Frontier Stories. Bret Harte
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shirt."
Meantime, the seasons did not wait the discovery of the secret. The red pools in Blazing Star highway were soon dried up in the fervent June sun and riotous night winds of those altitudes. The ephemeral grasses that had quickly supplanted these pools and the chocolate-colored mud, were as quickly parched and withered. The footprints of spring became vague and indefinite, and were finally lost in the impalpable dust of the summer highway.
In one of his long, aimless excursions, Cass had penetrated a thick undergrowth of buckeye and hazel, and found himself quite unexpectedly upon the high road to Red Chief's Crossing. Cass knew by the lurid cloud of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He had already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again, as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.
"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"
Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.
"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went on. "Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."
In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain kind of pleased curiosity.
"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,—and,"—leading him along at a brisk trot by her side,—"just here, look, see! this is what I found."
It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only stare at it blankly.
"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look there!"
Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles to the sky. It was a dead man! So palpably dead that life seemed to have taken flight from his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and degraded by them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would have been less insulting to humanity. The head had fallen back, and was partly hidden in a gopher burrow, but the white, upturned face and closed eyes had less of helpless death in them than those wretched enwrappings. Indeed, one limp hand that lay across the swollen abdomen lent itself to the grotesquely hideous suggestion of a gentleman sleeping off the excesses of a hearty dinner.
"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"
Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt collar, and matted hair, proved the only record.
"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to relinquish his burden. "Maybe you'll find another wound."
But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a present inquest.
"Perhaps you'd better ride on, Miss, afore you get summoned as a witness. I'll give warning at Red Chief's Crossing, and send the coroner down here."
"Let me go with you," she said, earnestly; "it would be such fun. I don't mind being a witness. Or," she added, without heeding Cass's look of astonishment, "I'll wait here till you come back."
"But you see, Miss, it wouldn't seem right"—began Cass.
"But I found him first," interrupted the girl, with a pout.
Staggered by this preemptive right, sacred to all miners, Cass stopped.
"Who is the coroner?" she asked.
"Joe Hornsby."
"The tall, lame man, who was half eaten by a grizzly?"
"Yes."
"Well, look now! I'll ride on and bring him back in half an hour. There!"
"But, Miss—!"
"Oh, don't mind me. I never saw anything of this kind before, and I want to see it all."
"Do you know Hornsby?" asked Cass, unconsciously a trifle irritated.
"No, but I'll bring him." She wheeled her horse into the road.
In the presence of this living energy Cass quite forgot the helpless dead. "Have you been long in these parts, Miss?" he asked.
"About two weeks," she answered, shortly. "Good-by, just now. Look around for the pistol or anything else you can find, although I have been over the whole ground twice already."
A little puff of dust as the horse sprang into the road, a muffled shuffle, struggle, then the regular beat of hoofs, and she was gone.
After five minutes had passed, Cass regretted that he had not accompanied her: waiting in such a spot was an irksome task. Not that there was anything in the scene itself to awaken gloomy imaginings; the bright, truthful Californian sunshine scoffed at any illusion of creeping shadows or waving branches. Once, in the rising wind, the empty hat rolled over—but only in a ludicrous, drunken way. A search for any further sign or token had proved futile, and Cass grew impatient. He began to hate himself for having stayed; he would have fled but for shame. Nor was his good-humor restored when at the close of a weary half hour two galloping figures emerged from the dusty horizon—Hornsby and the young girl.
His vague annoyance increased as he fancied that both seemed to ignore him, the coroner barely acknowledging his presence with a nod. Assisted by the young girl, whose energy and enthusiasm evidently delighted him, Hornsby raised the body for a more careful examination. The dead man's pockets were carefully searched. A few coins, a silver pencil, knife, and tobacco-box were all they found. It gave no clew to his identity. Suddenly the young girl, who had, with unabashed curiosity, knelt beside the exploring official hands of the Red Chief, uttered a cry of gratification.
"Here's something! It dropped from the bosom of his shirt on the ground. Look!"
She was holding in the air, between her thumb and forefinger, a folded bit of well-worn newspaper. Her eyes sparkled.
"Shall I open it?" she asked.
"Yes."
"It's a little ring," she said; "looks like an engagement ring. Something is written on it. Look! 'May to Cass.'"
Cass darted forward. "It's mine," he stammered, "mine! I dropped it. It's nothing—nothing," he went on, after a pause, embarrassed and blushing, as the girl and her companion both stared at him—"a mere trifle. I'll take it."
But the coroner opposed his outstretched hand. "Not much," he said, significantly.
"But it's mine," continued Cass, indignation taking the place of shame at his discovered secret. "I found it six months ago in the road. I—picked it up."
"With your name already written on it! How handy!" said the coroner, grimly.
"It's an old story," said Cass, blushing again under the half mischievous, half searching eyes of the girl. "All Blazing Star knows I found it."
"Then ye'll have no difficulty in provin' it," said Hornsby, coolly. "Just now, however, we've found it, and we propose to keep it for the inquest."
Cass shrugged his shoulders. Further altercation