a yellow-jacket an' he said, great big an' loud, 'Money! from them! Don't touch it, child!' An' he frowed it in the fire. But I did n't see no money and I wanted to keep my letter, 'cause it was all mine. But I had my new mamma then, an' when I cried she writed me another letter."

"Yes," I said, "it's very queer to have two mammas, is n't it? But when did you get your new mamma?"

"Well, one day, after there was n't any more snow, we all went to church. And I had on my new white dress—it's awful pretty—and a new ribbon on my hair, and a new hat—not this old one—prettier than this, lots, with pretty flowers on it. And papa and—and—her, they stood up and talked wif the preacher, an' I would n't sit still. I dust runned right up side of my papa and held on to his leg all the time. An' when the preacher did n't talk any more she picked me up an' hugged me tight, an' kissed me an' said, 'I 'm going to be your mamma now, darling.'

"An' she 's been my new mamma ever since, an' I 'm going to keep her for my mamma always and always, and I don't want my gone-away mamma ever to come back, 'cause I love my new mamma best."

Just then there burst upon the warm, soft air a babel of shouts and yells and loud hurrahs. The wee maiden turned a brightening face in the direction of the uproar, and announced:

"That's wecess. I must go now. I 'spect my mamma will want me. She is n't dust my new mamma, she is n't. She's the teacher, too. An' I go to school wif her every day. But I don't have to stay in the schoolhouse 'less I want to."

She slipped off the log and started down the path, and then came back to kiss me good-bye. The hurried tread of a woman rustled through the thicket, and a Madonna-like face appeared between the branches.

"Come, dearie," she called, and the child ran across the glade, jumped into her arms and nestled upon her neck with a cry of delight.

Months afterward, in a city on the other side of the continent, I met a beautiful woman. She was a little overdressed and over-jewelled, but I thought as I talked with her that never before had I seen a woman of such glorious perfection of features and complexion and figure.

My visit to the Yosemite, the previous summer, chanced to be mentioned, and at once she began to ask me question after question about the Valley, and about those who live in it and cater to the comfort of travellers. Her husband, tall, athletic-looking, and handsome, leaned upon the back of her chair and made tactful efforts to divert the conversation into other channels. She yielded for the moment, but soon managed to lead me away to a quiet nook where she at once re-commenced her inquiries. Her beautiful face haunted and teased me with suggestions of previous sight. But I could not recall any former meeting, and so I decided that some chance street view of her countenance had impressed its beauty upon my memory.

As she rapidly poured forth question after question, I could not help noticing and wondering about the pathetic wistfulness in her eyes and the nervous eagerness of her manner. Presently she said she hoped to visit the Yosemite herself some time, and then hurriedly asked if I had seen any of the people who live there during the winter, and if any of them had children, and if the little ones, too, were subjected to that hardship.

There was intense longing in her lovely violet eyes as she asked these questions, but she quickly dropped her lids, and only her hands, trembling in her lap, betrayed that she felt more than casual interest.

I told her everything I could remember, facts, incidents, and anecdotes, that I thought would interest her. It did not occur to me that her eagerness for information was anything more than an unusually keen curiosity about a mode of life so different from her own. Chancing to recall my adventure with the little maid I told her about it.

I dwelt on the child's beauty and precocity, and repeated her account of why she had two mammas. The red blood was dyeing my listener's face a deep crimson, but still I did not understand, and went on lightly—

"She was as charming a little thing as I ever saw, but she was not at all complimentary to the 'gone-away mamma,' for she declared, emphatically, that she loved her new mamma best, and meant to keep her always, and did n't want her gone-away mamma ever to come back, because the new mamma loved her so much, and they had such good times together."

The surging color flowed in a quick tide from her face and left there a gray pallor, like that of granite cliffs when the sun goes down, and her hands were so tightly locked that her fingers looked white and ghastly. I thought it was indignation against that distant and unknown woman who had yielded to temptation that was moving her so strongly, and expected to hear from her parted lips some sweeping sentence of fiery feminine scorn and contempt.

But it was a low moan that came through their paling curves as she swayed once in her chair and then fell to the floor.

The physician, who was hurriedly summoned, said that it was a case of heart failure, and that she must have died instantly from some sudden shock.

And then, looking again at the beautiful, cold face, I understood at last. For death had completed the likeness which life had only suggested, and the faultless features, lying now in their eternal, expressionless calm, were exactly those of the beautiful child.

Her friends wondered much at her strange and sudden death. But I knew that remorse had had its perfect work, and that the sudden vision of a sweet child-face out of whose rosy lips came the accusing words, "I love my new mamma best, and I don't want my gone-away mamma ever to come back," had pierced her heart through and through.



POSEY

"Since I breathed, A houseless head, beneath the sun and stars, The soul of the wood has stricken through my blood." —THE FORESTERS.

Everybody who has ever seen him knows him only as "Posey"—a name for which he is indebted solely to the accident of birth. For in that Indiana county where he first saw the light, and when he went to California, some forty years ago, that was the name at once bestowed upon him, and by it he has been known ever since. It is possible that Posey has not forgotten what his name really is; but, if so, he is the only person who has allowed his memory to be burdened with that useless knowledge.

The traveller is likely to meet him striding along any one of the forest roads or trails within forty miles of the Yosemite Valley, or lounging around a stage station, or taking his ease in some mountaineer's cabin. And he will know at once that that is Posey, for no one who has ever heard of him can mistake his identity at even the first glance. Moreover, Sunday is always with him, and Sunday is just as unmistakable as Posey. Sunday is a very small dog, of about the bigness of your two fists, that carries within his small skin enough courage, audacity, and dignity to befit the size of an elephant. He is also known as "Posey's bear dog"—a sobriquet bestowed upon him partly in humor, because of his ridiculously small size, and partly in honor, because of his utter fearlessness.

Posey is a sparely built, muscular man, of medium size, quick and jerky in his movements, and springy in his gait. His face is broad and tanned, his cheek bones high, and his nose a snub. His beard is short and thin and grizzled, and his gray hair, curling at the ends, hangs around his neck. His shoulders are sloping, his chest deep but not wide, his arms long, and his hips narrow. He is always dressed in a blue flannel shirt, blue overalls, hob-nailed shoes, and a gray slouch hat; and the whole outfit is always very old and very dirty. His overalls, fastened upon him in some miraculous way, hang far below his waist. Why they stay in place suggests the goodness of God since it passeth all understanding.

Nature made a great mistake when she caused Posey to be born a white man, heir to all the white man's achievement. For he is a child of earth—a gentle, kindly savage, a white man with the soul of an Indian. But Posey has done his best to correct nature's mistake, and has made himself as much of an Indian as his white man's heritage will allow. He is a nomad, as thorough a nomad as any barbarian who never heard of those wondrous works of man called civilization. In all that wide stretch of country which he frequents and in which he has lived for thirty years and better, there is not one spot which he can call home. But that is nothing to Posey. He would not know what to do with a home if he had one.

His sole possessions are some blankets, a gun, and Sunday. If he wants to go anywhere, whether it be one mile or fifty miles away, he straps his blankets on his back, whistles to Sunday, shoulders his gun, and goes. Sometimes he sleeps on the ground and sometimes he stops for a night or for three months in the cabin of some lone mountaineer or in an Indian rancheria. It is doubtful if Posey himself knows how many Indian wives and half-breed children he has in these Indian villages scattered through the mountains. He will drop in on one of them for a day or a month, divide his possessions with her and her children, provide lavishly for them with gun and fishing-tackle while he is there, and when the desire fills him to be somewhere else he will leave them with as little concern as he feels for the birds and squirrels in the trees.

Save in the mirthfulness of which he is an ever-bubbling spring, Posey has become, in looks and gestures, in mode of thought and manner of expression, as much Indian as white. Nevertheless, he prefers, very greatly, the society of his own race, and likes best that of people of superior mental qualities and force of character. In Posey's creed there is but one article, namely, that all men are eternally and immutably equal—just as good as he is. That is, that would be the sole article in his creed if he had any creed and if he were conscious that such is his belief. For it is very certain that Posey never gave thought, in all his life, to the question of human equality. He simply has an unconscious feeling about it which he has breathed into his being from the mountain air around him and absorbed from the earth which has been his bed for many and many a night. It is there, just as the dirt on his neck is there, and Posey is equally unconscious of them both.

Formerly, for a good many years, he was a guide in the Yosemite Valley, and once he had in his charge a woman who was a many times millionaire, of social prestige throughout two continents, and known by name all over her own land from the palaces of Newport to the huts in the Sierras. She found fault with many things, and finally insisted that her stirrup was too small. Posey, who had cheerfully endeavored to satisfy all her complaints, examined it carefully and then told her, in gentlest voice and politest manner: "The stirrup 's all right, madam. It's your foot that 's too damn big."

Nobody ever saw Posey troubled in the least about anything in this world or the next. To him, mere existence is a pleasure, and the days of his life have been a linked merriment long drawn out. He is always ready to listen to and laugh at and join in jokes and fun; and if nothing new of that sort is at hand, old ones will answer the purpose almost as well. He is quick to repay such entertainment from his own inexhaustible store, and he never fails to turn anything that happens, no matter how serious it may be, into jest and farce. He has even been known to fling witticisms and ridicule at a bear that was coming at him full speed. But, no; that is not quite accurate. Posey has been known to say that he said these things to a charging bruin. But Posey usually hunts alone.

He is learned in the habits and secrets of the beasts and birds and reptiles and insects of the mountain and the forest, and in the virtues and malefactions of trees and flowers. But he does not consider this knowledge of any consequence, and sets far more store upon another stock of learning, which he does not display upon ordinary occasions. For such chance acquaintances among the tourists as he considers unusual in mental attainments he rolls out the scientific names of trees and plants with unction and delight. Usually they are not recognizable at first, because, having been learned by ear and preserved by memory, their Latin has become somewhat Poseyized.

He can reel off yards upon yards of narrative about adventures in mountain storms, exciting incidents in hunting, the people he has guided in the Yosemite Valley and upon the mountains, and all the strange things that could not but have happened to a merry earth-spirit, living alternately among the denizens of the wilderness and in the midst of a stream of people from all the four quarters of the globe. When he tells these tales he generally adopts the crescendo method, being spurred on by the applause of his hearers to larger and larger achievements as story succeeds story.

One autumn afternoon I sat on the veranda at Wawona and listened to the tales of luck and pluck in forest and mountain that Posey, squatted on the steps, poured forth for my entertainment and that of such others as chose to stop and listen. He talked in quick, jerky sentences, constantly bobbing his head about and making little, angular gestures with his hands and arms.

"Posey," I said, "did you ever meet a bear, face to face, when you did n't have a gun?"

"Lots of times!"

"What did you do?"

"Pooh! I don't care, if 't ain't a grizzly. If I meet a grizzly on the trail when I hain't no gun with me I don't tramp on his toes, you bet. I jest hide behind a bush and purtend I don't see him till he gets out the way. But any other kind of a bear 's got to give me right o' way, gun or no gun. Me get out of the way fer an ornery brown bear! Huh! Not much! All you've got to do is jest to stand up and lay down the law to 'em, and they 'll sneak out and into the bushes and leave you the trail, 'fore you can get furder 'n 'Be it enacted.' I 'll bet I could talk any brown bear in the Sierras out o' the trail in five minutes.

"Once I was comin' down Pinoche Mountain, windin' along a narrow trail through some high bushes, when I seed a bear roundin' a turn not more 'n ten yards ahead of me. I did n't have no gun, and it was n't much of a trail, but I reckoned it was a heap sight better 'n scramblin' through them bushes, and I jest thought I 'd let the bear do the scramblin'. Sunday, he rushed out between my legs and begun to bow-wow, bold as if he 'd been John Sullivan. 'Hist, Sunday!' says I, 'I've got the floor! Gimme the first chance; and if there 's any talking to do after that, you can do it.' So he come and squatted down beside me; and the bear, he stood there lookin' at us.

"'Mr. Bear,' says I, 'I 'd hate to have to spile your hide, but I 'll do it if you don't get out o' this trail. I 've killed eighty bear in these mountains, and I won't take no sass from you. The climate in this trail ain't what you need, an' I advise you to git out of it. Off into the bushes with you! Whoop! Git!' An' off he went, just as if I owned that trail an' he was trespassin'.



"That bear was as reasonable as any I ever see, but I had more trouble with a big feller up toward Crescent Lake. I got sleepy that afternoon, for I 'd been settin' up watchin' fer bear the night before. So I put my gun an' a snack I had on a stump and went to sleep. When I waked up there was a big brown bear nosin' my lunch and tryin' to open the bundle with his paw. I picked up some pine cones—Pinus pondyrosy it was I was sleepin' under" (he rolled this out with the slyest glance at a professor from an Eastern college who had joined his little audience)—"an' begun peltin' 'em at him just so's to tip his ears and his tail. Sunday, he 'd travelled off somewhere and missed this fun. Then I started in to abusin' that bear. My! I called him everything I could lay my tongue to. He 'd stop an' listen a minute, cock up one ear and wink, and then he 'd go to work at that lunch passel ag'in. I jest kept on swearin' harder and harder at him till I could taste brimstone. And at last it got too much for 'im. He took his paws down off 'n that stump an' marched off as dignified as a woman who 's heard you say somethin' you did n't mean her to.

"But the cheekiest thing I ever did with a bear was one night over in Devil's Gulch. A big storm come up just about dark an' I found a sort o' cave to crawl into. A big tree, a Pinus Lamberteeny" (another sly glance at the professor), "had fell alongside o' some rocks an' made a fine dry den. A lot of dry leaves was made into a bed, an' I says to Sunday: 'Reckon we 'll have company before long. Wonder whether it 'll be a brown or a grizzly.' Sunday, he curled up an' went to sleep, an' I was settin' down at the mouth of the den lookin' out into the dark when up come a big, black thing. I knew 't was the bear, an' it was too dark to see if it was a grizzly. But it just made me mad to think of that bear comin' to turn me out into the rain, an' I up with my fist an' give 'im a cuff. 'Git out o' this, you ole tramp,' says I. 'I was here first, an' there ain't no room fer you.' An' I belted him on the other ear. That bear jest turned tail an' walked off as meek as Moses, an' me an' Sunday had the den to ourselves all night.

"Yes, sir," and he shook his head and chuckled in delighted remembrance of his waggishness, "that was jest about the cheekiest joke I ever played on a bear!"

Posey's mirthful spirits make him always a welcome visitor in the cabins that, tucked away among trees and bowlders, shelter the lone mountaineers. But of all those who live within the circuit of his peregrinations his particular chum is Win Davis—"J. Winthrop Davis" is the name painted in big, black letters on a pine board nailed to his cabin door, although nobody ever takes the trouble to call him anything but "Win." After seeing that doorplate, you will hardly need to hear his nasal intonation to know that he came from the land of the tutelary codfish.

That was nearly half a century ago and ever since he has been the child of the mines, the forests, and the mountains. And Nature, as if in gratitude for his loving allegiance, seems to have taken him under her protection and stayed the progress of years over his head. For, although he has almost reached the allotted three score and ten, his big frame, his ruddy face, his shock of hair, his auburn beard that flows to his waist, his actions, and his apparent feelings do not indicate a day over forty.

When our buckboard stopped at his cabin door he rushed out, shouting hospitable welcome in a tremendous voice. If he ever spoke in anything less than a roar he would make his Herculean body and Jovian head ridiculous. As he never does, he is grand.

Posey was there, and, while Win bustled about in the lean-to kitchen making hot biscuits and coffee, he began to tell us entrancing yarns of the adventures and successes they had enjoyed hunting and trapping together during the previous winter. Apparently neither had felt it any hardship that for months they had been shut off entirely from all companionship with their kind. Nature is good to these lone men of the mountains. She gives them happiness and serenity in her arms, steeps them in lore of all manner of wild things, and makes them simple and honest of heart as a child. But for what she gives she exacts an awful price, for she cuts from their hearts the dearest ties of the race. In all those little cabins scattered along the slopes and through the gorges of the Sierras there is scarcely one in which you will find wife or child, or regret that there is none, or wish that such might yet be.

The talk drifted from one thing to another, and finally one of our party told Mark Twain's yarn about "the meanest man on earth." Our host listened at the kitchen door, a streak of flour shining white athwart the cataract of his auburn beard, and testified his amusement by a delighted roar that was like unto the rejoicings of a bull of Bashan.

"Posey," he exclaimed, "tell 'em about that stingy friend o' yours!"

Posey chuckled and pushed his old slouch hat to the back of his head.

"Well," he said, "I reckon that feller was jest about as stingy as the feller you 've been tellin' about, and mebby stingier, 'cause he 'd take more risks. Anyway, he was as ornery stingy as he could be an' live. If he 'd been any wuss he 'd of died to save grub an' shoe leather. W'y, him and me was out huntin' together oncet, over toward Mono. But I oughter tell you fust it was a long time ago, 'way back in the days when everybody had to carry powder-flasks, an' each of us had one on a string 'round his neck.

"Well, 'long about noon we come to a clear, purty little lake and set down to eat a snack. I was stoopin' over the edge of the lake to get some water in my hat an' my powder-flask slipped off an' went, kersplash, down to the bottom! The water was so clear I could see it layin' down there, as plain as could be, fifty feet down, I reckon, fer them mountain lakes is prodeejus deep. Well, the other feller, he could dive better 'n I could—he was a great one fer divin'—an' he said he 'd go down after it. So he stripped, but kep' his powder-flask 'round his neck. That kinder riled me, fer it looked as if he was afeared I 'd run off with it while he was gone. I did n't say nothin', though, an' down he went.

"Well, I set there an' waited, an' finished eatin' my snack, an' waited an' waited for him to come up agin. I reckon I must a' set there about fifteen minutes, anyhow, and at last I begun to git so curious about what he could be doin' all that time, that I up an' went over to the edge of the bank an' peeked down into the water. An' consarn my soul!"—here Posey bristled up with as much excited interest in voice and manner as if he were at that moment peering down into the depths of the lake—"What do you s'pose he was a-doin' down there?"

"Drowning?" suggested one of our party in a tone that Posey must have thought too flippant for the occasion, for he turned upon the speaker with an indignation that could not all have been inspired by the memory of his stingy friend's deed.

"Drownin'! Him! An' leave his duds up on the ground fer somebody else to git the good of? Huh! Not much! No, sir! There he was, down there at the bottom of the lake—an' I 'm a-tellin' you the Gospel truth, an' you may take me out an' drown me in that there very lake if I ain't—there was that ornery, stingy cuss down there takin' his time to empty the powder out o' my flask into his'n! I was so mad I felt like heavin' a rock down on 'im!"

Like many a man in far less humble station, Posey has but to repeat an idea or a statement a few times to convince himself of its absolute truth, no matter how reckless may have been its first enunciation. As we talked, the sound and savor of frying venison came appetizingly from the kitchen. Posey sniffed it and straightened up, with childlike, pleased expectancy.

"Venison 's a mighty healthy meat, ain't it, Doc?" he said, addressing a physician who was with us. The doctor gave assent, and Posey swelled and beamed with pleasure that his opinion had won scientific approval.

"Yes, sir," he went on enthusiastically, "it's the healthiest meat there is! Wy, if a man would jest eat venison all the time, he 'd never be sick, an'—an' he'd never die, neither!" He paused a moment, the least mite taken aback by the sweepingness of his proposition, then glanced belligerently around his little circle of listeners and repeated with emphasis: "No, sir! he'd never die!" He stopped again, but this time with triumph shining in his face, as who would say. Dispute it if you dare! Evidently he was quite convinced by that time of the truth of his statement, but still felt the need of making his hearers believe. He brought his fist down upon the table with a blow that made the dishes Win Davis was placing thereon jump and rattle, and exclaimed in tones of the most serious and heartfelt conviction:

"No, sir! He'd live forever, he would! He 'd never, never die!"



A CASE OF THE INNER IMPERATIVE

"This is my section," said Dr. Elizabeth Black; and the three women who were convoying her down the aisle crowded around her for a last good-bye. There was an excited flurry of talk as they hoped her journey would be pleasant and wished they were going too; and she heartily wished they were; and they wondered if she would find it tiresome; and she assured them she was a good traveller; and they charged her to write them a postal every day. Then all four had to press into the section to make room for two men to walk past them to the next seat.

"But they did n't get on here—they 've only been out on the platform," said the youngest and prettiest of the three, lowering her voice and casting a swift glance in their direction. "They look interesting, Doctor, and if they stay on long enough maybe you 'll scrape acquaintance with them. When I take a long journey I always know everybody in the car by the end of the second day."

"We must go, girls," exclaimed another. "It's time for the train to start." Then she produced a florist's parcel, which she had been trying to conceal in the folds of her dress, and unrolled from it a bunch of glowing roses. Another pressed into Dr. Black's hands a book; and the third, a box of candy.

"And here 's a magazine Dr. Wallace sent—you know she could n't come—and we agreed not to give them to you till the very last minute—for our last good-bye—" Her voice wavered and Dr. Black broke in with surprised and grateful exclamations.

"The book 's a love story," said the youngest one, an apologetic note perceptible in her voice, "but it's a pretty story, and the treatment's interesting, and I thought you might enjoy it, for railroad travelling always makes one feel sentimental, anyway."

"Oh, the train 's moving! Good-bye, dear!" The one who was nearest to Dr. Black left a hurried kiss upon her cheek, the others hastily pressed her hands, and all three scurried toward the door. Their friend raised her window and looked out in time to wave a final farewell as they landed safely upon the platform. As she settled back in her seat she saw that one of the men in the next section had also been watching for their reappearance outside. Their eyes met as she turned from the window, relieved and smiling.

She admired her roses for a moment, tucked them into her belt, and then opened her magazine. But her expression was more pensive than interested as she idled over its pages, looking now and then at a picture and reading only a paragraph or a stanza here and there. Her thoughts were more with the scenes of the life she was leaving behind her, or flying on, with inquiry and indecision, into that whither she was bound. Should she stay on the Pacific Coast where she was going to visit her father and mother in their new home, open an office in some city near them, and build up a practice there? Or should she return to take the position which had been offered her in the faculty of the women's medical college from which she had been graduated with high honors three years before? After her graduation, a year's work as interne in the women's hospital had heightened the expectations of her friends; and the success with which she had then served as physician and superintendent of a branch dispensary and hospital in the slum district had made all who were watching her progress predict for her a brilliant career.

She had accepted the appointment to the college corps of instructors with the deepest gratification, and she looked forward longingly to the opportunities it would give her for special work and to the surety of advancement that would follow. But her heart misgave her not a little as she thought of the great joy it would give her father and mother should she decide to stay near them in California, and of the grief that her mother would try to dissemble if she should return to the East.

Well, she would not decide the question now, and she put it from her as she cast a careless eye over her fellow travellers, let it rest for a moment on the two men in the section in front of her own and then turned to her book. Alternately reading, looking at the passing landscape, and now and then lapsing into reverie, her attention was so withdrawn from her surroundings that she was not aware that one of the men in front had turned several times and allowed a casual glance to pass from her down the row of heads behind her. Nor did she notice, when they returned from an hour's absence in the smoker, that he sat down in the front seat of their section.

"You don't mind riding backward?" commented his companion.

"I 'm not particularly stuck on it, but just now I want to look at that girl in the section behind us. It's good for the eyes to rest on such a splendid creature as she is."

"I 'll come over there with you and we 'll study her together," the other replied, as he changed his seat.

"Is n't she a fine specimen?" said the first. "She 's five feet nine if she 's an inch,—I noticed her when she got on at Philadelphia,—broad-shouldered and deep-chested and clear-skinned. And that glow in her cheeks rivals the roses her friends gave her. How old do you guess her, Wilson?"

"I 'd never try guessing such a problem as that! She's evidently one of the new women—you can tell that by her looks. And they never show their age, maybe because they don't think about it. This girl might be twenty, perhaps a year or two more, if you judge by her face. But if you take her expression into account—these women who do things always look as if they 'd had an experience of life that in former days they could n't acquire under forty. Well, you might split the difference and say she 's thirty."