The Three Partners. Bret Harte
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They were silent for a few moments, and then seemed to have fallen into their former dreamy mood as they relapsed into their old seats again. At last Stacy drew a long breath. “I wish we had sent those nuggets off with the others this morning.”
“Why?” said Demorest suddenly.
“Why? Well, d—n it all! they kind of oppress me, don’t you see. I seem to feel ‘em here, on my chest—all the three,” returned Stacy only half jocularly. “It’s their d——d specific gravity, I suppose. I don’t like the idea of sleeping in the same room with ‘em. They’re altogether too much for us three men to be left alone with.”
“You don’t mean that you think that anybody would attempt”—said Demorest.
Stacy curled a fighting lip rather superciliously. “No; I don’t think THAT—I rather wish I did. It’s the blessed chunks of solid gold that seem to have got US fast, don’t you know, and are going to stick to us for good or ill. A sort of Frankenstein monster that we’ve picked out of a hole from below.”
“I know just what Stacy means,” said Barker breathlessly, rounding his gray eyes. “I’ve felt it, too. Couldn’t we make a sort of cache of it—bury it just outside the cabin for to-night? It would be sort of putting it back into its old place, you know, for the time being. IT might like it.”
The other two laughed. “Rather rough on Providence, Barker boy,” said Stacy, “handing back the Heaven-sent gift so soon! Besides, what’s to keep any prospector from coming along and making a strike of it? You know that’s mining law—if you haven’t preempted the spot as a claim.”
But Barker was too staggered by this material statement to make any reply, and Demorest arose. “And I feel that you’d both better be turning in, as we’ve got to get up early.” He went to the corner of the cabin, and threw the blanket back over the pan and its treasure. “There that’ll keep the chunks from getting up to ride astride of you like a nightmare.” He shut the door and gave a momentary glance at its cheap hinges and the absence of bolt or bar. Stacy caught his eye. “We’ll miss this security in San Francisco—perhaps even in Boomville,” he sighed.
It was scarcely ten o’clock, but Stacy and Barker had begun to undress themselves with intervals of yawning and desultory talk, Barker continuing an amusing story, with one stocking off and his trousers hanging on his arm, until at last both men were snugly curled up in their respective bunks. Presently Stacy’s voice came from under the blankets:—
“Hallo! aren’t you going to turn in too?”
“Not yet,” said Demorest from his chair before the fire. “You see it’s the last night in the old shanty, and I reckon I’ll see the rest of it out.”
“That’s so,” said the impulsive Barker, struggling violently with his blankets. “I tell you what, boys: we just ought to make a watch-night of it—a regular vigil, you know—until twelve at least. Hold on! I’ll get up, too!” But here Demorest arose, caught his youthful partner’s bare foot which went searching painfully for the ground in one hand, tucked it back under the blankets, and heaping them on the top of him, patted the bulk with an authoritative, paternal air.
“You’ll just say your prayers and go to sleep, sonny. You’ll want to be fresh as a daisy to appear before Miss Kitty to-morrow early, and you can keep your vigils for to-morrow night, after dinner, in the back drawing-room. I said ‘Good-night,’ and I mean it!”
Protesting feebly, Barker finally yielded in a nestling shiver and a sudden silence. Demorest walked back to his chair. A prolonged snore came from Stacy’s bunk; then everything was quiet. Demorest stirred up the fire, cast a huge root upon it, and, leaning back in his chair, sat with half-closed eyes and dreamed.
It was an old dream that for the past three years had come to him daily, sometimes even overtaking him under the shade of a buckeye in his noontide rest on his claim,—a dream that had never yet failed to wait for him at night by the fireside when his partners were at rest; a dream of the past, but so real that it always made the present seem the dream through which he was moving towards some sure awakening.
It was not strange that it should come to him to-night, as it had often come before, slowly shaping itself out of the obscurity as the vision of a fair young girl seated in one of the empty chairs before him. Always the same pretty, childlike face, fraught with a half-frightened, half-wondering trouble; always the same slender, graceful figure, but always glimmering in diamonds and satin, or spiritual in lace and pearls, against his own rude and sordid surroundings; always silent with parted lips, until the night wind smote some chord of recollection, and then mingled a remembered voice with his own. For at those times he seemed to speak also, albeit with closed lips, and an utterance inaudible to all but her.
“Well?” he said sadly.
“Well?” the voice repeated, like a gentle echo blending with his own.
“You know it all now,” he went on. “You know that it has come at last,—all that I had worked for, prayed for; all that would have made us happy here; all that would have saved you to me has come at last, and all too late!”
“Too late!” echoed the voice with his.
“You remember,” he went on, “the last day we were together. You remember your friends and family would have you give me up—a penniless man. You remember when they reproached you with my poverty, and told you that it was only your wealth that I was seeking, that I then determined to go away and never to return to claim you until that reproach could be removed. You remember, dearest, how you clung to me and bade me stay with you, even fly with you, but not to leave you alone with them. You wore the same dress that day, darling; your eyes had the same wondering childlike fear and trouble in them; your jewels glittered on you as you trembled, and I refused. In my pride, or rather in my weakness and cowardice, I refused. I came away and broke my heart among these rocks and ledges, yet grew strong; and you, my love, YOU, sheltered and guarded by those you loved, YOU”—He stopped and buried his face in his hands. The night wind breathed down the chimney, and from the stirred ashes on the hearth came the soft whisper, “I died.”
“And then,” he went on, “I cared for nothing. Sometimes my heart awoke for this young partner of mine in his innocent, trustful love for a girl that even in her humble station was far beyond his hopes, and I pitied myself in him. Home, fortune, friends, I no longer cared for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to come. Too late! Too late!”
The wondering, troubled eyes that had looked into his here appeared to clear and brighten with a sweet prescience. Was it the wind moaning in the chimney that seemed to whisper to him: “Too late, beloved, for ME, but not for you. I died, but Love still lives. Be happy, Philip. And in your happiness I too may live again”?
He started. In the flickering firelight the chair was empty. The wind that had swept down the chimney had stirred the ashes with a sound like the passage of a rustling skirt. There was a chill in the air and a smell like that of opened earth. A nervous shiver passed over him. Then he sat upright. There was no mistake; it was no superstitious fancy, but a faint, damp current of air was actually flowing across his feet towards the fireplace. He was about to rise when he stopped suddenly and became motionless.
He was actively conscious now of a strange sound which had affected him even in the preoccupation of his vision. It was a gentle brushing of some yielding substance like that made by a soft broom on sand, or the sweep of a gown. But to his mountain ears, attuned to every woodland sound, it was not like the gnawing of gopher or squirrel, the scratching of wildcat, nor the hairy rubbing of bear. Nor was it human; the long, deep respirations of his sleeping companions were distinct from that monotonous sound. He could not even tell if it were IN the cabin or without. Suddenly his eye fell upon the pile in the corner. The blanket that covered the treasure was actually moving!
He