Frontier Stories by Bret Harte

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In an instant she was collected and calm. "Dad," she said, in her
ordinary indifferent tone, "there's torches movin; up toward the
diamond pit. Likely it's tramps. I'll take the squaw and see." And
before the old man could stagger to his feet she had dragged Lance with
her into the road.

CHAPTER VI.

The wind charged down upon them, slamming the door at their backs,
extinguishing the broad shaft of light that had momentarily shot out
into the darkness, and swept them a dozen yards away. Gaining the lee
of a madrono tree, Lance opened his blanketed arms, enfolded the girl,
and felt her for one brief moment tremble and nestle in his bosom like
some frightened animal. "Well," he said, gayly, "what next?" Flip
recovered herself. "You're safe now anywhere outside the house. But did
you expect them to-night?" Lance shrugged his shoulders. "Why not?"
"Hush!" returned the girl; "they're coming this way."

The four flickering, scattered lights presently dropped into line. The
trail had been found; they were coming nearer. Flip breathed quickly;
the spiced aroma of her presence filled the blanket as he drew her
tightly beside him. He had forgotten the storm that raged around them,
the mysterious foe that was approaching, until Flip caught his sleeve
with a slight laugh. "Why, it's Kennedy and Bijah!"

"Who's Kennedy and Bijah?" asked Lance, curtly.

"Kennedy's the Postmaster and Bijah's the Butcher."

"What do they want?" continued Lance.

"Me," said Flip, coyly.

"You?"

"Yes; let's run away."

Half leading, half dragging her friend, Flip made her way with unerring
woodcraft down the ravine. The sound of voices and even the tumult of
the storm became fainter, an acrid smell of burning green wood smarted
Lance's lips and eyes; in the midst of the darkness beneath him
gradually a faint, gigantic nimbus like a lurid eye glowed and sank,
quivered and faded with the spent breath of the gale as it penetrated
their retreat. "The pit," whispered Flip; "it's safe on the other
side," she added, cautiously skirting the orbit of the great eye, and
leading him to a sheltered nest of bark and sawdust. It was warm and
odorous. Nevertheless, they both deemed it necessary to enwrap
themselves in the single blanket. The eye beamed fitfully upon them,
occasionally a wave of lambent tremulousness passed across it; its
weirdness was an excuse for their drawing nearer each other in playful
terror.

"Flip."

"Well?"

"What did the other two want? To see you, _too_?"

"Likely," said Flip, without the least trace of coquetry. "There's been
a lot of strangers yer, off and on."

"Perhaps you'd like to go back and see them?"

"Do you want me to?"

Lance's reply was a kiss. Nevertheless he was vaguely uneasy. "Looks a
little as if I were running away, don't it?" he suggested.

"No," said Flip; "they think you're only a squaw; it's me they're
after." Lance smarted a little at this infelicitous speech. A strange
and irritating sensation had been creeping over him--it was his first
experience of shame and remorse. "I reckon I'll go back and see," he
said, rising abruptly.

Flip was silent. She was thinking. Believing that the men were seeking
her only, she knew that their intention would be directed from her
companion when it was found out he was no longer with her, and she
dreaded to meet them in his irritable presence.

"Go," she said; "tell Dad something's wrong in the diamond pit, and say
I'm watching it for him here."

"And you?"

"I'll go there and wait for him. If he can't get rid of them, and they
follow him there, I'll come back here and meet you. Anyhow, I'll manage
to have Dad wait there a spell."

She took his hand and led him back by a different path to the trail. He
was surprised to find that the cabin, its window glowing from the fire,
was only a hundred yards away. "Go in the back way, by the shed. Don't
go in the room, nor near the light, if you can. Don't talk inside, but
call or beckon to Dad. Remember," she said, with a laugh, "you're
keeping watch of me for him. Pull your hair down on your eyes, so."
This operation, like most feminine embellishments of the masculine
toilet, was attended by a kiss, and Flip, stepping back into the
shadow, vanished in the storm.

Lance's first movements were inconsistent with his assumed sex. He
picked up his draggled skirt and drew a bowie-knife from his boot. From
his bosom he took a revolver, turning the chambers noiselessly as he
felt the caps. He then crept toward the cabin softly and gained the
shed. It was quite dark but for a pencil of light piercing a crack of
the rude, ill-fitting door that opened on the sitting-room. A single
voice not unfamiliar to him, raised in half-brutal triumph, greeted his
ears. A name was mentioned--his own! His angry hand was on the latch.
One moment more and he would have burst the door, but in that instant
another name was uttered--a name that dropped his hand from the latch
and the blood from his cheeks. He staggered backward, passed his hand
swiftly across his forehead, recovered himself with a gesture of
mingled rage and despair, and, sinking on his knees beside the door,
pressed his hot temples against the crack.

"Do I know Lance Harriott?" said the voice. "Do I know the d--d
ruffian? Didn't I hunt him a year ago into the brush three miles from
the Crossing? Didn't we lose sight of him the very day he turned up yer
at this ranch, and got smuggled over into Monterey? Ain't it the same
man as killed Arkansaw Bob--Bob Ridley--the name he went by in Sonora?
And who was Bob Ridley, eh? Who? Why, you d--d old fool, it was Bob
Fairley--YOUR SON!"

The old man's voice rose querulous and indistinct.

"What are ye talkin' about?" interrupted the first speaker. I tell you
I _know_. Look at these pictures. I found 'em on his body. Look at 'em.
Pictures of you and your girl. Pr'aps you'll deny them. Pr'aps you'll
tell me I lie when I tell you he told me he was your son; told me how
he ran away from you; how you were livin' somewhere in the mountains
makin' gold, or suthin' else, outer charcoal. He told me who he was as
a secret. He never let on he told it to any one else. And when I found
that the man who killed him, Lance Harriott, had been hidin' here, had
been sendin' spies all around to find out all about your son, had been
foolin' you, and tryin' to ruin your gal as he had killed your boy, I
knew that _he_ knew it too."

"LIAR!"

The door fell in with a crash. There was the sudden apparition of the
demoniac face, still half hidden by the long trailing black locks of
hair that curled like Medusa's around it. A cry of terror filled the
room. Three of the men dashed from the door and fled precipitately. The
man who had spoken sprang toward his rifle in the chimney corner. But
the movement was his last; a blinding flash and shattering report
interposed between him and his weapon. The impulse carried him forward
headlong into the fire, that hissed and spluttered with his blood, and
Lance Harriott, with his smoking pistol, strode past him to the door.
Already far down the trail there were hurried voices, the crack and
crackling of impending branches growing fainter and fainter in the
distance. Lance turned back to the solitary living figure--the old man.

Yet he might have been dead too, he sat so rigid and motionless, his
fixed eyes staring vacantly at the body on the hearth. Before him on
the table lay the cheap photographs, one evidently of himself, taken in
some remote epoch of complexion, one of a child which Lance recognized
as Flip.

"Tell me," said Lance hoarsely, laying his quivering hand on the table,
"was Bob Ridley your son?"

"My son," echoed the old man in a strange, far-off voice, without
turning his eyes from the corpse,--"my son--is--is--is there!" pointing
to the dead man. "Hush! Didn't he tell you so? Didn't you hear him say
it? Dead--dead--shot--shot!"

"Silence! are you crazy, man?" interposed Lance, tremblingly; "that is
not Bob Ridley, but a dog, a coward, a liar, gone to his reckoning.
Hear me! If your son _was_ Bob Ridley, I swear to God I never knew it,
now or--or--_then_. Do you hear me? Tell me! Do you believe me? Speak!
You shall speak!"

He laid his hand almost menacingly on the old man's shoulder. Fairley
slowly raised his head. Lance fell back with a groan of horror. The
weak lips were wreathed with a feeble imploring smile, but the eyes
wherein the fretful, peevish, suspicious spirit had dwelt were blank
and tenantless; the flickering intellect that had lit them was blown
out and vanished.

Lance walked toward the door and remained motionless for a moment,
gazing into the night. When he turned back again toward the fire his
face was as colorless as the dead man's on the hearth; the fire of
passion was gone from his beaten eyes; his step was hesitating and
slow. He went up to the table.

"I say, old man," he said, with a strange smile and an odd, premature
suggestion of the infinite weariness of death in his voice, "you
wouldn't mind giving me this, would you?" and he took up the picture of
Flip. The old man nodded repeatedly. "Thank you," said Lance. He went
to the door, paused a moment, and returned. "Good-by, old man," he
said, holding out his hand. Fairley took it with a childish smile.
"He's dead," said the old man softly, holding Lance's hand, but
pointing to the hearth. "Yes," said Lance, with the faintest of smiles
on the palest of faces. "You feel sorry for any one that's dead, don't
you?" Fairley nodded again. Lance looked at him with eyes as remote as
his own, shook his head, and turned away. When he reached the door he
laid his revolver carefully, and, indeed, somewhat ostentatiously, upon
a chair. But when he stepped from the threshold he stopped a moment in
the light of the open door to examine the lock of a small derringer
which he drew from his pocket. He then shut the door carefully, and
with the same slow, hesitating step, felt his way into the night.

He had but one idea in his mind, to find some lonely spot; some spot
where the footsteps of man would never penetrate, some spot that would
yield him rest, sleep, obliteration, forgetfulness, and, above all,
where _he_ would be forgotten. He had seen such places; surely there
were many,--where bones were picked up of dead men who had faded from
the earth and had left no other record. If he could only keep his
senses now he might find such a spot, but he must be careful, for her
little feet went everywhere, and she must never see him again alive or
dead. And in the midst of his thoughts, and the darkness, and the
storm, he heard a voice at his side, "Lance, how long you have been!"

* * * * *

Left to himself, the old man again fell into a vacant contemplation of
the dead body before him, until a stronger blast swept down like an
avalanche upon the cabin, burst through the ill-fastened door and
broken chimney, and, dashing the ashes and living embers over the
floor, filled the room with blinding smoke and flame. Fairley rose with
a feeble cry, and then, as if acted upon by some dominant memory,
groped under the bed until he found his buckskin bag and his precious
crystal, and fled precipitately from the room. Lifted by this second
shock from his apathy, he returned to the fixed idea of his life,--the
discovery and creation of the diamond,--and forgot all else. The feeble
grasp that his shaken intellect kept of the events of the night
relaxed, the disguised Lance, the story of his son, the murder, slipped
into nothingness; there remained only the one idea, his nightly watch
by the diamond pit. The instinct of long habit was stronger than the
darkness or the onset of the storm, and he kept his tottering way over
stream and fallen timber until he reached the spot. A sudden tremor
seemed to shake the lambent flame that had lured him on. He thought he
heard the sound of voices; there were signs of recent
disturbance,--footprints in the sawdust! With a cry of rage and
suspicion, Fairley slipped into the pit and sprang toward the nearest
opening. To his frenzied fancy it had been tampered with, his secret
discovered, the fruit of his long labors stolen from him that very
night. With superhuman strength he began to open the pit, scattering
the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the
suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At
times the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the
sides of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the
blind instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and
bury his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the
paroxysm past, he sank back again into his old apathetic attitude of
watching, the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible.
In this attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.

It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the
broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first,
and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes;
it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose
shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more,
but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted
misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine-top, but
always lifting, lifting. It came with the sparkle of emerald in the
grasses, and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in
the awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.

The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to
interrogate the old man. He came, and, putting his finger on his lips,
made a sign of caution. When three or four men had descended he bade
them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently: "My
boy--my son Robert--came home--came home at last--here with Flip--both
of them--come and see!"

He had reached a little niche or nest in the hillside, and stopped, and
suddenly drew aside a blanket. Beneath it, side by side, lay Flip and
Lance, dead, with their cold hands clasped in each other's.

"Suffocated!" said two or three, turning with horror toward the broken
up and still smouldering pit.

"Asleep!" said the old man. "Asleep! I've seen 'em lying that way when
they were babies together. Don't tell me! Don't say I don't know my own
flesh and blood! So! so! So, my pretty ones!" He stooped and kissed
them. Then, drawing the blanket over them gently, he rose and said
softly, "Good night!"

FOUND AT BLAZING STAR.

The rain had only ceased with the gray streaks of morning at Blazing
Star, and the settlement awoke to a moral sense of cleanliness, and the
finding of forgotten knives, tin cups, and smaller camp utensils, where
the heavy showers had washed away the debris and dust heaps before the
cabin-doors. Indeed, it was recorded in Blazing Star that a fortunate
early riser had once picked up on the highway a solid chunk of gold
quartz which the rain had freed from its incumbering soil, and washed
into immediate and glittering popularity. Possibly this may have been
the reason why early risers in that locality, during the rainy season,
adopted a thoughtful habit of body, and seldom lifted their eyes to the
rifted or india-ink washed skies above them.

"Cass" Beard had risen early that morning, but not with a view to
discovery. A leak in his cabin roof--quite consistent with his
careless, improvident habits--had roused him at 4 A.M., with a flooded
"bunk" and wet blankets. The chips from his wood pile refused to kindle
a fire to dry his bedclothes, and he had recourse to a more provident
neighbor's to supply the deficiency. This was nearly opposite. Mr.
Cassius crossed the highway, and stopped suddenly. Something glittered
in the nearest red pool before him. Gold, surely! But, wonderful to
relate, not an irregular, shapeless fragment of crude ore, fresh from
Nature's crucible, but a bit of jeweler's handicraft in the form of a
plain gold ring. Looking at it more attentively, he saw that it bore
the inscription, "May to Cass."

Like most of his fellow gold-seekers, Cass was superstitious. "Cass!"
His own name! He tried the ring. It fitted his little finger closely.
It was evidently a woman's ring. He looked up and down the highway. No
one was yet stirring. Little pools of water in the red road were
beginning to glitter and grow rosy from the far-flushing east, but
there was no trace of the owner of the shining waif. He knew that there
was no woman in camp, and among his few comrades in the settlement he
remembered to have seen none wearing an ornament like that. Again, the
coincidence of the inscription to his rather peculiar nickname would
have been a perennial source of playful comment in a camp that made no
allowance for sentimental memories. He slipped the glittering little
hoop into his pocket, and thoughtfully returned to his cabin.

Two hours later, when the long, straggling procession, which every
morning wended its way to Blazing Star Gulch,--the seat of mining
operations in the settlement,--began to move, Cass saw fit to
interrogate his fellows.

"Ye didn't none on ye happen to drop anything round yer last night?" he
asked, cautiously.

"I dropped a pocketbook containing government bonds and some other
securities, with between fifty and sixty thousand dollars," responded
Peter Drummond, carelessly; "but no matter, if any man will return a
few autograph letters from foreign potentates that happened to be in
it,--of no value to anybody but the owner,--he can keep the money.
Thar's nothin' mean about me," he concluded, languidly.

This statement, bearing every evidence of the grossest mendacity, was
lightly passed over, and the men walked on with the deepest gravity.

"But hev you?" Cass presently asked of another.

"I lost my pile to Jack Hamlin at draw-poker, over at Wingdam last
night," returned the other, pensively, "but I don't calkilate to find
it lying round loose."

Forced at last by this kind of irony into more detailed explanation,
Cass confided to them his discovery, and produced his treasure. The
result was a dozen vague surmises,--only one of which seemed to be
popular, and to suit the dyspeptic despondency of the party,--a
despondency born of hastily masticated fried pork and flapjacks. The
ring was believed to have been dropped by some passing "road agent"
laden with guilty spoil.

"Ef I was you," said Drummond gloomily, "I wouldn't flourish that yer
ring around much afore folks. I've seen better men nor you strung up a
tree by _Vigilantes_ for having even less than that in their
possession."

"And I wouldn't say much about bein' up so d----d early this morning,"
added an even more pessimistic comrade; "it might look bad before a
jury."

With this the men sadly dispersed, leaving the innocent Cass with the
ring in his hand, and a general impression on his mind that he was
already an object of suspicion to his comrades,--an impression, it is
hardly necessary to say, they fully intended should be left to rankle
in his guileless bosom.

Notwithstanding Cass's first hopeful superstition, the ring did not
seem to bring him nor the camp any luck. Daily the "clean up" brought
the same scant rewards to their labors, and deepened the sardonic
gravity of Blazing Star. But, if Cass found no material result from his
treasure, it stimulated his lazy imagination, and, albeit a dangerous
and seductive stimulant, at least lifted him out of the monotonous
grooves of his half-careless, half-slovenly, but always self-contented
camp life. Heeding the wise caution of his comrades, he took the habit
of wearing the ring only at night. Wrapped in his blanket, he
stealthily slipped the golden circlet over his little finger, and, as
he averred, "slept all the better for it." Whether it ever evoked any
warmer dream or vision during those calm, cold, virgin-like spring
nights, when even the moon and the greater planets retreated into the
icy blue, steel-like firmament, I cannot say. Enough that this
superstition began to be colored a little by fancy, and his fatalism
somewhat mitigated by hope. Dreams of this kind did not tend to promote
his efficiency in the communistic labors of the camp, and brought him a
self-isolation that, however gratifying at first, soon debarred him the
benefits of that hard practical wisdom which underlaid the grumbling of
his fellow-workers.

"I'm dog-goned," said one commentator, "ef I don't believe that Cass is
looney over that yer ring he found. Wears it on a string under his
shirt."

Meantime, the seasons did not wait the discovery of the secret. The red
pools in Blazing Star highway were soon dried up in the fervent June
sun and riotous night winds of those altitudes. The ephemeral grasses
that had quickly supplanted these pools and the chocolate-colored mud,
were as quickly parched and withered. The footprints of spring became
vague and indefinite, and were finally lost in the impalpable dust of
the summer highway.

In one of his long, aimless excursions, Cass had penetrated a thick
undergrowth of buckeye and hazel, and found himself quite unexpectedly
upon the high road to Red Chief's Crossing. Cass knew by the lurid
cloud of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He
had already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial
occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery
of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again,
as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or
corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young
girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged
from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.

"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"

Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.

"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went
on. "Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."

In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that
the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or
frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain
kind of pleased curiosity.

"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went
into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along
at a brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I
found."

It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met
Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in
the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so
incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying
there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity
to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him
with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could
only stare at it blankly.

"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"

Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have
seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but
presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand
protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way
and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of
cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite
angles to the sky. It was a dead man! So palpably dead that life seemed
to have taken flight from his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and
degraded by them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would
have been less insulting to humanity. The head had fallen back, and was
partly hidden in a gopher burrow, but the white, upturned face and
closed eyes had less of helpless death in them than those wretched
enwrappings. Indeed, one limp hand that lay across the swollen abdomen
lent itself to the grotesquely hideous suggestion of a gentleman
sleeping off the excesses of a hearty dinner.

"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"

Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded
curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the
helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown
paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt collar, and matted hair, proved
the only record.

"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to
relinquish his burden. "Maybe you'll find another wound."

But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older
civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a
present inquest.

"Perhaps you'd better ride on, Miss, afore you get summoned as a
witness. I'll give warning at Red Chief's Crossing, and send the
coroner down here."

"Let me go with you," she said, earnestly; "it would be such fun. I
don't mind being a witness. Or," she added, without heeding Cass's look
of astonishment, "I'll wait here till you come back."

"But you see, Miss, it wouldn't seem right"--began Cass.

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