From Sand Hill to Pine. Bret Harte
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was silent for a moment, and he could only see the back of her head and its heavy brown coils. After a pause she asked abruptly, “Where’s your handkerchief?”
He took it from his pocket; her ingenious uncle’s bullet had torn rather than pierced the cambric.
“I thought so,” she said, gravely examining it, “but I kin mend it as good as new. I reckon you allow I can’t sew,” she continued, “but I do heaps of mendin’, as the digger squaw and Chinamen we have here do only the coarser work. I’ll send it back to you, and meanwhiles you keep mine.”
She drew a handkerchief from her pocket and handed it to him. To his great surprise it was a delicate one, beautifully embroidered, and utterly incongruous to her station. The idea that flashed upon him, it is to be feared, showed itself momentarily in his hesitation and embarrassment.
She gave a quick laugh. “Don’t be frightened. It’s bought and paid for. Uncle Harry don’t touch passengers’ fixin’s; that ain’t his style. You oughter know that.” Yet in spite of her laugh, he could see the sensitive pout of her lower lip.
“I was only thinking,” he said hurriedly and sympathetically, “that it was too fine for me. But I will be proud to keep it as a souvenir of you. It’s not too pretty for THAT!”
“Uncle gets me these things. He don’t keer what they cost,” she went on, ignoring the compliment. “Why, I’ve got awfully fine gowns up there that I only wear when I go to Marysville oncet in a while.”
“Does he take you there?” asked Brice.
“No!” she answered quietly. “Not”—a little defiantly—“that he’s afeard, for they can’t prove anything against him; no man kin swear to him, and thar ain’t an officer that keers to go for him. But he’s that shy for ME he don’t keer to have me mixed with him.”
“But nobody recognizes you?”
“Sometimes—but I don’t keer for that.” She cocked her hat a little audaciously, but Brice noticed that her arms afterwards dropped at her side with the same weary gesture he had observed before. “Whenever I go into shops it’s always ‘Yes, miss,’ and ‘No, miss,’ and ‘Certainly, Miss Dimwood.’ Oh, they’re mighty respectful. I reckon they allow that Snapshot Harry’s rifle carries far.”
Presently she faced him again, for their conversation had been carried on in profile. There was a critical, searching look in her brown eyes.
“Here I’m talkin’ to you as if you were one”—Mr. Brice was positive she was going to say “one of the gang,” but she hesitated and concluded, “one of my relations—like cousin Hiram.”
“I wish you would think of me as being as true a friend,” said the young man earnestly.
She did not reply immediately, but seemed to be examining the distance. They were not far from the canyon now, and the river bank. A fringe of buckeyes hid the base of the mountain, which had begun to tower up above them to the invisible stage road overhead. “I am going to be a real guide to you now,” she said suddenly. “When we reach that buckeye corner and are out of sight, we will turn into it instead of going through the canyon. You shall go up the mountain to the stage road, from THIS side.”
“But it is impossible!” he exclaimed, in astonishment. “Your uncle said so.”
“Coming DOWN, but not going up,” she returned, with a laugh. “I found it, and no one knows it but myself.”
He glanced up at the towering cliff; its nearly perpendicular flanks were seamed with fissures, some clefts deeply set with stunted growths of thorn and “scrub,” but still sheer and forbidding, and then glanced back at her incredulously. “I will show you,” she said, answering his look with a smile of triumph. “I haven’t tramped over this whole valley for nothing! But wait until we reach the river bank. They must think that we’ve gone through the canyon.”
“They?
“Yes—any one who is watching us,” said the girl dryly.
A few steps further on brought them to the buckeye thicket, which extended to the river bank and mouth of the canyon. The girl lingered for a moment ostentatiously before it, and then, saying “Come,” suddenly turned at right angles into the thicket. Brice followed, and the next moment they were hidden by its friendly screen from the valley. On the other side rose the mountain wall, leaving a narrow trail before them. It was composed of the rocky debris and fallen trees of the cliff, from which buckeyes and larches were now springing. It was uneven, irregular, and slowly ascending; but the young girl led the way with the free footstep of a mountaineer, and yet a grace that was akin to delicacy. Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl’s fashion, she was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude and rustic surroundings. It was the same slim shoe-print which had guided him that morning. Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing curiously at the cliff side. Brice followed the direction of her eyes. On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly wind was flapping heavily, like a raven’s wing, or as if still saturated with the last night’s rain. “That’s mighty queer!” said Flo, gazing intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which had a vague, weird suggestion. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”
“It looks like a man’s coat,” remarked Brice uneasily.
“Whew!” said the girl. “Then somebody has come down who won’t go up again! There’s a lot of fresh rocks and brush here, too. What’s that?” She was pointing to a spot some yards before them where there had been a recent precipitation of debris and uprooted shrubs. But mingled with it lay a mass of rags strangely akin to the tattered remnant that flagged from the bush a hundred feet above them. The girl suddenly uttered a sharp feminine cry of mingled horror and disgust,—the first weakness of sex she had shown,—and, recoiling, grasped Brice’s arm. “Don’t go there! Come away!”
But Brice had already seen that which, while it shocked him, was urging him forward with an invincible fascination. Gently releasing himself, and bidding the girl stand back, he moved toward the unsightly heap. Gradually it disclosed a grotesque caricature of a human figure, but so maimed and doubled up that it seemed a stuffed and fallen scarecrow. As is common in men stricken suddenly down by accident in the fullness of life, the clothes asserted themselves before all else with a hideous ludicrousness, obliterating even the majesty of death in their helpless yet ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the wearer, but to have been assumed in ghastly jocularity,—a boot half off the swollen foot, a ripped waistcoat thrown over the shoulder, were like the properties of some low comedian. At first the body appeared to be headless; but as Brice cleared away the debris and lifted it, he saw with horror that the head was twisted under the shoulder, and swung helplessly from the dislocated neck. But that horror gave way to a more intense and thrilling emotion as he saw the face—although strangely free from laceration or disfigurement, and impurpled and distended into the simulation of a self-complacent smile—was a face he recognized! It was the face of the cynical traveler in the coach—the man who he was now satisfied had robbed it.
A strange and selfish resentment took possession of him. Here was the man through whom he had suffered shame and peril, and who even now seemed complacently victorious in death. He examined him closely; his coat and waistcoat had been partly torn away in his fall; his shirt still clung to him, but through its torn front could be seen a heavy treasure belt encircling his waist. Forgetting his disgust, Brice tore away the shirt and unloosed the belt. It was saturated with water like the rest of the clothing, but its pocket seemed heavy and distended. In another instant he had opened it, and discovered the envelope containing the packet of greenbacks, its seal still inviolate and unbroken. It was the stolen treasure!
A faint sigh recalled him to himself. The girl was standing a few feet from him, regarding him curiously.
“It’s the thief himself!” he said, in a breathless explanation. “In trying to escape he must have fallen from the road above. But here are the greenbacks safe! We must go back to your uncle at once,” he said excitedly.