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“Wonder whether he’s got parents in the stage, and has been playing truant here,” he mused, lazily. “Looked as if he’d been up to some devilment, or more like as if he was primed for it. If he’d been a little older, I’d have bet he was in league with some road-agents to watch the coach. Just my luck to have him light out as I was beginning to get some talk out of him.” He paused, looked at his watch, and straightened himself in his stirrups. “Four o’clock. I reckon I might as well try the woods and what that imp calls the ‘bresh;’ I may strike a shanty or a native by the way.”
With this determination, Mr. Hamlin urged his horse along the faint trail by the brink of the watercourse which the boy had just indicated. He had no definite end in view beyond the one that had brought him the day before to that locality—his quest of the unknown poetess. His clue would have seemed to ordinary humanity the faintest. He had merely noted the provincial name of a certain plant mentioned in the poem, and learned that its habitat was limited to the southern local range; while its peculiar nomenclature was clearly of French Creole or Gulf State origin. This gave him a large though sparsely-populated area for locality, while it suggested a settlement of Louisianians or Mississippians near the Summit, of whom, through their native gambling proclivities, he was professionally cognizant. But he mainly trusted Fortune. Secure in his faith in the feminine character of that goddess, he relied a great deal on her well-known weakness for scamps of his quality.
It was not long before he came to the “slide”—a lightly-cut or shallow ditch. It descended slightly in a course that was far from straight, at times diverging to avoid the obstacles of trees or boulders, at times shaving them so closely as to leave smooth abrasions along their sides made by the grinding passage of long logs down the incline. The track itself was slippery from this, and preoccupied all Hamlin’s skill as a horseman, even to the point of stopping his usual careless whistle. At the end of half an hour the track became level again, and he was confronted with a singular phenomenon.
He had entered the wood, and the trail seemed to cleave through a far-stretching, motionless sea of ferns that flowed on either side to the height of his horse’s flanks. The straight shafts of the trees rose like columns from their hidden bases and were lost again in a roof of impenetrable leafage, leaving a clear space of fifty feet between, through which the surrounding horizon of sky was perfectly visible. All the light that entered this vast sylvan hall came from the sides; nothing permeated from above; nothing radiated from below; the height of the crest on which the wood was placed gave it this lateral illumination, but gave it also the profound isolation of some temple raised by long-forgotten hands. In spite of the height of these clear shafts, they seemed dwarfed by the expanse of the wood, and in the farthest perspective the base of ferns and the capital of foliage appeared almost to meet. As the boy had warned him, the slide had turned aside, skirting the wood to follow the incline, and presently the little trail he now followed vanished utterly, leaving him and his horse adrift breast-high in this green and yellow sea of fronds. But Mr. Hamlin, imperious of obstacles, and touched by some curiosity, continued to advance lazily, taking the bearings of a larger red-wood in the centre of the grove for his objective point. The elastic mass gave way before him, brushing his knees or combing his horse’s flanks with wide-spread elfin fingers, and closing up behind him as he passed, as if to obliterate any track by which he might return. Yet his usual luck did not desert him here. Being on horseback, he found that he could detect what had been invisible to the boy and probably to all pedestrians, namely, that the growth was not equally dense, that there were certain thinner and more open spaces that he could take advantage of by more circuitous progression, always, however, keeping the bearings of the central tree. This he at last reached, and halted his panting horse. Here a new idea which had been haunting him since he entered the wood took fuller possession of him. He had seen or known all this before! There was a strange familiarity either in these objects or in the impression or spell they left upon him. He remembered the verses! Yes, this was the “underbrush” which the poetess had described: the gloom above and below, the light that seemed blown through it like the wind, the suggestion of hidden life beneath this tangled luxuriance, which she alone had penetrated,—all this was here. But, more than that, here was the atmosphere that she had breathed into the plaintive melody of her verse. It did not necessarily follow that Mr. Hamlin’s translation of her sentiment was the correct one, or that the ideas her verses had provoked in his mind were at all what had been hers: in his easy susceptibility he was simply thrown into a corresponding mood of emotion and relieved himself with song. One of the verses he had already associated in his mind with the rhythm of an old plantation melody, and it struck his fancy to take advantage of the solitude to try its effect. Humming to himself, at first softly, he at last grew bolder, and let his voice drift away through the stark pillars of the sylvan colonnade till it seemed to suffuse and fill it with no more effort than the light which strayed in on either side. Sitting thus, his hat thrown a little back from his clustering curls, the white neck and shoulders of his horse uplifting him above the crested mass of fern, his red sash the one fleck of color in their olive depths, I am afraid he looked much more like the real minstrel of the grove than the unknown poetess who transfigured it. But this, as has been already indicated, was Jack Hamlin’s peculiar gift. Even as he had previously outshone the vaquero in his borrowed dress, he now silenced and supplanted a few fluttering blue-jays—rightful tenants of the wood—with a more graceful and airy presence and a far sweeter voice.
The open horizon towards the west had taken a warmer color from the already slanting sun when Mr. Hamlin, having rested his horse, turned to that direction. He had noticed that the wood was thinner there, and, pushing forward, he was presently rewarded by the sound of far-off wheels, and knew he must be near the high-road that the boy had spoken of. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, there seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant’s advice and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed recesses. Once or twice—perhaps because he recalled the words of the poem—that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life, and he had even fancied, here and there, a swaying of its plumed crests. Howbeit, he still lingered long enough for the open sunlight into which he had obtruded to point out the bravery of his handsome figure. Then he wheeled his horse, the light glanced from polished double bit and bridle-fripperies, caught his red sash and bullion buttons, struck a parting flash from his silver spurs, and he was gone!
For a moment the light streamed unbrokenly through the wood. And then it could be seen that the yellow mass of undergrowth HAD moved with the passage of another figure than his own. For ever since he had entered the shade, a woman, shawled in a vague, shapeless fashion, had watched him wonderingly, eagerly, excitedly, gliding from tree to tree as he advanced, or else dropping breathlessly below the fronds of fern whence she gazed at him as between parted fingers. When he wheeled she had run openly to the west, albeit with hidden face and still clinging shawl, and taken a last look at his retreating figure. And then, with a faint but lingering sigh, she drew back into the shadow of the wood again and vanished also.
CHAPTER III
At the end of twenty minutes Mr. Hamlin reined in his mare. He had just observed in the distant shadows of a by-lane that intersected his road the vanishing flutter of two light print dresses. Without a moment’s hesitation he lightly swerved out of the high-road and followed the retreating figures.
As he neared them, they seemed to be two slim young girls, evidently so preoccupied with the rustic amusement of edging each other off the grassy border into the dust of the track that they did not perceive his approach. Little shrieks, slight scufflings, and interjections of “Cynthy! you limb!” “Quit that, Eunice, now!” and “I just call that real mean!” apparently drowned the sound of his canter in the soft dust. Checking his speed to a gentle trot, and pressing his horse close beside the opposite fence, he passed them with gravely uplifted hat and a serious, preoccupied air. But in that single, seemingly conventional glance, Mr. Hamlin had seen that they were both pretty, and that one had the short upper lip of his errant little guide. A hundred yards farther on he halted, as if irresolutely, gazed doubtfully ahead of him, and then turned back. An expression of innocent—almost childlike—concern was clouding the rascal’s face. It was well, as the two girls had drawn closely together, having been apparently surprised in the midst of a glowing eulogium of this glorious passing vision by its sudden return. At his nearer approach, the one with the short upper lip hid that piquant feature and the rest of her rosy face behind the other’s shoulder, which was suddenly and significantly opposed to the advance of this handsome intruder, with a certain dignity, half real, half affected, but wholly charming. The protectress appeared—possibly from her defensive attitude—the superior of her companion.
Audacious as Jack was to his own sex, he had early learned that such rare but discomposing graces as he possessed required a certain apologetic attitude when presented to women, and that it was only a plain man who could be always complacently self-confident in their presence. There was, consequently, a hesitating lowering of this hypocrite’s brown eyelashes as he said, in almost pained accents,—
“Excuse me, but I fear I’ve taken the wrong road. I’m going to Green Springs.”
“I reckon you’ve taken the wrong road, wherever you’re going,” returned the young lady, having apparently made up her mind to resent each of Jack’s perfections as a separate impertinence: “this is a PRIVATE road.” She drew herself fairly up here, although gurgled at in the ear and pinched in the arm by her companion.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jack, meekly. “I see I’m trespassing on your grounds. I’m very sorry. Thank you for telling me. I should have gone on a mile or two farther, I suppose, until I came to your house,” he added, innocently.
“A mile or two! You’d have run chock ag’in’ our gate in another minit,” said the short-lipped one, eagerly. But a sharp nudge from her companion sent her back again into cover, where she waited expectantly for another crushing retort from her protector.
But, alas! it did not come. One cannot be always witty, and Jack looked distressed. Nevertheless, he took advantage of the pause.
“It was so stupid in me, as I think your brother”—looking at Short-lip—“very carefully told me the road.”
The two girls darted quick glances at each other. “Oh, Bawb!” said the first speaker, in wearied accents,—“THAT limb! He don’t keer.”
“But he DID care,” said Hamlin, quietly, “and gave me a good deal of information. Thanks to him, I was able to see that ferny wood that’s so famous—about two miles up the road. You know—the one that there’s a poem written about!”
The shot told! Short-lip burst into a display of dazzling little teeth and caught the other girl convulsively by the shoulders. The superior girl bent her pretty brows, and said, “Eunice, what’s gone of ye? Quit that!” but, as Hamlin thought, paled slightly.
“Of course,” said Hamlin, quickly, “you know—the poem everybody’s talking about. Dear me! let me see! how does it go?” The rascal knit his brows, said, “Ah, yes,” and then murmured the verse he had lately sung quite as musically.
Short-lip was shamelessly exalted and excited. Really she could scarcely believe it! She already heard herself relating the whole occurrence. Here was the most beautiful young man she had ever seen—an entire stranger—talking to them in the most beautiful and natural way, right in the lane, and reciting poetry to her sister! It was like a novel—only more so. She thought that Cynthia, on the other hand, looked distressed, and—she must say it—“silly.”
All of which Jack noted, and was wise. He had got all he wanted—at present. He gathered up his reins.
“Thank you so much, and your brother, too, Miss Cynthia,” he said, without looking up. Then, adding, with a parting glance and smile, “But don’t tell Bob how stupid I was,” he swiftly departed.
In half an hour he was at the Green Springs Hotel. As he rode into the stable yard, he noticed that the coach had only just arrived, having been detained by a land-slip on the Summit road. With the recollection of Bob fresh in his mind, he glanced at the loungers at the stage office. The boy was not there, but a moment later Jack detected him among the waiting crowd at the post-office opposite. With a view of following up his inquiries, he crossed the road as the boy entered the vestibule of the post-office. He arrived in time to see him unlock one of a row of numbered letter-boxes rented by subscribers, which occupied a partition by the window, and take out a small package and a letter. But in that brief glance Mr. Hamlin detected the printed address of the “Excelsior Magazine” on the wrapper. It was enough. Luck was certainly with him.
He had time to get rid of the wicked sparkle that had lit his dark eyes, and to lounge carelessly towards the boy as the latter broke open the package, and then hurriedly concealed it in his jacket-pocket, and started for the door. Mr. Hamlin quickly followed him, unperceived, and, as he stepped into the street, gently tapped him on the shoulder. The boy turned and faced him quickly. But Mr. Hamlin’s eyes showed nothing but lazy good-humor.
“Hullo, Bob. Where are you going?”
The boy again looked up suspiciously at this revelation of his name.
“Home,” he said, briefly.
“Oh, over yonder,” said Hamlin, calmly. “I don’t mind walking with you as far as the lane.”
He saw the boy’s eyes glance furtively towards an alley that ran beside the blacksmith’s shop a few rods ahead, and was convinced that he intended to evade him there. Slipping his arm carelessly in the youth’s, he concluded to open fire at once.
“Bob,” he said, with irresistible gravity, “I did not know when I met you this morning that I had the honor of addressing a poet—none other than the famous author of ‘Underbrush.’”
The boy started back, and endeavored to withdraw his arm, but Mr. Hamlin tightened his hold, without, however, changing his careless expression.
“You see,” he continued, “the editor is a friend of mine, and, being afraid this package might not get into the right hands—as you didn’t give your name—he deputized me to come here and see that it was all square. As you’re rather young, for all you’re so gifted, I reckon I’d better go home with you, and take a receipt from your parents. That’s about square, I think?”
The consternation of the boy was so evident and so far beyond Mr. Hamlin’s expectation that he instantly halted him, gazed into his shifting eyes, and gave a long whistle.
“Who said it was for ME? Wot you talkin’ about? Lemme go!” gasped the boy, with the short intermittent breath of mingled fear and passion.
“Bob,” said Mr. Hamlin, in a singularly colorless voice which was very rare with him, and an expression quite unlike his own, “what is your little game?”
The boy looked down in dogged silence.
“Out with it! Who are you playing this on?”
“It’s all among my own folks; it’s nothin’ to YOU,” said the boy, suddenly beginning to struggle violently, as if inspired by this extenuating fact.
“Among your own folks, eh? White Violet and the rest, eh? But SHE’S not in it?”
No reply.
“Hand me over that package. I’ll give it back to you again.”
The boy handed it to Mr. Hamlin. He read the letter, and found the inclosure contained a twenty-dollar gold-piece. A half-supercilious smile passed over his face at this revelation of the inadequate emoluments of literature and the trifling inducements to crime. Indeed, I fear the affair began to take a less serious moral complexion in his eyes.
“Then White Violet—your sister Cynthia, you know,” continued Mr. Hamlin, in easy parenthesis—“wrote for this?” holding the coin contemplatively in his fingers, “and you calculated to nab it yourself?”
The quick searching glance with which Bob received the name of his sister, Mr. Hamlin attributed only to his natural surprise that this stranger should be on such familiar terms with her; but the boy responded immediately and bluntly:—
“No! SHE didn’t write for it. She didn’t want nobody to know who she was. Nobody wrote for it but me. Nobody KNEW FOLKS WAS PAID FOR PO’TRY BUT ME. I found it out from a feller. I wrote for it. I wasn’t goin’ to let that skunk of an editor have it himself!”
“And you thought YOU would take it,” said Hamlin, his voice resuming its old tone. “Well, George—I mean Bob, your conduct was praiseworthy, although your intentions were bad. Still, twenty dollars is rather too much for your trouble. Suppose we say five and call it square?” He handed the astonished boy five dollars. “Now, George Washington,” he continued, taking four other twenty-dollar pieces from his pocket, and adding them to the inclosure, which he carefully refolded, “I’m going to give you another chance to live up to your reputation. You’ll take that package, and hand it to White Violet, and say you found it, just as it is, in the lock-box. I’ll keep the letter, for it would knock you endways if it was seen, and I’ll make it all right with the editor. But, as I’ve got to tell him that I’ve seen White Violet myself, and know she’s got it, I expect YOU to manage in some way to have me see her. I’ll manage the rest of it; and I won’t blow on you, either. You’ll come back to the hotel, and tell me what you’ve done. And now, George,” concluded Mr. Hamlin, succeeding at last in fixing the boy’s evasive eye with a peculiar look, “it may be just as well for you to understand that I know every nook and corner of this place, that I’ve already been through that underbrush you spoke of once this morning, and that I’ve got a mare that can go wherever YOU can, and a d–d sight quicker!”
“I’ll give the package to White Violet,” said the boy, doggedly.
“And you’ll come back to the hotel?”
The boy hesitated, and then said, “I’ll come back.”
“All right, then. Adios, general.”
Bob disappeared around the corner of a cross-road at a rapid trot, and Mr. Hamlin turned into the hotel.
“Smart little chap that!” he said to the barkeeper.
“You bet!” returned the man, who, having recognized Mr. Hamlin, was delighted at the prospect of conversing with a gentleman of such decidedly dangerous reputation. “But he’s been allowed to run a little wild since old man Delatour died, and the widder’s got enough to do, I reckon, lookin’ arter her four gals, and takin’ keer of old Delatour’s ranch over yonder. I guess it’s pretty hard sleddin’ for her sometimes to get clo’es and grub for the famerly, without follerin’ Bob around.”
“Sharp girls, too, I reckon; one of them writes things for the magazines, doesn’t she?—Cynthia, eh?” said Mr. Hamlin, carelessly.
Evidently this fact was not a notorious one to the barkeeper. He, however, said, “Dunno; mabbee; her father was eddicated, and the widder Delatour, too, though she’s sorter queer, I’ve heard tell. Lord! Mr. Hamlin, YOU oughter remember old man Delatour! From Opelousas, Louisiany, you know! High old sport French style, frilled bosom—open-handed, and us’ter buck ag’in’ faro awful! Why, he dropped a heap o’ money to YOU over in San Jose two years ago at poker! You must remember him!”
The slightest possible flush passed over Mr. Hamlin’s brow under the shadow of his hat, but did not get lower than his eyes. He suddenly HAD recalled the spendthrift Delatour perfectly, and as quickly regretted now that he had not doubled the honorarium he had just sent to his portionless daughter. But he only said, coolly, “No,” and then, raising his pale face and audacious eyes, continued in his laziest and most insulting manner, “no: the fact is, my mind is just now preoccupied in wondering if the gas is leaking anywhere, and if anything is ever served over this bar except elegant conversation. When the gentleman who mixes drinks comes back, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell him to send a whisky sour to Mr. Jack Hamlin in the parlor. Meantime, you can turn off your soda fountain: I don’t want any fizz in mine.”
Having thus quite recovered himself, Mr. Hamlin lounged gracefully across the hall into the parlor. As he did so, a darkish young man, with a slim boyish figure, a thin face, and a discontented expression, rose from an armchair, held out his hand, and, with a saturnine smile, said:—
“Jack!”
“Fred!”
The two men remained gazing at each other with a half-amused, half-guarded expression. Mr. Hamlin was first to begin. “I didn’t think YOU’D be such a fool as to try on this kind of thing, Fred,” he said, half seriously.
“Yes, but it was to keep you from being a much bigger one that I hunted you up,” said the editor, mischievously. “Read that. I got it an hour after you left.” And he placed a little triumphantly in Jack’s hand the letter he had received from White Violet.
Mr. Hamlin read it with an unmoved face, and then laid his two hands on the editor’s shoulders. “Yes, my young friend, and you sat down and wrote her a pretty letter and sent her twenty dollars—which, permit me to say, was d–d poor pay! But that isn’t your fault, I reckon: it’s the meanness of your proprietors.”
“But it isn’t the question, either, just now, Jack, however you have been able to answer it. Do you mean to say seriously that you want to know anything more of a woman who could write such a letter?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, cheerfully. “She might be a devilish sight funnier than if she hadn’t written it—which is the fact.”
“You mean to say SHE didn’t write it?”
“Yes.”
“Who did, then?”
“Her brother Bob.”
After a moment’s scrutiny of his friend’s bewildered face, Mr. Hamlin briefly related his adventures, from the moment of his meeting Bob at the mountain-stream to the barkeeper’s gossiping comment and sequel. “Therefore,” he concluded, “the author of ‘Underbrush’ is Miss Cynthia Delatour, one of four daughters of a widow who lives two miles from here at the crossing. I shall see her this evening and make sure; but to-morrow morning you will pay me the breakfast you owe me. She’s good-looking, but I can’t say I fancy the poetic style: it’s a little too high-toned for me. However, I love my love with a C, because she is your Contributor; I hate her with a C, because of her Connections; I met her by Chance and treated her with Civility; her name is Cynthia, and she lives on a Cross-road.”
“But you surely don’t expect you will ever see Bob, again!” said the editor, impatiently. “You have trusted him with enough to start him for the Sandwich Islands, to say nothing of the ruinous precedent you have established in his mind of the value of poetry. I am surprised that a man of your knowledge of the world would have faith in that imp the second time.”
“My knowledge of the world,” returned Mr. Hamlin, sententiously, “tells me that’s the only way you can trust anybody. ONCE doesn’t make a habit, nor show a character. I could see by his bungling that he had never tried this on before. Just now the temptation to wipe out his punishment by doing the square thing, and coming back a sort of hero, is stronger than any other. ‘Tisn’t everybody that gets that chance,” he added, with an odd laugh.
Nevertheless, three hours passed without bringing Bob. The two men had gone to the billiard-room, when a waiter brought a note, which he handed to Mr. Hamlin with some apologetic hesitation. It bore no superscription, but had been brought by a boy who described Mr. Hamlin perfectly, and requested that the note should be handed to him with the remark that “Bob had come back.”
“And is he there now?” asked Mr. Hamlin, holding the letter unopened in his hand.