CHAPTER XVIII

OUTLAWED

The night and the chaparral had made Garland's escape possible. In those first moments, breaking through the thicket with the shots and shouts of his pursuers at his back, his mind had held nothing but a frantic fear. A thing of gaping mouth and strained eyes, he had groped and rushed, torn between branches, splashed through streams, a menaced animal possessed by an animal's instinct for flight.

Then a bullet, tearing the leaves above his head, had pulled his scattered faculties together. He dropped and lay, crawled forward in a moist darkness, rose and made a slantwise dart across the hill's face, crouching as a bullet struck into a nearby trunk. Pausing to listen, he could hear the voices of his pursuers flung back and forth, sound against sound, broken, clamorous, the baying of the pack. Against the ground, trickle of water and stir of leaves soft around him, he lay for a second, the breaths coming in rending gasps from his lungs.

By a series of doublings and loops, he gained the summit and here rose and looked down. The voices were fainter, the trampling among the branches was drifting toward the right. The lights of the town showed a central cluster with a scattering of bright, disconnected particles as if a fiery thing had fallen and burst, sending sparks in every direction. Some of them moved, a train of dancing dots, lanterns carried on the run—the town was roused for the man hunt.

He went on, down from the crest and then up; the voices died and he was alone in the vast, enmuffling dark.

For the time safe, he allowed himself a rest, flat on his back under a pine, breathing through open mouth. It was then that he was aware of a wet warmth on his neck, and feeling of it with clumsy fingers remembered the shot that had followed the breaking of the door. One inch to the left and he would have been a dead man. As it was, it was only a surface tear through the flesh and he sopped at it with his bandanna, muttering and wiping his fingers on the moss.

Presently he moved on again, one with the woodland creatures in their night prowls. He could hear them, cracklings of twigs under their furtive feet, scurrying retreats before his heavier human tread. Once he stopped at a cry, a shriek tearing open the silence as the lightning tears the cope of the sky. He knew it well, had heard it often by his camp fire in his old prospecting days—the yell of a California lion in the mountains beyond. The night was drawing toward its last deep hours when he came to a straight uprearing of rock, a ledge, broken and heaved upward in some ancient earth-throe. He felt along its face, glazed by water films, close-curtained by shrubs and ferns, found an opening and crawled in.

There he stayed for a week; saw the sun rise over the sea of pines, wheel across the sky, drop behind the rock whence its last glow painted every tree top with a golden varnish. Then came evening, long and still, a great rush of color to the west, birds winging their way homeward, shadows slanting blue over the slopes, brimming purple in the hollows. Then night with its majestic silence and its large, serene stars. He lay in the cave mouth looking at them, his thoughts ranging far. Sometimes they went back to the past and he remembered the deep blue nights in Arizona, the white glare of the days. He could see the walls of his ranch house, with the peppers in red bunches, Juana in her calico wrapper and Pancha playing in the shade. He rose, cursing, sopped his bandanna in the water trickling from the rock and put it on his wound. It hurt and made him feverish, a prey to such harassing memories.

With a piece of cord he found in his pocket he made a trap—a noose suspended from a bent sapling—and caught a rabbit. This kept him in food for two days, then setting it again he broke the cord, and driven by hunger went forth, revolver in hand. He saw fresh deer tracks, and was lucky enough to find his quarry, steal close and shoot it. His hunger made him reckless and he lit a fire, roasting the meat on planted sticks. But the birds came and wheeled about overhead and the specks of moving birds in the sky can be seen from afar.

His forces restored by nourishment he grew restless. The loneliness of the place oppressed him and he wanted to hear of Knapp. Knapp had been caught and Knapp would talk and he burned to know what Knapp would say of him. He was sure the man knew little; he had foreseen such a catastrophe and been as secret as the grave, but Knapp might have picked up something. Anyway he wanted to know just how he stood. Food, his greatest need, supplied, his next was news, someone to tell him, or a newspaper.

The people who stood in with him were scattered far. Up beyond Angels the Garcias were his friends, and over to the left, on the bend of the river near Pine Flat, Old Man Haley, reputed cracked and a survivor of the great days of the lode, had been his confederate from the start. But Haley's shack was too near Pine Flat, and now with a reward probably offered, he feared the Garcias—greasers, father and son, not to be trusted. The wisest course was to lie low and keep to himself, anyway till he knew more.

So he tracked across the country from landmark to landmark, a cave, an abandoned tunnel, the shell of a ruined cabin. He left the foothills and went back toward the mountain spurs where ridge rises beyond ridge, and at the bottom of ravines rivers lie like yellow threads. Nature held him aloof, an atom leaving no mark upon it, an intruder on its musing self-engrossment. He moved, secure and solitary, seeing no living thing but the game he shot and the hawk hanging poised in the blue. Sometimes he sat for hours watching its winged shadow float over the tree tops.

Finally he knew he would have to return to the settlements, for his store of cartridges was almost exhausted. He tried to hoard them, eking out his deer meat with roots and berries till body and nerve began to weaken. That decided him and he started back, eating only just enough to give him strength to get there. He was nearly spent when he found himself once more among the chaparral's low growth, looking down on the brown and green fields.

There was a ranch below him whose acres stretched like a patterned cloth along the hill's slant. The house, white-painted, stood in the midst of cultivated land which he would have to cross to reach it. But driven by hunger he stole down, his way marked by a swaying in the close-packed foliage. He could see the smoke rising in a blue skein from its chimney and at night its windows break out in bright squares. He drew close enough to watch the men go off to their work and the women move, sunbonneted, about the yard.

The second day, faint and desperate, he ventured; it was midmorning, the men away in the fields till noon. There was not a sound when he reached the house, skirted the rear, and walked round to the side where a balcony ran the length of the building. Chairs stood here and evidences of sewing, work baskets, spools and scissors, and a tumbled heap of material. On the step lay a newspaper and he was stretching his hand for it when he heard the voices of women.

Through an open door he saw them—two—standing in front of a mirror, one with her back toward him, in a blouse of pink that she was pulling into a waistband. The other watched her, pins in her mouth, a tape measure over her arm. Both were absorbed, the one in her reflection in the glass, the other in the pink blouse. He trod on the step with a heavy foot and muttered a gruff "Say, lady."

The women flashed round and he saw them to be middle-aged and young—a mother and daughter evidently. The elder with a quick, defensive movement walked to the doorway and stood there, blocking it. He heard the younger exclaim, "A tramp!" and then she came forward, squeezing in beside her mother. Hostility and apprehension were on both their faces.

"What do you want here?" said the elder sharply.

"Somethin' to eat," he answered, trying to make his hoarse tones mild; "I bin on the tramp for days."

"No, no, go off," she cried, waving him away.

"I'm starved," he pleaded. "Any bones or scraps'll do me."

They eyed him, still apprehensive, but evidently impressed by his appearance.

"Honest to God it's true," he said, snatching at his advantage. "Can't you see it by the looks of me?"

The girl, thrusting her hand through her mother's arm and drawing her back, answered,

"All right. Go round to the kitchen."

With the words she banged the door and he heard the click of the lock, then their scurrying steps, bangs of other doors and their receding voices. In a twinkling he grabbed the paper, thrust it into his coat pocket, and slouched round to the kitchen door.

"Stay out there," called the mother from within. "I'll give you food, but I don't want no tramp tracking up my kitchen."

He could see them cutting bread and chunks of meat, flurried and he knew frightened. Leaning against a chair was a rifle, placed where he could see it. He could have smiled at it had he not been so bound and cramped with fear. As they cut they interchanged low-toned remarks, and once the elder looked at him frowningly over her shoulder.

"Why ain't you workin'? A big, husky man like you?" she asked.

"I'm calcalatin' to find work at Sonora, but I have to have the strength to git there. I've had a bad spell of ague."

The girl raised her eyes to him and compassion softened them. As she went back to her bread-cutting he heard her murmur,

"I guess that's straight. He sure has an awful peaked look."

It was she who gave him the food, rolled in a piece of newspaper. Standing in the doorway, she held it out to him and said, smiling,

"There, it's a good lunch. I hope it'll brace you up so you can get to Sonora all right. I believe you're tellin' the truth and I wish you luck."

He grunted his thanks and made off, shambling across the yard and out into the sun-flooded fields. He had to cross them to get out of range behind a hill spur before he turned into the woods. As he walked, feeling their eyes boring into his back, conscious of himself as hugely conspicuous in the untenanted landscape, he opened the paper and ate ravenously, tearing at the bread and meat.

He was far afield before he dared to rest and look at the paper. It was part of the Sunday edition of the Stockton Expositor, and in it he read of the approaching trial of Knapp. Both Danny Leonard and Jim Bailey had identified him by his hands and his size as the man who had wounded the messenger, and Knapp had admitted it. The paper predicted a life sentence for him. Then it went on to Garland, who was still at large. Various people were sure they had seen him. A saloon keeper on the outskirts of Placerville was ready to swear that a mounted man, who had stopped at his place one night for a drink, was the fugitive outlaw. If this evidence was reliable Garland was moving toward his old stamping ground, the camps along the Feather, where it was said he had friends.

His relief was intense, for it was evident Knapp had had little to say of him, and his hunters were on the wrong trail. Food cravings appeased, his anxieties temporarily at rest, he was easier than he had been since the night at Sheeps Bar. Curled under a thicket of madrone he slept like a log and woke in the morning, his energies primed, his brain alert, thinking of Pancha.

There were two things that had to be done—get a letter to her and replenish his store of cartridges. If too long a time passed without news of him, she would grow anxious, might talk, might betray suspicious facts or draw inferences herself. A word from him, dispatched from a camp along the lode, would quiet her. So he must gird his loins for the perilous venture of a break into the open under the eyes of men.

Up beyond Angels, slumbering amid its rotting placers and abandoned ditches, lies the old camp of Farleys. In times past it was a stop on the way to the Calaveras Big Trees, but after the railroad diverted the traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy and a good way from anywhere. Warnings sent from there would not be acted upon too quickly. A man could catch the eye of Farleys, wake its suspicions and get away while it was talking things over and starting the machinery for his arrest.

This was the place he decided on and forthwith moved toward. He had four cartridges and if game was plentiful and his aim good he might make Farleys and still have one or maybe two left.

But it took longer than he calculated, swollen rivers blocking his path, luck going against him. Three of his cartridges were expended on a deer before he brought it down and the rains came back, blinding and torrential. Forced to make detours because of the unfordable streams he lost his way and spent precious hours groping about in pine forests, dark as twilight, their boughs bent to the onslaught of the storm. Crossing a watercourse he fell and his matches were soaked, and that night, crouched against a tree trunk, a creature less protected than the beasts who had their shelters, he sucked the raw meat.

The next day his misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was. But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with the first light, staggering a little, squinting down the columned aisles for open ground whence he could look out and get his bearings.

It was late in the afternoon, dusk at hand, when he saw the light of a clearing. He hastened, staring ahead, stood for a stunned second, then leaped behind a tree, muscles tight, the dull confusion of his brain gone. Looming high through the gray of the twilight, balconied, many-windowed, was a large white building. Outhouses sprawled at one side, a weed-grown drive curved to its front steps, down the slant of its roof the rain ran, spouting from broken gutters and lashing the shutters that blinded its tiers of windows.

The first shock over, he stole cat-soft from trunk to trunk, studying it. There were no lights, no smoke from the chimneys, no sign of habitation. A loosened shutter on the ground floor banged furiously, calling out echoes from the solitude. He circled the back of it, round by the outbuildings, a lot of them, one like a stable—all silent. Then made his way to the side with its deep, first-floor veranda and was creeping toward the front when he ran into something—a circular construction covered with a rough bark and topped by a balustrade.

One look at it and he gave a smothered exclamation and ran back among the trees. The light was almost gone, but there was enough to show a line of enormous shafts towering into a remote blackness. Like reddish monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to touch the low sky. He knew where he was now—the Calaveras Big Trees. The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few travelers found their way there, but at this season the spot was in as complete a solitude as it had been when the first gringoes came and stood in silent awe.

He broke his way in by the window with the loosened shutter and passed through the dimness of long rooms, bare and chilly, his steps loud on the uncarpeted floors. The place was damp and had the musty smell of a house long unaired and unoccupied. The double doors into the dining room were jammed and he had to wrench them open; in the pantry a windowpane was broken and the rain had seeped in. Here, on a three-legged table, he found a calendar and remembered hearing that the hotel had been opened during the previous summer, but that, business being bad, the proprietor had closed it after a few weeks.

In the kitchen he found signs of this period of habitation. On a shelf in a cupboard, hidden by a debris of paper and empty boxes, he came upon two cans evidently overlooked. He took them to the window, threw back the shutter, and saw they contained tomatoes and cherries. This heartened him to new efforts and he began a search through the dirty desolation of the room. He was rewarded by finding a half-filled match box, a few sticks of split wood and in the bottom of a coal bunker in the passage enough coal to make at least one good fire.

Before he started it he closed the shutter tight, then, groping in the dusk, filled the big range with paper and wood and set a match to it. It flickered, caught, snapped cheerily, light flickering along the walls, shining between the bars. He poured on the coal, opened all the draughts, saw the iron grow slowly red and felt the grateful warmth. With his knife he cut open the tomato can, heated its contents in a leaky saucepan, and, taking it to the sink, spooned it up with a piece of wood. The cherries were his dessert.

After that he peeled off his outer clothes and lay on the floor in front of the range. It threw out a violent heat, but not too much for him; he luxuriated, basked in it, delighting in the rosy patches that grew on the stove's rusty surface, the bright droppings from its grate. Holding his stiff feet out to it, he cooked himself, stretching and turning like a cat. Finally, he lay quiet, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes touching points that the red light played upon, and listened to the rain. The building shook to its buffets; it swept like feeling fingers across the windows, drummed on the low roofs of the outhouses, ran in a spattering rush along the balcony. The sound of it soothed him like a lullaby, and with the banging of the unfastened shutter loud in his ears he slept the sleep of the just.

The next morning, with the daylight to help him, he extended his search and found a few spoonfuls of tea in a glass preserve jar, a handful of moldy potatoes in a gunny-sack and in a shed back of the kitchen a pile of cut wood. He breakfasted royally, finishing the remains of the cherries, built the fire up high and hot, and started to explore the house.

It was as empty as a shell, room opening out of room, half lighted, bare and dismal. There was nothing to be got out of it and he was back on his way to the warmth of the kitchen when he thought of the broken-legged table in the pantry. Propping this up against the window ledge, a drawer fell from it, scattering sheets of paper and envelopes on the floor. He stood staring at them, lying round his feet, fallen there as if from heaven to supply his last and now greatest need. With an upturned box for a seat, the stub of pencil he always carried sharpened to a pin point by his knife, he steadied the table on the windowsill, and sat down to write to Pancha. He wrote the word "Farleys" at the top of the sheet, as he knew she would see the Farleys postmark, but the date he omitted:

"MY DEARY PANCHITA:

"Farleys

"Here's the old man writing to you from Farleys. Sort of small dead place, but there's business moving round it, so I got washed up here for a few days. I ain't had anything that's good yet, but there's a feller that looks like he might nibble, and take it from me my hooks are out. Anyways if he does I'll let you know. Plenty lot of rain, but I've been comfortable right along. Got a good room here and swell grub. And don't you worry about my roomatiz. All you want to know is I ain't got it. I can't give you no address, as I'm moving on soon, Wednesday maybe. But I'll drop you a line from somewheres as soon as I got anything to say. You want to remember I'm all right and as happy as I ever am when I ain't with my best girl. This leaves me in good health, which I hope it finds you.

"YOUR BEST BEAU."

The rain lasted that day, but on the next the sun rose on a world washed clean, woodland-scented, fresh and beautiful. The time had come for him to dare. At nightfall he started, a young moon to guide him, followed a road ankle high in ruts and mud, and at dawn crept into an alder thicket for rest and sleep. It was nine, the day well started, when he walked into Farleys.

The little town was up and about its business, windows open, housewives sweeping front steps. The air was redolent of pine balsam, the sun licking up the water in hollows on the sidewalks, the distances colored a transparent blue. Outside the saloon the barkeeper was patting his dog, women in sunbonnets with string bags on their arms were on their way to the general store, men were bringing out chairs and placing them with pondering calculation the right distance from the hitching bar.

He bought his stamp and posted his letter, the man inside the window offering comments on the weather. Then he had to face the length of the street; he had been there before and knew the hardware store was at its other end. As he traversed it the heads of the men—already settled in their chairs for the day—turned hopefully at the sound of his masculine tread. It might be someone who would stand a drink, and even if it wasn't, staring at a passerby was something to do. To run such a gauntlet required all his fortitude, and as he walked under the battery of eyes the sweat gathered on his face and his heart thumped in his throat.

The clerk at the hardware store was reading a paper. When he went for the cartridges he left it on the counter and the fugitive saw the heading of a column, "Garland still eludes justice." As he waited he read it, turning from it to take his package and then back to it as the clerk made change. They were hunting in the Feather country. A blacksmith beyond Auburn swore he knew the outlaw and had seen him, mounted on a bay horse, ride past his shop a week before at sunset. The clerk held out the change, and Garland, reading, nodded toward the counter. He was afraid to extend his hand, knowing that it shook, and presently, dropping the paper, scooped up the money with a curved palm.

"Looks like Garland was goin' to give 'em the slip after all," said the clerk.

"Um—looks that way, but I wouldn't bank on it. If he's lyin' low in one of them camps up the Feather he's liable to be seen. There's folks there that knows him it says here and you can't always trust your friends. Fine weather we're havin' after the rain. So long."

When he came out into the street he was nerved for a last, desperate venture. He went to the general store and bought a stock of provisions: bread, sugar, bacon, coffee and tobacco. The salesman was inclined to be friendly and asked him questions, and he explained himself as a prospector in the hills, cut off by the recent rains. He got away from there as quickly as he could, dropped down a side path and made for the woods and "home."

That evening he went out and lay under the giant trees, and smoked his first pipe for weeks. The sunset gleamed through the foliage in fiery spots, here and there piercing it with a long ray of light which slanted across the red trunks. From the forest recesses twilight spread in stealthy advance, and looking up he could see bits of the sky, scatterings of pink through the darkening green. It was intensely quiet, not a stir of wind, not a bird note, or leaf rustle. The place was held in that mysterious silence which broods over the Californian country and suggests a hushed and ominous attention. It is as if nature were aware of some impending event, imminent and portentous, and waited in tranced expectancy. The outlaw felt it, and moved, disquieted, setting his oppression down to loneliness.

One afternoon a week later, while standing at the kitchen window, he saw a figure dart across an opening between the trees. It went so swiftly that he was aware of it only as a dash of darkness, the passage of a shadow, but It left a moving wake in the ferns and grasses. With his heart high and smothering, he felt for his revolver and crept through the rooms to the broken window on the veranda. If he was caught he would die game, fight from this citadel till his last cartridge was gone. His eyes to a crack in the shutter he looked out—no one was there. The vista of the forest stretched back as free of human presence as in the days before man had roamed its solemn corridors.

Then he saw it again; the tightness of his muscles relaxed, and the hand holding the revolver dropped to his side. It was a child, a boy; there were two of them. He watched them move, foot balanced before foot, wary eyes on the house, emerge from behind a trunk and flee to the shelter of the next one. They were little fellows, eight or perhaps ten, in overalls and ragged hats, scared and yet adventurous, creeping cautiously nearer.

It was easy to guess what they were and what had brought them: ranch children who had seen the smoke of his fire, and, knowing the hotel to be empty, had come to discover who was there. The game was up—they might have been round the place for hours, for days. He suddenly threw open the shutters and roared at them, an unexpected and fearful challenge. A moment of paralyzed terror was followed by a wild rush, the bracken breaking under their flying feet. After they had passed from his sight he could hear the swish and crashing of their frantic flight. Two boys, so frightened, would not take long to reach home and gasp out their story.

He left on their heels, window and door flapping behind him, the fire red in the range.

Two days later he found cover in a deserted tunnel back in the hills. Its timbers sagged with the weight of the years, the yellow mound of its dump was hidden under a mantle of green. Even its mouth, once a black hole in the hillside verdure, was curtained by a veil of creepers. There was game and there was water and there he stayed. At first he rested, then idle and inert lay among the ferns on the top of the dump, staring at the distance, squinting up at the sky, deadened with the weight of the interminable, empty days.



CHAPTER XIX

HALF TRUTHS AND INFERENCES

Chrystie had developed a liking for long walks. As she was a person of a lazy habit Lorry inquired about it and received the answer that walking was the easiest way to keep down your weight. This was a satisfactory explanation, for Chrystie was of the ebullient, early-spreading Californian type, and an extending acquaintance among girls of her age might readily awake a dormant vanity. So the walks passed unchallenged.

But, beside an unwonted attention to her looks, Lorry noticed that her sister was changing. Quite suddenly she seemed to have emerged from childhood, blossomed into a grown-up phase. She was losing her irrelevant high spirits, bubbled much less frequently, sometimes sat in silence for half an hour at a time. Then there were moments when her glance was fixed and pondering, as if her thoughts ranged afar. The new interest in her appearance extended from her figure to her clothes. She spent so much money on them that Lorry spoke to her about it and was answered with mutinous irritation. Why shouldn't she have pretty things like the other girls? What was the sense of hoarding up their money like misers? Lorry could do it if she liked; she was going to get some good out of hers.

Lorry saw the change as the result of a widening social experience—she had tried to find amusement, the proper surroundings of her age and station, for Chrystie and she had succeeded. Gayeties had grown out of that first, agitating dinner till they now moved through quite a little round of parties. Under this new excitement Chrystie was acquiring poise, also fluctuations of spirit and temper. Lorry supposed it was natural—you couldn't stay up late when you weren't used to it and be as easy-going and good-humored as when you went to bed every night at ten.

Lorry might have seen deeper, but her attention was diverted. For the first time in her life she was thinking a good deal about her own affairs. What she felt was kept very secret, but even if it hadn't been there was no one to notice, certainly not Chrystie, nor Aunt Ellen. The only other person near enough to notice was Fong, and it wasn't Fong's place to help—at least to help in an open way.

One morning in the kitchen, when he and "Miss Lolly" were making the menu for a new dinner, he had said,

"Mist Bullage come this time?"

"Miss Lolly," with a faint access of color and an eye sliding from Fong's to the back porch, had answered,

"No, I'm not asking Mr. Burrage to this one, Fong."

"Why not ask Mist Bullage?" Fong had persisted, slightly reproving.

"Because I've asked him several times and he hasn't come."

That was in the old Bonanza manner. One answered a Chinaman like Fong truthfully and frankly as man to man.

"He come this time. You lite him nice letter."

"No, I don't want to, I've enough without him. It's all made up."

"I no see why—plenty big loom, plenty good dinner. Velly nice boy, good boy, best boy ever come to my boss's house."

"Now, Fong, don't get side-tracked. I didn't come to talk to you about the people, I came to talk about the food."

Fong looked at her, gently inquiring, "You no like Mist Bullage, Miss Lolly?"

"Of course I like him. Won't you please attend to what I'm saying?"

"Then you ask him and I make awful swell dinner—same like I make for your Pa when General Grant eat here."

When Fong had a fixed idea that way there was no use arguing with him; one rose with a resigned air and left the kitchen. As Lorry passed through the pantry door he called after her, amiable but determined,

"All samey Mist Bullage no come I won't make bird nest ice cleam with pink eggs."

No one but Fong bothered about Mr. Burrage's absence. After the evening at the Albion Chrystie set him down as "hopeless," and when he refused two dinner invitations, said they ought to have asked him to wait on the table and then he would have accepted. To this gibe Lorry made no answer, but that night before the mirror in her own room, she addressed her reflection with bitterness:

"Why should any man like me? I'm not pretty, I'm not clever, I'm as slow as a snail." She saw tears rise in her eyes and finished ruthlessly, "I'm such a fool that I cry about a man who's done everything but say straight out, 'I don't care for you, you bore me, do leave me alone.'"

So Lorry, nursing her hidden wound, was forgetful of her stewardship.

It was a pity, for there were times when Chrystie, caught in a contrite mood and questioned, would have told. Such times generally came when she was preparing for one of her walks. At these moments her adventure had a way of suddenly losing its glamour and appearing as a shabby and underhand performance. Before she saw Mayer she often hesitated, a prey to a chill distaste, sometimes even questioning her love for him. After she saw him things were different. She came away filled with a bridling vanity, feeling herself a siren, a queen of men. Helen of Troy, seeing brave blood spilled for her possession, was not more satisfied of her worth than Chrystie after an hour's talk with Boye Mayer.

It was the certainty of Lorry's disapproval that made secrecy necessary. He soon realized that Lorry was the governing force, the loved and feared dictator. But he was a cunning wooer. He put no ban upon confession—if Chrystie wanted to tell he was the last person to stop it. And having placed the responsibility in her hands, he wove closer round the little fly the parti-colored web of illusion. He made her feel the thrill of the clandestine, the romance of stolen meetings, see herself not as a green, affrighted girl, but a woman queening it over her own destiny, fit mate for him in eagle flight above the hum-drum multitude.

But the moments when her conscience pricked still recurred. She was particularly oppressed one afternoon as she sat in her room waiting for the clock to strike three. At half past she was to meet Mayer in the plaza, opposite the Greek Church. She had no time for a long walk that day—an engagement for tea claimed her at five—so he had suggested the plaza. No one they knew ever went there, and a visit to the Greek Church would be interesting.

Her hat and furs lay ready on the bed and she sat in the long wicker chair by the window, one hand supporting her chin, while her eyes rested somberly on the fig tree in the garden. She was reluctant to go; she did not know why, except that just then, waiting for the clock to strike, she had had an eerie sort of fear of Mayer. She told herself it was because he was so clever, so superior to any man she had ever known. But she wished she could tell Lorry, say boldly, "Lorry, Mr. Mayer is in love with me"—she wished she could dare.

At that moment Lorry appeared in the doorway between the two rooms.

"Hello," she said. "How serious you look."

"I'm thinking," said Chrystie, studying the fig tree.

"Are you going out?" The things on the bed had caught her eye.

"Um—presently."

"So soon? You're not asked to the Forsythe's till five and it's not three yet."

"I could be going somewhere else first."

"Oh—where?"

"Somewhere out of this house—that's the main thing. Since the furnace was put in it's like a Turkish bath."

"You're going for a walk?" Lorry went to the bed and picked up the hat. It was a new one with a French maker's name in the crown. "You oughtn't to hack this hat about, Chrystie. I wouldn't wear it when I went for a walk."

"Do you think it would be better to wear it in the house? Having bought it I must wear it somewhere."

Lorry, laughing, put on the hat and looked at herself in the glass. There was a moment's pause, then the chair creaked under a movement of Chrystie's, and her voice came very quiet.

"Lorry, do you like Boye Mayer?"

Lorry, studying the effect of the hat, did not answer with any special interest. The Perfect Nugget had lost all novelty for her. He came to the house now and then, was a help in their entertainments, and was always considerate and polite—that was all.

"No, not much," she murmured.

"Why not?"

"It's hard to say exactly—just something." She placed her hand over a rakish green paradise plume to see if its elimination would be an improvement.

"But if you don't like a person you ought to have a reason."

"You don't always. It's just a feeling, an instinct like dogs have. I've an instinct against Mr. Mayer—he's not the real thing."

Chrystie sat forward in the chair.

"That's exactly what I'd say he was, and everybody else says so, too."

"On the outside—yes, I didn't mean that. I meant deep down. I don't think he's real straight through—it's all varnish and glitter. Of course I don't mind his coming here the way he does; we don't see him often and he's amusing and pleasant. But I wouldn't like him to be on a friendly footing. In fact he never could be—I wouldn't let him."

It was the voice of authority. Chrystie felt its finality, and guided by her own inner distress and the hopelessness of revolt, said sharply:

"And yet you wouldn't mind Mark Burrage being on a friendly footing."

"Mark Burrage!" There was something ludicrous in Lorry's face, full of surprise under the overpowering hat. "What has Mark Burrage to do with it?"

Chrystie climbed somewhat lumberingly out of the chair. Her movements were dignified, her tone sarcastic.

"Oh, nothing, nothing. Only if Mr. Mayer is so far below your standard I'm wondering where Mr. Burrage comes in." She stretched a long arm and snatched the hat. "Excuse me," she said with brusque politeness, setting it on her own head and turning to the glass, "but I really must be going. Only a salamander could live comfortably in this house."

Lorry was startled. Her sister's face, deeply flushed, showed an intense irritation.

"I don't understand you. You can't make a comparison between those two men. They're as different as black and white."

"They certainly are," said Chrystie, driving a long pin through the hat. "Or chalk and cheese, or brass and gold, or whatever else stands for the real thing and the imitation."

"What's the matter with you, Chrystie? Are you angry?"

"Me?" She gave a glance from under her lifted arm. "Why should I be angry?"

"I don't know but—" An alarming thought seized Lorry, and she moved nearer. It was preposterous, but after all girls took strange fancies, and Chrystie was no longer a child. "You don't care for Boye Mayer, do you?"

It was the propitious moment, but Chrystie was now as far from telling as if she had taken an oath of silence. What Lorry had already said was enough, and the tone in which she asked the question was the finishing touch. If she thought her sister had fallen in love with Fong, she couldn't have appeared more shocked and incredulous.

"Care for him?" said Chrystie, pulling out the bureau drawer and clawing about in it for her gloves. "Well, I care for him in some ways, and then I don't care for him in other ways."

"I don't mean that, I mean really care."

"Do you mean, am I in love with him?"

Her eye on Lorry was steady and questioning, also slightly scornful. Lorry was abashed by it; she felt that she ought not to have asked, and in confusion stammered, "Yes."

Chrystie moved to the bed and threw on her furs. Her ill-humor was gone, though she was still a little scornful and rather grandly forbearing. Her manner suggested that she could condone this in Lorry owing to her relationship and the honesty of her intention.

"Dearest Lorry, you talk like an old maid in a musical comedy. In love with him? How I wish I could be! At my age every self-respecting girl ought to be in love—they always are in books. But try as I will, I can't seem to manage it. I guess I've got a heart of stone or perhaps it's been left out of me entirely. Good-by, the heartless wonder's going for her walk."

She ended on a laugh, a little strident, and crossed the room, perfume shaken from her brilliant clothes. Outside the door she broke into a song that rose above her scudding flight down the stairs.

Lorry's momentary uneasiness died. Chrystie, as a woman of ruses and deceptions, was a thing she could not at this stage accept.

They met in the plaza and saw the Greek Church and then sat on a bench under a tree and talked. They were so secure in the little park's isolation that they gave their surroundings no attention. That was why a woman crossing it was able to draw near, stand for a watching moment, skirt the back of their bench, and pass on unnoticed. She was the same woman who had seen them at that earlier meeting in Union Square.

During that month the new operetta at the Albion had been put on and had fallen flat. There was a good deal of speculation as to the cause of the failure, and it was rumored that the management set it down to Miss Lopez. She had slighted her work of late, been careless and indifferent. Nobody knew what was the matter with her. She scorned the idea of ill health, but she looked worn out and several times had given vent to savage and unreasonable bursts of temper. She was too valuable a woman to quarrel with, and when the head of the enterprise suggested a rest—a week or two in the country—she rejected the idea with an angry repudiation of illness or fatigue.

Crowder was there on the first night and went away disturbed. He had never seen her give so poor a performance; all her fire was gone, she was mechanical, almost listless. Her public was loyal though puzzled, and the papers stood by her, but "What's happened to Pancha Lopez? How she has gone off!" was a current phrase where men and women gathered. Behind the scenes her mates whispered, some jealously observant, others more kindly, concerned and wondering. Gossip of a love affair was bandied about, but died for lack of confirmation. She had been seen with no one, the methodical routine of her days remained unchanged.

For her the month had been the most wretched of her life. Never in the hard past had she passed through anything as devastating. Those trials she had known how to meet; this was all new, finding her without defense, naked to unexpected attack. Belief and dread had alternated in her, ravaged and laid her waste. After the manner of impassioned women she would not see, clung to hope, had days, after a letter or a message from Mayer, when she had almost ascended to the top of the golden moment again. Then there was silence, a note of hers unanswered, and she fell, sinking into darkling depths. Once or twice, waking in the night or waiting for his knock, she had sudden flashes of clear sight. These left her in a frozen stillness, staring with wide eyes, frightened of herself.

The process of enlightenment had been gradual. Mayer wanted no scenes, no annoying explanations; there was to be no violent moment of severance. To accomplish his withdrawal gracefully, he put himself to some trouble. After that first letter he waylaid her at the stage door one night, and walked part of the way home with her. He had been kind, friendly, brotherly—a completely changed Mayer. She felt it and refused to understand, walking at his side, trying to be the old, merry Pancha.

It was at this time that she received her father's letter from Farleys. Weeks had passed since she had heard from him, and when she saw his writing on the envelope she realized that she had almost forgotten him. The thought left her cold, but when she read the homely phrases she was moved. In a moment of extended vision she saw the parents' tragedy—the love that lives for the child's happiness and is powerless to create it. He would have died for her and she would have thrust him aside, pushed him pleading from her path, to follow a man a few months before a stranger.

After that she endured a week without a word from Mayer, and then, unable to sleep or work, telephoned to his hotel. In answer to her question the switchboard girl said Mr. Mayer had not been out of town at all for the last two weeks. She asked to speak with him and heard his voice, sharp and cold. He couldn't talk freely over the wire; he would rather she didn't call him up; his out-of-town business had been postponed, that was all.

"Why are you mad with me?" she breathed, trying to make her voice steady.

"I am not," came the answer. "Please don't be fanciful. And don't call me up here, I don't like it. I'll be around as soon as I can, but I've a lot to do, as I've already told you several times. Good-by."

She had sent the call from a telephone booth, and carefully, with a slow precision, she hung up the receiver. A feeling of despair, a stifling anguish, seized her and she began to cry. Shut into the hot, small place, she broke into rending sobs, her head bent, her hands gripped, rocking back and forth. Small, choked sounds, whines and cries came from her, and fearful of being heard, she pressed her hands against her mouth, looking up, looking down, an animal distracted in its unfamiliar pain.

The following day he wrote to her, excused himself, said he had been worried on business matters and sent her flowers. She buoyed herself up and once more tried to believe, but her will had been weakened. From lower layers of consciousness the truth was forcing its way to recognition, yet she still ignored it. Realization of her state if she admitted it made her afraid and her fight had the fierceness of a struggle for life. It was only in the night—awake in the dumb dark—that she could not escape it. Then, staring at the pale square of the window, she heard her voice whispering:

"What will I do? What will become of me?"

In all her miserable imaginings and self-queries the thought that she had been supplanted had no place. Mayer had often spoken to her of his social diversions and no woman had ever figured in them. The paragraphs which still appeared about him touched on no feminine influences. It was her fault; she had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Had she not always wondered that he should have cared for her? On close acquaintance he had found her to be what she was—common, uneducated, impossible. At first she had tried to hide it and then it had come out and he had been repelled. It was not till the afternoon, aimlessly walking to ease her pain, when she saw him again with the blonde-haired girl, that the thought of another woman entered her mind.

That night Crowder, after watching the last act from the back of the house, resolved to see her and find out what was wrong. He had been talking to the manager in the foyer and the man's sulky discontent alarmed him. If Pancha didn't buck up she'd lose her job.

She was at the dressing table in her red kimono when he came in. The grease was nearly all off and with her front hair drawn back from her forehead, her face had a curiously bare, haggard look. As he entered she glanced up, not smiling, and saw the knowledge of her failure in his eyes.

For a moment she looked at him, grave and sad, confessing it. The expression caught at his heart, and he had nothing to say, turning away from her to look for a chair.

She picked up the rag and went on wiping her face.

"Well," she said in a brisk voice, "I wasn't on the job tonight, was I?"

Reassured by her tone, he sat down and faced her.

"No, you weren't. It wasn't a good performance, Panchita. I've always told you the truth and I've got to go on doing it."

"Go ahead, you're not telling me anything I don't know. I've got my finger on the pulse of this house. I know every rise and fall of its temperature. But I can't always be up in G, can I?"

"No, but you can't stay down at zero too long."

"It was as bad as that, was it?"

"Yes, it was bad."

She dropped her hand to the edge of the dressing table and looked at it. Her face, with the hair strained back, the rouge gone, looked withered and yellow. Crowder eyed it anxiously.

"Say, Panchita, you're sick."

"Sick? Forget it! I never was better in my life."

"Then why are you off your work—why do you act as if you didn't care?"

"Can't I have a part I hate? Can't I get weary of this old joint with its smoke and its beer? God!" She began to pull the pins out of her hair and fling them on the dresser. "I'm human—I've got my ups and downs—and you keep forgetting it."

"That's just what I'm not forgetting."

"Stop talking about me—I'm sick of it," she cried, and snatching up the comb began tearing it through her hair.

"It's nerves," said Crowder. "Everything shows it. The way you're combing your hair does."

"If you don't let me alone I'll put you out—all of you nagging and picking at me; a saint couldn't stand it!" Crowder rose, but she whirled round on him, the comb held out in an arresting hand. "No, don't go yet. I'll give you another chance. I want to ask you something. I saw a woman the other day and I want to know who she is—at least I don't really want to know, but she'll do as well as anything else to change the subject. Tall with yellow sort of dolly hair and a dolly face. Dark purple dress with black velvet edges, lynx furs and a curly brimmed hat with a green paradise plume falling over one side."

Crowder's face wrinkled with a grin.

"Well, that's funny! You might have asked me forty others and I'd not have known. But thanks to your vivid description I can tell you—I saw her yesterday afternoon in those very togs. It's the youngest Alston girl."

"Who's she?"

"One of the two daughters of George Alston. They're orphans, live in a big house on Pine Street. The one you saw was Chrystie. What do you want to know about her?"

Pancha, gathering her hair in one hand, began to whisk it round into a knot. Her head was down bent.

"I don't know—just curiosity. She's sort of stunning looking. Did you ever meet her?"

Crowder smiled.

"I know them well—have for over a year. Awfully nice girls—the best kind."

Pancha lifted her head, her face sharp with interest.

"What's she like?"

He considered, the smile softened to an amused indulgence.

"Oh, just a great big baby, good-natured and jolly. Everybody likes her—you couldn't help it if you tried. She's so simple and sweet, accepts the whole world as if it was her friend. Her money hasn't spoiled her a bit."

"Money—she has money?"

"To burn, my dear. She's rich."

Pancha took up a hand glass and turning her back to him studied her profile in the mirror. It did not occur to Crowder that he never before had seen her do such a thing.

"Rich, is she?" she murmured. "How rich?"

"Something like four hundred thousand dollars; her father was one of the Virginia City crowd. Chrystie's just come into her part of the roll. Eighteen years old and an heiress—that's a good beginning."

"Um—must be a queer feeling. I guess the men are around the honey thick as flies."

Crowder screwed up his eyes considering.

"No, they're not—not yet anyhow. Until this winter the girls lived so retired—didn't know many people, kept to themselves. Now they've broken out and I suppose it's only a matter of time before the flies gather, and if you asked me I'd say they'd gather thickest round Chrystie. She hasn't as much character or brains as Lorry, but she's prettier and jollier, and after all that's what most men like."

"It certainly is, especially with four hundred thousand thrown in for good measure."

The hand holding the glass dropped to her lap. She sat still for a moment, then without turning told him to go; she was tired and wanted to get home. It did not even strike him as odd that she never looked at him, just flapped a hand over her shoulder and dismissed him with a short "Good-night."

When he had gone she sat as he had left her, the mirror still in her lap. The gas jet flamed in its wire cage, and so silent was the room that a mouse crept out from behind the baseboard, spied about, then made a scurrying dart across the floor. Her eye caught it, slid after it, and she moved, putting the glass carefully on the dresser. The palms of her hands were wet with perspiration and she rubbed them on the skirt of her kimono and rose stiffly, resting for a moment against the back of her chair. She had a sick feeling, a sensation as if her heart were dissolving, as if the room looked unfamiliar and much larger than usual. When she put on her clothes she did it slowly, her fingers fumbling stupidly at buttons and hooks, her mouth a little open as if breathing was difficult.



CHAPTER XX

MARK PAYS A CALL

Mark Burrage saw the winter pass and only went once to the Alstons and then they were not at home. He had refused three invitations to the house and after the ignominous event at the Albion received no more. When he allowed himself to think of that humiliating evening he did not wonder.

But, outside of his work, he allowed himself very little thinking. All winter he had concentrated on his job with ferocious energy. The older men in the office had a noticing eye on him. "That fellow Burrage has got the right stuff in him, he'll make good," they said among themselves. The younger ones, sons of rich fathers who had squeezed them into places in the big firm, regarded his efforts with indulgent surprise. They liked him, called him "Old Mark," and were a little patronizing in their friendliness: "He was just the sort who'd be a grind. Those ranch chaps who had to get up at four in the morning and feed the 'horgs' were the devil to work when they came down to the city. Even law was a cinch after the 'horgs.'"

Sometimes at night—his endeavor relaxed for a pondering moment—he studied the future. The outlook might have daunted a less resolute spirit. A great gap yawned between the present and the time when he could go to Lorry Alston and say, "Let me take care of you; I can do it now." But he figured it out, bridged the gap, knew what one man had done another man could do. He reckoned on leaving the office next year and setting up for himself, and grim-visaged, mouth set to a straight line, he calculated on the chances of the fight. Its difficulties braced him to new zeal and in the strain and stress of the struggle his youthful awkwardness wore away, giving place to a youthful sternness.

No one guessed his hopes and high aspiration, not even his friend Crowder. When Crowder rallied him about this treatment of the Alstons he had been short and offhand—didn't care for society, hadn't time to waste going round being polite. He left upon Crowder the impression that the Alston girls did not interest him any more than any other girls. "Old Mark isn't a lady's man," was the way Crowder excused him to Chrystie. Of course Chrystie laughed and said she had no illusions about that, but whatever kind of a man he was he ought to take some notice of them, no matter how dull and deadly they were. Crowder, realizing his own responsibility—it was he who had taken Mark to the Alston house—was kind but firm.

"It's up to you to go and see those girls. It's not the decent thing to drop out without a reason. They've gone out of their way to be civil to you, and you know, old chap, they're ladies"

Mark grunted, and frowning as at a disagreeable duty said he'd go.

It took him some weeks to get there. Twice he started, circled the house, and tramped off over the hills. The third time he got as far as the front gate, weakened and turned away. After long abstinence the thought of meeting Lorry's eyes, touching her hand, created a condition of turmoil that made him a coward; that, while he longed to enter, drew him back like a sinner from the scene of his temptation. Then an evening came when, his jaw set, his heart thumping like a steam piston, he put on his best blue serge suit, his new gray overcoat, even a pair of mocha gloves, and went forth with a face as hard as a stone.

Fong opened the door, saw who it was and broke into a joyful grin.

"Mist Bullage! Come in, Mist Bullage. No see you for heap long time, Mist Bullage."

"I've been busy," said the visitor. "Hadn't much time to come around."

Fong helped him off with the gray overcoat.

"You work awful hard, Mist Bullage. Too hard, not good. You come here and have good time. Lots of fun here now. You come."

He moved to hang the coat on the hatrack, and, as he adjusted it, turned and shot a sharp look over his shoulder at the young man.

"All men who come now not like you, Mist Bullage."

There was something of mystery, an odd suggestion of withheld meaning, in the old servant's manner that made Mark smile.

"How are they different—better or worse?"

Fong passed him, going to the drawing-room door. His hand on the knob, he turned, his voice low, his slit eyes craftily knowing.

"Ally samey not so good. I take care Miss Lolly and Miss Clist—I look out. You all 'ight, you come." He threw open the door with a flourish and called in loud, glad tones, "Miss Lolly, Miss Clist, one velly good fliend come—Mist Bullage."

At the end of the long room Mark was aware of a small group whence issued a murmur of talk. At his name the sound ceased, there was a rising of graceful feminine forms which floated toward him, leaving a masculine figure in silhouette against the lighted background of the dining room. He was confused as he made his greetings, touched and dropped Lorry's hand, tried to find an answer for Chrystie's challenging welcome. Then he switched off to Aunt Ellen in her rocker, groping at knitting that was sliding off her lap, and finally was introduced to the man who stood waiting, his hands on the back of his chair.

At the first glance, while Lorry's voice murmured their names, Mark disliked him. He would have done so even if he had not been a guest at the Alstons, complacently at home there, even if he had not been in evening dress, correct in every detail, even if the hands resting on the chair back had not shown manicured nails that made his own look coarse and stubby. The face and each feature, the high-bridged, haughty nose, the eyes cold and indolent under their long lids, the thin, close line of the mouth—separately and in combination—struck him as objectionable and repellent. He bowed stiffly, not extending his hand, substituting for the Westerner's "Pleased to meet you," a gruff "How d'ye do, Mr. Mayer."

Before the introduction, Mayer, watching Mark greeting the girls, knew he had seen him before but could not remember where. The young man in his neat, well fitting clothes, his country tan given place to the pallor of study and late hours, was a very different person from the boy in shirt sleeves and overalls of the ranch yard. But his voice increased Mayer's vague sense of former encounter and with it came a faint feeling of disquiet. Memory connected this fellow with something unpleasant. As Mark turned to him it grew into uneasiness. Where before had he met those eyes, dark blue, looking with an inquiring directness straight into his?

They sank into chairs, everyone except Aunt Ellen, seized by an inner discomfort which showed itself in a chilled constraint. Mayer, combing over his recollections, the teasing disquiet increasing with every moment, was too disturbed for speech. The sight of Lorry had paralyzed what little capacity for small talk Mark had. She looked changed, more unapproachable than ever in a new exquisiteness. It was only a more fashionable way of doing her hair and a becoming dress, but the young man saw it as a growing splendor, removing her to still remoter distances. She herself was so nervous that she kept looking helplessly at Chrystie, hoping that that irrepressible being would burst into her old-time sprightliness. But Chrystie had her own reasons for being oppressed. The presence of Mayer, paying no more attention to her than he did to Aunt Ellen, and the memory of him making love to her on park benches, gave her a feeling of dishonesty that weighed like lead.

It looked as if it was going to be a repetition of one of those evenings in the past before they had "known how to do things," when Fong caused a diversion by appearing from the dining room bearing a tray.

To regale evening visitors with refreshments had been the fashion in Fong's youth, so in his old age the habit still persisted. He entered with his friendly grin and set the tray on a table beside Lorry. On it stood decanters of red and white wine, glasses, a pyramid of fruit and a cake covered with varicolored frosting.

Nobody wanted anything to eat, but they turned to the tray with the eagerness of shipwrecked mariners to an oyster bed. Even Aunt Ellen became animated, and looking at Mark over her glasses said:

"Have you been away, Mr. Burrage?"

No, Mr. Burrage had been in town, very busy, and, the hungriest of all the mariners, he turned to the tray and helped Lorry pour out the wine. The ladies would take none, so the filled glass was held out to Mayer.

"Claret!" he said, leaning forward to offer the glass.

As he did so he was aware of a slight, curious expression in the face he had disliked. The eyelids twitched, the upper lip drew down tight over the teeth, the nostrils widened. It was a sudden contraction and then flexing of the muscles, an involuntary grimace, gone almost as soon as it had come. With murmured thanks, Mayer stretched his hand and took the wine.

It had all come back with the offered glass. A glance shot round the little group showed him that no one had noticed; they were cutting and handing about the cake. He refused a piece and found his stiffened lips could smile, but he was afraid of his voice, and sipped slowly, forcing the wine down the contracted passage of his throat. Then he stole a look at Mark, clumsily steering a way between the chairs to Aunt Ellen who wanted some grapes. The fellow hadn't guessed—hadn't the faintest suspicion—it was incredible that he should have. It was all right but—he raised his hand to his cravat, felt of it, then slipped a finger inside his collar and drew it away from his neck.

Through a blurred whirl of thought he could hear Aunt Ellen's voice.

"I've wanted to see you for a long time, Mr. Burrage. You come from that part of the country and I thought you'd know."

Then Mark's voice:

"Know what, Mrs. Tisdale?"

"About that Knapp man's story. Didn't you tell us your ranch was up near the tules where those bandits buried the gold?"

Lorry explained.

"Aunt Ellen's been so excited about that story, she couldn't talk of anything else."

"And why not?" said Aunt Ellen. "It's a very unusual performance. Two sets of thieves, one stealing the money and burying it and another coming along and finding it."

Chrystie, diverted from her private worries by this exciting subject, bounced round toward Mark with something of her old explosiveness.

"Why, you were up there at the time—the first time I mean. Don't you remember you told us that evening when you were here. And you said people thought the bandits had a cache in the chaparral. Why didn't any of you think of the tules?"

"Stupid, I guess," said Mark. "Not a soul thought of them. And it was an A1 hiding-place. Besides the duck shooters, nobody ever goes there."

"But somebody did go there," came from Aunt Ellen with a knowing nod.

They laughed at that, even Mr. Mayer, who appeared only languidly interested, his eyes on the film of wine in the bottom of his glass.

"Who do you suppose it could have been?" asked Chrystie.

"A duck shooter, probably." This was Mr. Mayer's first contribution to the subject.

Mark was exceedingly pleased to be able to correct this silent and supercilious person.

"No, it couldn't have been. The duck season doesn't open till September fifteen, and Knapp said when they went back in six days the cache was empty." He turned to Chrystie. "I've often wondered if it could have been a man I saw that afternoon."

As on that earlier visit his knowledge of the holdup had made him an attractive center, so once again he saw the girls turn expectant eyes on him, Aunt Ellen forget her grapes, and even the strange man's glance shift from the wineglass and rest, attentive, on his face.

"It was a tramp. He stopped late that afternoon at my father's ranch which gives on the road and asked for a drink of water. I gave it to him and watched him go off in the direction of the trail that leads to the tules. Of course it would have been an unusual thing for him to have tried to get across them, but he might have done it and stumbled on the cache."

"Could he have—isn't it all water?" Lorry asked.

"There's a good deal of solid land and here and there planks laid across the deeper streams. There is a sort of trail if you happen to know it and a tramp might. It's part of his business to be familiar with the short cuts and easiest ways round."

"What was he like?" said Chrystie.

"A miserable looking fellow—most of them are—all brown and dusty with a straggly beard. There was one thing about him that I noticed, his voice. It was like an educated man's—a sort of echo of better days."

Aunt Ellen found this very absorbing and she and Chrystie had questions to ask. Fong's entrance for the tray prevented Lorry from joining in. As the Chinaman leaned down to take it, she whispered to him to open a window, the room was hot. Her eye, touching Mr. Mayer, had noticed that he had drawn out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead which shone with a thin beading of perspiration. No one heard the order, and Fong, after opening the window, carried the tray into the dining room and left it on the table. When Lorry turned to the others, Mark had proved to Aunt Ellen that the gentleman tramp was a recognized variety of the species, and Chrystie had taken up the thread.

"Did your people up there know anything about him? Did they think he was the man?"

"None of them saw him. After Knapp's story came out I wrote up and asked them but no one round there remembered him."

"Would you know him again if you saw him?"

"If I saw him in the same clothes I would, but"—he smiled into Chrystie's eager face—"I'm not likely to do that. If it's he, he's got twelve thousand dollars and I guess he's spent some of it on a shave and a new suit."

Here Mr. Mayer, moving softly, turned to where the tray had stood. It was gone, and, gracefully apologetic, he rose—he wanted to put down his glass and get a drink of water. His exit from the group put a temporary stop to the conversation, chairs were in the way, and Aunt Ellen let her grapes fall on the floor. Mark, scrabbling for them, saw Lorry rise and press an electric bell on the wall; she had remembered there was no water on the tray. Mayer, moving to the dining room, did not see her, and called back over his shoulder:

"Your American rooms are a little too warm for a person used to the cold storage atmosphere of houses abroad."

He said it well, better than he thought he could, for he was stifled by a sudden loud pounding of his heart. To hide his face and steady himself with a draught of wine was what he wanted. A moment alone, a moment to get a grip on his nerves, would be enough. With his back toward them he leaned against the table and lifted a decanter in his shaking hand. As he did so, Fong entered through a door just opposite.

"Water for Mr. Mayer, Fong," came Lorry's voice from the room beyond.

The voice and Fong's appearance, coming simultaneously, abrupt and unexpected, made Mayer give a violent start. His hand jerked upward, sending the wine in a scattering spray over the cloth. Fong made no move for the water, but stood looking from the crimson stain to the man's face.

"You sick, Mist Mayer?" he said.

The strained tension snapped. With an eye if steel-cold fury on the servant the man broke into a low, almost whispered, cursing. The words ran out of his mouth, fluent, rapid, in an unpremeditated rush. They were as picturesque and malignantly savage as those with which he had cursed the tules; and suddenly they stopped, checked by the Chinaman's expression. It was neither angry or alarmed, but intently observant, the eyes unblinking—an imperturbable, sphinx-like face against which the flood of rage broke, leaving no mark.

Mayer took up the half-filled glass and drained it, the servant watching him with the same quiet scrutiny. He longed to plant his fist in the middle of that unrevealing mask, but instead tried to laugh, muttered an explanation about feeling ill, and slid a five-dollar gold piece across the table.

To his intense relief Fong picked it up, dropped it into the pocket of his blouse, and without a word turned and left the room.

No one had noticed the little scene. When Mayer came back the group was on its feet, Mark having made a move to go.

There were handshakes and good-nights, and Burrage and Lorry moved forward up the long room. Aunt Ellen took the opportunity of slipping through a side door that led to the hall, and Chrystie and her lover faced each other among the empty chairs.

With his eye on the receding backs of the other couple, Mayer said, hardly moving his lips:

"When can I see you again? Tomorrow at the Greek Church at four?"

She demurred as she constantly did. At each station in the clandestine courtship he had the same struggle with the same faltering uncertainty. But, after tonight, the time for humoring her moods was past. What he had endured during the last hour showed in a haggard intensity of expression, a subdued, fierce urgence of manner. Chrystie looked at him and looked away, almost afraid of him. He was staring at her with an avid waiting as if ready to drag the answer out of her lips. She fluttered like a bird under the snake's hypnotic eye.

"I can't," she whispered; "I'm going out with Lorry."

"Then when?'

"Oh, Boye, I don't know—I have so many things to do."

He had difficulty in pinning her down to a date, but finally succeeded five days off. In his low-toned insistence he used a lover's language, terms of endearment, tender phrases, but her timorous reluctance roused a passion of rage in him. He would have liked to shake her; he would have liked to swear at her as he had at Fong.



CHAPTER XXI

A WOMAN SCORNED

After the conversation with Crowder, Pancha was very quiet for several days. She spoke only the necessary word, came and went with feline softness, performed her duties with the precision of a mechanism. Her stillness had a curious quality of detachment; she seemed held in a spell, her eye, suddenly encountered, blank and vacant; even her voice was toneless. She reacted to nothing that went on around her.

All her vitality had withdrawn to feed the inner flame. Under that dead exterior fires blazed so high and hot that the shell containing them was empty of all else. They had burned away pride and reason and conscience; they were burning to explosive outbreak. The girl had no consciousness of it; she only felt their torment and with the last remnant of her will tried to hide her anguish. Then came a day when the shell cracked and the fires burst through.

Unable to bear her own thoughts, weakened by two sleepless nights, she telephoned to the Argonaut Hotel and said she wanted to speak to Mr. Mayer. The switchboard girl answered that he was in and asked for her name. On Pancha's refusal to give it, the girl had crisply replied that Mr. Mayer had left orders no one was to speak with him unless he knew the name. Pancha gave it and waited. Presently the answer came—"Very sorry, Mr. Mayer doesn't seem to be there—thought he was in, but I guess I was wrong."

This falsehood, contemptuously transparent, act of final dismissal, was the blow that broke the shell and let the fire loose. Such shreds of pride and self-respect as remained to the wretched girl were shriveled. She put on her hat and coat, and tying a thick veil over her face, went across town to the Argonaut Hotel.

It was the day after Mayer had met Mark at the Alstons'. He too had not slept, had had a horrible, harassing night. All day he had sat in his rooms going over the scene, recalling the young man's face, assuring himself of its unconsciousness. But he was upset, jarred, his security gone. Luxury had corroded his already wasted and overdrawn forces; the habits of idleness weakened his power to resist. One fact stood out in his mind—he must carry the courtship with Chrystie to its conclusion, and arrange for their elopement. Sprawled in the armchair or pacing off the space from the bedroom door to the window he planned it. One or two more interviews with her would bring her to the point of consent, then they would slip away to Nevada; he would marry her there and they would go on to New York. It ought not to take more than a week, at the longest ten days. If he had had any other woman to deal with—not this spiritless fool of a girl—he could manage it in a much shorter time. All he had to do was to make a last trip to Sacramento and get what was left of the money and that could be done in a day.

A knock at the door made him start. Any sound would have made him start in the state he was in, and a knock called up nightmare visions of Burrage, police officers, Lorry Alston—there was no end to his alarms. Then he reassured himself—a package or the room boy with towels—and called out "Come in."

At the first glance he did not know who it was. Like a woman in a novel a female, closely veiled, entered without greeting and closed the door. When she raised the veil and he saw it was Pancha Lopez he was at once relieved and exasperated. Her manner did not tend to remove his irritation. Leaning against the table, her face very white, she looked at him without speaking. Had not the sight of her just then been extremely unwelcome, the melodrama of the whole thing—the veil, the pallid face, the dramatic silence—would have amused him. As it was he looked anything but amused, rising from the armchair, his brows drawn together in an ugly frown.

"What on earth brings you here?" was his greeting.

"You," she answered.

Her voice, husky and breathless, matched the rest of the crazy performance. He saw an impending scene, and under his anger had a feeling of grievance. This was more than he deserved. He gave her an ironical bow.

"That's very flattering, I'm sure, and I'm highly honored. But, my dear Pancha, pardon me if I say I don't like it. It's not my custom to see ladies up here."

"Don't talk like that to me, Boye," she said, the huskiness of her tone deepening. "Don't put on style and act like you didn't know me. We're past that."

He shrugged.

"Answer for yourself, Pancha. Believe me, I'm not at all past conforming to the usages of civilized people." He had moved back to the fireplace, and leaning against the mantel waited for her to reply. As she did not do so, he said, "Let me repeat, I don't like your coming here."

Her eyes, level and fixed, were disconcerting. To avoid them he turned to the mantel and took up a cigarette and matches lying there.

"Then why don't you come to see me?" she said.

"Teh—Teh!" He put the cigarette between his teeth and struck the match on the shelf. "Haven't I told you I'm busy?"

"Yes, you've told me that."

"Well?"

"You've told me lies."

"Thank you." He was occupied lighting the cigarette.

"Why, when I telephoned an hour ago and gave my name, did you say you were out?"

He affected an air of forbearance.

"Because I happened to be out."

"Boye, that's another lie."

He threw the match into the fireplace and turned his eyes on her full of a steely dislike.

"Look here, Pancha. You've bothered me a lot lately, calling me up, nagging at me about things I couldn't help. I'm not the kind of man that likes that; I'm not the kind that stands it. I've been a friend of yours and hope to stay so, but—"

She cut him off, her voice trembling with passion.

"Friend—you a friend! You who do nothing but put me off with lies—who are trying to shake me, throw me away like an old shoe!"

Her restraint was gone. With her shoulders raised and her chin thrust forward, the thing she had been, and still was—child of the lower depths, bred in its ways—was revealed to him. It made him afraid of her, seeing possibilities he had not grasped before. What he had thought to be harmless and powerless might become one more menacing element in the dangers that surrounded him. His natural caution put a check upon his anger. He tried to speak with a soothing good humor.

"Now, my dear girl, don't talk like that. It's not true in the first place, it's stupid in the second, and in the third it only tends to make bad feeling between us that there's no cause for."

"Oh, yes, there's cause, lots of cause."

He found her steady eyes more discomfiting than ever, and looking at his cigarette said:

"Panchita, you're not yourself. You're overworked and overwrought, imagining things that don't exist. Instead of standing there slanging me you ought to go home and take a rest."

She paid no attention to this suggestion, but suddenly, moving nearer, said:

"What did you do it for, Boye?"

"Do what?"

"Make love to me—make me think you loved me. Why did you come? Why did you say what you did? Why did you kiss me? Why, when you saw the way I felt, did you keep on? What good was it to you?"

To gain a moment's time, and to hide his face from her haggard gaze, he turned and put the cigarette carefully on the stand of the matchsafe. He found it difficult to keep the soothing note in his voice.

"Why—why—why? I don't see any need for these questions? What did I do? A kiss! What's that? And you talk as if I'd ceased to care for you. Of course I haven't. I always will. I don't know anyone I think more of than I do of you. That's why I want you to go. You don't look well, and as I told you before, it's not the right thing for you to be here."

She was beside him and he laid his hand on her arm, gentle and persuasive. She snatched the arm away, and with a small, feeble fist struck him in the chest and gasped out an epithet of the people.

For a still moment they stood looking at one another. Both faces showed that bitterest of antagonisms—the hate of one-time lovers. She saw it in his and it increased her desperation, he in her's, and in the uprush of his anger he forgot his fear. She spoke first, her voice low, her breathing loud on the room's stillness.

"You could fool me once, but it's too late now. There's no coming over me any more with soft talk."

"Then I'll not try it. Take it from me straight. I've come to the end of my patience. I've had enough of you and your exactions."

"Oh, you needn't tell me that," she cried. "I know it, and I know why. I know the secret of your change of heart, Mr. Boye Mayer."

She saw the alarm in his face, the sudden arrested attention.

"What are you talking about?" he said, too startled to feign indifference.

"Oh, you thought no one was on," she cried, backing away from him, "but I was. I've been for the past month. Four hundred thousand dollars! Think of it, Boye! You're getting on in the world. Some difference between that and an actress at the Albion."

If Pancha had still cherished a hope that she might have been mistaken, the sight of Mayer's rage would have extinguished it. He made a step toward her, hard-eyed, pale as she was.

"You're mad. That's what's the matter with you. I might have known it when you came. Now go—I don't want any lunatics here."

She stood her ground and tried to laugh, a horrible sound.

"You don't even like me to know that. Won't even share a secret with me—me, the friend that you care for so much."

"Go!" he thundered and pointed to the door.

"Not till I hear more, I'm curious. Is it just the money, or would you like the lady even if she hadn't any?"

Exasperated beyond reason he made a pounce at her and caught her by the arm. This time his grasp was too strong for her to shake off. His fingers closed on the slender stem and closing shook it.

"Since you won't go, I'll have to help you," he breathed in his fury.

She squirmed in his grip, trying to pull his fingers away with her free hand, and in this humiliating fashion felt herself drawn toward the door. It was the last consummate insult, his superior strength triumphing. If he had loosed her she would have gone, but anything he did she was bound to resist, most of all his hand upon her. That, once the completest comfort, was now the crowning ignominy.

As he pushed her, short sentences of savage hostility flashed between them, sparks struck from a mutual hate. Hers betrayed the rude beginnings she had tried to hide, his the falseness of his surface finish. It was as if for the first time they had established a real understanding. At grips, filled with fury, they attained a sudden intimacy, the hidden self of each at last plain to the other.

The scene was interrupted in an unexpected and ridiculous manner—the telephone rang. As the bell whirred he stopped irresolute, his fingers tight on her arm. Then, as it rang again, he looked at her with a sort of enraged helplessness, and made a movement to draw her to the phone. An outsider would have laughed, but the two protagonists were beyond comedy, and glared at one another in dumb defiance. Finally, the bell filling the room with its clamor, there was nothing for it but to answer. With grim lips and a murderous eye on his opponent, Mayer dropped her arm, and going to the phone, took down the receiver. From the other end, plaintive and apologetic, came Chrystie's voice.

Pancha retreated to the door, opened it and came to a halt on the sill. Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of her watching him, a baleful figure. He feared to employ the tenderness of tone necessary in his conversations with Chrystie, and as he listened and made out that she wanted to break her next engagement, he turned and fastened a gorgon's glance on the woman in the doorway, jerking his head in a gesture of dismissal.

She answered it with ominous quiet, "When I've finished. I've just one more thing to say."

In desperation he turned to the mouthpiece and said as softly as he dared:

"Wait a minute. The window's open and I can't hear. I must shut it," then put the receiver against his chest and muttered:

"Do you want me to kill you?"

"Not yet—after I get square you can. I won't care then what you do. But I've got to get square and I'm going to. There's Indian in me and that's the blood that doesn't forget. And there's something else you don't know—yes, there was something I never told you. I've someone to fight my fights and hit my enemies, and if I can't get you, they can. Watch out and see."

She retreated, closing the door. Mayer had to resume his conversation with the blood drumming in his ears, uplift Chrystie's flagging spirit, and shift their engagement to another day. When it was over he fell on the sofa, limp and exhausted. He lay there till dinner time, thinking over what Pancha had said, and what she could do, assuring himself it was only bluff, the impotent threatenings of a discarded woman. He felt certain that the champion she had alluded to was her one-time admirer, the bandit. This being the case, there was nothing to be feared from him, in hiding in the wilderness. It would be many a day before he'd venture forth. But the girl herself, full of venom, burning with the sense of her wrongs, was a new factor in the perils of his position. Stronger now than ever was this conviction that he must hurry his schemes to their climax.



CHAPTER XXII

THEREBY HANGS A TALE

That same evening the audience at the Albion had a disappointment. At half past eight the manager appeared before the curtain and said that Miss Lopez was ill and could not appear. As they all knew, she had been an unremitting worker, had given them of her best, and in her love of her art and her public had worn herself out and suffered a nervous breakdown. A week or two of rest would restore her, and meantime her place would be taken by Miss Lottie Vere.

The audience, not knowing what was expected of them, applauded and then looked at one another in aggrieved surprise. They felt rather peevish, for they had come to regard Pancha Lopez as a permanent institution devised for their amusement. They no more expected her to fail them than the clock in the Ferry Tower to be wrong. Charlie Crowder heard it at the Despatch office next morning—Mrs. Wesson, who picked up local news like a wireless, met him on the stairs and told him.

"I'm glad she's given in at last," said the good-natured society reporter. "She's been running down hill for the past month, and if she'd kept on much longer she'd have run to the place where you jump off."

That afternoon Crowder went round to see her. There was no use phoning, the Vallejo was still in that archaic stage where the only telephone was in the lower hall and guests were called to it by the clerk. Besides, you never could tell about a girl like Pancha; she was half a savage, liable to lie curled up in a corner and never think of a doctor.

He found her on the sofa in her sitting-room, a box of crackers and a bottle of milk on the table, a ragged Navajo blanket over her feet. When she saw who it was she sat up with a cry of welcome, her wrapper falling loose from her brown neck. She looked very ill, her eyes dark-circled and sunken in her wasted face.

He sat beside her on the sofa's edge—she was so thin there was plenty of room—and taking her hand held it while he tried to hide the concern that seized him. After the first sentence of greeting she fell back on the crumpled pillow, and lay still, the little flicker of animation dying out.

"Well, well, Panchita," he said, patting her hand, a kindly awkward figure hunched up in his big overcoat; "this is something new for you."

She made an agreeing movement with her head, her glance resting where it fell, too languid to move.

"I seem to be all in," she murmured.

"Just played out?"

"Looks that way."

"I didn't know till this morning—Mrs. Wesson told me. How did it happen?"

"I don't know, I got all weak. It was last night."

"At the theater?"

"No, here, in my room. I kept feeling worse and worse, but I thought I could pull through. And then I knew I couldn't and I got down to the phone some way and told them. And then I came back here and—I don't know—I sort of broke to pieces."

As she completed the sentence tears suddenly welled into her eyes and began to run, unchecked, in shining drops down her cheeks. She drew her hand from Crowder's and turning on her side placed it and its fellow over her face and wept, a river of tears that came softly without sobs. Crowder was overwhelmed. He had never thought his friend could be so broken, never had imagined her weak as other women, bereft of her gallant pride.

"Oh, Pancha," he said, unutterably distressed, "you poor girl! I'm so sorry, I'm so awfully sorry." He crooned over her in his rough man's tenderness, stroking her hair. "You've worked yourself to the bone. You ought to have given in sooner, you've kept it up too long."

Her voice came smothered through the shielding hands:

"It's not that, Charlie, it's not that."

This surprised him exceedingly. That any other cause than overwork could so reduce her had never occurred to him. Had she some ailment—some hidden suffering—preying on her? He thought of the Indian's stoicism and was filled with apprehension.

"Well, then, what is it?" he asked. "Are you ill?"

She moved her head in silent negation.

"But if it isn't work, it must be something. A girl as strong as you doesn't collapse without a reason."

She dropped her hands and sat up. Her face was brought on a level with his, the swollen eyes blinking through tears, the mouth twisted and pitiful.

"It's pain, it's pain, Charlie," she quavered.

"Then you are sick," he said, now thoroughly alarmed.

"No—it's not my body, it's my heart. It's here." She clasped her hands over her heart, and suddenly closing her eyes rocked back and forth. "A little while ago I was so happy. I never was like that before—every minute of the day lovely. And then it was all changed, it all ended. I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe it. I kept saying 'it'll come all right, nothing so awful could happen to anyone.' But it could—it did. And it's that that's made me this way—to be so full of joy and then to have it snatched away. It's too much, Charlie. Even I couldn't stand it—I who once thought nothing could beat me."

Crowder had had a wide experience in exhibitions of human suffering, but he had never seen anything quite like this. Tenderness was not what was needed, and, his eyes stern on her working face, he said with quiet authority:

"Pancha, I don't get what this means. Now, like a good girl, tell me. I've got to know."

Then and there, without more urging, she told him.

She told her story truthfully as far as she went, but she did not go to the end. All the preceding night, the interview with Mayer, had repeated itself in her memory, bitten itself in in every brutal detail. Hate trailed after it a longing to repay in kind and she saw herself impotent. The threat of her father's championship, snatched at in blind rage, she knew meant nothing, the boast of "getting square" was empty. Subtlety was her only weapon and now in her confession to Crowder she employed it. What she told of Mayer's conduct was true, but she did not tell what to her was a mitigating circumstance—the counter-attraction of Chrystie. The lure of money was to this child of poverty an excuse for her lover's desertion. Even Crowder, her friend, might condone a transfer of affection from Pancha Lopez to the daughter of George Alston. So the young man, hearing the story ended, saw Mayer as Pancha intended him to—a blackguard, breaking a girl's heart for pastime.

"The dog!" he muttered. "The cur! Why didn't you tell me? I'd have sized him up for you."

"I believed him, I thought it was true. And I was afraid you'd interfere—tell me it was all wrong."

The young man shifted his eyes from her face and stifled a comment. It was no time now to reproach her. There was a moment's silence and then she broke out into the query, put so often to herself, put to Mayer, tormenting and inexplicable.

"Why did he do it—why did he begin it? It was he who came, sought me out, gave me flowers. He'd come whenever I'd let him—and he was so interested, couldn't hear enough about me. There wasn't any little thing in my life he didn't want to know. Every man who'd ever come near me he'd want me to tell him about, he'd just hound me to tell him. What made him do it? Was it all a fake from the beginning, and if it was did he do it just for sport?"