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“But suppose he don’t get it?” said Christie, slightly contracting her brows.
“Then there’s the flume to show for it,” said Dick.
“But of what use is the flume, if there isn’t any more gold?” continued Christie, almost angrily.
“That’s good from YOU, miss,” said Dick, giving way to a fit of hilarity. “That’s good for a fash’nable young lady—own daughter of Philip Carr. She sez, says she,” continued Dick, appealing to the sedate pines for appreciation of Christie’s rare humor, “‘Wot’s the use of a flume, when gold ain’t there?’ I must tell that to the boys.”
“And what’s the use of the gold in the ground when the flume isn’t there to work it out?” said Jessie to her sister, with a cautioning glance towards Dick.
But Dick did not notice the look that passed between the sisters. The richer humor of Jessie’s retort had thrown him into convulsions of laughter.
“And now SHE says, wot’s the use o’ the gold without the flume? ‘Xcuse me, ladies, but that’s just puttin’ the hull question that’s agitatin’ this yer camp inter two speeches as clear as crystal. There’s the hull crowd outside—and some on ‘em inside, like Fairfax, hez their doubts—ez says with Miss Christie; and there’s all of us inside, ez holds Miss Jessie’s views.”
“I never heard Mr. Munroe say that the flume was wrong,” said Jessie quickly.
“Not to you, nat’rally,” said Dick, with a confidential look at Christie; “but I reckon he’d like some of the money it cost laid out for suthin’ else. But what’s the odds? The gold is there, and WE’RE bound to get it.”
Dick was the foreman of a gang of paid workmen, who had replaced the millionaires in mere manual labor, and the WE was a polite figure of speech.
The conversation seemed to have taken an unfortunate turn, and both the girls experienced a feeling of relief when they entered the long gulch or defile that led to Indian Spring. The track now becoming narrow, they were obliged to pass in single file along the precipitous hillside, led by this escort. This effectually precluded any further speech, and Christie at once surrendered herself to the calm, obliterating influences of the forest. The settlement and its gossip were far behind and forgotten. In the absorption of nature, her companions passed out of her mind, even as they sometimes passed out of her sight in the windings of the shadowy trail. As she rode alone, the fronds of breast-high ferns seemed to caress her with outstretched and gently-detaining hands; strange wildflowers sprang up through the parting underbrush; even the granite rocks that at times pressed closely upon the trail appeared as if cushioned to her contact with star-rayed mosses, or lightly flung after her long lassoes of delicate vines. She recalled the absolute freedom of their al-fresco life in the old double cabin, when she spent the greater part of her waking hours under the mute trees in the encompassing solitude, and, half regretting the more civilized restraints of this newer and more ambitious abode, forgot that she had ever rebelled against it. The social complication that threatened her now seemed to her rather the outcome of her half-civilized parlor than of the sylvan glade. How easy it would have been to have kept the cabin, and then to have gone away entirely, than for her father to have allowed them to be compromised with the growing fortunes of the settlement! The suspicions and distrust that she had always felt of their fortunes seemed to grow with the involuntary admission of Whiskey Dick that they were shared by others who were practical men. She was fain to have recourse to the prospect again to banish these thoughts, and this opened her eyes to the fact that her companions had been missing from the trail ahead of her for some time. She quickened her pace slightly to reach a projecting point of rock that gave her a more extended prospect. But they had evidently disappeared.
She was neither alarmed nor annoyed. She could easily overtake them soon, for they would miss her, and return or wait for her at the spring. At the worst she would have no difficulty in retracing her steps home. In her present mood, she could readily spare their company; indeed she was not sorry that no other being should interrupt that sympathy with the free woods which was beginning to possess her.
She was destined, however, to be disappointed. She had not proceeded a hundred yards before she noticed the moving figure of a man beyond her in the hillside chaparral above the trail. He seemed to be going in the same direction as herself, and, as she fancied, endeavoring to avoid her. This excited her curiosity to the point of urging her horse forward until the trail broadened into the level forest again, which she now remembered was a part of the environs of Indian Spring. The stranger hesitated, pausing once or twice with his back towards her, as if engaged in carefully examining the dwarf willows to select a switch. Christie slightly checked her speed as she drew nearer; when, as if obedient to a sudden resolution, he turned and advanced towards her. She was relieved and yet surprised to recognize the boyish face and figure of George Kearney. He was quite pale and agitated, although attempting, by a jaunty swinging of the switch he had just cut, to assume the appearance of ease and confidence.
Here was an opportunity. Christie resolved to profit by it. She did not doubt that the young fellow had already passed her sister on the trail, but, from bashfulness, had not dared to approach her. By inviting his confidence, she would doubtless draw something from him that would deny or corroborate her father’s opinion of his sentiments. If he was really in love with Jessie, she would learn what reasons he had for expecting a serious culmination of his suit, and perhaps she might be able delicately to open his eyes to the truth. If, as she believed, it was only a boyish fancy, she would laugh him out of it with that camaraderie which had always existed between them. A half motherly sympathy, albeit born quite as much from a contemplation of his beautiful yearning eyes as from his interesting position, lightened the smile with which she greeted him.
“So you contrived to throw over your stupid business and join us, after all,” she said; “or was it that you changed your mind at the last moment?” she added mischievously. “I thought only we women were permitted that!” Indeed, she could not help noticing that there was really a strong feminine suggestion in the shifting color and slightly conscious eyelids of the young fellow.
“Do young girls always change their minds?” asked George, with an embarrassed smile.
“Not, always; but sometimes they don’t know their own mind—particularly if they are very young; and when they do at last, you clever creatures of men, who have interpreted their ignorance to please yourselves, abuse them for being fickle.” She stopped to observe the effect of what she believed a rather clear and significant exposition of Jessie’s and George’s possible situation. But she was not prepared for the look of blank resignation that seemed to drive the color from his face and moisten the fire of his dark eyes.
“I reckon you’re right,” he said, looking down.
“Oh! we’re not accusing you of fickleness,” said Christie gayly; “although you didn’t come, and we were obliged to ask Mr. Hall to join us. I suppose you found him and Jessie just now?”
But George made no reply. The color was slowly coming back to his face, which, as she glanced covertly at him, seemed to have grown so much older that his returning blood might have brought two or three years with it.
“Really, Mr. Kearney,” she said dryly, “one would think that some silly, conceited girl”—she was quite earnest in her epithets, for a sudden, angry conviction of some coquetry and disingenuousness in Jessie had come to her in contemplating its effects upon the young fellow at her side—“some country jilt, had been trying her rustic hand upon you.”
“She is not silly, conceited, nor countrified,” said George, slowly raising his beautiful eyes to the young girl half reproachfully. “It is I who am all that. No, she is right, and you know it.”
Much as Christie admired and valued her sister’s charms, she thought this was really going too far. What had Jessie ever done—what was Jessie—to provoke and remain insensible to such a blind devotion as this? And really, looking at him now, he was not so VERY YOUNG for Jessie; whether his unfortunate passion had brought out all his latent manliness, or whether he had hitherto kept his serious nature in the background, certainly he was not a boy. And certainly his was not a passion that he could be laughed out of. It was getting very tiresome. She wished she had not met him—at least until she had had some clearer understanding with her sister. He was still walking beside her, with his hand on her bridle rein, partly to lead her horse over some boulders in the trail, and partly to conceal his first embarrassment. When they had fairly reached the woods, he stopped.
“I am going to say good-by, Miss Carr.”
“Are you not coming further? We must be near Indian Spring, now; Mr. Hall and—and Jessie—cannot be far away. You will keep me company until we meet them?”
“No,” he replied quietly. “I only stopped you to say good-by. I am going away.”
“Not from Devil’s Ford?” she asked, in half-incredulous astonishment. “At least, not for long?”
“I am not coming back,” he replied.
“But this is very abrupt,” she said hurriedly, feeling that in some ridiculous way she had precipitated an equally ridiculous catastrophe. “Surely you are not going away in this fashion, without saying good-by to Jessie and—and father?”
“I shall see your father, of course—and you will give my regards to Miss Jessie.”
He evidently was in earnest. Was there ever anything so perfectly preposterous? She became indignant.
“Of course,” she said coldly, “I won’t detain you; your business must be urgent, and I forgot—at least I had forgotten until to-day—that you have other duties more important than that of squire of dames. I am afraid this forgetfulness made me think you would not part from us in quite such a business fashion. I presume, if you had not met me just now, we should none of us have seen you again?”
He did not reply.
“Will you say good-by, Miss Carr?”
He held out his hand.
“One moment, Mr. Kearney. If I have said anything which you think justifies this very abrupt leave-taking, I beg you will forgive and forget it—or, at least, let it have no more weight with you than the idle words of any woman. I only spoke generally. You know—I—I might be mistaken.”
His eyes, which had dilated when she began to speak, darkened; his color, which had quickly come, as quickly sank when she had ended.
“Don’t say that, Miss Carr. It is not like you, and—it is useless. You know what I meant a moment ago. I read it in your reply. You meant that I, like others, had deceived myself. Did you not?”
She could not meet those honest eyes with less than equal honesty. She knew that Jessie did not love him—would not marry him—whatever coquetry she might have shown.
“I did not mean to offend you,” she said hesitatingly; “I only half suspected it when I spoke.”
“And you wish to spare me the avowal?” he said bitterly.
“To me, perhaps, yes, by anticipating it. I could not tell what ideas you might have gathered from some indiscreet frankness of Jessie—or my father,” she added, with almost equal bitterness.
“I have never spoken to either,” he replied quickly. He stopped, and added, after a moment’s mortifying reflection, “I’ve been brought up in the woods, Miss Carr, and I suppose I have followed my feelings, instead of the etiquette of society.”
Christie was too relieved at the rehabilitation of Jessie’s truthfulness to notice the full significance of his speech.
“Good-by,” he said again, holding out his hand.
“Good-by!”
She extended her own, ungloved, with a frank smile. He held it for a moment, with his eyes fixed upon hers. Then suddenly, as if obeying an uncontrollable impulse, he crushed it like a flower again and again against his burning lips, and darted away.
Christie sank back in her saddle with a little cry, half of pain and half of frightened surprise. Had the poor boy suddenly gone mad, or was this vicarious farewell a part of the courtship of Devil’s Ford? She looked at her little hand, which had reddened under the pressure, and suddenly felt the flush extending to her cheeks and the roots of her hair. This was intolerable.
“Christie!”
It was her sister emerging from the wood to seek her. In another moment she was at her side.
“We thought you were following,” said Jessie. “Good heavens! how you look! What has happened?”
“Nothing. I met Mr. Kearney a moment ago on the trail. He is going away, and—and—” She stopped, furious and flushing.
“And,” said Jessie, with a burst of merriment, “he told you at last he loved you. Oh, Christie!”
CHAPTER VI
The abrupt departure of George Kearney from Devil’s Ford excited but little interest in the community, and was soon forgotten. It was generally attributed to differences between himself and his partners on the question of further outlay of their earnings on mining improvements—he and Philip Carr alone representing a sanguine minority whose faith in the future of the mine accepted any risks. It was alleged by some that he had sold out to his brother; it was believed by others that he had simply gone to Sacramento to borrow money on his share, in order to continue the improvements on his own responsibility. The partners themselves were uncommunicative; even Whiskey Dick, who since his remarkable social elevation had become less oracular, much to his own astonishment, contributed nothing to the gossip except a suggestion that as the fiery temper of George Kearney brooked no opposition, even from his brother, it was better they should separate before the estrangement became serious.
Mr. Carr did not disguise his annoyance at the loss of his young disciple and firm ally. But an unlucky allusion to his previous remarks on Kearney’s attentions to Jessie, and a querulous regret that he had permitted a disruption of their social intimacy, brought such an ominous and frigid opposition, not only from Christie, but even the frivolous Jessie herself, that Carr sank back in a crushed and terrified silence. “I only meant to say,” he stammered after a pause, in which he, however, resumed his aggrieved manner, “that FAIRFAX seems to come here still, and HE is not such a particular friend of mine.”
“But she is—and has your interest entirely at heart,” said Jessie, stoutly, “and he only comes here to tell us how things are going on at the works.”
“And criticise your father, I suppose,” said Mr. Carr, with an attempt at jocularity that did not, however, disguise an irritated suspiciousness. “He really seems to have supplanted ME as he has poor Kearney in your estimation.”
“Now, father,” said Jessie, suddenly seizing him by the shoulders in affected indignation, but really to conceal a certain embarrassment that sprang quite as much from her sister’s quietly observant eye as her father’s speech, “you promised to let this ridiculous discussion drop. You will make me and Christie so nervous that we will not dare to open the door to a visitor, until he declares his innocence of any matrimonial intentions. You don’t want to give color to the gossip that agreement with your views about the improvements is necessary to getting on with us.”
“Who dares talk such rubbish?” said Carr, reddening; “is that the kind of gossip that Fairfax brings here?”
“Hardly, when it’s known that he don’t quite agree with you, and DOES come here. That’s the best denial of the gossip.”
Christie, who had of late loftily ignored these discussions, waited until her father had taken his departure.
“Then that is the reason why you still see Mr. Munroe, after what you said,” she remarked quietly to Jessie.
Jessie, who would have liked to escape with her father, was obliged to pause on the threshold of the door, with a pretty assumption of blank forgetfulness in her blue eyes and lifted eyebrows.
“Said what? when?” she asked vacantly.
“When—when Mr. Kearney that day—in the woods—went away,” said Christie, faintly coloring.
“Oh! THAT day,” said Jessie briskly; “the day he just gloved your hand with kisses, and then fled wildly into the forest to conceal his emotion.”
“The day he behaved very foolishly,” said Christie, with reproachful calmness, that did not, however, prevent a suspicion of indignant moisture in her eyes—“when you explained”—
“That it wasn’t meant for ME,” interrupted Jessie.
“That it was to you that MR. MUNROE’S attentions were directed. And then we agreed that it was better to prevent any further advances of this kind by avoiding any familiar relations with either of them.”
“Yes,” said Jessie, “I remember; but you’re not confounding my seeing Fairfax occasionally now with that sort of thing. HE doesn’t kiss my hand like anything,” she added, as if in abstract reflection.
“Nor run away, either,” suggested the trodden worm, turning.
There was an ominous silence.
“Do you know we are nearly out of coffee?” said Jessie choking, but moving towards the door with Spartan-like calmness.
“Yes. And something must be done this very day about the washing,” said Christie, with suppressed emotion, going towards the opposite entrance.
Tears stood in each other’s eyes with this terrible exchange of domestic confidences. Nevertheless, after a moment’s pause, they deliberately turned again, and, facing each other with frightful calmness, left the room by purposeless and deliberate exits other than those they had contemplated—a crushing abnegation of self, that, to some extent, relieved their surcharged feelings.
Meantime the material prosperity of Devil’s Ford increased, if a prosperity based upon no visible foundation but the confidences and hopes of its inhabitants could be called material. Few, if any, stopped to consider that the improvements, buildings, and business were simply the outlay of capital brought from elsewhere, and as yet the settlement or town, as it was now called, had neither produced nor exported capital of itself equal to half the amount expended. It was true that some land was cultivated on the further slope, some mills erected and lumber furnished from the inexhaustible forest; but the consumers were the inhabitants themselves, who paid for their produce in borrowed capital or unlimited credit. It was never discovered that while all roads led to Devil’s Ford, Devil’s Ford led to nowhere. The difficulties overcome in getting things into the settlement were never surmounted for getting things out of it. The lumber was practically valueless for export to other settlements across the mountain roads, which were equally rich in timber. The theory so enthusiastically held by the original locators, that Devil’s Ford was a vast sink that had, through ages, exhausted and absorbed the trickling wealth of the adjacent hills and valleys, was suffering an ironical corroboration.
One morning it was known that work was stopped at the Devil’s Ford Ditch—temporarily only, it was alleged, and many of the old workmen simply had their labor for the present transferred to excavating the river banks, and the collection of vast heaps of “pay gravel.” Specimens from these mounds, taken from different localities, and at different levels, were sent to San Francisco for more rigid assay and analysis. It was believed that this would establish the fact of the permanent richness of the drifts, and not only justify past expenditure, but a renewed outlay of credit and capital. The suspension of engineering work gave Mr. Carr an opportunity to visit San Francisco on general business of the mine, which could not, however, prevent him from arranging further combinations with capital. His two daughters accompanied him. It offered an admirable opportunity for a shopping expedition, a change of scene, and a peaceful solution of their perplexing and anomalous social relations with Devil’s Ford. In the first flush of gratitude to their father for this opportune holiday, something of harmony had been restored to the family circle that had of late been shaken by discord.
But their sanguine hopes of enjoyment were not entirely fulfilled. Both Jessie and Christie were obliged to confess to a certain disappointment in the aspect of the civilization they were now reentering. They at first attributed it to the change in their own habits during the last three months, and their having become barbarous and countrified in their seclusion. Certainly in the matter of dress they were behind the fashions as revealed in Montgomery Street. But when the brief solace afforded them by the modiste and dressmaker was past, there seemed little else to be gained. They missed at first, I fear, the chivalrous and loyal devotion that had only amused them at Devil’s Ford, and were the more inclined, I think, to distrust the conscious and more civilized gallantry of the better dressed and more carefully presented men they met. For it must be admitted that, for obvious reasons, their criticisms were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with. They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits. It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil’s Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they were unable yet to reach.
The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men, demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses, their extravagant demand for excitement. In less than a week they found themselves regretting—not the new villa on the slope of Devil’s Ford, which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous ostentation of the villas and private houses around them—but the double cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in its grave simplicity and abstention. In the mysterious forests of masts that thronged the city’s quays they recalled the straight shafts of the pines on Devil’s slopes, only to miss the sedate repose and infinite calm that used to environ them. In the feverish, pulsating life of the young metropolis they often stopped oppressed, giddy, and choking; the roar of the streets and thoroughfares was meaningless to them, except to revive strange memories of the deep, unvarying monotone of the evening wind over their humbler roof on the Sierran hillside. Civic bred and nurtured as they were, the recurrence of these sensations perplexed and alarmed them.
“It seems so perfectly ridiculous,” said Jessie, “for us to feel as out of place here as that Pike County servant girl in Sacramento who had never seen a steamboat before; do you know, I quite had a turn the other day at seeing a man on the Stockton wharf in a red shirt, with a rifle on his shoulder.”
“And you wanted to go and speak to him?” said Christie, with a sad smile.
“No, that’s just it; I felt awfully hurt and injured that he did not come up and speak to ME! I wonder if we got any fever or that sort of thing up there; it makes one quite superstitious.”
Christie did not reply; more than once before she had felt that inexplicable misgiving. It had sometimes seemed to her that she had never been quite herself since that memorable night when she had slipped out of their sleeping-cabin, and stood alone in the gracious and commanding presence of the woods and hills. In the solitude of night, with the hum of the great city rising below her—at times even in theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women—she forgot herself, and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some pantheistic embrace that made her a part of them? Had she been baptized in that moonlight as a child of the great forest? It was easy to believe in the myths of the poets of an idyllic life under those trees, where, free from conventional restrictions, one loved and was loved. If she, with her own worldly experience, could think of this now, why might not George Kearney have thought? . . . She stopped, and found herself blushing even in the darkness. As the thought and blush were the usual sequel of her reflections, it is to be feared that they may have been at times the impelling cause.