 1. Just where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside in gentler undulations and the rivers grow less rapid than yellow, on the side of a great red mountain stands Smith's Pocket. Seen from the red road at sunset in the red light and the red dust, its white houses look like the outcroppings of quartz on the mountain side. The red stage topped with red-shirted passengers is lost to view half a dozen times in the tortures' descent, turning up unexpectedly and out of the way places, and vanishing altogether within a hundred yards of the town. It is probably owing to this sudden twist in the road that the advent of a stranger at Smith's Pocket is usually attended with a peculiar circumstance. Dismounting from the vehicle at the stage-office, the too-confident traveller is apt to walk straight out of town under the impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel-men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpet-bag, umbrella, harper's magazine, and other evidences of civilisation and refinement plotting along over the road he'd just ridden, vainly endeavouring to find the settlement of Smith's Pocket. An observant traveller might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man. While half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten and a deluvian. At every step, smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their cello-deaths, unlovely streams, that crapped away to a clandestine union with a great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin, with a chimney alone left intact and the hearthstone open to the skies. The settlement of Smith's Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a pocket on its site by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars were taken out of it in one half hour by Smith. Three thousand dollars were expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling, and then Smith's Pocket was found to be only a pocket, and subject, like other pockets, to depletion. Although Smith pierced the bowels of the great red mountain, that five thousand dollars was the first and last return of his labour. The mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets, and the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of Smith's fortune. Then Smith went into quartz mining, then into quartz milling, then into hydraulics and ditching, and then by easy degrees into saloon keeping. Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a great deal, then it was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard, and then people began to think, as they're ebbed to, that he had never been anything else. But the settlement of Smith's Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's Pocket became a settlement, with its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its two first families. Occasionally, its one long, straggling street was overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions imported per express exclusively to the first families, making outraged nature in the ragged outline of a furrowed surface look still more homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the population to whom the Sabbath, with the change of linen, brought merely the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment. Then there was a Methodist church, and hard buyer, Monterbank, and a little beyond, on the mountainside, a graveyard, and then a little schoolhouse. The Master, as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the extremes of choreographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as rich as art deceitful, and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work, but the opening of the door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty and shabbily clad. Still, her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed, lustilous black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms and feet streaked with the red soil were all familiar to him. It was Melissa Smith, Smith's motherless child. What can she want here? thought the Master. Everybody knew Melissa as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain. Everybody knew her as an incursable girl. Her fierce, ungovernable disposition, her mad, freaks and lawless character, were in their way as proverbial as the story of her father's weaknesses, and as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the Master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bare-headed on the mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered arms. Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to Melissa. The Reverend Joshua Mcsnagley, stated preacher, had placed her in the hotel as servant by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced her to his scholars at Sunday School. But she threw plates occasionally at a landlord and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the guests, and created in the Sabbath School a sensation that was so inimical to the orthodox dullness and placidity of that institution that, with a decent regard for the starched frocks and unblemished morals of the two pink and white-faced children of the first families, the Reverend Gentleman had her ignominiously expelled. Such were the antecedents, and such the character of Melissa as she stood before the Master. It was shown in the ragged dress, the unkempt hair, and bleeding feet, and asked his pity. It flashed from her black, fearless eyes, and commanded his respect. I come here tonight, she said rapidly and boldly, keeping her hard glance on his. Because I knew you was alone. I wouldn't come here when them girls was here. I hate them, and they hate me. That's why. You keep school, don't you? I want to be teached. If to the shabbiness of her apparel and uncombleness of her tangled hair and dirty face she had added the humility of tears, the Master would have extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and nothing more. But with the natural, though illogical instincts of his species, her boldness awakened in him something of that respect which all original natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade. And he gazed at her the more fixedly as she went on, still rapidly, her hand on that door latch and her eyes on his. My name's Melissa. Melissa, you can bet your life on that. My father's old Smith, old Bummer Smith. That's what's the matter with him. Melissa, and I'm coming to school. Well, said the Master. A custom to be thwarted and opposed, often wantonly and cruelly, for no other purpose than to excite the violent impulses of her nature, the Master's flame evidently took her by surprise. She stopped, she began to twist a lock of her hair between her fingers, and the rigid line of upper lip drawn over the wicked little teeth relaxed and quivered slightly. Then her eyes dropped and something like a blush struggled up to her cheek and tried to assert itself through the splashes of rudder soil and the sunburn of years. Suddenly she threw herself forward, calling on God to strike her dead and fell quite weak and helpless, with her face on the Master's desk, crying and sobbing as if her heart would break. The Master lifted her gently, and waited for the paroxysm to pass. When, with face still averted, she was repeating between her sobs the mea culpa of childish penitence, that she'd be good, she didn't mean to, etc., it came to him to ask her why she had left Sabbath school. Why'd she left the Sabbath school? Why? Oh yes, why did he, McSnagley, want to tell her she was wicked for? What did he tell her that God hated her for? If God hated her, what did she want to go to Sabbath school for? She didn't want to be beholden to anybody who hated her. Had she told McSnagley this? Yes, she had. The Master laughed. It was a hearty laugh, and echoed so oddly in the little schoolhouse, and seemed so inconsistent and discordant with the sighing of the pines without, that he shortly corrected himself with a sigh. The sigh was quite as sincere in its way, however, and after a moment of serious silence he asked about her father. Her father? What father? Whose father? What had he ever done for her? Why did the girls hate her? Come now, what made the folks say, old bummer Smith's mless when she passed? Yes, oh yes, she wished he was dead, she was dead, everybody was dead, and her sobs broke forth anew. The Master then, leaning over her, told her as well as he could what you or I might have said after hearing such unnatural theories from childish lips, only bearing in mind perhaps better than you or I the unnatural facts of her ragged dress, her bleeding feet, and the omnipresent shadow of her drunken father. Then, raising her to her feet, he wrapped his shoal around her, and, bidding her come early in the morning, he walked with her down the road. There he bade her good night. The moon shone brightly on the narrow path before them. He stood and watched the bent little figure as it staggered down the road, and waited until it had passed the little graveyard and reached the curve of the hill, where it turned and stood for a moment, a mere atom of suffering outlined against the far-off patient's task. Then he went back to his work. But the lines of the copybook thereafter faded into long parallels of never-ending road over which childish figures seemed to pass sobbing and crying into the night. Then, the little schoolhouse seemed lonelier than before, he shut the door and went home. The next morning, Mliss came to school. Her face had been washed, and her coarse black hair bore evidence of recent struggles with the comb, in which both had evidently suffered. The old defiant look shone occasionally in her eyes, but her manner was tamer and more subdued. Then began a series of little trials and self-sacrifices, in which master and pupil bore an equal part, and which increased the confidence and sympathy between them. Although obedient under the master's eye, at times during recess, if thwarted or stung by a fancied slide, Mliss would rage in ungovernable fury, and many a palpitating young savage, finding himself matched with his own weapons of torment, would seek the master with torn jacket and scratched face and complaints of the dreadful Mliss. There was a serious division among the townspeople on the subject, some threatening to withdraw their children from such evil companionship, and others as warmly upholding the cause of the master in his work of reclamation. Meanwhile, with his steady persistence that seemed quite astonishing to him on looking back afterward, the master drew Mliss gradually out of the shadow of her past life, as though it were but a natural progress down the narrow path on which he had set her feet the moonlit night of their first meeting. Remembering the experience of the evangelical Mliss, he carefully avoided that rock of ages on which that unskillful pilot had shipwrecked her young faith. But if, in the cause of her reading, she chants to stumble upon those few words which have lifted such a sheep above the level of the older, the wiser, and the more prudent, if she learned something of her faith that is symbolized by suffering, and the old light softened in her eyes, it did not take the shape of a lesson. A few of the plainer people had made up a little sum by which the ragged Mliss was enabled to assume the garments of respect and civilisation, and often a rough shake of the hand and words of homely commendation from a red-herded and burly figure sent a glow to the cheek of the young master, and set him to thinking if it was altogether deserved. Three months had passed from the time of their first meeting, and the master was sitting late one evening over the moral and sententious copies when there came a tap at the door, and again Mliss stood before him. She was neatly clad and clean-faced, and there was nothing perhaps but the long black hair and bright black eyes to remind him of his former apparition. Are you busy? she asked. Can you come with me? And on his signifying his readiness, in her old willful way she said, Come then, quick. They passed out of the door together and into the dark road. As they entered the town, the master asked her whether she was going. She replied, To see my father. It was the first time he had heard her call him by that filial title, or in need anything more than Old Smith or the Old Man. It was the first time in three months that she'd spoken of him at all, and the master knew she had kept resolutely aloof from him since a great change. Satisfied from her manner that it was fruitless to question her purpose, he passively followed. In out-of-the-way places, low grogheries, restaurants, and saloons, in gambling hells and dance houses, the master, preceded by Mliss, came and went. In the reeking smoke and blasphemous outcries of low dens, the child, holding the master's hand, stood and anxiously gazed, seemingly unconscious of all in the one absorbing nature of her pursuit. Some of the revelers, recognizing Mliss, called the child to sing and dance for them, and would have forced liquor upon her but for the interference of the master. Others, recognizing him mutely, made way for them to pass. So an hour slipped by. Then the child whispered in his ear that there was a cabin on the other side of the creek crossed by the long flume, where she thought he still might be. The third day crossed, a toilsome half-hour's walk, but in vain. They were returning by the ditch at the abutment of the flume, gazing at the lights of the town on the opposite bank, when, suddenly, sharply, a quick report rang out on the clear night air. The echoes quoted, and carried it round and round Red Mountain, and set the dogs to barking all along the streams. Lights seemed to dance and move quickly on the outskirts of the town for a few moments. The stream rippled quite audibly beside them. A few stones loosened themselves from the hillside and splashed into the stream. A heavy wind seemed to surge the branches of the funereal pines, and then the silence seemed to fall thicker, heavier, and deadlier. The master turned to Mliss with an unconscious gesture of protection. But the child had gone. Oppressed by a strange fear, he ran quickly down the trail to the river's bed, and, jumping from boulder to boulder, reached the base of Red Mountain and the outskirts of the village. Midway of the crossing, he looked up, and held his breath in awe. For high above him, on the narrow flume, he saw the fluttering little figure of his late companion crossing swiftly in the darkness. He climbed the bank, and, guided by a few lights moving about a central point on the mountain, soon found himself breathless among a crowd of awe-stricken and sorrowful men. Out from among them the child appeared, and, taking the master's hand, led him silently before what seemed a ragged hole in the mountain. Her face was quite white, but her excited manner gone, and her look, that of one to whom some long-expected event had at last happened, an expression that, to the master in his bewilderment, seemed almost like relief. The walls of the cavern were partly propped by decaying timbers. The child pointed to what appeared to be some ragged, cast-off clothes left in the hole by the late occupant. The master approached nearer with his flaming dip, and bent over them. It was Smith, already cold, with a pistol in his hand, and a bullet in his heart, lying beside his empty pocket. Chapter 2 The opinion which McSnackley expressed in reference to a change of heart, supposed to be experienced by Mliss, was more forcibly described in the gulchers and tunnels. It was thought there that Mliss had struck a good lead. So when there was a new grave added to the little enclosure, and at the expense of the master, a little board and inscription put above it, the red mountain banner came out quite handsomely, and did the fair thing to the memory of one of our oldest pioneers, alluding gracefully to that bane of noble intellects, and otherwise gently shelving our dear brother with the past. He leaves an only child to mourn his loss, says the banner, who is now an exemplary scholar thanks to the efforts of the Reverend Mr. McSnackley. The Reverend McSnackley, in fact, made a strong point of Mliss's conversion, and indirectly attributing to the unfortunate child the suicide of her father, made effecting allusions in Sunday school to the beneficial effects of the silent tomb, and in this cheerful contemplation drove most of the children into speechless horror, and caused the pink and white skeins of the first families to howl dismally and refuse to be comforted. The long dry summer came, as each fierce day burned itself out in little whiffs of pearl-gray smoke on the mountain summits, and the up-springing breeze scattered its red embers over the landscape, the green wave which in early spring upheaved above Smith's grave grew sear and dry and hard. In those days, the master, strolling in the little church-hard of a sabbath afternoon, was sometimes surprised to find a few wildflowers plucked from the damp pine forests scattered there, and often a rude wreath hung upon the little pine cross. Most of these wreaths were formed of a sweet-scented grass which the children loved to keep in their desks, intertwined with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringea, and the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the dark blue cowl of the monk's hood, or deadly echinite. There was something in the odd association of this noxious plant with these memorials which occasioned a painful sensation to the master deeper than his aesthetic sense. One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded ridge, he came upon Mliss in the heart of the forest, perched upon a prostrate pine on a fantastic throne, formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless branches, her lap full of grasses and pine burrs, and crooning to herself one of the negro melodies of her younger life. Recognizing him at a distance, she made room for him on her elevated throne, and with a grave assumption of hospitality and patronage that would have been ridiculous had it not been so terribly earnest, she fed him with pine nuts and crap apples. The master took that opportunity to point out to her the noxious and deadly qualities of the monk's hood whose dark blossoms he saw in her lap, and extorted from her a promise not to meddle with it as long as she remained his pupil. This done, as the master had tested her integrity before, he rested satisfied, and the strange feeling which had overcome him on seeing them died away. Of the homes that were offered Mliss, when her conversion became known, the master preferred that of Mrs. Morphe, a womanly and kind-hearted specimen of southwestern efflorescence, known in her maidenhood as the Prairie Rose. Being one of those who content resolutely against their own natures, Mrs. Morphe, by a long series of self-sacrifices and struggles, had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition the principles of order, which he considered, in common with Mr. Pope, as heaven's first law. But she could not entirely govern the orbits of her satellites, however regular her own movements, and even her own genes sometimes collided with her. Again her old nature asserted itself in her children. Lycurgus dipped into the cupboard between meals, and Aristides came home from school without shoes, leaving those important articles on the threshold for the delight of a barefooted walk down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were clueless of their clothes. So with but one exception, however much the Prairie Rose might have trimmed them pruned and trained their own matured luxurians, the little shoots came up defiantly wild and straggling. That one exception was Clithymnestra Morphe, aged fifteen. She was the realization of her mother's immaculate conception, neat, orderly, and dull. It was an amiable weakness of Mrs. Morphe to imagine that Clithy was a consolation and model from Lyc. Following this fallacy, Mrs. Morphe threw Clithy at the head of Mliss when she was bad, and set her up before the child for adoration in her penitential moments. It was not therefore surprising to the master to hear that Clithy was coming to school, obviously as a favor to the master, and as an example from Mliss and others. For Clithy was quite a young lady. Inheriting her mother's physical peculiarities and in obedience to the climatic laws of the Red Mountain region, she was an early bloomer. The youth of Smith's pocket, to whom this kind of flower was rare, sighed for her in April, and languished in May, and a moored swains haunted the schoolhouse at the hour of this missile. A few were jealous of the master. Perhaps it was this latter circumstance that opened the master's eyes to another. He could not help noticing that Clithy was romantic, that in school she required a great deal of attention, that her pens were uniformly bad and wanted fixing, that she usually accompanied the request with a certain expectation in her eye that was somewhat disproportionate to the quality of service she verbally required, that she sometimes allowed the curves of a round, plump white arm to rest on his when he was writing her copies, that she always blushed and flung back her blonde curls when she did so. I don't remember whether I've stated that the master was a young man. It's a little consequence, however. He had been severely educated in the school in which Clithy was taking her first lesson, and, on the whole, withstood the flexible curves and fictitious glance like the fine young Spartan that he was. Perhaps an insufficient quality of food may have tended to this asceticism. He generally avoided Clithy, but one evening when she returned to the schoolhouse after something she had forgotten, and did not find it until the master walked home with her, I hear that he endeavoured to make himself particularly agreeable, partly from the fact, I imagine, that his conduct was adding goal and bitterness to the already overcharged hearts of Clithymnestres' admirers. The morning after this effecting episode, Mlys did not come to school. Noon came, but not Mlys. Questioning Clithy on the subject, it appeared that he had left for school together, but the willful Mlys had taken another road. The afternoon brought her not. In the evening he called on Mrs. Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed. Mr. Morpher had spent all day in search of her without discovering a trace that might lead to her discovery. Aristides was summoned as a probable accomplice, but that equitable infant succeeded in impressing the household with his innocence. Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that the child would yet be found drowned in the ditch, or what was almost as terrible, muddied and soiled beyond the redemption of soap and water. Sick at heart, the master returned to the schoolhouse. As he lit his lamp and seated himself at his desk, he found a note lying before him, addressed to himself, in Mlys's handwriting. It seemed to be written on a leaf torn from some old memorandum book, and, to prevent sacrilegious trifling, had been sealed with six broken wafers. Opening it almost tenderly, the master read as follows. Respected sir, when you read this, I am run away, never to come back, never, never, never. You can give my beads to Mary Jennings, and my America's pride, a highly-called litograph from a tobacco box, to Sally Flanders. But don't you give anything to Clitty Morpher? Don't you dare to? Do you know what my opinion is of her? It is this. She is perfectly disgusting. Let us all and no more at present from yours respectfully, Melissa Smith. The master set pondering on this strange epistle, till the moon lifted its bright face above the distant hills, and illuminated the trail that led to the schoolhouse, beaten quite hard with the coming and going of little feet. Then, more satisfied in mind, he tore the missive into fragments and scattered them along the road. At sunrise the next morning, he was picking his way through the palm-like fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hair from its form, and awakening a quarellous protest from a few dissipated crows, who had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge where it once found malice. There he found the prostrate pine and tassled branches, but the throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch, and sheltered itself in some friendly foliage. The master, reaching the old seat, found the nest still warm. Looking up in the intertwining branches, he met the black eyes of the errant malice. They gazed at each other, without speaking. She was first to break the silence. What do you want? she asked curtly. The master had decided on a cause of action. I want some crapper apples, he said humbly. Shall't have them. Go away. Why don't you get them off Clitham Narestra? It seemed to be a relief to malice to express her contempt in additional syllables to that classical young woman's already long-drawn title. Oh, you wicked thing! I am hungry, Lizzie. I've eaten nothing since dinner yesterday. I'm famished. And the young man, in a state of remarkable extortion, land against the tree. Malice's heart was touched. In the bitter days of her gypsy life, she had known the sensation he so artfully simulated. Overcome by his heart-broken tone, but not entirely divested of suspicion, she said, dig under the tree near the roots, and you'll find lots, but mind you don't tell. From Liz had her hordes, as well as the rats and squirrels. But the master, of course, was unable to find them. The effects of hunger are probably blinding his senses. Malice grew uneasy. At length she peered at him through the leaves in an elfish way and questioned, If I come down and give you some, you'll promise you won't touch me? The master promised. Hope you'll die if you do. The master accepted instant dissolution as a forfeit. Malice slid down the tree. For a few moments nothing transpired but the munching of the pine nuts. Do you feel better? She asked with some solicitude. The master confessed to a recuperated feeling, and then, gravely thanking her, proceeded to retrace his steps. As he expected, he had not gone far before she called him. He turned. She was standing there quite white, with tears in her widely-opened alps. The master felt at the right moment had come. Going up to her, he took both her hands, and, looking in her tearful eyes, said gravely, Lizzie, do you remember the first evening you came to see me? Lizzie remembered. You asked if you might come to school, for you wanted to learn something and be better, and I said, Come, responded the child promptly. What would you say if the master now came to you and said that he was lonely without his little scholar, and that he wanted her to come and teach him to be better? The child hung her head for a few moments in silence. The master waited patiently. Tempted by the quiet, a hair ran close to the couple, and, raising her bright eyes and velvet faux pas, sat and gaze at them. A squirrel ran half-way down the furrowed bark of a fallen tree, and there stopped. We are waiting, Lizzie, said the master, in a whisper, and the child smiled. Stirred by a passing breeze, the treetops rocked, and a long pencil of light stole through their interlaced boughs, full on the doubting face and irresolute little figure. Suddenly, she took the master's hand in a quick way. What she said was scarcely audible, but the master, putting the black hair back from her forehead, kissed her, and so, hand in hand, they passed out of the damp ales and forest odours into the open, sunlit road. End of part one of Mliss. Mliss, part two, from Selected Stories by Brett Hart. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Selected Stories by Brett Hart. Mliss, chapter three. Somewhat less spiteful in her intercourse with other scholars, Mliss still retained an offensive attitude in regard to Clithomnestra. Perhaps the jealous element was not entirely lulled in her passionate little breast. Perhaps it was only that the round curves and plump outline offered more extended pinching surface. But while such abolition were under the master's control, her enmity occasionally took a new and irrepressible form. The master in his first estimate of the child's character could not conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll, but then it was emphatically Mliss's doll, a smaller copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morphe. It had been the old-time companion of Mrs. Wonderings and bore evident marks of suffering. Its original complexion was long since washed away by the weather and anointed by the slime of ditches. It looked very much as Mliss had in days past. Its one gown of faded stuff was dirty and ragged as hers had been. Mliss had never been known to apply to it any childish term of endearment. She never exhibited it in the presence of other children. It was put severely to bed in a hollow tree near the schoolhouse and only allowed exercise during Mliss's rambles. Fulfilling a stern duty to her doll as she would to herself, it knew no luxuries. Now Mrs. Morphe obeying a commendable impulse bought another doll and gave it to Mliss. The child received it gravely and curiously. The master, on looking at it one day, fancied he saw a slight resemblance in its round red cheeks and mild blue eyes to Clitamnestra. It became evident before long that Mliss had also noticed the same resemblance. Accordingly, she hammered its wax and head on the rocks when she was alone and sometimes dragged it with a string round its neck to and from school. At other times, setting it up on her desk, she made a pencushion of its patient and inoffensive body. Whether this was done in revenge of what she considered a second figurative obtusion of Clitie's excellences upon her, or whether she had an intuitive appreciation of the rites of certain other heathens and, indulging in that fetish ceremony, imagined that the original of her wax model would pine away and finally die, is a metaphysical question I shall not now consider. In spite of these moral vagaries, the master could not help noticing in her different tasks the working of a quick, restless and vigorous perception. She knew neither the hesitancy nor the doubts of childhood. Her answers in class were always slightly dashed with audacity. Of course, she was not infallible, but her courage and daring in passing beyond her own death and that of the floundering little swimmers around her, in their minds outweighed all errors of judgment. Children are not better than grown people in this respect I fancy, and whenever the little red hand flashed above her desk there was a wandering silence, and even the master was sometimes oppressed with a doubt of his own experience and judgment. Nevertheless, certain attributes which had first amused and entertained his fancy began to afflict him with grave doubts. He could not but see that Mliss was revengeful, irreverent and willful, that there was but one better quality which pertained to her semi-savage disposition, the faculty of physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another, though not always an attribute of the noble savage, truth. Mliss was both fearless and sincere. Perhaps in such a character the adjectives were synonymous. The master had been doing some hard thinking on this subject and had arrived at that conclusion quite common to all who think sincerely that he was generally the slave of his own prejudices, when he determined to call on the reverent McSnackley for advice. The decision was somewhat humiliated to his pride, as he and McSnackley were not friends, but he thought of Mliss and the evening of their first meeting, and perhaps with a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with the complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked back his dislike, and went to McSnackley. The reverent gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed that the master was looking peartish, and hoped he had got over the neuralgy and rheumatism. He himself had been troubled with a dumb agor since last conference, but he had learned to wrestle and pray. Pausing a moment to enable the master to write a certain method of curing the dumb agor upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnackley proceeded to inquire after his sister Morpher. She is an adornment to Christianity, and has a likely grown young family, added Mr. McSnackley, and there is that manly young girl, so well-behaved, Ms. Clitty. In fact, Clitty's perfections seemed to affect him to such an extent that he dwelled for several minutes upon them. The master was doubly embarrassed. In the first place, there was an enforced contrast with poor Mliss in all this praise of Clitty. Secondly, there was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Mliss Morpher's earliest born, so that the master, after a few futile efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another engagement, and left without asking the information required. But in his after-reflections, somewhat unjustly giving the reverend Mr. McSnackley the full benefit of having refused it. Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil once more in the close communion of old. The child seemed to notice the change in the master's manner, which had of late been constrained, and in one of their long, post-prandial walks she stopped suddenly, and, mounting a stump, looked full in his face with big, searching eyes. You ain't mad? said she, with an interrogative shake of the black braids. No. Nor bothered? No. No hungry? A hunger was too Mliss a sickness that might attack a person at any moment? No. Nor thinking of her? Of whom, Lissie? That white girl. This was the latest epithet invented by Mliss, who was a very dark brunette, to express Clintonestra. No. Upon your word? A substitute for hope you'll die, proposed by the master. Yes. And sacred honour? Yes. Then Mliss gave him a fierce little kiss, and, hopping down, flooded off. For two or three days after that, she condescended to appear more like other children, and be, as she expressed it, good. Two years had passed since the master's advent at Smith's Pocket, and as his salary was not large, and the prospects of Smith's Pocket eventually becoming the capital of the state not entirely definite, he contemplated the change. He had informed the school trustees privately of his intentions, but educated young men of unblemished moral character being scarce at that time, he consented to continue his school term through the winter to early spring. None else knew of his intention, except his one friend, a Dr. Duchessny, a young Creole physician known to the people of Wingdom as Duchessny. He never mentioned it to Mrs. Morfer, Clithy, or any of his scholars. His reticence was partly the result of a constitutional intersposition to fuss, partly a desire to be spared the questions and surmises of vulgar curiosity, and partly that he never really believed he was going to do anything before it was done. He did not like to think of Melissa. It was a selfish instinct perhaps which made him try to fancy his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic, and unpractical. He even tried to imagine that she would do better under the control of an older and stoner teacher. Then she was nearly eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red Mountain, would be a woman. He had done his duty. After Smith's death, he addressed letters to Smith's relatives and received one answer from a sister of Melissa's mother. Thanking the master, she stated her intention of leaving the Atlantic States for California with her husband in a few months. This was a slight superstructure for the airy castle which the master pictured from Melissa's home, but it was easy to fancy that some loving, sympathetic woman with the claims of kindred might better guide her wayward nature. Yet, when the master had read the letter, Melissa listened to it carelessly, received it submissively, and afterward cut figures out of it with her scissors, supposed to represent Clithymnestra, labelled the White Girl to prevent mistakes, and impaled them upon the outer walls of the schoolhouse. When the summer was about spent and the last harvest had been gathered in the valleys, the master prethought him of gathering in a few ripened shoots of the young idea, and of having his harvest home or examination. So the savants and professionals of Smith's pocket were gathered to witness that time-honoured custom of placing timid children in a constrained position and bullying them as in a witness box. As usual in such cases, the most audacious and self-possessed were the lucky recipients of the honours. The reader will imagine that in the present instance Melissa and Clithy were preeminent and divided public attention. Melissa with a clearness of material perception and self-reliance, Clithy with her placid self-esteem and saintly correctness of deportment, the other little ones were timid and blundering. Melissa's readiness and brilliancy, of course, captivated the greatest number, and provoked the greatest applause. Melissa's antecedence had unconsciously awakened the strongest sympathies of a class whose athletic forms were ranged against the walls, or whose handsome bearded faces looked in at the windows, but Melissa's popularity was overthrown by an unexpected circumstance. Mcsnackley had invited himself and had been going through the pleasing entertainment of frightening the more timid pupils by the vaguest and most ambiguous questions delivered in an impressive funerial tone. And Melissa had soared into astronomy and was tracking the cause of our spotted ball through space and keeping time with the music of the spheres and defining the tethered orbits of the planets when Mcsnackley impressively arose. Melissa, you were speaking of the revolutions of this year's earth, that the movements of the sun, and I think you said it had been a doing of it since the creation, huh? Melissa nodded a scornful affirmative. Well, were that the truth? said Mcsnackley, folding his arms. Yes, said Melissa, shutting up her little red lips tightly. The handsome outlines at the windows peered further in the schoolroom, and a saintly raffle face with blonde beard and soft blue eyes belonging to the biggest scamp in the Diggins turned toward the child and whispered, stick to it, Melissa. The Reverend Gentleman heaved a deep sigh and cast a compassionate glance at the master, then at the children, and then rested his look on Clitty. That young woman softly elevated her round wide arm. Its seductive curves were enhanced by a gorgeous and massive specimen bracelet, the gift of one of her humblest worshippers, worn in honour of the occasion. There was a momentary silence. Clitty's round cheeks were very pink and soft. Clitty's big eyes were very bright and blue. Clitty's low-necked white book muslin rested softly on Clitty's white plump shoulders. Clitty looked at the master and the master nodded. Then Clitty spoke softly. Drusher commanded the son to stand still, and it obeyed him. There was a low hum of applause in the schoolroom, a triumphant expression on Mcsnackley's face, a grave shadow on the master's, and a comical look of disappointment reflected from the windows. Melissa skimmed rapidly over her astronomy, and then shut the book with a loud snap. A groan burst from Mcsnackley, an expression of astonishment from the schoolroom, a yell from the windows as Melissa brought her red fist down on the desk, with the emphatic declaration, It's a damn lie! I don't believe it! Chapter 4 The long wet season had drawn near its close. Signs of spring were visible in the swelling butts and rushing torrents. The pine forests exhaled the fresher spysary. The azaleas were already budding, the cianothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland, which climbed Red Mountain at its southern aspect, the long spike of the monk's hood shot up from its broad-leafed stool, and once more shook its dark blue bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was soft and green, its crest just tossed with the foam of daisies and butter-cups. The little graveyard had gathered a few new dwellers in the past year, and the mounds were placed two by two by the little pailing until they reached Smith's grave, and there the was but one. General superstition had shunted, and the plot beside Smith was vacant. There have been several placards posted about the town, intimating that, at a certain period, a celebrated dramatic company would perform for a few days a series of sight-splitting and screaming farses. That, alternating pleasantly with this, there would be some melodrama and a grand divertiment which would include singing, dancing, etc. These announcements occasioned a great fluttering among the little folk, and were the theme of much excitement and great speculation among the master's scholars. The master had promised Melissa, to whom this sort of thing was sacred and rare, that she should go, and on that momentous evening the master and Melissa assisted. The performance was the prevalent style of heavy mediocrity. The melodrama was not bad enough to laugh at, nor good enough to excite, but the master, turning rarely to the child, was astonished, and felt something like self-accusation in noticing the peculiar effect upon her excitable nature. The red blood flushed in her cheeks at each stroke of her panting little heart. Her small, passionate lips were slightly potted to give vent to a hurried breath. Her widely-opened lids threw up and arched her black eyebrows. She did not laugh at the dismal comicalities of the funny man, for Melissa seldom laughed, nor was she discreetly affected to the delicate extremes of the corner of a white handkerchief as was the tender-hearted clitty who was talking with her fellow and ogling the master at the same moment. But when the performance was over and the green curtain fell on the little stage, Melissa drew a long, deep breath, and turned to the master's grave face with a half apologetic smile and wary gesture. Then she said, Now take me home, and drop the lids of her black eyes, as if to dwell once more in fancy on the mimic stage. On their way to Mrs. Morfus, the master thought proper to ridicule the whole performance. Now he shouldn't wonder if Melissa thought that the young lady who acted so beautifully was really in earnest, and in love with a gentleman who wore such fine clothes. Well, if she were in love with him, it was a very unfortunate thing. Why, except Melissa, with an upward sweep of the drooping lid. Oh, well, he couldn't support his wife at this present salary and pay so much a week for his fine clothes, and then they wouldn't receive as much wages if they were married as if they were merely lovers, that is, added the master, if they are not already married to somebody else. But I think the husband of the pretty young countess takes the tickets at the door, or pulls up the curtain, or snuffs the candles, or does something equally refined and elegant. As to the young man with nice clothes, which are really nice now, and must cost at least two and a half for three dollars, not to speak of that mantle of red drugard which I happen to know the price of, for I bought some of it for my room once. As to this young man, Lizzie, he is a pretty good fellow, and if he does drink occasionally, I don't think people ought to take advantage of it and give him black eyes and throw him in the mud. Do you? I am sure you might owe me two dollars and a half a long time before I would throw it up in his face, as the fellow did the other night at Wingdom. Liz had taken his hand in both of hers, and was trying to look in his eyes, which the young man kept us resolutely averted. Liz had a faint idea of irony, indulging herself sometimes in a species of sardonic humor which was equally visible in her actions and her speech. But the young man continued in this strain until they had reached Mrs. Morfus, and he had deposited Liz in her maternal charge. Waving the invitation of Mrs. Morfus to refreshment and rest, and shading his eyes with his hand to keep out the blue-eyed Clithymnestrus siren glances, he excused himself and went home. For two or three days after the event of the dramatic company, Liz was late at school, and the master s usual Friday afternoon ramble was for once omitted, owing to the absence of his trustworthy guide. As he was putting away his books and preparing to leave the schoolhouse, a small voice piped at his side. Please, sir. The master turned, and there stood Erisidus Morfus. Well, my little man, said the master impatiently. What is it? Quick! Please, sir. Me and Kirk think that Liz is going to run away again. What's that, sir? said the master, with that unjust testiness with which we always received his agreeable news. Why, sir, she don't stay home any more, and Kirkamie seared talking with one of those actor-fellows, and she's with him now, and please, sir, yesterday she told Kirkamie she could make a speech as well as Mrs. Celestinum and Mercy, and she spouted right off by heart. And the little fellow paused in a collapsed condition. What actor? asked the master. Him is where the shiny head, and hair, and gold pin, and gold chain, said the just Erisidus, putting periods for commerce to eke out his breath. The master put on his gloves and head, feeling an unpleasant tightness in his chest and thorax, and walked out in the road. Erisidus trodded along by his side, endeavouring to keep pace with his short legs the master strides, when the master stopped suddenly, and Erisidus bumped up against him. Where were they talking? asked the master, as if continuing the conversation. At the arcade, said Erisidus. When they reached the main street, the master paused. Run down home, said each of the boy. If Mrs. there, come to the arcade and tell me. If she isn't there, stay home. Run! And off trotted the short-legged Erisidus. The arcade was just across the way, a long, rambling building containing a bar room, billiard room, and restaurant. As the young man crossed the plaza, he noticed that two or three of the passers-by turned and looked after him. He looked at his clothes, took out his handkerchief, and wiped his face before he entered the bar room. It contained the usual number of loungers, who stared at him as he entered. One of them looked at him so fixedly, and with such a strange expression that the master stopped and looked again, and then saw it was only his own reflection in a large mirror. This made the master think that perhaps he was a little excited, and so he took up a copy of the Red Mountain Benner from one of the tables, and tried to recover his composure by reading the column of advertisements. He then walked through the bar room, through the restaurant, and into the billiard room. The child was not there. In the letter apartment, a person was standing by one of the tables with a broad, brimmed, glazed head on his head. The master recognized him as the agent of the dramatic company. He had taken a dislike to him at their first meeting, from the peculiar fashion of wearing his beard and hair. Satisfied that the object of his search was not there, he turned to the man with a glazed head. He had noticed the master, but tried that common trick of unconsciousness in which vulgar natures always fail. Balancing a billiard cue in his hand, he pretended to play with a ball in the center of the table. The master stood opposite to him until he raised his eyes. When their glances met, the master walked up to him. He had intended to avoid a scene or quarrel, but when he began to speak, something kept rising in his throat and retarded his utterance, and his own voice frightened him. It sounded so distant, low, and resonant. I understand, he began, that Melissa Smith, an orphan and one of my scholars, has talked with you about adopting your profession. Is that so? The man with the glazed head leaned over the table and made an imaginary shot that sent the ball spinning round the cushions. Then, walking round the table, he recovered the ball and placed it upon the spot. This duty discharged, getting ready for another shot, he said. Sposh he has? The master choked up again, but squeezing the cushion of the table in his gloved hand, he went on. If you are a gentleman, I have only to tell you that I am her guardian and responsible for her career. You know as well as I do the kind of life you offer her. As you may learn of anyone here, I have already brought her out of an existence worse than death, out of the streets in the contamination of vice. I am trying to do so again. Let us talk like men. She has neither a father, mother, sister or brother. Are you seeking to give her an equivalent for these? The man with the glazed head examined the point of his cue, and then looked around for somebody to enjoy the joke with him. I know that she is a strange, willful girl, continued the master, but she is better than she was. I believe that I have some influence over her still. I beg and hope therefore that she will take no further steps in this matter, but as a man, as a gentleman, leave her to me. I am willing. But here something rose again in the master's throat, and the sentence remained unfinished. The man with the glazed head, mistaking the master's silence, raised his head with a coarse, brutal laugh, and said in a loud voice, Wander yourself, do you? That cock won't fight here, young man. The insult was more in the tone than in the words, more in the glance than tone, and more in the man's instinctive nature than all these. The best appreciable rhetoric to this kind of animal is a blow. The master felt this, and with his pent-up, nervous energy finding expression in the one act he struck the brute, full in his grinning face. The blow sent the glazed head one way and the cue another, and tore the glove and skin from the master's hand from knuckles rejoined. It opened up the corners of the fellow's mouth, and spoiled the peculiar shape of his beard for some time to come. There was a shout, an implication, a scuffle, and the trampling of many feet. Then the crowd parted right and left, and two sharp, quick reports followed each other in rapid succession. Then they closed again about his opponent, and the master was standing alone. He remembered picking bits of burning wadding from his coat sleeve with his left hand. Someone was holding his other hand. Looking at it, he saw it was still bleeding from the blow, but his fingers were clenched around the handle of a glittering knife. He could not remember when or how he got it. The man who was holding his hand was Mr. Morpher. He hurried the master to the door, but the master held back, and tried to tell him as well as he could with his parched throat about Mliss. It's all right, my boy, said Mr. Morpher. She's home. And they passed out into the street together. As they walked along, Mr. Morpher said that Mliss had come running into the house a few moments before, and had dragged him out, saying that somebody was trying to kill the master at the arcade. Wishing to be alone, the master promised Mr. Morpher that he would not seek the agent again that night, and parted from him, taking the road toward the schoolhouse. He was surprised in nearing it to find the door open, still more surprised to find Mliss sitting there. The master's nature, as I've hinted before, had, like most sensitive organizations, a selfish basis. The brutal taunt thrown out by his late adversary still rankled in his heart. It was possible, he thought, that such a construction might be put upon his affection for the child, which at best was foolish and quixotic. Besides, had she not voluntarily abnegated his authority and affection? And what had everybody else said about her? Why should he alone combat the opinion of all, and be at last obliged tacitly to confess the truth of all they predicted? And he had been a participant in a low bar room fight with a common borer, and risked his life to prove what? What had he proved? Nothing? What would the people say? What would his friends say? What would McSnackley say? In his self-accusation, the last person he should have wished to meet was Mliss. He entered the door, and, going up to his desk, told the child in a few cold words that he was busy, and wished to be alone. As she rose, he took her vacant seat, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands. When he looked up again, she was still standing there. She was looking at his face with an anxious expression. Did you kill him? She asked. No, said the master. That's what I gave you the knife for, said the child quickly. Gave me the knife? repeated the master in bewilderment. Yes, gave you the knife. I was there under the bar. So he hit him. So he both fell. He dropped his old knife. I gave it to you. Why didn't you stick him? said Mliss rapidly, with an expressive twinkle of the black eyes, and a gesture of the little red hand. The master could only look his astonishment. Yes, said Mliss. If you'd asked me, I told you I was off with the play actors. Why was I off with the play actors? Because you wouldn't tell me he was going away. I knew it. I heard you tell the doctor so. I wasn't going to stay here alone with those morphers. I'd rather die first. With a dramatic gesture, which was perfectly consistent with her character, she drew from her bosom a few limp green leaves, and holding them out at arm's length, set in her quick, vivid way, and in the queer pronunciation of her old life, which she fell into when unduly excited. That's the poison plant you set would kill me. I'll go with the play actors, or I'll eat this and die here. I don't care which. I won't stay here, where they hate and despise me, neither would you let me, if you didn't hate and despise me too. The passionate little breast heaved, and two big tears peeped over the edge of Mliss's eyelids, but she whisked them away with the corner of her apron, as if they had been wasps. If you lock me up in jail, except Mliss fiercely, to keep me from the play actors, I'll poison myself. Father killed himself, why shouldn't I? You set a mouthful of that root would kill me, and I always carried here. And she struck her breasts with a clenched fist. The master thought of the vacant plot beside Smith's rave, and of the passionate little figure before him, seizing her hands in his, and looking full into her truthful eyes, he said, Lissie, will you go with me? The child put her arms around his neck, and said joyfully, Yes! But now, tonight, tonight. And, hand in hand, they passed into the road, the narrow road that had once brought her rary feet to the master's door, and which it seemed she should not tread again alone. The stars glittered brightly above them. For good or ill the lesson had been learned, and behind them the school of Red Mountain closed upon them forever. End of Mliss. The year of Grace, 1797, passed away on the coast of California in a southwesterly gale. The little bay of San Carlos, albeit sheltered by the headlands of the Blessed Trinity, was rough and turbulent. Its foam clung quivering to the seaward wall of the Mission Garden. The air was filled with flying sand and spume, and as the Señor Comandante Hermene Gildo Salvatierra looked from the deep embresured window of the Presidio Guard Room, he felt the salt breath of the distant sea buffet of color into his smoke-dried cheeks. The commander, I've said, was gazing thoughtfully from the window of the Guard Room. He may have been reviewing the events of the year now about to pass away. But, like the garrison at the Presidio, there was little to review. The year, like its predecessors, had been uneventful. The days had slipped by in a delicious monotony of simple duties, unbroken by incident or interruption. The regularly recurring feasts and saints' days, the half-yearly courier from San Diego, the rare transport ship, and rarer far and vessel were the mere details of his patriarchal life. If there was no achievement, there was certainly no failure. Abundant harvests and patient industry amply supplied the wants of Presidio in mission. Isolated from the family of nations, the wars which shook the world concerned them not so much as the last earthquake. The struggle that emancipated their sister colonies on the other side of the continent to them had no suggestiveness. In short, it was that glorious Indian summer of California history around which so much poetical haze still lingers, that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving spirit of American conquest. The commander turned from the window and walked toward the fire that burned brightly on the deep oven-like hearth. A pile of copy books, the work of the Presidio school, lay on the table, as he turned over the leaves with a paternal interest, and surveyed the fair-round scripture text, the first pious pot-hooks of the pupils of San Carlos, an audible commentary fell from his lips. Abimelech took her from Iberham. Ah, little one, excellent! Jacob sent to see his brother, body of Christ, that upstroke of thine paquita is marvelous. The governor shall see it. A film of honest pride dimmed the commander's left eye, the right alas, twenty years before it had been sealed by an Indian arrow. He rubbed it softly with the sleeve of his leather jacket and continued. The Ishmaelites, having arrived, he stopped, for there was a step in the courtyard, a foot upon the threshold, and a stranger entered. With the instinct of an old soldier, the commander, after one glance at the intruder, turned quickly toward the wall, where his trusty Toledo hung, or should have been hanging. But it was not there, and as he recalled that the last time he had seen that weapon, it was being ridden up and down the gallery of Pepito, the infant son of Bautista, the tortilla-maker, he blushed and then contended himself with frowning upon the intruder. But the stranger's air, though irreverent, was decidedly peaceful. He was unarmed, and wore the ordinary cape of tarpaulin and sea-boots of Mariner. Except the villainous smell of codfish, there was little about him that was peculiar. His name, as he informed the commander in Spanish, was more fluent than elegant or precise. His name was Pelig Scudder. He was master of the schooner general court, of the port of Salem in Massachusetts, on a trading voyage to the South Seas, but now driven by stress of weather into the Bay of San Carlos. He begged permission to ride out the gale under the headlines of the Blessed Trinity, and no more. Water he did not need, having taken in a supply at Bodega. He knew the strict surveillance of the Spanish port regulations in regard to foreign vessels, and would do nothing against the severe discipline and good order of the settlement. There was a slight tinge of sarcasm in his tone as he glanced toward the desolate parade ground of the Presidio and the open unguarded gate. The fact was that the sentry Felipe Gomez had discreetly retired to shelter at the beginning of the storm, and was then sound asleep in the corridor. The commander hesitated. The port regulations were severe, but he was accustomed to exercise individual authority, and beyond an old order issued ten years before, regarding the American ship Columbia, there was no precedent to guide him. The storm was severe, and a sentiment of humanity urged him to grant the stranger's request. It is but just to the commander to say that his inability to enforce a refusal did not weigh with his decision. He would have denied, with equal disregard of consequences, that right to a seventy-four gun ship, which he now yielded so gracefully to this Yankee trading schooner. He stipulated only that there should be no communication between the ship and shore. For yourselves, senor captain, he continued, accept my hospitality. The fort is yours, as long as you shall grace it with your distinguished presence. And with old-fashioned courtesy he made the semblance of withdrawing from the guard room. Master Pelig Scudder smiled as he thought of the half-dismantled fort, the two moldy brass cannon, cast in Manila a century previous, and the shiftless garrison, a wild thought of accepting the commander's offer literally conceived in the reckless spirit of a man who never let slip an offer for trade, for a moment filled his brain, but a timely reflection of the commercial unimportance of the transaction checked him. He only took a capacious squid of tobacco, as the commander gravely drew a saddle before the fire, and in front of his guest untied the black silk handkerchief that bound his grizzled brows. What passed between Salvatiera and his guest that night, it becomes me not, as a grave chronicler of salient points of history to relate. I have said that Master Pelig Scudder was a fluent talker, and under the influence of diverse strong waters furnished by his host, he became still more loquacious. The commander learned for the first time how Great Britain lost her colonies, of the French Revolution, of the Great Napoleon whose achievements perhaps Pelig colored more highly than the commander's superiors would have liked, and when Pelig turned questioner, the commander was at his mercy. He gradually made himself master of the gossip of the mission and percedio, the small beer chronicles of that pastoral age, the conversion of the heathen, the percedioschools, and even asked the commander how he had lost his eye. It is said that at this point of the conversation Master Pelig produced from about his person diverse small trinkets, crickshaws, and newfangled trifles, and even forced some of them upon his host. It is further alleged that under the malign influence of Pelig and several glasses of aguardiente, the commander lost somewhat of his decorum, and behaved in a manner unseemingly for one in his position, reciting high-flown Spanish poetry, and even piping in a thin high voice, diverse madrigals, and heathen kansenets of an amorous complexion. Chiefly in regard to a little one, who was his, the commander's soul, these allegations perhaps unworthy, the notice of a serious chronicler, should be received with great caution, and are introduced here as simple hearsay. That the commander, however, took a handkerchief and attempted to show his guest the mysteries of the semi-quaqua, capering in an agile but in decorous manner about the apartment has been denied. Enough for the purposes of this narrative that at midnight Pelig assisted his host to bed with many protestations of undying friendship, and then, as the gale had abated, took his leave of the presidio and hurried aboard the general court. When the day broke the ship was gone. I know not if Pelig kept his word with his host. It is said that the holy fathers at the mission that night heard a loud chanting in the plaza, as of heathen singing psalms through their noses. That for many days after an odor of salt codfish prevailed in the settlement, that a dozen hard nutmegs, which were unfit for spice or seed, were found in the possession of the wife of the baker, and that several bushes of shoepigs, which bore a pleasing resemblance to oaths, but were quite inadequate to the purpose of the provender, were discovered in a stable of the blacksmith. But when the reader reflects upon the sacredness of a Yankee trader's word, the stringent discipline of the Spanish port regulations, and the proverbial indisposition of my countrymen to impose upon the confidence of a simple people, he will at once reject this part of the story. A roll of drums ushering in the year 1798 awoke the commander. The sun was shining brightly, and the storm had ceased. He sat up in bed, and through the force of habit rubbed his left eye. As the remembrance of the previous night came back to him, he jumped from his couch and ran to the window. There was no ship in the bay. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he rubbed both of his eyes. Not content with this, he consulted the metallic mirror which hung beside this crucifix. There was no mistake. The commander had a visible second eye, a right one, as good, saved for the purpose of vision, as the left. Whatever might have been the true secret of this transformation, but one opinion prevailed at San Carlos. It was one of those rare miracles vouchsafed the pious Catholic community as an evidence to the heathen, through the intercession of the blessed San Carlos himself. That their beloved commander, the temporal defender of the faith, should be the recipient of this miraculous manifestation was most fit and seemly. The commander himself was reticent. He could not tell a falsehood. He dared not tell the truth. After all, if the good folk of San Carlos believed that the powers of his right eye were actually restored, was it wise and discreet for him to undeceive them? For the first time in his life, the commander thought of policy. For the first time he quoted that text which has been the lure of so many well-meaning but easy Christians of being all things to all men. Infeliz, Hermene Hildo Salvatierra, for by degrees an ominous whisper crept through the little settlement. The right eye of the commander, although miraculous, seemed to exercise a baleful effect upon the beholder. No one could look at it without winking. It was cold, hard, relentless, and unflinching. More than that, it seemed to be endowed with a dreadful prescience. A faculty of seeing threw and into the inarticulate thoughts of those it looked upon. The soldiers of the garrison obeyed the eye rather than the voice of their commander and answered his glance rather than his lips and questioning. The servants could not evade the ever-watchful but cold attention that seemed to pursue them. The children of the Presidio School smirched their copybooks under the awful supervision, and por paquita the prize pupil failed utterly in that marvelous upstroke when her patron stood beside her. Gradually distrust, suspicion, self-accusation, and timidity took the place of trust, confidence, and security through San Carlos. Whenever the right eye of the commander fell, a shadow fell with it. Nor was Salvatierra entirely free from the baleful influence of his miraculous acquisition. Unconscious of its effect upon others, he only saw in their actions evidence of certain things the crafty Peleg had hinted on that eventful New Year's Eve. His most trusty retainers stammered, blushed, and faltered before him. Self-accusations, confessions of minor faults and delinquencies, or extravagant excuses and apologies met his mildest inquiries. The very children that he loved, his pet pupil Paquita, seemed to be conscious of some hidden sin. The result of this constant irritation showed itself more plainly. For the first half year, the commander's voice and eye were at variance. He was still kind, tender and thoughtful in speech. Gradually, however, his voice took upon itself the hardness of his glance, and its skeptical, impassive quality, and as the year again nearer its close, it was plain that the commander had fitted himself to the eye, and not the eye to the commander. It was surmised that these changes did not escape the watchful solicitude of the fathers. Indeed, the few who were first to ascribe the right eye of Salvatierra to miraculous origin, and the special grace of the Blessed San Carlos, now talked openly of witchcraft and the agency of Luzbel, the evil one. It would have fared ill with Hermene Hildo Salvatierra had he been awed but commander or amenable to local authority. But the Reverend Father, friar Manuel de Cortes, had no power over the political executive, and all attempts at spiritual advice failed signally. He retired baffled and confused from his first interview with the commander, who seemed now to take a grim satisfaction in the fateful power of his glance. The Holy Father contradicted himself, exposed the fallacies of his own arguments, and even it is asserted committed himself to several undoubted heresies. When the commander stood up at mass, if the officiating priest caught that skeptical and searching eye, the service was inevitably ruined. Even the power of the Holy Church seemed to be lost, and the last hold upon the affections of the people, and the good order of the settlement departed from San Carlos. As the long dry summer passed, the low hills that surrounded the white walls of the Presidio grew more and more to resemble in hue the leather jacket of the commander, and nature herself seemed to have borrowed his dry-hard glare. The earth was cracked and seemed with drought, a blight had fallen upon the orchards and vineyards, and the rain, long delayed and ardently prayed for, came not. The sky was as tearless as the right eye of the commander. Murmers of discontent, insubordination, and plotting among the Indians reached his ears. He only said his teeth the more firmly, tighten a knot of his black silk handkerchief, and looked up his Toledo. The last day of the year 1798 found the commander sitting at the hour of evening prayers alone in the guard room. He no longer attended the services of the Holy Church, but crept away at such times to some solitary spot where he spent the interval in silent meditation. The firelight played upon the low beams and rafters, but left the bowed figure of Salvatierra in darkness. Sitting thus he felt a small hand touch his arm, and looking down he saw the figure of Paquita, his little Indian pupil, at his knee. Ah, littlest of all, said the commander, with something of his old tenderness, lingering over the endearing diminutive of his native speech. Sweet one, what dost thou here? Are thou not afraid of him who everyone shuns and fears? No, said little Indian. Not in the dark. I hear your voice, the old voice. I feel your touch, the old touch, but I see not your eye, Señor Comandante. That only I fear, and that, o Señor, o my father, said the child, lifting her little arms towards his. That, I know, is not thine own. The commander shuddered and turned away. Then, recovering himself, he kissed Paquita gravely on the forehead, and bade her retire. A few hours later, when silence had fallen upon the procedure, he sought his own couch, and slept peacefully. At about the middle watch of the night a dusky figure crept through the low embrasure of the commander's apartment. Other figures were flitting through the parade-ground, which the commander might have seen had he had not slept so quietly. The intruders stepped noiselessly to the couch, and listened to the sleeper's deep-drawn inspiration. Something glittered in the fire-light, as the savage lifted his arm. Another moment, and the score perplexities of Hermene Hildo Salvatierra would have been over. When suddenly the savage started and fell back in a paroxysm of terror. The commander slept peacefully, but his right eye, widely open, fixed and unaltered, glared coldly on the would-be assassin. The man fell to the earth in a fit, and the noise awoke the sleeper. To rise to his feet, grasp his sword, and deal blows thick and fast upon the mutantous savages who now thronged a room was the work of a moment. Help, opportunally arrived, and the undisciplined Indians were speedily driven beyond the walls, but in the scuffle the commander received a blow upon his right eye, and lifting his hand to that mysterious organ it was gone. Never again was it found, and never again, for bail or bliss did it adorn the right orbit of the commander. With it passed away the spell that had fallen upon San Carlos. The rain returned to invigorate the languid soil. Harmony was restored between priest and soldier. The green grass presently waved over the seer hillsides. The children flocked again to the side of their martial preceptor. A tedeum was sung in the mission church, and pastoral content once more smiled upon the gentle valleys of San Carlos. And far southward crept the general court, with its master Pelig Scudder, trafficking in beads and peltries with the Indians, and offering glass eyes, wooden legs, and other Boston notions to the chiefs. It was near the close of an October day that I began to be disagreeably conscious of the Sacramento Valley. I had been riding since sunrise, and my course through the depressing monotony of the long, level landscape affected me more like a dull, dyspeptic dream than a business journey performed under that sincerest of natural phenomena, a California sky. The recurring stretches of brown and baked fields, the gaping fissures in the dusty trail, the hard outline of the distant hills, and the herds of slowly moving cattle seemed like features of some glittering stereoscopic picture that never changed. Active exercise might have removed this feeling, but my horse by some subtle instinct had long since given up all ambitious effort and had lapsed into a dogged trot. It was autumn, but not the season suggested to the Atlantic reader under that title. The sharply defined boundaries of the wet and dry seasons were prefigured in the clear outlines of the distant hills. In the dry atmosphere the decay of vegetation was too rapid for the slow hectic which overtakes an eastern landscape, or else nature was too practical for such thin disguises. She merely turned the hippocratic face to the spectator, with the old diagnosis of death in her sharp, contracted features. In the contemplation of such a prospect there was little to excite any but a morbid fancy. There were no clouds in the flinty blue heavens, and the setting of the sun was accompanied with as little ostentation as was consistent with the dryly practical atmosphere. Darkness soon followed, with a rising wind which increased as the shadows deepened on the plain. The fringe of alder by the water course began to loom up as I urged my horse forward. A half hour's active spurring brought me to a corral, and a little beyond a house. So low and broad it seemed at first sight to be half buried in the earth. My second impression was that it had grown out of the soil, like some monstrous vegetable. Its dreary proportions were so in keeping with the vast prospect. There were no recesses along its roughly boarded walls for vagrant and unprofitable shadows to lurk in the daily sunshine. No projection for the wind by night to grow musical over, to wail, whistle, or whisper to. Only a long wooden shelf containing a chilly looking tin basin and a bar of soap. Its uncurtained windows were red with the sinking sun, as though bloodshot and inflamed from a too long unlit existence. The tracks of cattle led to its front door firmly closed against the rattling wind. To avoid being confounded with this familiar element, I walked to the rear of the house, which was connected with a smaller building by a slight platform. A grizzled, hard-faced old man was standing there, and met my salutation with a look of inquiry, and, without speaking, led the way to the principal room. As I entered, four young men who were reclining by the fire slightly altered their attitudes of perfect repose, but beyond that betrayed neither curiosity nor interest. A hound started from a dark corner with a growl, but was immediately kicked by the old man into obscurity and silenced again. I can't tell why, but I instantly received the impression that, for a long time, the group by the fire had not uttered a word or moved a muscle. Taking a seat, I briefly stated my business. Was a United States surveyor, had come on account of the Espirito Santo Rancho, wanted to correct the exterior boundaries of township lines, so as to connect with the near-exteriors of private grants. There had been some intervention to the old survey by Mr. Tryon, who had preempted adjacent, said, Old Land Warrants, interrupted the old man. Ah, yes, Land Warrants, and then this was Mr. Tryon. I had spoken mechanically, for I was preoccupied in connecting other public lines with private surveys, as I looked in his face. It was certainly a hard face, and reminded me of the singular effect of that mining operation known as ground sluicing. The harder lines of underlying character were exposed, and what were once plastic curves and soft outlines were obliterated by some powerful agency. There was a dryness in his voice, not unlike the prevailing atmosphere of the valley, as he launched into an ex parte statement of the contest with a fluency which, like the wind without, showed frequent and unrestrained expression. He told me, what I had already learned, that the boundary line of the old Spanish grant was a creek, described in the loose phraseology of the deseno, as beginning in the valda, or skirt of the hill. Its precise location long the subject of litigation. I listened and answered with little interest, for my mind was still distracted by the wind which swept violently by the house, as well as by his odd face, which was again reflected in the resemblance that the silent group by the fire bore toward him. He was still talking, and the wind was yet blowing, when my confused attention was aroused by a remark addressed to the recumbent figures. Now then, which on yield see the stranger up the creek to al-taskar's tomorrow? There was a general movement of opposition in the group, but no decided answer. Can you go, Kurg? Who's to look up stock in Strawberry Pirari? This seemed to imply a negative, and the old man turned to another hopeful, who was pulling the fur from a mangy bearskin on which he was lying, with an expression as though it were somebody's hair. Well, Tom, what's to hinder you from going? Mam's going to Brown's store at Sunup, and I suppose I've got to pack her and the baby again. I think the expression of scorn, this unfortunate youth exhibited for the filial duty into which he had been evidently beguiled, was one of the finest things I had ever seen. Wise? Wise, deigned no verbal reply, but figuratively thrust a worn and patched boot into the discourse. The old man flushed quickly. I told ye to get Brown to give you a pair the last time you were down the river. Said he wouldn't, without an order. Said it was like pulling gum-teeth to get the money from you even then. There was a grim smile at this local hit at the old man's parsimony, and Wise, who was clearly the privileged wit of the family, sank back in honorable retirement. Well, Joe, if your boots are new and you aren't pestered with women and children, perhaps you'll go. Said Tryon, with a nervous twitching, intended for a smile about a mouth not remarkably mirthful. Tom lifted a pair of bushy eyebrows and said shortly, Got no saddle? What's gone of your saddle? Curg there, indicating his brother, with a look such as Cain, might have worn at the sacrifice. You lie, returned Curg cheerfully. Tryon sprang to his feet, seizing the chair, flourishing it around his head, and gazing furiously in the hard young faces which fearlessly met his own. But it was only for a moment. His arm soon dropped by his side, and a look of hopeless fatality crossed his face. He allowed me to take the chair from his hand, and I was trying to pacify him by the assurance that I required no guide when the irrepressible Wise again lifted his voice. There's George coming. Why don't you ask him? He'll go and introduce you to Don Fernandy's daughter, too, if you ain't particular. The laugh which followed this joke, which evidently had some domestic illusion, the general tendency of rural pleasantry, was followed by a life step on the platform, and the young man entered. Seeing a stranger present, he stopped and colored, made a shy salute and colored again, and then drawing a box from the corner sat down, his hands clasped lightly together, and his very handsome bright blue eyes turned frankly on mine. Perhaps I was in a condition to receive the romantic impression he made upon me, and I took it upon myself to ask his company as guide, and he cheerfully assented. But some domestic duty called him presently away. The fire gleamed brightly on the hearth, and no longer resisting the prevailing influence, I silently watched the spurting flame, listening to the wind which continually shook the tenement. Besides the one chair which had acquired a new importance in my eyes, I presently discovered a crazy table in one corner, with an ink bottle and pen, the latter in that greasy state of decomposition peculiar to country taverns and farmhouses. A goodly array of rifles and double-barreled guns stocked the corner. Half a dozen saddles and blankets lay near, with a mild flavor of the horse about them. Some deer and bearskins completed the inventory. As I sat there, with the silent group around me, the shadowy gloom within and the dominant wind without, I found it difficult to believe I had ever known a different existence. My profession had often led me to wilder scenes, but rarely among those whose unrestrained habits and easy unconsciousness made me feel so lonely and uncomfortable, I shrank closer to myself, not without grave doubts, which I think occur naturally to people in like situations, that this was the general rule of humanity, and I was a solitary and somewhat gratuitous exception. It was a relief when a laconic announcement of supper by a weak-eyed girl caused a general movement in the family. We walked across the dark platform which led to another low-sealed room. Its entire length was occupied by a table, at the farther end of which a weak-eyed woman was already taking her repast as she at the same time gave nourishment to a weak-eyed baby. As the formalities of introduction had been dispensed with, and as she took no notice of me, I was enabled to slip into a seat without discomposing or interrupting her. Tryon extemporized a grace, and the attention of the family became absorbed in bacon, potatoes, and dried apples. The meal was a sincere one. Gentle gurglings at the upper end of the table often betrayed the presence of the wellspring of pleasure. The conversation generally referred to the labours of the day, and comparing notes as to the whereabouts of missing stock. Yet the supper was such a vast improvement upon the previous intellectual feast that when a chance illusion of mine to the business of my visit brought out the elder Tryon, the interest grew quite exciting. I remember he invade bitterly against the system of ranch-holding by the greasers as he was pleased to term the native Californians. As the same ideas have been sometimes advanced under more pretentious circumstances, they may be worthy of record. Look at him holding the finest grazing land that ever lay out her doors. Wars the papers for it. Was it grants? Mighty fine grants. Most of them made art or the Americans got possession. More fools the Americans for letting them hold them. What paid for them? American and blood money. Didn't they otter have something out of their own native country? What for? Did they ever improve? Got a lot of yaller skin diggers, not so sensible as niggers to look hard or stock, and they are sitting home and smoking with their gold and silver candlesticks and missions and crucifixions, priests and graven idols and sitch. Them sort of things weren't allowed in Missouri. At the mention of improvements I involuntarily lifted my eyes and met the half- laughing, half-embarassed look of George. The act did not escape detection, and I had at once the satisfaction of seeing that the rest of the family had formed an offensive alliance against us. It was again nature and again God, added Tryon. God never intended gold in the rocks to be made into heath and candlesticks and crucifixions. That's why he sent Americans here. Nature never intended such a climate for lazy lopers. She never again six months sunshine to be slept and smoked away. How long he continued, and with what further illustration I could not say, for I took an early opportunity to escape to the sitting-room. I was soon followed by George, who called me to an open door leading to a smaller room and pointed to a bed. You'd better sleep there to-night, he said. You'll be more comfortable, and I'll call you early. I thanked him and would have asked him several questions which were then troubling me, but he shyly slipped into the door and vanished. A shadow seemed to fall on the room when he had gone. The boys returned, one by one, and shuffled to their old places. A larger log was thrown on the fire, and the huge chimney glowed like a furnace, but it did not seem to melt or subdue a single line of the hard faces that it lit. In half an hour later, the furs which had served as chairs by day undertook the nightly office of mattresses, and each received its owner's full-length figure. Mr. Tryon had not returned, and I missed George. I sat there until, wakeful and nervous, I saw the fire fall and the shadows mount the wall. There was no sound but the rushing of the wind and the snoring of the sleepers. At last, feeling the place insupportable, I seized my hat and opening the door ran out briskly into the night. The acceleration of my torpid pulse in the keen fight with the wind, whose violence was almost equal to that of a tornado, and the familiar faces of the bright stars above me, I felt as a blessed relief. I ran not knowing wither, and when I halted the square outline of the house was lost in the older bushes. An uninterrupted plane stretched before me, like a vast sea beaten flat by the force of the gale. As I kept on, I noticed a slight elevation toward the horizon, and presently my progress was impeded by the ascent of an Indian mound. It struck me forcibly as resembling an island in the sea. Its height gave me a better view of the expanding plain. But even here I found no rest. The ridiculous interpretation Tryon had given the climate was somehow sung in my ears, and echoed in my throbbing pulse as, guided by the star, I sought the house again. But I felt fresher and more natural as I stepped upon the platform. The door of the lower building was open, and the old man was sitting beside the table, thumbing the leaves of a Bible with a look in his face as though he were hunting up prophecies against the greaser. I turned to enter, but my attention was attracted by a blanketed figure lying beside the house on the platform. The broad chest heaving with healthy slumber and the open, honest face were familiar. It was George who had given up his bed to the stranger among his people. I was about to wake him, but he lay so peaceful and quiet I felt odd and hushed. And I went to bed with a pleasant impression of his handsome face and tranquil figure soothing me to sleep. I was awakened the next morning from a sense of lulled repose and grateful silence by the cheery voice of George, who stood beside my bed ostentatiously twirling a riata as if to recall the duties of the day to my sleep bewildered eyes. I looked around me. The wind had been magically laid and the sun shone to recall the duties of the day to my sleep bewildered eyes. I looked warmly through the windows. A dash of cold water with an extra chill on from the tin basin helped to brighten me. It was still early, but the family had already breakfasted and dispersed, and a wagon winding far in the distance showed that the unfortunate Tom had already packed his relatives away. I felt more cheerful. There are few troubled youth cannot distance with the start of a good night's rest. After a substantial breakfast, prepared by George, in a few moments we were mounted and dashing down the plain. We followed the line of alder that defined the creek, now dry and baked with summer's heat, but which in winter, George told me, overflowed its banks. I still retain a vivid impression of that morning's ride. The far-off mountains, like silhouettes against the steel-blue sky, the crisp dry air, and the expanding track before me, animated often by the well-knit figure of George Tryon, musical with jingling spurs and picturesque with flying riata. He rode powerful native ron, wild-eyed, untiring in stride and unbroken in nature, alas, the curves of beauty were concealed by the cumbrous maquillas of the Spanish saddle which levels all equine distinctions. The single rain lay loosely on the cruel bit that can gripe, and if need be, crush the jaw it controls. Again the illimitable freedom of the valley rises before me, as we again bear down into sunlit space. Can this be Choo-Choo? Stayed and respectable filly of American pedigree? Choo-Choo? Forgetful of plank roads and cobblestones, wild with excitement, twinkling her small white feet beneath me? George laughs out a cloud of dust. Give her her head! Don't you see she likes it? And Choo-Choo seems to like it. And whether bitten by native tarantula into native barbarism or emulous of the ron, blood asserts itself, and in a moment the peaceful servitude of years is beaten out in the music of her clattering hoofs. The creek widens to a deep golly. We dive into it, and up on the opposite side, carrying a moving cloud of impalpable powder with us. Cattle are scattered over the plain, grazing quietly or banded together in vast restless herds. George makes a wide, indefinite sweep with Riata as if to include them all in his vaquero's loop, and says, Ours! About how many, George? Don't know. How many? Well, perhaps three thousand head, says George, reflecting. We don't know. Takes five men to look them up and keep run. What are they worth? About thirty dollars ahead? I make a rapid calculation and look my astonishment at the laughing George. Perhaps a recollection of the domestic economy of the Tryon household is expressed in that look, for George averts his eyes and says apologetically, I've tried to get the old man to sell and build, but you know he says it ain't no use to settle down just yet. We must keep moving. In fact, he built the shanty for that purpose. Less titles should fall through and we'd have to get up and move stakes further down. Suddenly his quick eye detects some unusual sight in a herd we are passing. And with an exclamation he puts his ron into the center of the mass. I follow, or rather Chuchu darts after the ron, and in a few moments we are in the midst of the apparently inextricable horns and hoofs. Toro! shouts George with vaquero enthusiasm, and the band opens away for the swinging riata. I can feel their steaming breaths and their spume is cast on Chuchu's quivering flank. Wild devilish-looking beasts are they. Not such shapes as Jove might have chosen to woo a goddess, nor such as peacefully range the downs of Devon. But lean and hungry Cassius-like bovines economically got up to meet the exigencies of a six-months rainless climate and accustomed to wrestle with the distracting wind and the blinding dust. That's not our brand, says George. They're strange stock. And he points to what my scientific eye recognizes as the astrological sign of Venus, deeply seared in the brown flanks of the bowl he is chasing. But the herd are closing round us with low mutterings, and George has again recourse to the authoritative Toro, and with swinging riata divides the bossy bucklers on either side. When we are free and breathing somewhat more easily, I venture to ask George if they ever attack anyone. Never horsemen, sometimes footmen, not through rage, you know, but curiosity. They think a man and his horse are one, and if they meet a chap afoot they run him down and trample him under hoof in the pursuit of knowledge. But, adds George, here's the lower bench of the foothills, and here's all Tosca's corral, and that white building you see yonder is the Casa. A whitewashed wall enclosed a court containing another adobe building, baked with the solar beams of many summers. Leaving our horses in the charge of a few peons in the courtyard who were basking lazily in the sun, we entered a low doorway, where a deep shadow and an agreeable coolness fell upon us, as sudden and grateful as a plunge in cool water from its contrast with the external glare and heat. In the center of a low-sealed apartment sat an old man with a black silk handkerchief tied about his head, the few gray hairs that escaped from its folds relieving his gamboge-colored face. The odor of cigarritos was as incense added to the cathedral gloom of the building. As Sr. Al Tosca rose with well-bred gravity to receive us, George advanced with such a heightened color and such a blending of tenderness and respect in his manner that I was touched to the heart by so much devotion in the careless youth. In fact, my eyes were still dazzled by the effect of the outer sunshine, and at first I did not see the white teeth and black eyes of Pepita, who slipped into the corridor as we entered. It was no pleasant matter to disclose particulars of business which would deprive the old senior of the greater part of that land we had just ridden over, and I did it with great embarrassment. But he listened calmly, not a muscle of his dark-faced stirring, and the smoke curling placidly from his lips showed his regular respiration. When I had finished, he offered quietly to accompany us to the line of demarcation. George had meanwhile disappeared, but a suspicious conversation in broken Spanish and English in the corridor betrayed his vicinity. When he returned again, a little absent-minded, the old man by far the coolest and most self-possessed of the party extinguished his black silk cap beneath that stiff, uncomblisome brero which all native Californians effect. A sarape thrown over his shoulders hinted that he was waiting. Horses are always ready, saddled in Spanish ranchos, and in half an hour from the time of our arrival we were again loping in the staring sunlight. But not as cheerfully as before. George and myself were weighed down by restraint, and Altaascar was gravely quiet. To break the silence, and by way of a consolatory assay, I hinted to him that there might be further intervention or appeal. But the proffered oil and wine were returned with a careless shrug of the shoulders and a sententious, que bueno, your courts are always just. The Indian mound of the previous night's discovery was a bearing monument of the new line, and there we halted. We were surprised to find the old man try in waiting us. For the first time during our interview, the old Spaniard seemed moved, and the blood rose in his yellow cheek. I was anxious to close the scene, and pointed out the corner boundaries as clearly as my recollection served. The deputies will be here tomorrow to run the lines from this initial point, and there will be no further trouble, I believe, gentlemen. Signor Altaascar had dismounted, and was gathering a few tufts of dried grass in his hands. George and I exchanged glances. He presently arose from his stooping posture, and advancing to within a few paces of Joseph Tryon said, in a voice broken with passion, and I, Fernando Jesus Maria Altaascar, put you in possession of my land in the fashion of my country. He threw a sod to each of the cardinal points. I don't know your courts, your judges, or your core guidores. Take the liano, and take this with it. May the drought seize your cattle till their tongues hang down as long as those of your lying lawyers. May it be the curse and torment of your old age, as you and yours have made eat of mine. We stepped between the principal actors in this scene, which only the passion of Altaascar made tragical, but Tryon, with a humility but ill concealing his triumph, interrupted. Let him curse on. He'll find him coming home to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side of the just, as well as again all slanders and revilers. Altaascar but half guessed the meaning of the Missourian, yet sufficiently to drive from his mind all but the extravagant power of his native invective. Stealer of the sacrament, open not. Open not, I say, your line, you thus leaps to me. Ah, half breed, with the soul of a coyote, caramba. With his passion reverberating among the consonants like distant thunder, he laid his hand upon the mane of his horse, as though it had been the gray locks of his adversary, swung himself into the saddle, and galloped away. George turned to me. Will you go back with us tonight? I thought of the cheerless walls, the silent figures by the fire, and the roaring wind, and hesitated. Well, then, good-bye. Good-bye, George. Another ring of the hands, and we parted. I had not ridden far when I turned and looked back. The wind had risen early that afternoon, and was already sweeping across the plane. A cloud of dust traveled before it, and a picturesque figure occasionally merging therefrom was my last indistinct impression of George Tryon. End of Part One of Notes by Flood and Field