Essential Novelists - Bret Harte. Bret Harte
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have a nice dolly?"
Olly opened her wide hungry eyes in hopeful anticipation and nodded assent.
"A nice dolly, with real mamma," he continued, "who plays with it like a true baby. Would ye like to help her play with it?"
The idea of a joint partnership of this kind evidently pleased Olly by its novelty.
"Well then, brother Gabe will get you one. But Gracie will have to go away, so that the doll's mamma kin come."
Olly at first resented this, but eventually succumbed to novelty, after the fashion of her sex, starving or otherwise. Yet she prudently asked—
"Is it ever hungry?"
"It is never hungry," replied Gabriel, confidently.
"Oh!" said Olly, with an air of relief.
Then Gabriel, the cunning, sought Mrs. Dumphy, the mentally alienated.
"You are jest killin' of yourself with the tendin' o' that child," he said, after bestowing a caress on the blanket and slightly pinching an imaginary cheek of the effigy. "It would be likelier and stronger fur a playmate. Good gracious! how thin it is gettin'. A change will do it good; fetch it to Olly, and let her help you to tend it until—until—to-morrow." To-morrow was the extreme limit of Mrs. Dumphy's future.
So Mrs. Dumphy and her effigy were installed in Gracie's place, and Olly was made happy. A finer nature or a more active imagination than Gabriel's would have revolted at this monstrous combination; but Gabriel only saw that they appeared contented, and the first pressing difficulty of Gracie's absence was overcome. So alternately they took care of the effigy, the child simulating the cares of the future and losing the present in them, the mother living in the memories of the past. Perhaps it might have been pathetic to have seen Olly and Mrs. Dumphy both saving the infinitesimal remnants of their provisions for the doll, but the only spectator was one of the actors, Gabriel, who lent himself to the deception; and pathos, to be effective, must be viewed from the outside.
At noon that day the hysterical young man, Gabriel's cousin, died. Gabriel went over to the other hut and endeavoured to cheer the survivors. He succeeded in infecting them so far with his hopefulness as to loosen the tongue and imagination of the story-teller, but at four o'clock the body had not yet been buried. It was evening, and the three were sitting over the embers, when a singular change came over Mrs. Dumphy. The effigy suddenly slipped from her hands, and looking up, Gabriel perceived that her arms had dropped to her side, and that her eyes were fixed on vacancy. He spoke to her, but she made no sign nor response of any kind. He touched her and found her limbs rigid and motionless. Olly began to cry.
The sound seemed to agitate Mrs. Dumphy. Without moving a limb, she said, in a changed, unnatural voice, "Hark!"
Olly choked her sobs at a sign from Gabriel.
"They're coming!" said Mrs. Dumphy.
"Which?" said Gabriel.
"The relief party."
"Where?"
"Far, far away. They're jest setting out. I see 'em—a dozen men with pack horses and provisions. The leader is an American—the others are strangers. They're coming—but far, oh, so far away!"
Gabriel fixed his eyes upon her, but did not speak. After a death-like pause, she went on—
"The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the grass is springing where they ride—but, oh, so far—too far away!"
"Do you know them?" asked Gabriel.
"No."
"Do they know us?"
"No."
"Why do they come, and how do they know where we are?" asked Gabriel.
"Their leader has seen us."
"Where?"
"In a dream."[1]
Gabriel whistled and looked at the rag baby. He was willing to recognise something abnormal, and perhaps even prophetic, in this insane woman; but a coincident exaltation in a stranger who was not suffering from the illusions produced by starvation was beyond his credulity. Nevertheless, the instincts of good humour and hopefulness were stronger, and he presently asked—
"How will they come?"
"Up through a beautiful valley and a broad shining river. Then they will cross a mountain until they come to another beautiful valley with steep sides, and a rushing river that runs so near us that I can almost hear it now. Don't you see it? It is just beyond the snow peak there; a green valley, with the rain falling upon it. Look! it is there."
She pointed directly north, toward the region of inhospitable snow.
"Could you get to it?" asked the practical Gabriel.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I must wait here for my baby. She is coming for us. She will find me here."
"When?"
"To-morrow."
It was the last time that she uttered that well-worn sentence; for it was only a little past midnight that her baby came to her—came to her with a sudden light, that might have been invisible to Gabriel, but that it was reflected in her own lack-lustre eyes—came to this poor half-witted creature with such distinctness that she half rose, stretched out her thin yearning arms, and received it—a corpse! Gabriel placed the effigy in her arms and folded them over it. Then he ran swiftly to the other hut. For some unexplained reason he did not get further than the door. What he saw there he has never told; but when he groped his fainting way back to his own hut again, his face was white and bloodless, and his eyes wild and staring. Only one impulse remained—to fly for ever from the cursed spot. He stopped only long enough to snatch up the sobbing and frightened Olly, and then, with a loud cry to God to help him—to help them—he dashed out, and was lost in the darkness.
CHAPTER IV. NATURE SHOWS THEM THE WAY.
It was a spur of the long grave-like ridge that lay to the north of the cañon. Up its gaunt white flank two figures had been slowly crawling since noon, until at sunset they at last stood upon its outer verge outlined against the sky—Philip and Grace.
For all the fatigues of the journey, the want of nourishing food and the haunting shadow of the suffering she had left, the face of Grace, flushed with the dying sun, was very pretty. The boy's dress she had borrowed was ill-fitting, and made her exquisite little figure still more diminutive, but it could not entirely hide its graceful curves. Here in this rosy light the swooning fringes of her dark eyes were no longer hidden; the perfect oval of her face, even the few freckles on her short upper lip, were visible to Philip. Partly as a physical support, partly to reassure her, he put his arm tenderly around her waist. Then he kissed her. It is possible that this last act was purely gratuitous.
Howbeit Grace first asked, with the characteristic prudence of her sex, the question she had already asked many days before that day, "Do you love me, Philip?" And Philip, with the ready frankness of our sex on such occasions, had invariably replied, "I do."
Nevertheless the young man was pre-occupied, anxious, and hungry. It was the fourth day since they had left the hut. On the second day they had found some pine cones with the nuts still intact and fresh beneath the snow, and later a squirrel's hoard. On the third day Philip had killed the proprietor and eaten him. The same evening Philip had espied a duck winging his way up the cañon. Philip, strong in the belief that some inland lake was the immediate object of its flight, had first marked its course, and then brought it down with a long shot. Then having altered their course in accordance with it suggestion, they ate their guide next morning for breakfast.
Philip was also disappointed. The summit of the spur so laboriously attained only showed him the same endless succession of white snow billows stretching rigidly to the horizon's edge. There was no break—no glimpse of watercourse or