From Sand Hill to Pine

A BELLE OF CANADA CITY

Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small glass at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of “stores,” ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy’s world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the hollows of her temples. Like others of her sex, she was a poor critic of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek as in her bright eyes and expression. Nevertheless, she was somewhat consoled by the ravishing effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and turned away not wholly dissatisfied. Indeed, as the acknowledged belle of Canada City and the daughter of its principal banker, small wonder that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her faults—and her attractions.

She bounded down the stairs and into the front parlor, for their house possessed the unheard-of luxury of a double drawing-room, albeit the second apartment contained a desk, and was occasionally used by Cissy’s father in private business interviews with anxious seekers of “advances” who shunned the publicity of the bank. Here she instantly flew into the arms of her bosom friend, Miss Piney Tibbs, a girl only a shade or two less pretty than herself, who, always more or less ill at ease in these splendors, was awaiting her impatiently. For Miss Tibbs was merely the daughter of the hotel-keeper; and although Tibbs was a Southerner, and had owned “his own niggers” in the States, she was of inferior position and a protegee of Cissy’s.

“Thank goodness you’ve come,” exclaimed Miss Tibbs, “for I’ve bin sittin’ here till I nigh took root. What kep’ ye?”

“How does it look?” responded Cissy, as a relevant reply.

The “it” referred to Cissy’s new hat, and to the young girl the coherence was perfectly plain. Miss Tibbs looked at “it” severely. It would not do for a protegee to be too complaisant.

“Hem! Must have cost a heap o’ money.”

“It did! Came from the best milliner in San Francisco.”

“Of course,” said Piney, with half assumed envy. “When your popper runs the bank and just wallows in gold!”

“Never mind, dear,” replied Cissy cheerfully. “So’ll YOUR popper some day. I’m goin’ to get mine to let YOUR popper into something—Ditch stocks and such. Yes! True, O King! Popper’ll do anything for me,” she added a little loftily.

Loyal as Piney was to her friend, she was by no means convinced of this. She knew the difference between the two men, and had a vivid recollection of hearing her own father express his opinion of Cissy’s respected parent as a “Gold Shark” and “Quartz Miner Crusher.” It did not, however, affect her friendship for Cissy. She only said, “Let’s come!” caught Cissy around the waist, pranced with her out into the veranda, and gasped, out of breath, “Where are we goin’ first?”

“Down Main Street,” said Cissy promptly.

“And let’s stop at Markham’s store. They’ve got some new things in from Sacramento,” added Piney.

“Country styles,” returned Cissy, with a supercilious air. “No! Besides, Markham’s head clerk is gettin’ too presumptuous. Just guess! He asked me, while I was buyin’ something, if I enjoyed the dance last Monday!”

“But you danced with him,” said the simple Piney, in astonishment.

“But not in his store among his customers,” said Cissy sapiently. “No! we’re going down Main Street past Secamps’. Those Secamp girls are sure to be at their windows, looking out. This hat will just turn ‘em green—greener than ever.”

“You’re just horrid, Ciss!” said Piney, with admiration.

“And then,” continued Cissy, “we’ll just sail down past the new block to the parson’s and make a call.”

“Oh, I see,” said Piney archly. “It’ll be just about the time when the new engineer of the mill works has a clean shirt on, and is smoking his cigyar before the office.”

Cissy tossed her hat disdainfully. “Much anybody cares whether he’s there or not! I haven’t forgotten how he showed us over the mill the other day in a pair of overalls, just like a workman.”

“But they say he’s awfully smart and well educated, and needn’t work, and I’m sure it’s very nice of him to dress just like the other men when he’s with ‘em,” urged Piney.

“Bah! That was just to show that he didn’t care what we thought of him, he’s that conceited! And it wasn’t respectful, considering one of the directors was there, all dressed up. Don’t tell me! You can see it in his eye, looking you over without blinking and then turning away as if he’d got enough of you. He makes me tired.”

Piney did not reply. The engineer had seemed to her to be a singularly attractive young man, yet she was equally impressed with Cissy’s superior condition, which could find flaws in such perfection. Following her friend down the steps of the veranda, they passed into the staring graveled walk of the new garden, only recently recovered from the wild wood, its accurate diamond and heart shaped beds of vivid green set in white quartz borders giving it the appearance of elaborately iced confectionery. A few steps further brought them to the road and the wooden “sidewalk” to Main Street, which carried civic improvements to the hillside, and Mr. Trixit’s very door. Turning down this thoroughfare, they stopped laughing, and otherwise assumed a conscious half artificial air; for it was the hour when Canada City lounged listlessly before its shops, its saloons, its offices and mills, or even held lazy meetings in the dust of the roadway, and the passage down the principal street of its two prettiest girls was an event to be viewed as if it were a civic procession. Hats flew off as they passed; place was freely given; impeding barrels and sacks were removed from the wooden pavement, and preoccupied indwellers hastily summoned to the front door to do homage to Cissy Trixit and Piney as they went by. Not but that Canada City, in the fierce and unregenerate days of its youth, had seen fairer and higher colored faces, more gayly bedizened, on its thoroughfares, but never anything so fresh and innocent. Men stood there all unconsciously, reverencing their absent mothers, sisters, and daughters, in their spontaneous homage to the pair, and seemed to feel the wholesome breath of their Eastern homes wafted from the freshly ironed skirts of these foolish virgins as they rustled by. I am afraid that neither Cissy nor Piney appreciated this feeling; few women did at that time; indeed, these young ladies assumed a slight air of hauteur.

“Really, they do stare so,” said Cissy, with eyes dilating with pleasurable emotion; “we’ll have to take the back street next time!”

Piney, proud in the glory reflected from Cissy, and in her own, answered, “We will—sure!”

There was only one interruption to this triumphal progress, and that was so slight as to be noticed by only one of the two girls. As they passed the new works at the mill, the new engineer, as Piney had foreseen, was leaning against the doorpost, smoking a pipe. He took his hat from his head and his pipe from his month as they approached, and greeted them with an easy “Good-afternoon,” yet with a glance that was quietly observant and tolerantly critical.

“There!” said Cissy, when they had passed, “didn’t I tell you? Did you ever see such conceit in your born days? I hope you did not look at him.”

Piney, conscious of having done so, and of having blushed under his scrutiny, nevertheless stoutly asserted that she had merely looked at him “to see who it was.” But Cissy was placated by passing the Secamps’ cottage, from whose window the three strapping daughters of John Secamp, lately an emigrant from Missouri, were, as Cissy had surmised, lightening the household duties by gazing at the—to them—unwonted wonders of the street. Whether their complexions, still bearing traces of the alkali dust and inefficient nourishment of the plains, took a more yellow tone from the spectacle of Cissy’s hat, I cannot say. Cissy thought they did; perhaps Piney was nearer the truth when she suggested that they were only “looking” to enable them to make a home-made copy of the hat next week.

Their progress forward and through the outskirts of the town was of the same triumphal character. Teamsters withheld their oaths and their uplifted whips as the two girls passed by; weary miners, toiling in ditches, looked up with a pleasure that was half reminiscent of their past; younger skylarkers stopped in their horse-play with half smiling, half apologetic faces; more ambitious riders on the highway urged their horses to greater speed under the girls’ inspiring eyes, and “Vaquero Billy,” charging them, full tilt, brought up his mustang on its haunches and rigid forelegs, with a sweeping bow of his sombrero, within a foot of their artfully simulated terror! In this way they at last reached the clearing in the forest, the church with its ostentatious spire, and the Reverend Mr. Windibrook’s dwelling, otherwise humorously known as “The Pastorage,” where Cissy intended to call.

The Reverend Mr. Windibrook had been selected by his ecclesiastical superiors to minister to the spiritual wants of Canada City as being what was called a “hearty” man. Certainly, if considerable lung capacity, absence of reserve, and power of handshaking and back slapping were necessary to the redemption of Canada City, Mr. Windibrook’s ministration would have been successful. But, singularly enough, the rude miner was apt to resent this familiarity, and it is recorded that Isaac Wood, otherwise known as “Grizzly Woods,” once responded to a cheerful back slap from the reverend gentleman by an ostentatiously friendly hug which nearly dislocated the parson’s ribs. Perhaps Mr. Windibrook was more popular on account of his admiring enthusiasm of the prosperous money-getting members of his flock and a singular sympathy with their methods, and Mr. Trixit’s daring speculations were an especially delightful theme to him.

“Ah, Miss Trixit,” he said, as Cissy entered the little parlor, “and how is your dear father? Still startling the money market with his fearless speculations? This, brother Jones,” turning to a visitor, “is the daughter of our Napoleon of finance, Montagu Trixit. Only last week, in that deal in ‘the Comstock,’ he cleared fifty thousand dollars! Yes, sir,” repeating it with unction, “fifty—thousand—dollars!—in about two hours, and with a single stroke of the pen! I believe I am not overstating, Miss Trixit?” he added, appealing to Cissy with a portentous politeness that was as badly fitting as his previous “heartiness.”

Cissy colored slightly. “I don’t know,” she said simply. She was perfectly truthful. She knew nothing of her father’s business, except the vague reputation of his success.

Her modesty, however, produced a singular hilarity in Mr. Windibrook, and a playful push. “YOU don’t know? Ha, but I do. Yes, sir,”—to the visitor,—“I have reason to remember it. I called upon him the next day. I used, sir, the freedom of an old friend. ‘Trixit,’ I said, clapping my hand on his shoulder, ‘the Lord has been good to you. I congratulate you.’

“‘H’m!’ he said, without looking up. ‘What do you reckon those congratulations are worth?’

“Many a man, sir, who didn’t know his style, would have been staggered. But I knew my man. I looked him straight in the eye. ‘A new organ,’ I said, ‘and as good a one as Sacramento can turn out.’

“He took up a piece of paper, scrawled a few lines on it to his cashier, and said, ‘Will that do?’” Mr. Windibrook’s voice sank to a thrilling whisper. “It was an order for one thousand dollars! Fact, sir. THAT is the father of this young lady.”

“Ye had better luck than Bishop Briggs had with old Johnson, the Excelsior Bank president,” said the visitor, encouraged by Windibrook’s “heartiness” into a humorous retrospect. “Briggs goes to him for a subscription for a new fence round the buryin’-ground—the old one havin’ rotted away. ‘Ye don’t want no fence,’ sez Johnson, short like. ‘No fence round a buryin’-ground?’ sez Briggs, starin’. ‘No! Them as is IN the buryin’-ground can’t get OUT, and them as ISN’T don’t want to get IN, nohow! So you kin just travel—I ain’t givin’ money away on uselessnesses!’ Ha! ha!”

A chill silence followed, which checked even Piney’s giggle. Mr. Windibrook evidently had no “heartiness” for non-subscribing humor. “There are those who can jest with sacred subjects,” he said ponderously, “but I have always found Mr. Trixit, though blunt, eminently practical. Your father is still away,” he added, shifting the conversation to Cissy, “hovering wherever he can extract the honey to store up for the provision of age. An industrious worker.”

“He’s still away,” said Cissy, feeling herself on safe ground, though she was not aware of her father’s entomological habits. “In San Francisco, I think.”

She was glad to get away from Mr. Windibrook’s “heartiness” and console herself with Mrs. Windibrook’s constitutional depression, which was partly the result of nervous dyspepsia and her husband’s boisterous cordiality. “I suppose, dear, you are dreadfully anxious about your father when he is away from home?” she said to Cissy, with a sympathetic sigh.

Cissy, conscious of never having felt a moment’s anxiety, and accustomed to his absences, replied naively, “Why?”

“Oh,” responded Mrs. Windibrook, “on account of his great business responsibilities, you know; so much depends upon him.”

Again Cissy did not comprehend; she could not understand why this masterful man, her father, who was equal to her own and, it seemed, everybody’s needs, had any responsibility, or was not as infallible and constant as the sunshine or the air she breathed. Without being his confidante, or even his associate, she had since her mother’s death no other experience; youthfully alive to the importance of their wealth, it seemed to her, however, only a natural result of being HIS daughter. She smiled vaguely and a little impatiently. They might have talked to her about HERSELF; it was a little tiresome to always have to answer questions about her “popper.” Nevertheless, she availed herself of Mrs. Windibrook’s invitation to go into the garden and see the new summerhouse that had been put up among the pines, and gradually diverted her hostess’s conversation into gossip of the town. If it was somewhat lugubrious and hesitating, it was, however, a relief to Cissy, and bearing chiefly upon the vicissitudes of others, gave her the comforting glow of comparison.

Touching the complexion of the Secamp girls, Mrs. Windibrook attributed it to their great privations in the alkali desert. “One day,” continued Mrs. Windibrook, “when their father was ill with fever and ague, they drove the cattle twenty miles to water through that dreadful poisonous dust, and when they got there their lips were cracked and bleeding and their eyelids like burning knives, and Mamie Secamp’s hair, which used to be a beautiful brown like your own, my dear, was bleached into a rusty yellow.”

“And they WILL wear colors that don’t suit them,” said Cissy impatiently.

“Never mind, dear,” said Mrs. Windibrook ambiguously; “I suppose they will have their reward.”

Nor was the young engineer discussed in a lighter vein. “It pains me dreadfully to see that young man working with the common laborers and giving himself no rest, just because he says he wants to know exactly ‘how the thing is done’ and why the old works failed,” she remarked sadly. “When Mr. Windibrook knew he was the son of Judge Masterton and had rich relations, he wished, of course, to be civil, but somehow young Masterton and he didn’t ‘hit off.’ Indeed, Mr. Windibrook was told that he had declared that the prosperity of Canada City was only a mushroom growth, and it seems too shocking to repeat, dear, but they say he said that the new church—OUR church—was simply using the Almighty as a big bluff to the other towns. Of course, Mr. Windibrook couldn’t see him after that. Why, he even said your father ought to send you to school somewhere, and not let you grow up in this half civilized place.”

Strangely enough, Cissy did not hail this corroboration of her dislike to young Masterton with the liveliness one might have expected. Perhaps it was because Piney Tibbs was no longer present, having left Cissy at the parsonage and returned home. Still she enjoyed her visit after a fashion, romped with the younger Windibrooks and climbed a tree in the security of her sylvan seclusion and the promptings of her still healthy, girlish blood, and only came back to cake and tea and her new hat, which she had prudently hung up in the summer-house, as the afternoon was waning. When they returned to the house, they found that Mr. Windibrook had gone out with his visitor, and Cissy was spared the advertisement of a boisterous escort home, which he generally insisted upon. She gayly took leave of the infant Windibrook and his mother, sallied out into the empty road, and once more became conscious of her new hat.

The shadows were already lengthening, and a cool breeze stirred the deep aisles of the pines on either side of the highway. One or two people passed her hurriedly, talking and gesticulating, evidently so preoccupied that they did not notice her. Again, a rapid horseman rode by without glancing round, overtook the pedestrians, exchanged a few hurried words with them, and then spurred swiftly away as one of them shouted after him, “There’s another dispatch confirming it.” A group of men talking by the roadside failed to look up as she passed. Cissy pouted slightly at this want of taste, which made some late election news or the report of a horse race more enthralling than her new hat and its owner. Even the toilers in the ditches had left their work, and were congregated around a man who was reading aloud from a widely margined “extra” of the “Canada City Press.” It seemed provoking, as she knew her cheeks were glowing from her romp, and was conscious that she was looking her best. However, the Secamps’ cottage was just before her, and the girls were sure to be on the lookout! She shook out her skirts and straightened her pretty little figure as she approached the house. But to her surprise, her coming had evidently been anticipated by them, and they were actually—and unexpectedly—awaiting her behind the low whitewashed garden palings! As she neared them they burst into a shrill, discordant laugh, so full of irony, gratified malice, and mean exaltation that Cissy was for a moment startled. But only for a moment; she had her father’s reckless audacity, and bore them down with a display of such pink cheeks and flashing eyes that their laughter was checked, and they remained open-mouthed as she swept by them.

Perhaps this incident prevented her from noticing another but more passive one. A group of men standing before the new mill—the same men who had so solicitously challenged her attention with their bows a couple of hours ago—turned as she approached and suddenly dispersed. It was not until this was repeated by another group that its oddity forced itself upon her still angry consciousness. Then the street seemed to be full of those excited preoccupied groups who melted away as she advanced. Only one man met her curious eyes,—the engineer,—yet she missed the usual critical smile with which he was wont to greet her, and he gave her a bow of such profound respect and gravity that for the first time she felt really uneasy. Was there something wrong with her hat? That dreadful, fateful hat! Was it too conspicuous? Did he think it was vulgar? She was eager to cross the street on the next block where there were large plate-glass windows which she and Piney—if Piney were only with her now!—had often used as mirrors.

But there was a great crowd on the next block, congregated around the bank,—her father’s bank! A vague terror, she knew not what, now began to creep over her. She would have turned into a side street, but mingled with her fear was a resolution not to show it,—not to even THINK of it,—to combat it as she had combated the horrid laugh of the Secamp girls, and she kept her way with a beating heart but erect head, without looking across the street.