From Sand Hill to Pine

“Very good. And I suppose you wouldn’t mind if it were kept out of the newspapers? You’re not hankering after a reputation as a hero?”

“Certainly not,” said Brice indignantly.

“Well, then, we’ll keep it where it is. You will say nothing. I will hand over the greenbacks to the company, but only as much of your story as I think they’ll stand. You’re all right as it is. Yuba Bill has already set you up in his report to the company, and the recovery of this money will put you higher! Only, the PUBLIC need know nothing about it.”

“But,” asked Brice amazedly, “how can it be prevented? The shippers who lost the money will have to know that it has been recovered.”

“Why should they? The company will assume the risk, and repay them just the same. It’s a great deal better to have the reputation for accepting the responsibility than for the shippers to think that they only get their money through the accident of its recovery.”

Brice gasped at this large business truth. Besides, it occurred to him that it kept the secret, and Flora’s participation in it, from Snapshot Harry and the gang. He had not thought of that before.

“Come,” continued the manager, with official curtness. “What do you say? Are you willing to leave it to me?”

Brice hesitated a moment. It was not what his impulsive truthful nature had suggested. It was not what his youthful fancy had imagined. He had not worked upon the sympathies of the company on behalf of Snapshot Harry as he believed he would do. He had not even impressed the manager. His story, far from exciting a chivalrous sentiment, had been pronounced improbable. Yet he reflected he had so far protected HER, and he consented with a sigh.

Nevertheless, the result ought to have satisfied him. A dazzling check, inclosed in a letter of thanks from the company the next day, and his promotion from “the road” to the San Francisco office, would have been quite enough for any one but Edward Brice. Yet he was grateful, albeit a little frightened and remorseful over his luck. He could not help thinking of the kindly tolerance of the highwayman, the miserable death of the actual thief, which had proved his own salvation, and above all the generous, high-spirited girl who had aided his escape. While on his way to San Francisco, and yet in the first glow of his success, he had written her a few lines from Marysville, inclosed in a letter to Mr. Tarbox. He had received no reply.

Then a week passed. He wrote again, and still no reply. Then a vague feeling of jealousy took possession of him as he remembered her warning hint of the attentions to which she was subjected, and he became singularly appreciative of Snapshot Harry’s proficiency as a marksman. Then, cruelest of all, for your impassioned lover is no lover at all if not cruel in his imaginings, he remembered how she had evaded her uncle’s espionage with HIM; could she not equally with ANOTHER? Perhaps that was why she had hurried him away,—why she had prevented his returning to her uncle. Following this came another week of disappointment and equally miserable cynical philosophy, in which he persuaded himself he was perfectly satisfied with his material advancement, that it was the only outcome of his adventure to be recognized; and he was more miserable than ever.

A month had passed, when one morning he received a small package by post. The address was in a handwriting unknown to him, but opening the parcel he was surprised to find only a handkerchief neatly folded. Examining it closely, he found it was his own,—the one he had given her, the rent made by her uncle’s bullet so ingeniously and delicately mended as to almost simulate embroidery. The joy that suddenly filled him at this proof of her remembrance showed him too plainly how hollow had been his cynicism and how lasting his hope! Turning over the wrapper eagerly, he discovered what he had at first thought was some business card. It was, indeed, printed and not engraved, in some common newspaper type, and bore the address, “Hiram Tarbox, Land and Timber Agent, 1101 California Street.” He again examined the parcel; there was nothing else,—not a line from HER! But it was a clue at last, and she had not forgotten him! He seized his hat, and ten minutes later was breasting the steep sand hill into which California Street in those days plunged, and again emerged at its crest, with a few struggling houses.

But when he reached the summit he could see that the outline of the street was still plainly marked along the distance by cottages and new suburban villa-like blocks of houses. No. 1101 was in one of these blocks, a small tenement enough, but a palace compared to Mr. Tarbox’s Sierran cabin. He impetuously rang the bell, and without waiting to be announced dashed into the little drawing-room and Mr. Tarbox’s presence. That had changed too; Mr. Tarbox was arrayed in a suit of clothes as new, as cheaply decorative, as fresh and, apparently, as damp as his own drawing room.

“Did you get my letter? Did you give her the one I inclosed? Why didn’t you answer?” burst out Brice, after his first breathless greeting.

Mr. Tarbox’s face here changed so suddenly into his old dejected doggedness that Brice could have imagined himself back in the Sierran cabin. The man straightened and bowed himself at Brice’s questions, and then replied with bold, deliberate emphasis:

“Yes, I DID get your letter. I DIDN’T give no letter o’ yours to her. And I didn’t answer your letter BEFORE, for I didn’t propose to answer it AT ALL.”

“Why?” demanded Brice indignantly.

“I didn’t give her your letter because I didn’t kalkilate to be any go-between ‘twixt you and Snapshot Harry’s niece. Look yar, Mr. Brice. Sense I read that ‘ar paragraph in that paper you gave me, I allowed to myself that it wasn’t the square thing for me to have any more doin’s with him, and I quit it. I jest chucked your letter in the fire. I didn’t answer you because I reckoned I’d no call to correspond with ye, and when I showed ye that trail over to Harry’s camp, it was ended. I’ve got a house and business to look arter, and it don’t jibe with keepin’ company with ‘road agents.’ That’s what I got outer that paper you gave me, Mr. Brice.”

Rage and disgust filled Brice at the man’s utter selfishness and shameless desertion of his kindred, none the less powerfully that he remembered the part he himself had played in concocting the paragraph. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded passionately, “that for the sake of that foolish paragraph you gave up your own kindred? That you truckled to the mean prejudices of your neighbors and kept that poor, defenseless girl from the only honest roof she could find refuge under? That you dared to destroy my letter to her, and made her believe I was as selfish and ungrateful as yourself?”

“Young feller,” said Mr. Tarbox still more deliberately, yet with a certain dignity that Brice had never noticed before, “what’s between you and Flo, and what rights she has fer thinkin’ ye ‘ez selfish’ and ‘ez ongrateful’ ez me—ef she does, I dunno!—but when ye talk o’ me givin’ up my kindred, and sling such hogwash ez ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ round this yer sittin’-room, mebbe it mout occur to ye that Harry Dimwood might hev HIS opinion o’ what was ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ ef I’d played in between his niece and a young man o’ the express company, his nat’ral enemy. It’s one thing to hev helped ye to see her in her uncle’s own camp, but another to help ye by makin’ a clandecent post-offis o’ my cabin. Ef, instead o’ writin’, you’d hev posted yourself by comin’ to me, you mout hev found out that when I broke with Harry I offered to take Flo with me for good and all—ef he’d keep away from us. And that’s the kind o’ ‘honest roof’ that that thar ‘poor defenseless girl’ got under when her crippled mother died three weeks ago, and left Harry free. It was by ‘trucklin’’ to them ‘mean prejudices,’ and readin’ that thar ‘foolish paragraph,’ that I settled this thing then and thar!”

Brice’s revulsion of sentiment was so complete, and the gratitude that beamed in his eyes was so sincere, that Mr. Tarbox hardly needed the profuse apologies which broke from him. “Forgive me!” he continued to stammer, “I have wronged you, wronged HER—everybody. But as you know, Mr. Tarbox, how I have felt over this, how deeply—how passionately”—

“It DOES make a man loony sometimes,” said Mr. Tarbox, relaxing into demure dryness again, “so I reckon you DID! Mebbe she reckoned so, too, for she asked me to give you the handkercher I sent ye. It looked as if she’d bin doin’ some fancy work on it.”

Brice glanced quickly at Mr. Tarbox’s face. It was stolid and imperturbable. She had evidently kept the secret of what passed in the hollow to herself. For the first time he looked around the room curiously. “I didn’t know you were a land agent before,” he said.

“No more I was! All that kem out o’ that paragraph, Mr. Brice. That man Heckshill, who was so mighty perlite that night, wrote to me afterwards that he didn’t know my name till he’d seed that paragraph, and he wanted to know ef, ez a ‘well-known citizen,’ I could recommend him some timber lands. I recommended him half o’ my own quarter section, and he took it. He’s puttin’ up a mill thar, and that’s another reason why we want peace and quietness up thar. I’m tryin’ (betwixt and between us, Mr. Brice) to get Harry to cl’ar out and sell his rights in the valley and the water power on the Fork to Heckshill and me. I’m opening a business here.”

“Then you’ve left Mrs. Tarbox with Miss Flora in your cabin while you attend to business here,” said Brice tentatively.

“Not exactly, Mr. Brice. The old woman thought it a good chance to come to ‘Frisco and put Flo in one o’ them Catholic convent schools—that asks no questions whar the raw logs come from, and turns ‘em out first-class plank all round. You foller me, Mr. Brice? But Mrs. Tarbox is jest in the next room, and would admire to tell ye all this—and I’ll go in and send her to you.” And with a patronizing wave of the hand, Mr. Tarbox complacently disappeared in the hall.

Mr. Brice was not sorry to be left to himself in his utter bewilderment! Flo, separated from her detrimental uncle, and placed in a convent school! Tarbox, the obscure pioneer, a shrewd speculator emerging into success, and taking the uncle’s place! And all this within that month which he had wasted with absurd repinings. How feeble seemed his own adventure and advancement; how even ludicrous his pretensions to any patronage and superiority. How this common backwoodsman had set him in his place as easily as SHE had evaded the advances of the journalist and Heckshill! They had taught him a lesson; perhaps even the sending back of his handkerchief was part of it! His heart grew heavy; he walked to the window and gazed out with a long sigh.

A light laugh, that might have been an echo of the one which had attracted him that night in Tarbox’s cabin, fell upon his ear. He turned quickly to meet Flora Dimwood’s laughing eyes shining upon him as she stood in the doorway.

Many a time during that month he had thought of this meeting—had imagined what it would be like—what would be his manner towards her—what would be her greeting, and what they would say. He would be cold, gentle, formal, gallant, gay, sad, trustful, reproachful, even as the moods in which he thought of her came to his foolish brain. He would always begin with respectful seriousness, or a frankness equal to her own, but never, never again would he offend as he had offended under the buckeyes! And now, with her pretty face shining upon him, all his plans, his speeches, his preparations vanished, and left him dumb. Yet he moved towards her with a brief articulate something on his lips,—something between a laugh and a sigh,—but that really was a kiss, and—in point of fact—promptly folded her in his arms.

Yet it was certainly direct, and perhaps the best that could be done, for the young lady did not emerge from it as coolly, as unemotionally, nor possibly as quickly as she had under the shade of the buckeyes. But she persuaded him—by still holding his hand—to sit beside her on the chilly, highly varnished “green rep” sofa, albeit to him it was a bank in a bower of enchantment. Then she said, with adorable reproachfulness, “You don’t ask what I did with the body.”

Mr. Edward Brice started. He was young, and unfamiliar with the evasive expansiveness of the female mind at such supreme moments.

“The body—oh, yes—certainly.”

“I buried it myself—it was suthin too awful!—and the gang would have been sure to have found it, and the empty belt. I burned THAT. So that nobody knows nothin’.”

It was not a time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am afraid that the girl’s characteristically familiar speech, even when pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent, endeared her the more to him. And when she said, “And now, Mr. Edward Brice, sit over at that end of the sofy and let’s talk,” they talked. They talked for an hour, more or less continuously, until they were surprised by a discreet cough and the entrance of Mrs. Tarbox. Then there was more talk, and the discovery that Mr. Brice was long due at the office.

“Ye might drop in, now and then, whenever ye feel like it, and Flo is at home,” suggested Mrs. Tarbox at parting.

Mr. Brice DID drop in frequently during the next month. On one of these occasions Mr. Tarbox accompanied him to the door. “And now—ez everything is settled and in order, Mr. Brice, and ef you should be wantin’ to say anything about it to your bosses at the office, ye may mention MY name ez Flo Dimwood’s second cousin, and say I’m a depositor in their bank. And,” with greater deliberation, “ef anything at any time should be thrown up at ye for marryin’ a niece o’ Snapshot Harry’s, ye might mention, keerless like, that Snapshot Harry, under the name o’ Henry J. Dimwood, has held shares in their old bank for years!”