He awoke with the aroma of the woods
still steeping his senses. His first instinct
was that of all young animals; he seized a few of the
young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena
vine that crept over his mossy pillow and ate them,
being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor that seemed
to soothe the cravings of his appetite. The languor
of sleep being still upon him, he lazily watched the
quivering of a sunbeam that was caught in the canopying
boughs above. Then he dozed again. Hovering
between sleeping and waking, he became conscious of
a slight movement among the dead leaves on the bank
beside the hollow in which he lay. The movement
appeared to be intelligent, and directed toward his
revolver, which glittered on the bank. Amused
at this evident return of his larcenous friend of
the previous day, he lay perfectly still. The
movement and rustle continued, but it now seemed long
and undulating. Lance’s eyes suddenly became
set; he was intensely, keenly awake. It was not
a snake, but the hand of a human arm, half hidden in
the moss, groping for the weapon. In that flash
of perception he saw that it was small, bare, and
deeply freckled. In an instant he grasped it firmly,
and rose to his feet, dragging to his own level as
he did so, the struggling figure of a young girl.
“Leave me go!” she said, more ashamed
than frightened.
Lance looked at her. She was
scarcely more than fifteen, slight and lithe, with
a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed
face and bare throat were absolutely peppered with
minute brown freckles, like grains of spent gunpowder.
Her eyes, which were large and gray, presented the
singular spectacle of being also freckled, at
least they were shot through in pupil and cornea with
tiny spots like powdered allspice. Her hair was
even more remarkable in its tawny, deer-skin color,
full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest
of blondes on the crown of her head, as if by the
action of the sun. She had evidently outgrown
her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and
the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and
sandy desert of shapely limb, for which the darned
stockings were equally too scant. Lance let his
grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then
with a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back
to her.
She did not retreat, but continued
looking at him in a half-surly embarrassment.
“I ain’t a bit frightened,”
she said; “I’m not going to run away, don’t
you fear.”
“Glad to hear it,” said
Lance, with unmistakable satisfaction, “but why
did you go for my revolver?”
She flushed again and was silent.
Presently she began to kick the earth at the roots
of the tree, and said, as if confidentially to her
foot,
“I wanted to get hold of it before you did.”
“You did? and why?”
“Oh, you know why.”
Every tooth in Lance’s head
showed that he did, perfectly. But he was discreetly
silent.
“I didn’t know what you
were hiding there for,” she went on, still addressing
the tree, “and,” looking at him sideways
under her white lashes, “I didn’t see
your face.”
This subtle compliment was the first
suggestion of her artful sex. It actually sent
the blood into the careless rascal’s face, and
for a moment confused him. He coughed. “So
you thought you’d freeze on to that six-shooter
of mine until you saw my hand?”
She nodded. Then she picked up
a broken hazel branch, fitted it into the small of
her back, threw her tanned bare arms over the ends
of it, and expanded her chest and her biceps at the
same moment. This simple action was supposed
to convey an impression at once of ease and muscular
force.
“Perhaps you’d like to
take it now,” said Lance, handing her the pistol.
“I’ve seen six-shooters
before now,” said the girl, evading the proffered
weapon and its suggestion. “Dad has one,
and my brother had two derringers before he was half
as big as me.”
She stopped to observe in her companion
the effect of this capacity of her family to bear
arms. Lance only regarded her amusedly. Presently
she again spoke abruptly:
“What made you eat that grass, just now?”
“Grass!” echoed Lance.
“Yes, there,” pointing to the yerba
buena.
Lance laughed. “I was hungry.
Look!” he said, gayly tossing some silver into
the air. “Do you think you could get me
some breakfast for that, and have enough left to buy
something for yourself?”
The girl eyed the money and the man with half-bashful
curiosity.
“I reckon Dad might give ye
suthing if he had a mind ter, though ez a rule he’s
down on tramps ever since they run off his chickens.
Ye might try.”
“But I want you to try. You can bring
it to me here.”
The girl retreated a step, dropped
her eyes, and, with a smile that was a charming hesitation
between bashfulness and impudence, said: “So
you are hidin’, are ye?”
“That’s just it. Your head’s
level. I am,” laughed Lance unconcernedly.
“Yur ain’t one o’ the McCarty gang are
ye?”
Mr. Lance Harriott felt a momentary
moral exaltation in declaring truthfully that he was
not one of a notorious band of mountain freebooters
known in the district under that name.
“Nor ye ain’t one of them
chicken lifters that raided Henderson’s ranch?
We don’t go much on that kind o’ cattle
yer.”
“No,” said Lance, cheerfully.
“Nor ye ain’t that chap ez beat his wife
unto death at Santa Clara?”
Lance honestly scorned the imputation.
Such conjugal ill treatment as he had indulged in
had not been physical, and had been with other men’s
wives.
There was a moment’s further
hesitation on the part of the girl. Then she
said shortly:
“Well, then, I reckon you kin come along with
me.”
“Where?” asked Lance.
“To the ranch,” she replied simply.
“Then you won’t bring me anything to eat
here?”
“What for? You kin get
it down there.” Lance hesitated. “I
tell you it’s all right,” she continued.
“I’ll make it all right with Dad.”
“But suppose I reckon I’d
rather stay here,” persisted Lance, with a perfect
consciousness, however, of affectation in his caution.
“Stay away then,” said
the girl coolly; “only as Dad perempted this
yer woods”
“Pre-empted,” suggested Lance.
“Per-empted or pre-emp-ted,
as you like,” continued the girl scornfully, “ez
he’s got a holt on this yer woods, ye might ez
well see him down thar ez here. For here he’s
like to come any minit. You can bet your life
on that.”
She must have read Lance’s amusement
in his eyes, for she again dropped her own with a
frown of brusque embarrassment. “Come along,
then; I’m your man,” said Lance, gayly,
extending his hand.
She would not accept it, eying it,
however, furtively, like a horse about to shy.
“Hand me your pistol first,” she said.
He handed it to her with an assumption
of gayety. She received it on her part with unfeigned
seriousness, and threw it over her shoulder like a
gun. This combined action of the child and heroine,
it is quite unnecessary to say, afforded Lance undiluted
joy.
“You go first,” she said.
Lance stepped promptly out, with a
broad grin. “Looks kinder as if I was a
prisoner, don’t it?” he suggested.
“Go on, and don’t fool,” she replied.
The two fared onward through the wood.
For one moment he entertained the facetious idea of
appearing to rush frantically away, “just to
see what the girl would do,” but abandoned it.
“It’s an even thing if she wouldn’t
spot me the first pop,” he reflected admiringly.
When they had reached the open hillside,
Lance stopped inquiringly. “This way,”
she said, pointing toward the summit, and in quite
an opposite direction to the valley where he had heard
the voices, one of which he now recognized as hers.
They skirted the thicket for a few moments, and then
turned sharply into a trail which began to dip toward
a ravine leading to the valley.
“Why do you have to go all the way round?”
he asked.
“We don’t,” the girl replied
with emphasis; “there’s a shorter cut.”
“Where?”
“That’s telling,” she answered shortly.
“What’s your name?”
asked Lance, after a steep scramble and a drop into
the ravine.
“Flip.”
“What?”
“Flip.”
“I mean your first name, your front
name.”
“Flip.”
“Flip! Oh, short for Felipa!”
“It ain’t Flipper, it’s
Flip.” And she relapsed into silence.
“You don’t ask me mine?” suggested
Lance.
She did not vouchsafe a reply.
“Then you don’t want to know?”
“Maybe Dad will. You can lie to him.”
This direct answer apparently sustained
the agreeable homicide for some moments. He moved
onward, silently exuding admiration.
“Only,” added Flip, with a sudden caution,
“you’d better agree with me.”
The trail here turned again abruptly
and re-entered the canyon. Lance looked up, and
noticed they were almost directly beneath the bay thicket
and the plateau that towered far above them. The
trail here showed signs of clearing, and the way was
marked by felled trees and stumps of pines.
“What does your father do here?”
he finally asked. Flip remained silent, swinging
the revolver. Lance repeated his question.
“Burns charcoal and makes diamonds,”
said Flip, looking at him from the corners of her
eyes.
“Makes diamonds?” echoed Lance.
Flip nodded her head.
“Many of ’em?” he continued carelessly.
“Lots. But they’re not big,”
she returned, with a sidelong glance.
“Oh, they’re not big?” said Lance
gravely.
They had by this time reached a small
staked inclosure, whence the sudden fluttering and
cackle of poultry welcomed the return of the evident
mistress of this sylvan retreat. It was scarcely
imposing. Further on, a cooking stove under a
tree, a saddle and bridle, a few household implements
scattered about, indicated the “ranch.”
Like most pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized
raid upon nature that had left behind a desolate battlefield
strewn with waste and decay. The fallen trees,
the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely
torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque
juxtaposition with the wrecked fragments of civilization,
in empty cans, broken bottles, battered hats, soleless
boots, frayed stockings, cast-off rags, and the crowning
absurdity of the twisted-wire skeleton of a hooped
skirt hanging from a branch. The wildest defile,
the densest thicket, the most virgin solitude, was
less dreary and forlorn than this first footprint
of man. The only redeeming feature of this prolonged
bivouac was the cabin itself. Built of the half-cylindrical
strips of pine bark, and thatched with the same material,
it had a certain picturesque rusticity. But this
was an accident of economy rather than taste, for which
Flip apologized by saying that the bark of the pine
was “no good” for charcoal.
“I reckon Dad’s in the
woods,” she added, pausing before the open door
of the cabin. “Oh, Dad!” Her voice,
clear and high, seemed to fill the whole long canyon,
and echoed from the green plateau above. The
monotonous strokes of an axe were suddenly pretermitted,
and somewhere from the depths of the close-set pines
a voice answered “Flip.” There was
a pause of a few moments, with some muttering, stumbling,
and crackling in the underbrush, and then the sudden
appearance of “Dad.”
Had Lance first met him in the thicket,
he would have been puzzled to assign his race to Mongolian,
Indian, or Ethiopian origin. Perfunctory but
incomplete washings of his hands and face, after charcoal
burning, had gradually ground into his skin a grayish
slate-pencil pallor, grotesquely relieved at the edges,
where the washing had left off, with a border of a
darker color. He looked like an overworked Christy
minstrel with the briefest of intervals between his
performances. There were black rims in the orbits
of his eyes, as if he gazed feebly out of unglazed
spectacles, which heightened his simian resemblance,
already grotesquely exaggerated by what appeared to
be repeated and spasmodic experiments in dyeing his
gray hair. Without the slightest notice of Lance,
he inflicted his protesting and querulous presence
entirely on his daughter.
“Well, what’s up now?
Yer ye are calling me from work an hour before noon.
Dog my skin, ef I ever get fairly limbered up afore
it’s ‘Dad!’ and ‘Oh, Dad!’”
To Lance’s intense satisfaction
the girl received this harangue with an air of supreme
indifference, and when “Dad” had relapsed
into an unintelligible, and, as it seemed to Lance,
a half-frightened muttering, she said coolly,
“Ye’d better drop that
axe and scoot round getten’ this stranger some
breakfast and some grub to take with him. He’s
one of them San Francisco sports out here trout fishing
in the branch. He’s got adrift from his
party, has lost his rod and fixins, and had to camp
out last night in the Gin and Ginger Woods.”
“That’s just it; it’s
allers suthin like that,” screamed the old
man, dashing his fist on his leg in a feeble, impotent
passion, but without looking at Lance. “Why
in blazes don’t he go up to that there blamed
hotel on the summit? Why in thunder ”
But here he caught his daughter’s large, freckled
eyes full in his own. He blinked feebly, his voice
fell into a tone of whining entreaty. “Now,
look yer, Flip, it’s playing it rather low down
on the old man, this yer running’ in o’
tramps and desarted emigrants and cast-ashore sailors
and forlorn widders and ravin’ lunatics, on
this yer ranch. I put it to you, Mister,”
he said abruptly, turning to Lance for the first time,
but as if he had already taken an active part in the
conversation, “I put it as a gentleman
yourself, and a fair-minded sportin’ man, if
this is the square thing?”
Before Lance could reply, Flip had
already begun. “That’s just it!
D’ye reckon, being a sportin’ man and
an A 1 feller, he’s goin’ to waltz down
inter that hotel, rigged out ez he is? D’ye
reckon he’s goin’ to let his partners
get the laugh outer him? D’ye reckon he’s
goin’ to show his head outer this yer ranch
till he can do it square? Not much! Go ’long.
Dad, you’re talking silly!”
The old man weakened. He feebly
trailed his axe between his legs to a stump and sat
down, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, and imparting
to it the appearance of a slate with a difficult sum
partly rubbed out. He looked despairingly at
Lance. “In course,” he said, with
a deep sigh, “you naturally ain’t got
any money. In course you left your pocketbook,
containing fifty dollars, under a stone, and can’t
find it. In course,” he continued, as he
observed Lance put his hand to his pocket, “you’ve
only got a blank check on Wells, Fargo & Co. for a
hundred dollars, and you’d like me to give you
the difference?”
Amused as Lance evidently was at this,
his absolute admiration for Flip absorbed everything
else. With his eyes fixed upon the girl, he briefly
assured the old man that he would pay for everything
he wanted. He did this with a manner quite different
from the careless, easy attitude he had assumed toward
Flip; at least the quick-witted girl noticed it, and
wondered if he was angry. It was quite true that
ever since his eye had fallen upon another of his
own sex, its glance had been less frank and careless.
Certain traits of possible impatience, which might
develop into man-slaying, were coming to the fore.
Yet a word or a gesture of Flip’s was sufficient
to change that manner, and when, with the fretful
assistance of her father, she had prepared a somewhat
sketchy and primitive repast, he questioned the old
man about diamond-making. The eye of Dad kindled.
“I want ter know how ye knew
I was making diamonds,” he asked, with a certain
bashful pettishness not unlike his daughter’s.
“Heard it in ’Frisco,”
replied Lance, with glib mendacity, glancing at the
girl.
“I reckon they’re gettin’
sort of skeert down there them jewelers,”
chuckled Dad, “yet it’s in nater that their
figgers will have to come down. It’s only
a question of the price of charcoal. I suppose
they didn’t tell you how I made the discovery?”
Lance would have stopped the old man’s
narrative by saying that he knew the story, but he
wished to see how far Flip lent herself to her father’s
delusion.
“Ye see, one night about two
years ago I had a pit o’ charcoal burning out
there, and tho’ it had been a smouldering and
a smoking and a blazing for nigh unto a month, somehow
it didn’t charcoal worth a cent. And yet,
dog my skin, but the heat o’ that er pit was
suthin hidyus and frightful; ye couldn’t stand
within a hundred yards of it, and they could feel
it on the stage road three miles over yon, t’other
side the mountain. There was nights when me and
Flip had to take our blankets up the ravine and camp
out all night, and the back of this yer hut shriveled
up like that bacon. It was about as nigh on to
hell as any sample ye kin get here. Now, mebbe
you think I built that air fire? Mebbe you’ll
allow the heat was just the nat’ral burning of
that pit?”
“Certainly,” said Lance,
trying to see Flip’s eyes, which were resolutely
averted.
“Thet’s whar you’d
be lyin’! That yar heat kem out of the bowels
of the yearth, kem up like out of a chimbley
or a blast, and kep up that yar fire. And when
she cools down a month after, and I got to strip her,
there was a hole in the yearth, and a spring o’
bilin’, scaldin’ water pourin’ out
of it ez big as your waist. And right in the middle
of it was this yer.” He rose with the instinct
of a skillful raconteur, and whisked from under his
bunk a chamois leather bag, which he emptied on the
table before them. It contained a small fragment
of native rock crystal, half-fused upon a petrified
bit of pine. It was so glaringly truthful, so
really what it purported to be, that the most unscientific
woodman or pioneer would have understood it at a glance.
Lance raised his mirthful eyes to Flip.
“It was cooled suddint, stunted
by the water,” said the girl, eagerly.
She stopped, and as abruptly turned away her eyes and
her reddened face.
“That’s it, that’s
just it,” continued the old man. “Thar’s
Flip, thar, knows it; she ain’t no fool!”
Lance did not speak, but turned a hard, unsympathizing
look upon the old man, and rose almost roughly.
The old man clutched his coat. “That’s
it, ye see. The carbon’s just turning to
di’mens. And stunted. And why?
’Cos the heat wasn’t kep up long enough.
Mebbe yer think I stopped thar? That ain’t
me. Thar’s a pit out yar in the woods ez
hez been burning six months; it hain’t,
in course, got the advantages o’ the old one,
for it’s nat’ral heat. But I’m
keeping that heat up. I’ve got a hole where
I kin watch it every four hours. When the time
comes, I’m thar! Don’t you see?
That’s me! that’s David Fairley, that’s
the old man, you bet!”
“That’s so,” said
Lance, curtly. “And now, Mr. Fairley, if
you’ll hand me over a coat or a jacket till
I can get past these fogs on the Monterey road, I
won’t keep you from your diamond pit.”
He threw down a handful of silver on the table.
“Ther’s a deerskin jacket
yer,” said the old man, “that one o’
them vaqueros left for the price of a bottle of whiskey.”
“I reckon it wouldn’t
suit the stranger,” said Flip, dubiously producing
a much-worn, slashed, and braided vaquero’s jacket.
But it did suit Lance, who found it warm, and also
had suddenly found a certain satisfaction in opposing
Flip. When he had put it on, and nodded coldly
to the old man, and carelessly to Flip, he walked to
the door.
“If you’re going to take
the Monterey road, I can show you a short cut to it,”
said Flip, with a certain kind of shy civility.
The paternal Fairley groaned.
“That’s it; let the chickens and the ranch
go to thunder, as long as there’s a stranger
to trapse round with; go on!”
Lance would have made some savage
reply, but Flip interrupted. “You know
yourself, Dad, it’s a blind trail, and as that
’ere constable that kem out here hunting French
Pete, couldn’t find it, and had to go round by
the canyon, like ez not the stranger would lose his
way, and have to come back!” This dangerous
prospect silenced the old man, and Flip and Lance
stepped into the road together. They walked on
for some moments without speaking. Suddenly Lance
turned upon his companion.
“You didn’t swallow all
that rot about the diamond, did you?” he asked,
crossly.
Flip ran a little ahead, as if to avoid a reply.
“You don’t mean to say
that’s the sort of hog wash the old man serves
out to you regularly?” continued Lance, becoming
more slangy in his ill temper.
“I don’t know that it’s
any consarn o’ yours what I think,” replied
Flip, hopping from boulder to boulder, as they crossed
the bed of a dry watercourse.
“And I suppose you’ve
piloted round and dry-nussed every tramp and dead
beat you’ve met since you came here,” continued
Lance, with unmistakable ill humor. “How
many have you helped over this road?”
“It’s a year since there
was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from the Crossing
into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to
come out, and nigh most starved to death in thar.
I had to drag him out and start him on the mountain,
for you couldn’t get him back to the road.
He was the last one but you.”
“Do you reckon it’s the
right thing for a girl like you to run about with
trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts
of rough and bad company?” said Lance.
Flip stopped short. “Look!
if you’re goin’ to talk like Dad, I’ll
go back.”
The ridiculousness of such a resemblance
struck him more keenly than a consciousness of his
own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that
he was joking. When he had made his peace they
fell into talk again, Lance becoming unselfish enough
to inquire into one or two facts concerning her life
which did not immediately affect him. Her mother
had died on the plains when she was a baby, and her
brother had run away from home at twelve. She
fully expected to see him again, and thought he might
sometime stray into their canyon. “That
is why, then, you take so much stock in tramps,”
said Lance. “You expect to recognize him?”
“Well,” replied Flip,
gravely, “there is suthing in that, and
there’s suthing in this: some o’
these chaps might run across brother and do him a
good turn for the sake of me.”
“Like me, for instance?” suggested Lance.
“Like you. You’d do him a good turn,
wouldn’t you?”
“You bet!” said Lance,
with a sudden emotion that quite startled him; “only
don’t you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously.”
He was half-conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy,
as he asked if any of her proteges had ever returned.
“No,” said Flip, “no
one ever did. It shows,” she added with
sublime simplicity, “I had done ’em good,
and they could get on alone. Don’t it?”
“It does,” responded Lance
grimly. “Have you any other friends that
come?”
“Only the Postmaster at the Crossing.”
“The Postmaster?”
“Yes; he’s reckonin’ to marry me
next year, if I’m big enough.”
“And what do you reckon?” asked Lance
earnestly.
Flip began a series of distortions
with her shoulders, ran on ahead, picked up a few
pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back
at Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a
piquant incarnation of everything suggestive and tantalizing,
and said,
“That’s telling.”
They had by this time reached the
spot where they were to separate. “Look,”
said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their
path, which seemed, however, to lose itself in the
underbrush a dozen yards away, “ther’s
your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further
you get on, but you must use your eyes here, and get
to know it well afore you get into the fog. Good-by.”
“Good-by.” Lance
took her hand and drew her beside him. She was
still redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to
the young man’s excited fancy seemed at that
moment to personify the perfume and intoxication of
her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly,
he tried to kiss her; she struggled for some time
strongly, but at the last moment yielded, with a slight
return and the exchange of a subtle fire that thrilled
him, and left him standing confused and astounded as
she ran away. He watched her lithe, nymph-like
figure disappear in the checkered shadows of the wood,
and then he turned briskly down the half-hidden trail.
His eyesight was keen, he made good progress, and
was soon well on his way toward the distant ridge.
But Flip’s return had not been
as rapid. When she reached the wood she crept
to its beetling verge, and, looking across the canyon,
watched Lance’s figure as it vanished and reappeared
in the shadows and sinuosities of the ascent.
When he reached the ridge the outlying fog crept across
the summit, caught him in its embrace, and wrapped
him from her gaze. Flip sighed, raised herself,
put her alternate foot on a stump, and took a long
pull at her too-brief stockings. When she had
pulled down her skirt and endeavored once more to renew
the intimacy that had existed in previous years between
the edge of her petticoat and the top of her stockings,
she sighed again, and went home.