A WAIF OF THE PLAINS

by Bret Harte




CHAPTER I


A long level of dull gray that further away became a faint blue,
with here and there darker patches that looked like water.  At
times an open space, blackened and burnt in an irregular circle,
with a shred of newspaper, an old rag, or broken tin can lying in
the ashes.  Beyond these always a low dark line that seemed to sink
into the ground at night, and rose again in the morning with the
first light, but never otherwise changed its height and distance.
A sense of always moving with some indefinite purpose, but of
always returning at night to the same place--with the same
surroundings, the same people, the same bedclothes, and the same
awful black canopy dropped down from above.  A chalky taste of dust
on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and
an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle.

This was "The Great Plains" as they seemed to two children from the
hooded depth of an emigrant wagon, above the swaying heads of
toiling oxen, in the summer of 1852.

It had appeared so to them for two weeks, always the same and
always without the least sense to them of wonder or monotony.  When
they viewed it from the road, walking beside the wagon, there was
only the team itself added to the unvarying picture.  One of the
wagons bore on its canvas hood the inscription, in large black
letters, "Off to California!" on the other "Root, Hog, or Die," but
neither of them awoke in the minds of the children the faintest
idea of playfulness or jocularity.  Perhaps it was difficult to
connect the serious men, who occasionally walked beside them and
seemed to grow more taciturn and depressed as the day wore on, with
this past effusive pleasantry.

Yet the impressions of the two children differed slightly.  The
eldest, a boy of eleven, was apparently new to the domestic habits
and customs of a life to which the younger, a girl of seven, was
evidently native and familiar.  The food was coarse and less
skillfully prepared than that to which he had been accustomed.
There was a certain freedom and roughness in their intercourse, a
simplicity that bordered almost on rudeness in their domestic
arrangements, and a speech that was at times almost untranslatable
to him.  He slept in his clothes, wrapped up in blankets; he was
conscious that in the matter of cleanliness he was left to himself
to overcome the difficulties of finding water and towels.  But it
is doubtful if in his youthfulness it affected him more than a
novelty.  He ate and slept well, and found his life amusing.  Only
at times the rudeness of his companions, or, worse, an indifference
that made him feel his dependency upon them, awoke a vague sense of
some wrong that had been done to him which while it was voiceless
to all others and even uneasily put aside by himself, was still
always slumbering in his childish consciousness.

To the party he was known as an orphan put on the train at "St. Jo"
by some relative of his stepmother, to be delivered to another
relative at Sacramento.  As his stepmother had not even taken leave
of him, but had entrusted his departure to the relative with whom
he had been lately living, it was considered as an act of
"riddance," and accepted as such by her party, and even vaguely
acquiesced in by the boy himself.  What consideration had been
offered for his passage he did not know; he only remembered that he
had been told "to make himself handy."  This he had done
cheerfully, if at times with the unskillfulness of a novice; but it
was not a peculiar or a menial task in a company where all took
part in manual labor, and where existence seemed to him to bear the
charm of a prolonged picnic.  Neither was he subjected to any
difference of affection or treatment from Mrs. Silsbee, the mother
of his little companion, and the wife of the leader of the train.
Prematurely old, of ill-health, and harassed with cares, she had no
time to waste in discriminating maternal tenderness for her
daughter, but treated the children with equal and unbiased
querulousness.

The rear wagon creaked, swayed, and rolled on slowly and heavily.
The hoofs of the draft-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with
a dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the
track.  Within, the children were playing "keeping store."  The
little girl, as an opulent and extravagant customer, was purchasing
of the boy, who sat behind a counter improvised from a nail-keg and
the front seat, most of the available contents of the wagon, either
under their own names or an imaginary one as the moment suggested,
and paying for them in the easy and liberal currency of dried beans
and bits of paper.  Change was given by the expeditious method of
tearing the paper into smaller fragments.  The diminution of stock
was remedied by buying the same article over again under a
different name.  Nevertheless, in spite of these favorable
commercial conditions, the market seemed dull.

"I can show you a fine quality of sheeting at four cents a yard,
double width," said the boy, rising and leaning on his fingers on
the counter as he had seen the shopmen do.  "All wool and will
wash," he added, with easy gravity.

"I can buy it cheaper at Jackson's," said the girl, with the
intuitive duplicity of her bargaining sex.

"Very well," said the boy.  "I won't play any more."

"Who cares?" said the girl indifferently.  The boy here promptly
upset the counter; the rolled-up blanket which had deceitfully
represented the desirable sheeting falling on the wagon floor.  It
apparently suggested a new idea to the former salesman.  "I say!
let's play 'damaged stock.'  See, I'll tumble all the things down
here right on top o' the others, and sell 'em for less than cost."

The girl looked up.  The suggestion was bold, bad, and momentarily
attractive.  But she only said "No," apparently from habit, picked
up her doll, and the boy clambered to the front of the wagon.  The
incomplete episode terminated at once with that perfect
forgetfulness, indifference, and irresponsibility common to all
young animals.  If either could have flown away or bounded off
finally at that moment, they would have done so with no more
concern for preliminary detail than a bird or squirrel.  The wagon
rolled steadily on.  The boy could see that one of the teamsters
had climbed up on the tail-board of the preceding vehicle.  The
other seemed to be walking in a dusty sleep.

"Kla'uns," said the girl.

The boy, without turning his head, responded, "Susy."

"Wot are you going to be?" said the girl.

"Goin' to be?" repeated Clarence.

"When you is growed," explained Susy.

Clarence hesitated.  His settled determination had been to become a
pirate, merciless yet discriminating.  But reading in a bethumbed
"Guide to the Plains" that morning of Fort Lamarie and Kit Carson,
he had decided upon the career of a "scout," as being more
accessible and requiring less water.  Yet, out of compassion for
Susy's possible ignorance, he said neither, and responded with the
American boy's modest conventionality, "President."  It was safe,
required no embarrassing description, and had been approved by
benevolent old gentlemen with their hands on his head.

"I'm goin' to be a parson's wife," said Susy, "and keep hens, and
have things giv' to me.  Baby clothes, and apples, and apple sass--
and melasses! and more baby clothes! and pork when you kill."

She had thrown herself at the bottom of the wagon, with her back
towards him and her doll in her lap.  He could see the curve of her
curly head, and beyond, her bare dimpled knees, which were raised,
and over which she was trying to fold the hem of her brief skirt.

"I wouldn't be a President's wife," she said presently.

"You couldn't!"

"Could if I wanted to!"

"Couldn't!"

"Could now!"

"Couldn't!"

"Why?"

Finding it difficult to explain his convictions of her
ineligibility, Clarence thought it equally crushing not to give
any.  There was a long silence.  It was very hot and dusty.  The
wagon scarcely seemed to move.  Clarence gazed at the vignette of
the track behind them formed by the hood of the rear.  Presently he
rose and walked past her to the tail-board.  "Goin' to get down,"
he said, putting his legs over.

"Maw says 'No,'" said Susy.

Clarence did not reply, but dropped to the ground beside the slowly
turning wheels.  Without quickening his pace he could easily keep
his hand on the tail-board.

"Kla'uns."

He looked up.

"Take me."

She had already clapped on her sun-bonnet and was standing at the
edge of the tail-board, her little arms extended in such perfect
confidence of being caught that the boy could not resist.  He
caught her cleverly.  They halted a moment and let the lumbering
vehicle move away from them, as it swayed from side to side as if
laboring in a heavy sea.  They remained motionless until it had
reached nearly a hundred yards, and then, with a sudden half-real,
half-assumed, but altogether delightful trepidation, ran forward
and caught up with it again.  This they repeated two or three times
until both themselves and the excitement were exhausted, and they
again plodded on hand in hand.  Presently Clarence uttered a cry.

"My!  Susy--look there!"

The rear wagon had once more slipped away from them a considerable
distance.  Between it and them, crossing its track, a most
extraordinary creature had halted.

At first glance it seemed a dog--a discomfited, shameless,
ownerless outcast of streets and byways, rather than an honest
stray of some drover's train.  It was so gaunt, so dusty, so
greasy, so slouching, and so lazy!  But as they looked at it more
intently they saw that the grayish hair of its back had a bristly
ridge, and there were great poisonous-looking dark blotches on its
flanks, and that the slouch of its haunches was a peculiarity of
its figure, and not the cowering of fear.  As it lifted its
suspicious head towards them they could see that its thin lips, too
short to cover its white teeth, were curled in a perpetual sneer.

"Here, doggie!" said Clarence excitedly.  "Good dog!  Come."

Susy burst into a triumphant laugh.  "Et tain't no dog, silly; it's
er coyote."

Clarence blushed.  It wasn't the first time the pioneer's daughter
had shown her superior knowledge.  He said quickly, to hide his
discomfiture, "I'll ketch him, any way; he's nothin' mor'n a ki yi."

"Ye can't, tho," said Susy, shaking her sun-bonnet.  "He's faster
nor a hoss!"

Nevertheless, Clarence ran towards him, followed by Susy.  When
they had come within twenty feet of him, the lazy creature, without
apparently the least effort, took two or three limping bounds to
one side, and remained at the same distance as before.  They
repeated this onset three or four times with more or less
excitement and hilarity, the animal evading them to one side, but
never actually retreating before them.  Finally, it occurred to
them both that although they were not catching him they were not
driving him away.  The consequences of that thought were put into
shape by Susy with round-eyed significance.

"Kla'uns, he bites."

Clarence picked up a hard sun-baked clod, and, running forward,
threw it at the coyote.  It was a clever shot, and struck him on
his slouching haunches.  He snapped and gave a short snarling yelp,
and vanished.  Clarence returned with a victorious air to his
companion.  But she was gazing intently in the opposite direction,
and for the first time he discovered that the coyote had been
leading them half round a circle.

"Kla'uns," said Susy, with a hysterical little laugh.

"Well?"

"The wagon's gone."

Clarence started.  It was true.  Not only their wagon, but the
whole train of oxen and teamsters had utterly disappeared,
vanishing as completely as if they had been caught up in a
whirlwind or engulfed in the earth!  Even the low cloud of dust
that usually marked their distant course by day was nowhere to be
seen.  The long level plain stretched before them to the setting
sun, without a sign or trace of moving life or animation.  That
great blue crystal bowl, filled with dust and fire by day, with
stars and darkness by night, which had always seemed to drop its
rim round them everywhere and shut them in, seemed to them now to
have been lifted to let the train pass out, and then closed down
upon them forever.


CHAPTER II


Their first sensation was one of purely animal freedom.

They looked at each other with sparkling eyes and long silent
breaths.  But this spontaneous outburst of savage nature soon
passed.  Susy's little hand presently reached forward and clutched
Clarence's jacket.  The boy understood it, and said quickly,--

"They ain't gone far, and they'll stop as soon as they find us
gone."

They trotted on a little faster; the sun they had followed every
day and the fresh wagon tracks being their unfailing guides; the
keen, cool air of the plains, taking the place of that all-
pervading dust and smell of the perspiring oxen, invigorating them
with its breath.

"We ain't skeered a bit, are we?" said Susy.

"What's there to be afraid of?" said Clarence scornfully.  He said
this none the less strongly because he suddenly remembered that
they had been often left alone in the wagon for hours without being
looked after, and that their absence might not be noticed until the
train stopped to encamp at dusk, two hours later.  They were not
running very fast, yet either they were more tired than they knew,
or the air was thinner, for they both seemed to breathe quickly.
Suddenly Clarence stopped.

"There they are now."

He was pointing to a light cloud of dust in the far-off horizon,
from which the black hulk of a wagon emerged for a moment and was
lost.  But even as they gazed the cloud seemed to sink like a fairy
mirage to the earth again, the whole train disappeared, and only
the empty stretching track returned.  They did not know that this
seemingly flat and level plain was really undulatory, and that the
vanished train had simply dipped below their view on some further
slope even as it had once before.  But they knew they were
disappointed, and that disappointment revealed to them the fact
that they had concealed it from each other.  The girl was the first
to succumb, and burst into a quick spasm of angry tears.  That
single act of weakness called out the boy's pride and strength.
There was no longer an equality of suffering; he had become her
protector; he felt himself responsible for both.  Considering her
no longer his equal, he was no longer frank with her.

"There's nothin' to boo-boo for," he said, with a half-affected
brusqueness.  "So quit, now!  They'll stop in a minit, and send
some one back for us.  Shouldn't wonder if they're doin' it now."

But Susy, with feminine discrimination detecting the hollow ring in
his voice, here threw herself upon him and began to beat him
violently with her little fists.  "They ain't!  They ain't!  They
ain't.  You know it!  How dare you?"  Then, exhausted with her
struggles, she suddenly threw herself flat on the dry grass, shut
her eyes tightly, and clutched at the stubble.

"Get up," said the boy, with a pale, determined face that seemed to
have got much older.

"You leave me be," said Susy.

"Do you want me to go away and leave you?" asked the boy.

Susy opened one blue eye furtively in the secure depths of her sun-
bonnet, and gazed at his changed face.

"Ye-e-s."

He pretended to turn away, but really to look at the height of the
sinking sun.

"Kla'uns!"

"Well?"

"Take me."

She was holding up her hands.  He lifted her gently in his arms,
dropping her head over his shoulder.  "Now," he said cheerfully,
"you keep a good lookout that way, and I this, and we'll soon be
there."

The idea seemed to please her.  After Clarence had stumbled on for
a few moments, she said, "Do you see anything, Kla'uns?"

"Not yet."

"No more don't I."  This equality of perception apparently
satisfied her.  Presently she lay more limp in his arms.  She was
asleep.

The sun was sinking lower; it had already touched the edge of the
horizon, and was level with his dazzled and straining eyes.  At
times it seemed to impede his eager search and task his vision.
Haze and black spots floated across the horizon, and round wafers,
like duplicates of the sun, glittered back from the dull surface of
the plains.  Then he resolved to look no more until he had counted
fifty, a hundred, but always with the same result, the return of
the empty, unending plains--the disk growing redder as it neared
the horizon, the fire it seemed to kindle as it sank, but nothing
more.

Staggering under his burden, he tried to distract himself by
fancying how the discovery of their absence would be made.  He
heard the listless, half-querulous discussion about the locality
that regularly pervaded the nightly camp.  He heard the
discontented voice of Jake Silsbee as he halted beside the wagon,
and said, "Come out o' that now, you two, and mighty quick about
it."  He heard the command harshly repeated.  He saw the look of
irritation on Silsbee's dusty, bearded face, that followed his
hurried glance into the empty wagon.  He heard the query, "What's
gone o' them limbs now?" handed from wagon to wagon.  He heard a
few oaths; Mrs. Silsbee's high rasping voice, abuse of himself, the
hurried and discontented detachment of a search party, Silsbee and
one of the hired men, and vociferation and blame.  Blame always for
himself, the elder, who might have "known better!"  A little fear,
perhaps, but he could not fancy either pity or commiseration.
Perhaps the thought upheld his pride; under the prospect of
sympathy he might have broken down.

At last he stumbled, and stopped to keep himself from falling
forward on his face.  He could go no further; his breath was spent;
he was dripping with perspiration; his legs were trembling under
him; there was a roaring in his ears; round red disks of the sun
were scattered everywhere around him like spots of blood.  To the
right of the trail there seemed to be a slight mound where he could
rest awhile, and yet keep his watchful survey of the horizon.  But
on reaching it he found that it was only a tangle of taller
mesquite grass, into which he sank with his burden.  Nevertheless,
if useless as a point of vantage, it offered a soft couch for Susy,
who seemed to have fallen quite naturally into her usual afternoon
siesta, and in a measure it shielded her from a cold breeze that
had sprung up from the west.  Utterly exhausted himself, but not
daring to yield to the torpor that seemed to be creeping over him,
Clarence half sat, half knelt down beside her, supporting himself
with one hand, and, partly hidden in the long grass, kept his
straining eyes fixed on the lonely track.

The red disk was sinking lower.  It seemed to have already crumbled
away a part of the distance with its eating fires.  As it sank
still lower, it shot out long, luminous rays, diverging fan-like
across the plain, as if, in the boy's excited fancy, it too were
searching for the lost estrays.  And as one long beam seemed to
linger over his hiding-place, he even thought that it might serve
as a guide to Silsbee and the other seekers, and was constrained to
stagger to his feet, erect in its light.  But it soon sank, and
with it Clarence dropped back again to his crouching watch.  Yet he
knew that the daylight was still good for an hour, and with the
withdrawal of that mystic sunset glory objects became even more
distinct and sharply defined than at any other time.  And with the
merciful sheathing of that flaming sword which seemed to have
swayed between him and the vanished train, his eyes already felt a
blessed relief.


CHAPTER III


With the setting of the sun an ominous silence fell.  He could hear
the low breathing of Susy, and even fancied he could hear the
beating of his own heart in that oppressive hush of all nature.
For the day's march had always been accompanied by the monotonous
creaking of wheels and axles, and even the quiet of the night
encampment had been always more or less broken by the movement of
unquiet sleepers on the wagon beds, or the breathing of the cattle.
But here there was neither sound nor motion.  Susy's prattle, and
even the sound of his own voice, would have broken the benumbing
spell, but it was a part of his growing self-denial now that he
refrained from waking her even by a whisper.  She would awaken soon
enough to thirst and hunger, perhaps, and then what was he to do?
If that looked-for help would only come now--while she still slept.
For it was part of his boyish fancy that if he could deliver her
asleep and undemonstrative of fear and suffering, he would be less
blameful, and she less mindful of her trouble.  If it did not come--
but he would not think of that yet!  If she was thirsty meantime--
well, it might rain, and there was always the dew which they used
to brush off the morning grass; he would take off his shirt and
catch it in that, like a shipwrecked mariner.  It would be funny,
and make her laugh.  For himself he would not laugh; he felt he was
getting very old and grown up in this loneliness.

It was getting darker--they should be looking into the wagons now.
A new doubt began to assail him.  Ought he not, now that he was
rested, make the most of the remaining moments of daylight, and
before the glow faded from the west, when he would no longer have
any bearings to guide him?  But there was always the risk of waking
her!--to what?  The fear of being confronted again with HER fear
and of being unable to pacify her, at last decided him to remain.
But he crept softly through the grass, and in the dust of the track
traced the four points of the compass, as he could still determine
them by the sunset light, with a large printed W to indicate the
west!  This boyish contrivance particularly pleased him.  If he had
only had a pole, a stick, or even a twig, on which to tie his
handkerchief and erect it above the clump of mesquite as a signal
to the searchers in case they should be overcome by fatigue or
sleep, he would have been happy.  But the plain was barren of brush
or timber; he did not dream that this omission and the very
unobtrusiveness of his hiding-place would be his salvation from a
greater danger.

With the coming darkness the wind arose and swept the plain with a
long-drawn sigh.  This increased to a murmur, till presently the
whole expanse--before sunk in awful silence--seemed to awake with
vague complaints, incessant sounds, and low moanings.  At times he
thought he heard the halloaing of distant voices, at times it
seemed as a whisper in his own ear.  In the silence that followed
each blast he fancied he could detect the creaking of the wagon,
the dull thud of the oxen's hoofs, or broken fragments of speech,
blown and scattered even as he strained his ears to listen by the
next gust.  This tension of the ear began to confuse his brain, as
his eyes had been previously dazzled by the sunlight, and a strange
torpor began to steal over his faculties.  Once or twice his head
dropped.

He awoke with a start.  A moving figure had suddenly uplifted
itself between him and the horizon!  It was not twenty yards away,
so clearly outlined against the still luminous sky that it seemed
even nearer.  A human figure, but so disheveled, so fantastic, and
yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance, that it seemed the
outcome of a childish dream.  It was a mounted figure, but so
ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim
legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it
might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus.  A
tall hat, crownless and rimless, a castaway of civilization,
surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over its
shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the
two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose.  In
one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager
scrutiny of some distant point beyond and east of the spot where
the children lay concealed.  Presently, with a dozen quick
noiseless strides of the pony's legs, the apparition moved to the
right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon.
There was no mistaking it now!  The painted Hebraic face, the large
curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes,
the straight long matted locks!  It was an Indian!  Not the
picturesque creature of Clarence's imagination, but still an
Indian!  The boy was uneasy, suspicious, antagonistic, but not
afraid.  He looked at the heavy animal face with the superiority of
intelligence, at the half-naked figure with the conscious supremacy
of dress, at the lower individuality with the contempt of a higher
race.  Yet a moment after, when the figure wheeled and disappeared
towards the undulating west, a strange chill crept over him.  Yet
he did not know that in this puerile phantom and painted pigmy the
awful majesty of Death had passed him by.

"Mamma!"

It was Susy's voice, struggling into consciousness.  Perhaps she
had been instinctively conscious of the boy's sudden fears.

"Hush!"

He had just turned to the objective point of the Indian's gaze.
There WAS something!  A dark line was moving along with the
gathering darkness.  For a moment he hardly dared to voice his
thoughts even to himself.  It was a following train overtaking them
from the rear!  And from the rapidity of its movements a train with
horses, hurrying forward to evening camp.  He had never dreamt of
help from that quarter.  This was what the Indian's keen eyes had
been watching, and why he had so precipitately fled.

The strange train was now coming up at a round trot.  It was
evidently well appointed with five or six large wagons and several
outriders.  In half an hour it would be here.  Yet he refrained
from waking Susy, who had fallen asleep again; his old superstition
of securing her safety first being still uppermost.  He took off
his jacket to cover her shoulders, and rearranged her nest.  Then
he glanced again at the coming train.  But for some unaccountable
reason it had changed its direction, and instead of following the
track that should have brought it to his side it had turned off to
the left!  In ten minutes it would pass abreast of him a mile and a
half away!  If he woke Susy now, he knew she would be helpless in
her terror, and he could not carry her half that distance.  He
might rush to the train himself and return with help, but he would
never leave her alone--in the darkness.  Never!  If she woke she
would die of fright, perhaps, or wander blindly and aimlessly away.
No!  The train would pass and with it that hope of rescue.
Something was in his throat, but he gulped it down and was quiet
again albeit he shivered in the night wind.

The train was nearly abreast of him now.  He ran out of the tall
grass, waving his straw hat above his head in the faint hope of
attracting attention.  But he did not go far, for he found to his
alarm that when he turned back again the clump of mesquite was
scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the plain.  This settled
all question of his going.  Even if he reached the train and
returned with some one, how would he ever find her again in this
desolate expanse?

He watched the train slowly pass--still mechanically, almost
hopelessly, waving his hat as he ran up and down before the
mesquite, as if he were waving a last farewell to his departing
hope.  Suddenly it appeared to him that three of the outriders who
were preceding the first wagon had changed their shape.  They were
no longer sharp, oblong, black blocks against the horizon but had
become at first blurred and indistinct, then taller and narrower,
until at last they stood out like exclamation points against the
sky.  He continued to wave his hat, they continued to grow taller
and narrower.  He understood it now--the three transformed blocks
were the outriders coming towards him.

This is what he had seen--

[Drawing of three black blocks]

This is what he saw now--

!  !  !

He ran back to Susy to see if she still slept, for his foolish
desire to have her saved unconsciously was stronger than ever now
that safety seemed so near.  She was still sleeping, although she
had moved slightly.  He ran to the front again.

The outriders had apparently halted.  What were they doing?  Why
wouldn't they come on?

Suddenly a blinding flash of light seemed to burst from one of
them.  Away over his head something whistled like a rushing bird,
and sped off invisible.  They had fired a gun; they were signaling
to him--Clarence--like a grown-up man.  He would have given his
life at that moment to have had a gun.  But he could only wave his
hat frantically.

One of the figures here bore away and impetuously darted forward
again.  He was coming nearer, powerful, gigantic, formidable, as he
loomed through the darkness.  All at once he threw up his arm with
a wild gesture to the others; and his voice, manly, frank, and
assuring, came ringing before him.

"Hold up!  Good God!  It's no Injun--it's a child!"

In another moment he had reined up beside Clarence and leaned over
him, bearded, handsome, powerful and protecting.

"Hallo!  What's all this?  What are you doing here?"

"Lost from Mr. Silsbee's train," said Clarence, pointing to the
darkened west.

"Lost?--how long?"

"About three hours.  I thought they'd come back for us," said
Clarence apologetically to this big, kindly man.

"And you kalkilated to wait here for 'em?"

"Yes, yes--I did--till I saw you."

"Then why in thunder didn't you light out straight for us, instead
of hanging round here and drawing us out?"

The boy hung his head.  He knew his reasons were unchanged, but all
at once they seemed very foolish and unmanly to speak out.

"Only that we were on the keen jump for Injins," continued the
stranger, "we wouldn't have seen you at all, and might hev shot you
when we did.  What possessed you to stay here?"

The boy was still silent.  "Kla'uns," said a faint, sleepy voice
from the mesquite, "take me."  The rifle-shot had awakened Susy.

The stranger turned quickly towards the sound.  Clarence started
and recalled himself.  "There," he said bitterly, "you've done it
now, you've wakened her!  THAT'S why I stayed.  I couldn't carry
her over there to you.  I couldn't let her walk, for she'd be
frightened.  I wouldn't wake her up, for she'd be frightened, and I
mightn't find her again.  There!"  He had made up his mind to be
abused, but he was reckless now that she was safe.

The men glanced at each other.  "Then," said the spokesman quietly,
"you didn't strike out for us on account of your sister?"

"She ain't my sister," said Clarence quickly.  "She's a little
girl.  She's Mrs. Silsbee's little girl.  We were in the wagon and
got down.  It's my fault.  I helped her down."

The three men reined their horses closely round him, leaning
forward from their saddles, with their hands on their knees and
their heads on one side.  "Then," said the spokesman gravely, "you
just reckoned to stay here, old man, and take your chances with her
rather than run the risk of frightening or leaving her--though it
was your one chance of life!"

"Yes," said the boy, scornful of this feeble, grown-up repetition.

"Come here."

The boy came doggedly forward.  The man pushed back the well-worn
straw hat from Clarence's forehead and looked into his lowering
face.  With his hand still on the boy's head he turned him round to
the others, and said quietly,--

"Suthin of a pup, eh?"

"You bet," they responded.

The voice was not unkindly, although the speaker had thrown his
lower jaw forward as if to pronounce the word "pup" with a humorous
suggestion of a mastiff.  Before Clarence could make up his mind if
the epithet was insulting or not, the man put out his stirruped
foot, and, with a gesture of invitation, said, "Jump up."

"But Susy," said Clarence, drawing back.

"Look; she's making up to Phil already."

Clarence looked.  Susy had crawled out of the mesquite, and with
her sun-bonnet hanging down her back, her curls tossed around her
face, still flushed with sleep, and Clarence's jacket over her
shoulders, was gazing up with grave satisfaction in the laughing
eyes of one of the men who was with outstretched hands bending over
her.  Could he believe his senses?  The terror-stricken, willful,
unmanageable Susy, whom he would have translated unconsciously to
safety without this terrible ordeal of being awakened to the loss
of her home and parents at any sacrifice to himself--this ingenuous
infant was absolutely throwing herself with every appearance of
forgetfulness into the arms of the first new-comer!  Yet his
perception of this fact was accompanied by no sense of ingratitude.
For her sake he felt relieved, and with a boyish smile of
satisfaction and encouragement vaulted into the saddle before the
stranger.


CHAPTER IV


The dash forward to the train, securely held in the saddle by the
arms of their deliverers, was a secret joy to the children that
seemed only too quickly over.  The resistless gallop of the fiery
mustangs, the rush of the night wind, the gathering darkness in
which the distant wagons, now halted and facing them, looked like
domed huts in the horizon--all these seemed but a delightful and
fitting climax to the events of the day.  In the sublime
forgetfulness of youth, all they had gone through had left no
embarrassing record behind it; they were willing to repeat their
experiences on the morrow, confident of some equally happy end.
And when Clarence, timidly reaching his hand towards the horse-hair
reins lightly held by his companion, had them playfully yielded up
to him by that hold and confident rider, the boy felt himself
indeed a man.

But a greater surprise was in store for them.  As they neared the
wagons, now formed into a circle with a certain degree of military
formality, they could see that the appointments of the strange
party were larger and more liberal than their own, or indeed
anything they had ever known of the kind.  Forty or fifty horses
were tethered within the circle, and the camp fires were already
blazing.  Before one of them a large tent was erected, and through
the parted flaps could be seen a table actually spread with a white
cloth.  Was it a school feast, or was this their ordinary household
arrangement?  Clarence and Susy thought of their own dinners,
usually laid on bare boards beneath the sky, or under the low hood
of the wagon in rainy weather, and marveled.  And when they finally
halted, and were lifted from their horses, and passed one wagon
fitted up as a bedroom and another as a kitchen, they could only
nudge each other with silent appreciation.  But here again the
difference already noted in the quality of the sensations of the
two children was observable.  Both were equally and agreeably
surprised.  But Susy's wonder was merely the sense of novelty and
inexperience, and a slight disbelief in the actual necessity of
what she saw; while Clarence, whether from some previous general
experience or peculiar temperament, had the conviction that what he
saw here was the usual custom, and what he had known with the
Silsbees was the novelty.  The feeling was attended with a slight
sense of wounded pride for Susy, as if her enthusiasm had exposed
her to ridicule.

The man who had carried him, and seemed to be the head of the
party, had already preceded them to the tent, and presently
reappeared with a lady with whom he had exchanged a dozen hurried
words.  They seemed to refer to him and Susy; but Clarence was too
much preoccupied with the fact that the lady was pretty, that her
clothes were neat and thoroughly clean, that her hair was tidy and
not rumpled, and that, although she wore an apron, it was as clean
as her gown, and even had ribbons on it, to listen to what was
said.  And when she ran eagerly forward, and with a fascinating
smile lifted the astonished Susy in her arms, Clarence, in his
delight for his young charge, quite forgot that she had not noticed
him.  The bearded man, who seemed to be the lady's husband,
evidently pointed out the omission, with some additions that
Clarence could not catch; for after saying, with a pretty pout,
"Well, why shouldn't he?" she came forward with the same dazzling
smile, and laid her small and clean white hand upon his shoulder.

"And so you took good care of the dear little thing?  She's such an
angel, isn't she? and you must love her very much."

Clarence colored with delight.  It was true it had never occurred
to him to look at Susy in the light of a celestial visitant, and I
fear he was just then more struck with the fair complimenter than
the compliment to his companion, but he was pleased for her sake.
He was not yet old enough to be conscious of the sex's belief in
its irresistible domination over mankind at all ages, and that
Johnny in his check apron would be always a hopeless conquest of
Jeannette in her pinafore, and that he ought to have been in love
with Susy.

Howbeit, the lady suddenly whisked her away to the recesses of her
own wagon, to reappear later, washed, curled, and beribboned like a
new doll, and Clarence was left alone with the husband and another
of the party.

"Well, my boy, you haven't told me your name yet."

"Clarence, sir."

"So Susy calls you, but what else?"

"Clarence Brant."

"Any relation to Colonel Brant?" asked the second man carelessly.

"He was my father," said the boy, brightening under this faint
prospect of recognition in his loneliness.

The two men glanced at each other.  The leader looked at the boy
curiously, and said,--

"Are you the son of Colonel Brant, of Louisville?"

"Yes, sir," said the boy, with a dim stirring of uneasiness in his
heart.  "But he's dead now," he added finally.

"Ah, when did he die?" said the man quickly.

"Oh, a long time ago.  I don't remember him much.  I was very
little," said the boy, half apologetically.

"Ah, you don't remember him?"

"No," said Clarence shortly.  He was beginning to fall back upon
that certain dogged repetition which in sensitive children arises
from their hopeless inability to express their deeper feelings.  He
also had an instinctive consciousness that this want of a knowledge
of his father was part of that vague wrong that had been done him.
It did not help his uneasiness that he could see that one of the
two men, who turned away with a half-laugh, misunderstood or did
not believe him.

"How did you come with the Silsbees?" asked the first man.

Clarence repeated mechanically, with a child's distaste of
practical details, how he had lived with an aunt at St. Jo, and how
his stepmother had procured his passage with the Silsbees to
California, where he was to meet his cousin.  All this with a lack
of interest and abstraction that he was miserably conscious told
against him, but he was yet helpless to resist.

The first man remained thoughtful, and then glanced at Clarence's
sunburnt hands.  Presently his large, good-humored smile returned.

"Well, I suppose you are hungry?"

"Yes," said Clarence shyly.  "But--"

"But what?"

"I should like to wash myself a little," he returned hesitatingly,
thinking of the clean tent, the clean lady, and Susy's ribbons.

"Certainly," said his friend, with a pleased look.  "Come with me."
Instead of leading Clarence to the battered tin basin and bar of
yellow soap which had formed the toilet service of the Silsbee
party, he brought the boy into one of the wagons, where there was a
washstand, a china basin, and a cake of scented soap.  Standing
beside Clarence, he watched him perform his ablutions with an
approving air which rather embarrassed his protege.  Presently he
said, almost abruptly,--

"Do you remember your father's house at Louisville?"

"Yes, sir; but it was a long time ago."

Clarence remembered it as being very different from his home at St.
Joseph's, but from some innate feeling of diffidence he would have
shrunk from describing it in that way.  He, however, said he
thought it was a large house.  Yet the modest answer only made his
new friend look at him the more keenly.

"Your father was Colonel Hamilton Brant, of Louisville, wasn't he?"
he said, half-confidentially.

"Yes," said Clarence hopelessly.

"Well," said his friend cheerfully, as if dismissing an abstruse
problem from his mind, "Let's go to supper."

When they reached the tent again, Clarence noticed that the supper
was laid only for his host and wife and the second man--who was
familiarly called "Harry," but who spoke of the former always as
"Mr. and Mrs. Peyton"--while the remainder of the party, a dozen
men, were at a second camp fire, and evidently enjoying themselves
in a picturesque fashion.  Had the boy been allowed to choose, he
would have joined them, partly because it seemed more "manly," and
partly that he dreaded a renewal of the questioning.

But here, Susy, sitting bolt upright on an extemporized high stool,
happily diverted his attention by pointing to the empty chair
beside her.

"Kla'uns," she said suddenly, with her usual clear and appalling
frankness, "they is chickens, and hamanaigs, and hot biksquits, and
lasses, and Mister Peyton says I kin have 'em all."

Clarence, who had begun suddenly to feel that he was responsible
for Susy's deportment and was balefully conscious that she was
holding her plated fork in her chubby fist by its middle, and, from
his previous knowledge of her, was likely at any moment to plunge
it into the dish before her, said softly,--

"Hush!"

"Yes, you shall, dear," said Mrs. Peyton, with tenderly beaming
assurance to Susy and a half-reproachful glance at the boy.  "Eat
what you like, darling."

"It's a fork," whispered the still uneasy Clarence, as Susy now
seemed inclined to stir her bowl of milk with it.

"'Tain't, now, Kla'uns, it's only a split spoon," said Susy.

But Mrs. Peyton, in her rapt admiration, took small note of these
irregularities, plying the child with food, forgetting her own
meal, and only stopping at times to lift back the forward straying
curls on Susy's shoulders.  Mr. Peyton looked on gravely and
contentedly.  Suddenly the eyes of husband and wife met.

"She'd have been nearly as old as this, John," said Mrs. Peyton, in
a faint voice.

John Peyton nodded without speaking, and turned his eyes away into
the gathering darkness.  The man "Harry" also looked abstractedly
at his plate, as if he was saying grace.  Clarence wondered who
"she" was, and why two little tears dropped from Mrs. Peyton's
lashes into Susy's milk, and whether Susy might not violently
object to it.  He did not know until later that the Peytons had
lost their only child, and Susy comfortably drained this mingled
cup of a mother's grief and tenderness without suspicion.

"I suppose we'll come up with their train early tomorrow, if some
of them don't find us to-night," said Mrs. Peyton, with a long sigh
and a regretful glance at Susy.  "Perhaps we might travel together
for a little while," she added timidly.

Harry laughed, and Mr. Peyton replied gravely, "I am afraid we
wouldn't travel with them, even for company's sake; and," he added,
in a lower and graver voice, "it's rather odd the search party
hasn't come upon us yet, though I'm keeping Pete and Hank
patrolling the trail to meet them."

"It's heartless--so it is!" said Mrs. Peyton, with sudden
indignation.  "It would be all very well if it was only this boy,
who can take care of himself; but to be so careless of a mere baby
like this, it's shameful!"

For the first time Clarence tasted the cruelty of discrimination.
All the more keenly that he was beginning to worship, after his
boyish fashion, this sweet-faced, clean, and tender-hearted woman.
Perhaps Mr. Peyton noticed it, for he came quietly to his aid.

"Maybe they knew better than we in what careful hands they had left
her," he said, with a cheerful nod towards Clarence.  "And, again,
they may have been fooled as we were by Injin signs and left the
straight road."

This suggestion instantly recalled to Clarence his vision in the
mesquite.  Should he dare tell them?  Would they believe him, or
would they laugh at him before her?  He hesitated, and at last
resolved to tell it privately to the husband.  When the meal was
ended, and he was made happy by Mrs. Peyton's laughing acceptance
of his offer to help her clear the table and wash the dishes, they
all gathered comfortably in front of the tent before the large camp
fire.  At the other fire the rest of the party were playing cards
and laughing, but Clarence no longer cared to join them.  He was
quite tranquil in the maternal propinquity of his hostess, albeit a
little uneasy as to his reticence about the Indian.

"Kla'uns," said Susy, relieving a momentary pause, in her highest
voice, "knows how to speak.  Speak, Kla'uns!"

It appearing from Clarence's blushing explanation that this gift
was not the ordinary faculty of speech, but a capacity to recite
verse, he was politely pressed by the company for a performance.

"Speak 'em, Kla'uns, the boy what stood unto the burnin' deck, and
said, 'The boy, oh, where was he?'" said Susy, comfortably lying
down on Mrs. Peyton's lap, and contemplating her bare knees in the
air.  "It's 'bout a boy," she added confidentially to Mrs. Peyton,
"whose father wouldn't never, never stay with him on a burnin'
ship, though he said, 'Stay, father, stay,' ever so much."

With this clear, lucid, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of
Mrs. Hemans's "Casabianca," Clarence began.  Unfortunately, his
actual rendering of this popular school performance was more an
effort of memory than anything else, and was illustrated by those
wooden gestures which a Western schoolmaster had taught him.  He
described the flames that "roared around him," by indicating with
his hand a perfect circle, of which he was the axis; he adjured his
father, the late Admiral Casabianca, by clasping his hands before
his chin, as if wanting to be manacled in an attitude which he was
miserably conscious was unlike anything he himself had ever felt or
seen before; he described that father "faint in death below," and
"the flag on high," with one single motion.  Yet something that the
verses had kindled in his active imagination, perhaps, rather than
an illustration of the verses themselves, at times brightened his
gray eyes, became tremulous in his youthful voice, and I fear
occasionally incoherent on his lips.  At times, when not conscious
of his affected art, the plain and all upon it seemed to him to
slip away into the night, the blazing camp fire at his feet to wrap
him in a fateful glory, and a vague devotion to something--he knew
not what--so possessed him that he communicated it, and probably
some of his own youthful delight in extravagant voice, to his
hearers, until, when he ceased with a glowing face, he was
surprised to find that the card players had deserted their camp
fires and gathered round the tent.


CHAPTER V


"You didn't say 'Stay, father, stay,' enough, Kla'uns," said Susy
critically.  Then suddenly starting upright in Mrs. Peyton's lap,
she continued rapidly, "I kin dance.  And sing.  I kin dance High
Jambooree."

"What's High Jambooree, dear?" asked Mrs. Peyton.

"You'll see.  Lemme down."  And Susy slipped to the ground.

The dance of High Jambooree, evidently of remote mystical African
origin, appeared to consist of three small skips to the right and
then to the left, accompanied by the holding up of very short
skirts, incessant "teetering" on the toes of small feet, the
exhibition of much bare knee and stocking, and a gurgling
accompaniment of childish laughter.  Vehemently applauded, it left
the little performer breathless, but invincible and ready for fresh
conquest.

"I kin sing, too," she gasped hurriedly, as if unwilling that the
applause should lapse.  "I kin sing.  Oh, dear!  Kla'uns,"
piteously, "WHAT is it I sing?"

"Ben Bolt," suggested Clarence.

"Oh, yes.  Oh, don't you remember sweet Alers Ben Bolt?" began
Susy, in the same breath and the wrong key.  "Sweet Alers, with
hair so brown, who wept with delight when you giv'd her a smile,
and--" with knitted brows and appealing recitative, "what's er rest
of it, Kla'uns?"

"Who trembled with fear at your frown?" prompted Clarence.

"Who trembled with fear at my frown?" shrilled Susy.  "I forget er
rest.  Wait!  I kin sing--"

"Praise God," suggested Clarence.

"Yes."  Here Susy, a regular attendant in camp and prayer-meetings,
was on firmer ground.

Promptly lifting her high treble, yet with a certain acquired
deliberation, she began, "Praise God, from whom all blessings
flow."  At the end of the second line the whispering and laughing
ceased.  A deep voice to the right, that of the champion poker
player, suddenly rose on the swell of the third line.  He was
instantly followed by a dozen ringing voices, and by the time the
last line was reached it was given with a full chorus, in which the
dull chant of teamsters and drivers mingled with the soprano of
Mrs. Peyton and Susy's childish treble.  Again and again it was
repeated, with forgetful eyes and abstracted faces, rising and
falling with the night wind and the leap and gleam of the camp
fires, and fading again like them in the immeasurable mystery of
the darkened plain.

In the deep and embarrassing silence that followed, at last the
party hesitatingly broke up, Mrs. Peyton retiring with Susy after
offering the child to Clarence for a perfunctory "good-night" kiss,
an unusual proceeding, which somewhat astonished them both--and
Clarence found himself near Mr. Peyton.

"I think," said Clarence timidly, "I saw an Injin to-day."

Mr. Peyton bent down towards him.  "An Injin--where?" he asked
quickly, with the same look of doubting interrogatory with which he
had received Clarence's name and parentage.

The boy for a moment regretted having spoken.  But with his old
doggedness he particularized his statement.  Fortunately, being
gifted with a keen perception, he was able to describe the stranger
accurately, and to impart with his description that contempt for
its subject which he had felt, and which to his frontier auditor
established its truthfulness.  Peyton turned abruptly away, but
presently returned with Harry and another man.

"You are sure of this?" said Peyton, half-encouragingly.

"Yes, sir."

"As sure as you are that your father is Colonel Brant and is dead?"
said Harry, with a light laugh.

Tears sprang into the boy's lowering eyes.  "I don't lie," he said
doggedly.

"I believe you, Clarence," said Peyton quietly.  "But why didn't
you say it before?"

"I didn't like to say it before Susy and--her!" stammered the boy.

"Her?"

"Yes, sir--Mrs. Peyton," said Clarence blushingly.

"Oh," said Harry sarcastically, "how blessed polite we are!"

"That'll do.  Let up on him, will you?" said Peyton, roughly, to
his subordinate.  "The boy knows what he's about.  But," he
continued, addressing Clarence, "how was it the Injin didn't see
you?"

"I was very still on account of not waking Susy," said Clarence,
"and--"  He hesitated.

"And what?"

"He seemed more keen watching what YOU were doing," said the boy
boldly.

"That's so," broke in the second man, who happened to be
experienced, "and as he was to wind'ard o' the boy he was off HIS
scent and bearings.  He was one of their rear scouts; the rest o'
them's ahead crossing our track to cut us off.  Ye didn't see
anything else?"

"I saw a coyote first," said Clarence, greatly encouraged.

"Hold on!" said the expert, as Harry turned away with a sneer.
"That's a sign, too.  Wolf don't go where wolf hez been, and coyote
don't foller Injins--there's no pickin's!  How long afore did you
see the coyote?"

"Just after we left the wagon," said Clarence.

"That's it," said the man, thoughtfully.  "He was driven on ahead,
or hanging on their flanks.  These Injins are betwixt us and that
ar train, or following it."

Peyton made a hurried gesture of warning, as if reminding the
speaker of Clarence's presence--a gesture which the boy noticed and
wondered at.  Then the conversation of the three men took a lower
tone, although Clarence distinctly heard the concluding opinion of
the expert.

"It ain't no good now, Mr. Peyton, and you'd be only exposing
yourself on their ground by breakin' camp agin to-night.  And you
don't know that it ain't US they're watchin'.  You see, if we
hadn't turned off the straight road when we got that first scare
from these yer lost children, we might hev gone on and walked plump
into some cursed trap of those devils.  To my mind, we're just in
nigger luck, and with a good watch and my patrol we're all right to
be fixed where we be till daylight."

Mr. Peyton presently turned away, taking Clarence with him.  "As
we'll be up early and on the track of your train to-morrow, my boy,
you had better turn in now.  I've put you up in my wagon, and as I
expect to be in the saddle most of the night, I reckon I won't
trouble you much."  He led the way to a second wagon--drawn up
beside the one where Susy and Mrs. Peyton had retired--which
Clarence was surprised to find fitted with a writing table and
desk, a chair, and even a bookshelf containing some volumes.  A
long locker, fitted like a lounge, had been made up as a couch for
him, with the unwonted luxury of clean white sheets and pillow-
cases.  A soft matting covered the floor of the heavy wagon bed,
which, Mr. Peyton explained, was hung on centre springs to prevent
jarring.  The sides and roof of the vehicle were of lightly paneled
wood, instead of the usual hooked canvas frame of the ordinary
emigrant wagon, and fitted with a glazed door and movable window
for light and air.  Clarence wondered why the big, powerful man,
who seemed at home on horseback, should ever care to sit in this
office like a merchant or a lawyer; and if this train sold things
to the other trains, or took goods, like the peddlers, to towns on
the route; but there seemed to be nothing to sell, and the other
wagons were filled with only the goods required by the party.  He
would have liked to ask Mr. Peyton who HE was, and have questioned
HIM as freely as he himself had been questioned.  But as the
average adult man never takes into consideration the injustice of
denying to the natural and even necessary curiosity of childhood
that questioning which he himself is so apt to assume without
right, and almost always without delicacy, Clarence had no
recourse.  Yet the boy, like all children, was conscious that if he
had been afterwards questioned about THIS inexplicable experience,
he would have been blamed for his ignorance concerning it.  Left to
himself presently, and ensconced between the sheets, he lay for
some moments staring about him.  The unwonted comfort of his couch,
so different from the stuffy blanket in the hard wagon bed which he
had shared with one of the teamsters, and the novelty, order, and
cleanliness of his surroundings, while they were grateful to his
instincts, began in some vague way to depress him.  To his loyal
nature it seemed a tacit infidelity to his former rough companions
to be lying here; he had a dim idea that he had lost that
independence which equal discomfort and equal pleasure among them
had given him.  There seemed a sense of servitude in accepting this
luxury which was not his.  This set him endeavoring to remember
something of his father's house, of the large rooms, drafty
staircases, and far-off ceilings, and the cold formality of a life
that seemed made up of strange faces; some stranger--his parents;
some kinder--the servants; particularly the black nurse who had him
in charge.  Why did Mr. Peyton ask him about it?  Why, if it were
so important to strangers, had not his mother told him more of it?
And why was she not like this good woman with the gentle voice who
was so kind to--to Susy?  And what did they mean by making HIM so
miserable?  Something rose in his throat, but with an effort he
choked it back, and, creeping from the lounge, went softly to the
window, opened it to see if it "would work," and looked out.  The
shrouded camp fires, the stars that glittered but gave no light,
the dim moving bulk of a patrol beyond the circle, all seemed to
intensify the darkness, and changed the current of his thoughts.
He remembered what Mr. Peyton had said of him when they first met.
"Suthin of a pup, ain't he?"  Surely that meant something that was
not bad!  He crept back to the couch again.

Lying there, still awake, he reflected that he wouldn't be a scout
when he grew up, but would be something like Mr. Peyton, and have a
train like this, and invite the Silsbees and Susy to accompany him.
For this purpose, he and Susy, early to-morrow morning, would get
permission to come in here and play at that game.  This would
familiarize him with the details, so that he would be able at any
time to take charge of it.  He was already an authority on the
subject of Indians!  He had once been fired at--as an Indian.  He
would always carry a rifle like that hanging from the hooks at the
end of the wagon before him, and would eventually slay many Indians
and keep an account of them in a big book like that on the desk.
Susy would help him, having grown up a lady, and they would both
together issue provisions and rations from the door of the wagon to
the gathered crowds.  He would be known as the "White Chief," his
Indian name being "Suthin of a Pup."  He would have a circus van
attached to the train, in which he would occasionally perform.  He
would also have artillery for protection.  There would be a
terrific engagement, and he would rush into the wagon, heated and
blackened with gunpowder; and Susy would put down an account of it
in a book, and Mrs. Peyton--for she would be there in some vague
capacity--would say, "Really, now, I don't see but what we were
very lucky in having such a boy as Clarence with us.  I begin to
understand him better."  And Harry, who, for purposes of vague
poetical retaliation, would also drop in at that moment, would
mutter and say, "He is certainly the son of Colonel Brant; dear
me!" and apologize.  And his mother would come in also, in her
coldest and most indifferent manner, in a white ball dress, and
start and say, "Good gracious, how that boy has grown!  I am sorry
I did not see more of him when he was young."  Yet even in the
midst of this came a confusing numbness, and then the side of the
wagon seemed to melt away, and he drifted out again alone into the
empty desolate plain from which even the sleeping Susy had
vanished, and he was left deserted and forgotten.  Then all was
quiet in the wagon, and only the night wind moving round it.  But
lo! the lashes of the sleeping White Chief--the dauntless leader,
the ruthless destroyer of Indians--were wet with glittering tears!

Yet it seemed only a moment afterwards that he awoke with a faint
consciousness of some arrested motion.  To his utter consternation,
the sun, three hours high, was shining in the wagon, already hot
and stifling in its beams.  There was the familiar smell and taste
of the dirty road in the air about him.  There was a faint creaking
of boards and springs, a slight oscillation, and beyond the audible
rattle of harness, as if the train had been under way, the wagon
moving, and then there had been a sudden halt.  They had probably
come up with the Silsbee train; in a few moments the change would
be effected and all of his strange experience would be over.  He
must get up now.  Yet, with the morning laziness of the healthy
young animal, he curled up a moment longer in his luxurious couch.

How quiet it was!  There were far-off voices, but they seemed
suppressed and hurried.  Through the window he saw one of the
teamsters run rapidly past him with a strange, breathless,
preoccupied face, halt a moment at one of the following wagons, and
then run back again to the front.

Then two of the voices came nearer, with the dull beating of hoofs
in the dust.

"Rout out the boy and ask him," said a half-suppressed, impatient
voice, which Clarence at once recognized as the man Harry's.

"Hold on till Peyton comes up," said the second voice, in a low
tone; "leave it to him."

"Better find out what they were like, at once," grumbled Harry.

"Wait, stand back," said Peyton's voice, joining the others; "I'LL
ask him."

Clarence looked wonderingly at the door.  It opened on Mr. Peyton,
dusty and dismounted, with a strange, abstracted look in his face.

"How many wagons are in your train, Clarence?"

"Three, sir."

"Any marks on them?"

"Yes, sir," said Clarence, eagerly: "'Off to California' and 'Root,
Hog, or Die.'"

Mr. Peyton's eye seemed to leap up and hold Clarence's with a
sudden, strange significance, and then looked down.

"How many were you in all?" he continued.

"Five, and there was Mrs. Silsbee."

"No other woman?"

"No."

"Get up and dress yourself," he said gravely, "and wait here till I
come back.  Keep cool and have your wits about you."  He dropped
his voice slightly.  "Perhaps something's happened that you'll have
to show yourself a little man again for, Clarence!"

The door closed, and the boy heard the same muffled hoofs and
voices die away towards the front.  He began to dress himself
mechanically, almost vacantly, yet conscious always of a vague
undercurrent of thrilling excitement.  When he had finished he
waited almost breathlessly, feeling the same beating of his heart
that he had felt when he was following the vanished train the day
before.  At last he could stand the suspense no longer, and opened
the door.  Everything was still in the motionless caravan, except--
it struck him oddly even then--the unconcerned prattling voice of
Susy from one of the nearer wagons.  Perhaps a sudden feeling that
this was something that concerned HER, perhaps an irresistible
impulse overcame him, but the next moment he had leaped to the
ground, faced about, and was running feverishly to the front.

The first thing that met his eyes was the helpless and desolate
bulk of one of the Silsbee wagons a hundred rods away, bereft of
oxen and pole, standing alone and motionless against the dazzling
sky!  Near it was the broken frame of another wagon, its fore
wheels and axles gone, pitched forward on its knees like an ox
under the butcher's sledge.  Not far away there were the burnt and
blackened ruins of a third, around which the whole party on foot
and horseback seemed to be gathered.  As the boy ran violently on,
the group opened to make way for two men carrying some helpless but
awful object between them.  A terrible instinct made Clarence
swerve from it in his headlong course, but he was at the same
moment discovered by the others, and a cry arose of "Go back!"
"Stop!"  "Keep him back!"  Heeding it no more than the wind that
whistled by him, Clarence made directly for the foremost wagon--the
one in which he and Susy had played.  A powerful hand caught his
shoulder; it was Mr. Peyton's.

"Mrs. Silsbee's wagon," said the boy, with white lips, pointing to
it.  "Where is she?"

"She's missing," said Peyton, "and one other--the rest are dead."

"She must be there," said the boy, struggling, and pointing to the
wagon; "let me go."

"Clarence," said Peyton sternly, accenting his grasp upon the boy's
arm, "be a man!  Look around you.  Try and tell us who these are."

There seemed to be one or two heaps of old clothes lying on the
ground, and further on, where the men at a command from Peyton had
laid down their burden, another.  In those ragged, dusty heaps of
clothes, from which all the majesty of life seemed to have been
ruthlessly stamped out, only what was ignoble and grotesque
appeared to be left.  There was nothing terrible in this.  The boy
moved slowly towards them; and, incredible even to himself, the
overpowering fear of them that a moment before had overcome him
left him as suddenly.  He walked from the one to the other,
recognizing them by certain marks and signs, and mentioning name
after name.  The groups gazed at him curiously; he was conscious
that he scarcely understood himself, still less the same quiet
purpose that made him turn towards the furthest wagon.

"There's nothing there," said Peyton; "we've searched it."  But the
boy, without replying, continued his way, and the crowd followed
him.

The deserted wagon, more rude, disorderly, and slovenly than it had
ever seemed to him before, was now heaped and tumbled with broken
bones, cans, scattered provisions, pots, pans, blankets, and
clothing in the foul confusion of a dust-heap.  But in this
heterogeneous mingling the boy's quick eye caught sight of a
draggled edge of calico.

"That's Mrs. Silsbee's dress!" he cried, and leapt into the wagon.

At first the men stared at each other, but an instant later a dozen
hands were helping him, nervously digging and clearing away the
rubbish.  Then one man uttered a sudden cry, and fell back with
frantic but furious eyes uplifted against the pitiless, smiling sky
above him.

"Great God! look here!"

It was the yellowish, waxen face of Mrs. Silsbee that had been
uncovered.  But to the fancy of the boy it had changed; the old
familiar lines of worry, care, and querulousness had given way to a
look of remote peace and statue-like repose.  He had often vexed
her in her aggressive life; he was touched with remorse at her
cold, passionless apathy now, and pressed timidly forward.  Even as
he did so, the man, with a quick but warning gesture, hurriedly
threw his handkerchief over the matted locks, as if to shut out
something awful from his view.  Clarence felt himself drawn back;
but not before the white lips of a bystander had whispered a single
word--

"Scalped, too! by God!"


CHAPTER VI


Then followed days and weeks that seemed to Clarence as a dream.
At first, an interval of hushed and awed restraint when he and Susy
were kept apart, a strange and artificial interest taken little
note of by him, but afterwards remembered when others had forgotten
it; the burial of Mrs. Silsbee beneath a cairn of stones, with some
ceremonies that, simple though they were, seemed to usurp the
sacred rights of grief from him and Susy, and leave them cold and
frightened; days of frequent and incoherent childish outbursts from
Susy, growing fainter and rarer as time went on, until they ceased,
he knew not when; the haunting by night of that morning vision of
the three or four heaps of ragged clothes on the ground and a half
regret that he had not examined them more closely; a recollection
of the awful loneliness and desolation of the broken and abandoned
wagon left behind on its knees as if praying mutely when the train
went on and left it; the trundling behind of the fateful wagon in
which Mrs. Silsbee's body had been found, superstitiously shunned
by every one, and when at last turned over to the authorities at an
outpost garrison, seeming to drop the last link from the dragging
chain of the past.  The revelation to the children of a new
experience in that brief glimpse of the frontier garrison; the
handsome officer in uniform and belted sword, an heroic, vengeful
figure to be admired and imitated hereafter; the sudden importance
and respect given to Susy and himself as "survivors"; the
sympathetic questioning and kindly exaggerations of their
experiences, quickly accepted by Susy--all these, looking back upon
them afterwards, seemed to have passed in a dream.

No less strange and visionary to them seemed the real transitions
they noted from the moving train.  How one morning they missed the
changeless, motionless, low, dark line along the horizon, and
before noon found themselves among the rocks and trees and a
swiftly rushing river.  How there suddenly appeared beside them a
few days later a great gray cloud-covered ridge of mountains that
they were convinced was that same dark line that they had seen so
often.  How the men laughed at them, and said that for the last
three days they had been CROSSING that dark line, and that it was
HIGHER than the great gray-clouded range before them, which it had
always hidden from their view!  How Susy firmly believed that these
changes took place in her sleep, when she always "kinder felt they
were crawlin' up," and how Clarence, in the happy depreciation of
extreme youth, expressed his conviction that they "weren't a bit
high, after all."  How the weather became cold, though it was
already summer, and at night the camp fire was a necessity, and
there was a stove in the tent with Susy; and yet how all this faded
away, and they were again upon a dazzling, burnt, and sun-dried
plain!  But always as in a dream!

More real were the persons who composed the party--whom they seemed
to have always known--and who, in the innocent caprice of children,
had become to them more actual than the dead had even been.  There
was Mr. Peyton, who they now knew owned the train, and who was so
rich that he "needn't go to California if he didn't want to, and
was going to buy a great deal of it if he liked it," and who was
also a lawyer and "policeman"--which was Susy's rendering of
"politician"--and was called "Squire" and "Judge" at the frontier
outpost, and could order anybody to be "took up if he wanted to,"
and who knew everybody by their Christian names; and Mrs. Peyton,
who had been delicate and was ordered by the doctor to live in the
open air for six months, and "never go into a house or a town
agin," and who was going to adopt Susy as soon as her husband could
arrange with Susy's relatives, and draw up the papers!  How "Harry"
was Henry Benham, Mrs. Peyton's brother, and a kind of partner of
Mr. Peyton.  And how the scout's name was Gus Gildersleeve, or the
"White Crow," and how, through his recognized intrepidity, an
attack upon their train was no doubt averted.  Then there was
"Bill," the stock herder, and "Texas Jim," the vaquero--the latter
marvelous and unprecedented in horsemanship.  Such were their
companions, as appeared through the gossip of the train and their
own inexperienced consciousness.  To them, they were all astounding
and important personages.  But, either from boyish curiosity or
some sense of being misunderstood, Clarence was more attracted by
the two individuals of the party who were least kind to him--
namely, Mrs. Peyton and her brother Harry.  I fear that, after the
fashion of most children, and some grown-up people, he thought less
of the steady kindness of Mr. Peyton and the others than of the
rare tolerance of Harry or the polite concessions of his sister.
Miserably conscious of this at times, he quite convinced himself
that if he could only win a word of approbation from Harry, or a
smile from Mrs. Peyton, he would afterwards revenge himself by
"running away."  Whether he would or not, I cannot say.  I am
writing of a foolish, growing, impressionable boy of eleven, of
whose sentiments nothing could be safely predicted but uncertainty.

It was at this time that he became fascinated by another member of
the party whose position had been too humble and unimportant to be
included in the group already noted.  Of the same appearance as the
other teamsters in size, habits, and apparel, he had not at first
exhibited to Clarence any claim to sympathy.  But it appeared that
he was actually a youth of only sixteen--a hopeless incorrigible of
St. Joseph, whose parents had prevailed on Peyton to allow him to
join the party, by way of removing him from evil associations and
as a method of reform.  Of this Clarence was at first ignorant, not
from any want of frankness on the part of the youth, for that
ingenious young gentleman later informed him that he had killed
three men in St. Louis, two in St. Jo, and that the officers of
justice were after him.  But it was evident that to precocious
habits of drinking, smoking, chewing, and card-playing this
overgrown youth added a strong tendency to exaggeration of
statement.  Indeed, he was known as "Lying Jim Hooker," and his
various qualities presented a problem to Clarence that was
attractive and inspiring, doubtful, but always fascinating.  With
the hoarse voice of early wickedness and a contempt for ordinary
courtesy, he had a round, perfectly good-humored face, and a
disposition that when not called upon to act up to his self-imposed
role of reckless wickedness, was not unkindly.

It was only a few days after the massacre, and while the children
were still wrapped in the gloomy interest and frightened reticence
which followed it, that "Jim Hooker" first characteristically
flashed upon Clarence's perceptions.  Hanging half on and half off
the saddle of an Indian pony, the lank Jim suddenly made his
appearance, dashing violently up and down the track, and around the
wagon in which Clarence was sitting, tugging desperately at the
reins, with every indication of being furiously run away with, and
retaining his seat only with the most dauntless courage and skill.
Round and round they went, the helpless rider at times hanging by a
single stirrup near the ground, and again recovering himself by--as
it seemed to Clarence--almost superhuman effort.  Clarence sat
open-mouthed with anxiety and excitement, and yet a few of the
other teamsters laughed.  Then the voice of Mr. Peyton, from the
window of his car, said quietly,--

"There, that will do, Jim.  Quit it!"

The furious horse and rider instantly disappeared.  A few moments
after, the bewildered Clarence saw the redoubted horseman trotting
along quietly in the dust of the rear, on the same fiery steed, who
in that prosaic light bore an astounding resemblance to an ordinary
team horse.  Later in the day he sought an explanation from the
rider.

"You see," answered Jim gloomily, "thar ain't a galoot in this yer
crowd ez knows jist WHAT'S in that hoss!  And them ez suspecks
daren't say!  It wouldn't do for to hev it let out that the Judge
hez a Morgan-Mexican plug that's killed two men afore he got him,
and is bound to kill another afore he gets through!  Why, on'y the
week afore we kem up to you, that thar hoss bolted with me at
camping!  Bucked and throwed me, but I kept my holt o' the stirrups
with my foot--so!  Dragged me a matter of two miles, head down, and
me keepin' away rocks with my hand--so!"

"Why didn't you loose your foot and let go?" asked Clarence
breathlessly.

"YOU might," said Jim, with deep scorn; "that ain't MY style.  I
just laid low till we kem to a steep pitched hill, and goin' down
when the hoss was, so to speak, kinder BELOW me, I just turned a
hand spring, so, and that landed me onter his back again."

This action, though vividly illustrated by Jim's throwing his hands
down like feet beneath him, and indicating the parabola of a spring
in the air, proving altogether too much for Clarence's mind to
grasp, he timidly turned to a less difficult detail.

"What made the horse bolt first, Mr. Hooker?"

"Smelt Injins!" said Jim, carelessly expectorating tobacco juice in
a curving jet from the side of his mouth--a singularly fascinating
accomplishment, peculiarly his own, "'n' likely YOUR Injins."

"But," argued Clarence hesitatingly, "you said it was a week
before--and--"

"Er Mexican plug kin smell Injins fifty, yes, a hundred miles
away," said Jim, with scornful deliberation; "'n' if Judge Peyton
had took my advice, and hadn't been so mighty feared about the
character of his hoss gettin' out he'd hev played roots on them
Injins afore they tetched ye.  But," he added, with gloomy
dejection, "there ain't no sand in this yer crowd, thar ain't no
vim, thar ain't nothin'; and thar kan't be ez long ez thar's women
and babies, and women and baby fixin's, mixed up with it.  I'd hev
cut the whole blamed gang ef it weren't for one or two things," he
added darkly.

Clarence, impressed by Jim's mysterious manner, for the moment
forgot his contemptuous allusion to Mr. Peyton, and the evident
implication of Susy and himself, and asked hurriedly, "What
things?"

Jim, as if forgetful of the boy's presence in his fitful mood,
abstractedly half drew a glittering bowie knife from his bootleg,
and then slowly put it back again.  "Thar's one or two old scores,"
he continued, in a low voice, although no one was in hearing
distance of them, "one or two private accounts," he went on
tragically, averting his eyes as if watched by some one, "thet hev
to be wiped out with blood afore I leave.  Thar's one or two men
TOO MANY alive and breathin' in this yer crowd.  Mebbee it's Gus
Gildersleeve; mebbee it's Harry Benham; mebbee," he added, with a
dark yet noble disinterestedness, "it's ME."

"Oh, no," said Clarence, with polite deprecation.

Far from placating the gloomy Jim, this seemed only to awake his
suspicions.  "Mebbee," he said, dancing suddenly away from
Clarence, "mebbee you think I'm lyin'.  Mebbee you think, because
you're Colonel Brant's son, yer kin run ME with this yer train.
Mebbee," he continued, dancing violently back again, "ye kalkilate,
because ye run off'n' stampeded a baby, ye kin tote me round too,
sonny.  Mebbee," he went on, executing a double shuffle in the dust
and alternately striking his hands on the sides of his boots,
"mebbee you're spyin' round and reportin' to the Judge."

Firmly convinced that Jim was working himself up by an Indian war-
dance to some desperate assault on himself, but resenting the last
unjust accusation, Clarence had recourse to one of his old dogged
silences.  Happily at this moment an authoritative voice called
out, "Now, then, you Jim Hooker!" and the desperate Hooker, as
usual, vanished instantly.  Nevertheless, he appeared an hour or
two later beside the wagon in which Susy and Clarence were seated,
with an expression of satiated vengeance and remorseful
bloodguiltiness in his face, and his hair combed Indian fashion
over his eyes.  As he generously contented himself with only
passing a gloomy and disparaging criticism on the game of cards
that the children were playing, it struck Clarence for the first
time that a great deal of his real wickedness resided in his hair.
This set him to thinking that it was strange that Mr. Peyton did
not try to reform him with a pair of scissors, but not until
Clarence himself had for at least four days attempted to imitate
Jim by combing his own hair in that fashion.

A few days later, Jim again casually favored him with a
confidential interview.  Clarence had been allowed to bestride one
of the team leaders postillionwise, and was correspondingly
elevated, when Jim joined him, on the Mexican plug, which appeared--
no doubt a part of its wicked art--heavily docile, and even
slightly lame.

"How much," said Jim, in a tone of gloomy confidence,--"how much
did you reckon to make by stealin' that gal-baby, sonny?"

"Nothing," replied Clarence with a smile.  Perhaps it was an
evidence of the marked influence that Jim was beginning to exert
over him that he already did not attempt to resent this fascinating
implication of grownup guilt.

"It orter bin a good job, if it warn't revenge," continued Jim
moodily.

"No, it wasn't revenge," said Clarence hurriedly.

"Then ye kalkilated ter get er hundred dollars reward ef the old
man and old woman hadn't bin scelped afore yet got up to 'em?" said
Jim.  "That's your blamed dodgasted luck, eh!  Enyhow, you'll make
Mrs. Peyton plank down suthin' if she adopts the babby.  Look yer,
young feller," he said, starting suddenly and throwing his face
forward, glaring fiendishly through his matted side-locks, "d'ye
mean ter tell me it wasn't a plant--a skin game--the hull thing?"

"A what?" said Clarence.

"D'ye mean to say"--it was wonderful how gratuitously husky his
voice became at this moment--"d'ye mean ter tell me ye didn't set
on them Injins to wipe out the Silsbees, so that ye could hev an
out-an'-out gal ORFEN on hand fer Mrs. Peyton ter adopt--eh?"

But here Clarence was forced to protest, and strongly, although Jim
contemptuously ignored it.  "Don't lie ter me," he repeated
mysteriously, "I'm fly.  I'm dark, young fel.  We're cahoots in
this thing?"  And with this artful suggestion of being in
possession of Clarence's guilty secret he departed in time to elude
the usual objurgation of his superior, "Phil," the head teamster.

Nor was his baleful fascination exercised entirely on Clarence.  In
spite of Mrs. Peyton's jealously affectionate care, Clarence's
frequent companionship, and the little circle of admiring courtiers
that always surrounded Susy, it became evident that this small Eve
had been secretly approached and tempted by the Satanic Jim.  She
was found one day to have a few heron's feathers in her possession
with which she adorned her curls, and at another time was
discovered to have rubbed her face and arms with yellow and red
ochre, confessedly the free gift of Jim Hooker.  It was to Clarence
alone that she admitted the significance and purport of these
offerings.  "Jim gived 'em to me," she said, "and Jim's a kind of
Injin hisself that won't hurt me; and when bad Injins come, they'll
think I'm his Injin baby and run away.  And Jim said if I'd just
told the Injins when they came to kill papa and mamma, that I
b'longed to him, they'd hev runned away."

"But," said the practical Clarence, "you could not; you know you
were with Mrs. Peyton all the time."

"Kla'uns," said Susy, shaking her head and fixing her round blue
eyes with calm mendacity on the boy, "don't you tell me.  I WAS
THERE!"

Clarence started back, and nearly fell over the wagon in hopeless
dismay at this dreadful revelation of Susy's powers of
exaggeration.  "But," he gasped, "you know, Susy, you and me left
before--"

"Kla'uns," said Susy calmly, making a little pleat in the skirt of
her dress with her small thumb and fingers, "don't you talk to me.
I was there.  I'se a SERIVER!  The men at the fort said so!  The
SERIVERS is allus, allus there, and allus allus knows everythin'."

Clarence was too dumfounded to reply.  He had a vague recollection
of having noticed before that Susy was very much fascinated by the
reputation given to her at Fort Ridge as a "survivor," and was
trying in an infantile way to live up to it.  This the wicked Jim
had evidently encouraged.  For a day or two Clarence felt a little
afraid of her, and more lonely than ever.

It was in this state, and while he was doggedly conscious that his
association with Jim did not prepossess Mrs. Peyton or her brother
in his favor, and that the former even believed him responsible for
Susy's unhallowed acquaintance with Jim, that he drifted into one
of those youthful escapades on which elders are apt to sit in
severe but not always considerate judgment.  Believing, like many
other children, that nobody cared particularly for him, except to
RESTRAIN him, discovering, as children do, much sooner than we
complacently imagine, that love and preference have no logical
connection with desert or character, Clarence became boyishly
reckless.  But when, one day, it was rumored that a herd of buffalo
was in the vicinity, and that the train would be delayed the next
morning in order that a hunt might be organized, by Gildersleeve,
Benham, and a few others, Clarence listened willingly to Jim's
proposition that they should secretly follow it.

To effect their unhallowed purpose required boldness and duplicity.
It was arranged that shortly after the departure of the hunting
party Clarence should ask permission to mount and exercise one of
the team horses--a favor that had been frequently granted him; that
in the outskirts of the camp he should pretend that the horse ran
away with him, and Jim would start in pursuit.  The absence of the
shooting party with so large a contingent of horses and men would
preclude any further detachment from the camp to assist them.  Once
clear, they would follow the track of the hunters, and, if
discovered by them, would offer the same excuse, with the addition
that they had lost their way to the camp.  The plan was successful.
The details were carried out with almost too perfect effect; as it
appeared that Jim, in order to give dramatic intensity to the
fractiousness of Clarence's horse, had inserted a thorn apple under
the neck of his saddle, which Clarence only discovered in time to
prevent himself from being unseated.  Urged forward by ostentatious
"Whoas!" and surreptitious cuts in the rear from Jim, pursuer and
pursued presently found themselves safely beyond the half-dry
stream and fringe of alder bushes that skirted the camp.  They were
not followed.  Whether the teamsters suspected and winked at this
design, or believed that the boys could take care of themselves,
and ran no risk of being lost in the proximity of the hunting
party, there was no general alarm.

Thus reassured, and having a general idea of the direction of the
hunt, the boys pushed hilariously forward.  Before them opened a
vast expanse of bottom land, slightly sloping on the right to a
distant half-filled lagoon, formed by the main river overflow, on
whose tributary they had encamped.  The lagoon was partly hidden by
straggling timber and "brush," and beyond that again stretched the
unlimitable plains--the pasture of their mighty game.  Hither, Jim
hoarsely informed his companion, the buffaloes came to water.  A
few rods further on, he started dramatically, and, alighting,
proceeded to slowly examine the ground.  It seemed to be scattered
over with half-circular patches, which he pointed out mysteriously
as "buffalo chip."  To Clarence's inexperienced perception the
plain bore a singular resemblance to the surface of an ordinary
unromantic cattle pasture that somewhat chilled his heroic fancy.
However, the two companions halted and professionally examined
their arms and equipments.

These, I grieve to say, though varied, were scarcely full or
satisfactory.  The necessities of their flight had restricted Jim
to an old double-barreled fowling-piece, which he usually carried
slung across his shoulders; an old-fashioned "six-shooter," whose
barrels revolved occasionally and unexpectedly, known as "Allen's
Pepper Box" on account of its culinary resemblance; and a bowie-
knife.  Clarence carried an Indian bow and arrow with which he had
been exercising, and a hatchet which he had concealed under the
flanks of his saddle.  To this Jim generously added the six-
shooter, taking the hatchet in exchange--a transfer that at first
delighted Clarence, until, seeing the warlike and picturesque
effect of the hatchet in Jim's belt, he regretted the transfer.
The gun, Jim meantime explained "extry charged," "chuck up" to the
middle with slugs and revolver bullets, could only be fired by
himself, and even then he darkly added, not without danger.  This
poverty of equipment was, however, compensated by opposite
statements from Jim of the extraordinary results obtained by these
simple weapons from "fellers I knew:" how HE himself had once
brought down a "bull" by a bold shot with a revolver through its
open bellowing mouth that pierced his "innards;" how a friend of
his--an intimate in fact--now in jail at Louisville for killing a
sheriff's deputy, had once found himself alone and dismounted with
a simple clasp-knife and a lariat among a herd of buffaloes; how,
leaping calmly upon the shaggy shoulders of the biggest bull, he
lashed himself with the lariat firmly to its horns, goading it
onward with his clasp-knife, and subsisting for days upon the flesh
cut from its living body, until, abandoned by its fellows and
exhausted by the loss of blood, it finally succumbed to its victor
at the very outskirts of the camp to which he had artfully driven
it!  It must be confessed that this recital somewhat took away
Clarence's breath, and he would have liked to ask a few questions.
But they were alone on the prairie, and linked by a common
transgression; the glorious sun was coming up victoriously, the
pure, crisp air was intoxicating their nerves; in the bright
forecast of youth everything WAS possible!

The surface of the bottom land that they were crossing was here and
there broken up by fissures and "potholes," and some circumspection
in their progress became necessary.  In one of these halts,
Clarence was struck by a dull, monotonous jarring that sounded like
the heavy regular fall of water over a dam.  Each time that they
slackened their pace the sound would become more audible, and was
at last accompanied by that slight but unmistakable tremor of the
earth that betrayed the vicinity of a waterfall.  Hesitating over
the phenomenon, which seemed to imply that their topography was
wrong and that they had blundered from the track, they were
presently startled by the fact that the sound was actually
APPROACHING them!  With a sudden instinct they both galloped
towards the lagoon.  As the timber opened before them Jim uttered a
long ecstatic shout.  "Why, it's THEM!"

At a first glance it seemed to Clarence as if the whole plain
beyond was broken up and rolling in tumbling waves or furrows
towards them.  A second glance showed the tossing fronts of a vast
herd of buffaloes, and here and there, darting in and out and among
them, or emerging from the cloud of dust behind, wild figures and
flashes of fire.  With the idea of water still in his mind, it
seemed as if some tumultuous tidal wave were sweeping unseen
towards the lagoon, carrying everything before it.  He turned with
eager eyes, in speechless expectancy, to his companion.

Alack! that redoubtable hero and mighty hunter was, to all
appearances, equally speechless and astonished.  It was true that
he remained rooted to the saddle, a lank, still heroic figure,
alternately grasping his hatchet and gun with a kind of spasmodic
regularity.  How long he would have continued this would never be
known, for the next moment, with a deafening crash, the herd broke
through the brush, and, swerving at the right of the lagoon, bore
down directly upon them.  All further doubt or hesitation on their
part was stopped.  The farseeing, sagacious Mexican plug with a
terrific snort wheeled and fled furiously with his rider.  Moved,
no doubt, by touching fidelity, Clarence's humbler team-horse
instantly followed.  In a few moments those devoted animals
struggled neck to neck in noble emulation.

"What are we goin' off this way for?" gasped the simple Clarence.

"Peyton and Gildersleeve are back there--and they'll see us,"
gasped Jim in reply.  It struck Clarence that the buffaloes were
much nearer them than the hunting party, and that the trampling
hoofs of a dozen bulls were close behind them, but with another
gasp he shouted,

"When are we going to hunt 'em?"

"Hunt THEM!" screamed Jim, with a hysterical outburst of truth;
"why, they're huntin' US--dash it!"

Indeed, there was no doubt that their frenzied horses were flying
before the equally frenzied herd behind them.  They gained a
momentary advantage by riding into one of the fissures, and out
again on the other side, while their pursuers were obliged to make
a detour.  But in a few minutes they were overtaken by that part of
the herd who had taken the other and nearer side of the lagoon, and
were now fairly in the midst of them.  The ground shook with their
trampling hoofs; their steaming breath, mingling with the stinging
dust that filled the air, half choked and blinded Clarence.  He was
dimly conscious that Jim had wildly thrown his hatchet at a cow
buffalo pressing close upon his flanks.  As they swept down into
another gully he saw him raise his fateful gun with utter
desperation.  Clarence crouched low on his horse's outstretched
neck.  There was a blinding flash, a single stunning report of both
barrels; Jim reeled in one way half out of the saddle, while the
smoking gun seemed to leap in another over his head, and then rider
and horse vanished in a choking cloud of dust and gunpowder.  A
moment after Clarence's horse stopped with a sudden check, and the
boy felt himself hurled over its head into the gully, alighting on
something that seemed to be a bounding cushion of curled and
twisted hair.  It was the shaggy shoulder of an enormous buffalo!
For Jim's desperate random shot and double charge had taken effect
on the near hind leg of a preceding bull, tearing away the flesh
and ham-stringing the animal, who had dropped in the gully just in
front of Clarence's horse.

Dazed but unhurt, the boy rolled from the lifted fore quarters of
the struggling brute to the ground.  When he staggered to his feet
again, not only his horse was gone but the whole herd of buffaloes
seemed to have passed too, and he could hear the shouts of unseen
hunters now ahead of him.  They had evidently overlooked his fall,
and the gully had concealed him.  The sides before him were too
steep for his aching limbs to climb; the slope by which he and the
bull had descended when the collision occurred was behind the
wounded animal.  Clarence was staggering towards it when the bull,
by a supreme effort, lifted itself on three legs, half turned, and
faced him.

These events had passed too quickly for the inexperienced boy to
have felt any active fear, or indeed anything but wild excitement
and confusion.  But the spectacle of that shaggy and enormous
front, that seemed to fill the whole gully, rising with awful
deliberation between him and escape, sent a thrill of terror
through his frame.  The great, dull, bloodshot eyes glared at him
with a dumb, wondering fury; the large wet nostrils were so near
that their first snort of inarticulate rage made him reel backwards
as from a blow.  The gully was only a narrow and short fissure or
subsidence of the plain; a few paces more of retreat and he would
be at its end, against an almost perpendicular bank fifteen feet
high.  If he attempted to climb its crumbling sides and fell, there
would be those short but terrible horns waiting to impale him!  It
seemed too terrible, too cruel!  He was so small beside this
overgrown monster.  It wasn't fair!  The tears started to his eyes,
and then, in a rage at the injustice of Fate, he stood doggedly
still with clenched fists.  He fixed his gaze with half-hysterical,
childish fury on those lurid eyes; he did not know that, owing to
the strange magnifying power of the bull's convex pupils, he,
Clarence, appeared much bigger than he really was to the brute's
heavy consciousness, the distance from him most deceptive, and that
it was to this fact that hunters so often owed their escape.  He
only thought of some desperate means of attack.  Ah! the six-
shooter.  It was still in his pocket.  He drew it nervously,
hopelessly--it looked so small compared with his large enemy!

He presented it with flashing eyes, and pulled the trigger.  A
feeble click followed, another, and again!  Even THIS had mocked
him.  He pulled the trigger once more, wildly; there was a sudden
explosion, and another.  He stepped back; the balls had apparently
flattened themselves harmlessly on the bull's forehead.  He pulled
again, hopelessly; there was another report, a sudden furious
bellow, and the enormous brute threw his head savagely to one side,
burying his left horn deep in the crumbling bank beside him.  Again
and again he charged the bank, driving his left horn home, and
bringing down the stones and earth in showers.  It was some seconds
before Clarence saw in a single glimpse of that wildly tossing
crest the reason of this fury.  The blood was pouring from his left
eye, penetrated by the last bullet; the bull was blinded!  A
terrible revulsion of feeling, a sudden sense of remorse that was
for the moment more awful than even his previous fear, overcame
him.  HE had done THAT THING!  As much to fly from the dreadful
spectacle as any instinct of self-preservation, he took advantage
of the next mad paroxysms of pain and blindness, that always
impelled the suffering beast towards the left, to slip past him on
the right, reach the incline, and scramble wildly up to the plain
again.  Here he ran confusedly forward, not knowing whither--only
caring to escape that agonized bellowing, to shut out forever the
accusing look of that huge blood-weltering eye.

Suddenly he heard a distant angry shout.  To his first hurried
glance the plain had seemed empty, but, looking up, he saw two
horsemen rapidly advancing with a led horse behind them--his own.
With the blessed sense of relief that overtook him now came the
fevered desire for sympathy and to tell them all.  But as they came
nearer he saw that they were Gildersleeve, the scout, and Henry
Benham, and that, far from sharing any delight in his deliverance,
their faces only exhibited irascible impatience.  Overcome by this
new defeat, the boy stopped, again dumb and dogged.

"Now, then, blank it all, WILL you get up and come along, or do you
reckon to keep the train waiting another hour over your blanked
foolishness?" said Gildersleeve savagely.

The boy hesitated, and then mounted mechanically, without a word.

"'Twould have served 'em right to have gone and left 'em," muttered
Benham vindictively.

For one wild instant Clarence thought of throwing himself from his
horse and bidding them go on and leave him.  But before he could
put his thought into action the two men were galloping forward,
with his horse led by a lariat fastened to the horn of
Gildersleeve's saddle.

In two hours more they had overtaken the train, already on the
march, and were in the midst of the group of outriders.  Judge
Peyton's face, albeit a trifle perplexed, turned towards Clarence
with a kindly, half-tolerant look of welcome.  The boy's heart
instantly melted with forgiveness.

"Well, my boy, let's hear YOUR story.  What happened?"

Clarence cast a hurried glance around, and saw Jim, with face
averted, riding gloomily behind.  Then nervously and hurriedly he
told how he had been thrown into the gully on the back of the
wounded buffalo, and the manner of his escape.  An audible titter
ran through the cavalcade.  Mr. Peyton regarded him gravely.  "But
how did the buffalo get so conveniently into the gully?" he asked.

"Jim Hooker lamed him with a shotgun, and he fell over," said
Clarence timidly.

A roar of Homeric laughter went up from the party.  Clarence looked
up, stung and startled, but caught a single glimpse of Jim Hooker's
face that made him forget his own mortification.  In its hopeless,
heart-sick, and utterly beaten dejection--the first and only real
expression he had seen on it--he read the dreadful truth.  Jim's
REPUTATION had ruined him!  The one genuine and striking episode of
his life, the one trustworthy account he had given of it, had been
unanimously accepted as the biggest and most consummate lie of his
record!


CHAPTER VII


With this incident of the hunt closed, to Clarence, the last
remembered episode of his journey.  But he did not know until long
after that it had also closed to him what might have been the
opening of a new career.  For it had been Judge Peyton's intention
in adopting Susy to include a certain guardianship and protection
of the boy, provided he could get the consent of that vague
relation to whom he was consigned.  But it had been pointed out by
Mrs. Peyton and her brother that Clarence's association with Jim
Hooker had made him a doubtful companion for Susy, and even the
Judge himself was forced to admit that the boy's apparent taste for
evil company was inconsistent with his alleged birth and breeding.
Unfortunately, Clarence, in the conviction of being hopelessly
misunderstood, and that dogged acquiescence to fate which was one
of his characteristics, was too proud to correct the impression by
any of the hypocracies of childhood.  He had also a cloudy instinct
of loyalty to Jim in his disgrace, without, however, experiencing
either the sympathy of an equal or the zeal of a partisan, but
rather--if it could be said of a boy of his years--with the
patronage and protection of a superior.  So he accepted without
demur the intimation that when the train reached California he
would be forwarded from Stockton with an outfit and a letter of
explanation to Sacramento, it being understood that in the event of
not finding his relative he would return to the Peytons in one of
the southern valleys, where they elected to purchase a tract of
land.

With this outlook, and the prospect of change, independence, and
all the rich possibilities that to the imagination of youth are
included in them, Clarence had found the days dragging.  The halt
at Salt Lake, the transit of the dreary Alkali desert, even the
wild passage of the Sierras, were but a blurred picture in his
memory.  The sight of eternal snows and the rolling of endless
ranks of pines, the first glimpse of a hillside of wild oats, the
spectacle of a rushing yellow river that to his fancy seemed tinged
with gold, were momentary excitements, quickly forgotten.  But
when, one morning, halting at the outskirts of a struggling
settlement, he found the entire party eagerly gathered around a
passing stranger, who had taken from his saddle-bags a small
buckskin pouch to show them a double handful of shining scales of
metal, Clarence felt the first feverish and overmastering thrill of
the gold-seekers.  Breathlessly he followed the breathless
questions and careless replies.  The gold had been dug out of a
placer only thirty miles away.  It might be worth, say, a hundred
and fifty dollars; it was only HIS share of a week's work with two
partners.  It was not much; "the country was getting played out
with fresh arrivals and greenhorns."  All this falling carelessly
from the unshaven lips of a dusty, roughly dressed man, with a
long-handled shovel and pickaxe strapped on his back, and a frying-
pan depending from his saddle.  But no panoplied or armed knight
ever seemed so heroic or independent a figure to Clarence.  What
could be finer than the noble scorn conveyed in his critical survey
of the train, with its comfortable covered wagons and appliances of
civilization?  "Ye'll hev to get rid of them ther fixin's if yer
goin' in for placer diggin'!"  What a corroboration of Clarence's
real thoughts!  What a picture of independence was this!  The
picturesque scout, the all-powerful Judge Peyton, the daring young
officer, all crumbled on their clayey pedestals before this hero in
a red flannel shirt and high-topped boots.  To stroll around in the
open air all day, and pick up those shining bits of metal, without
study, without method or routine--this was really life; to some day
come upon that large nugget "you couldn't lift," that was worth as
much as the train and horses--such a one as the stranger said was
found the other day at Sawyer's Bar--this was worth giving up
everything for.  That rough man, with his smile of careless
superiority, was the living link between Clarence and the Thousand
and One Nights; in him were Aladdin and Sindbad incarnate.

Two days later they reached Stockton.  Here Clarence, whose single
suit of clothes had been reinforced by patching, odds and ends from
Peyton's stores, and an extraordinary costume of army cloth, got up
by the regimental tailor at Fort Ridge, was taken to be refitted at
a general furnishing "emporium."  But alas! in the selection of the
clothing for that adult locality scant provision seemed to have
been made for a boy of Clarence's years, and he was with difficulty
fitted from an old condemned Government stores with "a boy's"
seaman suit and a brass-buttoned pea-jacket.  To this outfit Mr.
Peyton added a small sum of money for his expenses, and a letter of
explanation to his cousin.  The stage-coach was to start at noon.
It only remained for Clarence to take leave of the party.  The
final parting with Susy had been discounted on the two previous
days with some tears, small frights and clingings, and the
expressed determination on the child's part "to go with him;" but
in the excitement of the arrival at Stockton it was still further
mitigated, and under the influence of a little present from
Clarence--his first disbursement of his small capital--had at last
taken the form and promise of merely temporary separation.
Nevertheless, when the boy's scanty pack was deposited under the
stage-coach seat, and he had been left alone, he ran rapidly back
to the train for one moment more with Susy.  Panting and a little
frightened, he reached Mrs. Peyton's car.

"Goodness!  You're not gone yet," said Mrs. Peyton sharply.  "Do
you want to lose the stage?"

An instant before, in his loneliness, he might have answered,
"Yes."  But under the cruel sting of Mrs. Peyton's evident
annoyance at his reappearance he felt his legs suddenly tremble,
and his voice left him.  He did not dare to look at Susy.  But her
voice rose comfortably from the depths of the wagon where she was
sitting.

"The stage will be gone away, Kla'uns."

She too!  Shame at his foolish weakness sent the yearning blood
that had settled round his heart flying back into his face.

"I was looking for--for--for Jim, ma'am," he said at last, boldly.

He saw a look of disgust pass over Mrs. Peyton's face, and felt a
malicious satisfaction as he turned and ran back to the stage.  But
here, to his surprise, he actually found Jim, whom he really hadn't
thought of, darkly watching the last strapping of luggage.  With a
manner calculated to convey the impression to the other passengers
that he was parting from a brother criminal, probably on his way to
a state prison, Jim shook hands gloomily with Clarence, and eyed
the other passengers furtively between his mated locks.

"Ef ye hear o' anythin' happenin', ye'll know what's up," he said,
in a low, hoarse, but perfectly audible whisper.  "Me and them's
bound to part company afore long.  Tell the fellows at Deadman's
Gulch to look out for me at any time."

Although Clarence was not going to Deadman's Gulch, knew nothing of
it, and had a faint suspicion that Jim was equally ignorant, yet as
one or two of the passengers glanced anxiously at the demure, gray-
eyed boy who seemed booked for such a baleful destination, he
really felt the half-delighted, half-frightened consciousness that
he was starting in life under fascinating immoral pretenses.  But
the forward spring of the fine-spirited horses, the quickened
motion, the glittering sunlight, and the thought that he really was
leaving behind him all the shackles of dependence and custom, and
plunging into a life of freedom, drove all else from his mind.  He
turned at last from this hopeful, blissful future, and began to
examine his fellow passengers with boyish curiosity.  Wedged in
between two silent men on the front seat, one of whom seemed a
farmer, and the other, by his black attire, a professional man,
Clarence was finally attracted by a black-mantled, dark-haired,
bonnetless woman on the back seat, whose attention seemed to be
monopolized by the jocular gallantries of her companions and the
two men before her in the middle seat.  From her position he could
see little more than her dark eyes, which occasionally seemed to
meet his frank curiosity in an amused sort of way, but he was
chiefly struck by the pretty foreign sound of her musical voice,
which was unlike anything he had ever heard before, and--alas for
the inconstancy of youth--much finer than Mrs. Peyton's.  Presently
his farmer companion, casting a patronizing glance on Clarence's
pea-jacket and brass buttons, said cheerily--

"Jest off a voyage, sonny?"

"No, sir," stammered Clarence; "I came across the plains."

"Then I reckon that's the rig-out for the crew of a prairie
schooner, eh?"  There was a laugh at this which perplexed Clarence.
Observing it, the humorist kindly condescended to explain that
"prairie schooner" was the current slang for an emigrant wagon.

"I couldn't," explained Clarence, naively looking at the dark eyes
on the back seat, "get any clothes at Stockton but these; I suppose
the folks didn't think there'd ever be boys in California."

The simplicity of this speech evidently impressed the others, for
the two men in the middle seats turned at a whisper from the lady
and regarded him curiously.  Clarence blushed slightly and became
silent.  Presently the vehicle began to slacken its speed.  They
were ascending a hill; on either bank grew huge cottonwoods, from
which occasionally depended a beautiful scarlet vine.

"Ah! eet ees pretty," said the lady, nodding her black-veiled head
towards it.  "Eet is good in ze hair."

One of the men made an awkward attempt to clutch a spray from the
window.  A brilliant inspiration flashed upon Clarence.  When the
stage began the ascent of the next hill, following the example of
an outside passenger, he jumped down to walk.  At the top of the
hill he rejoined the stage, flushed and panting, but carrying a
small branch of the vine in his scratched hands.  Handing it to the
man on the middle seat, he said, with grave, boyish politeness--
"Please--for the lady."

A slight smile passed over the face of Clarence's neighbors.  The
bonnetless woman nodded a pleasant acknowledgment, and coquettishly
wound the vine in her glossy hair.  The dark man at his side, who
hadn't spoken yet, turned to Clarence dryly.

"If you're goin' to keep up this gait, sonny, I reckon ye won't
find much trouble gettin' a man's suit to fit you by the time you
reach Sacramento."

Clarence didn't quite understand him, but noticed that a singular
gravity seemed to overtake the two jocular men on the middle seat,
and the lady looked out of the window.  He came to the conclusion
that he had made a mistake about alluding to his clothes and his
size.  He must try and behave more manly.  That opportunity seemed
to be offered two hours later, when the stage stopped at a wayside
hotel or restaurant.

Two or three passengers had got down to refresh themselves at the
bar.  His right and left hand neighbors were, however, engaged in a
drawling conversation on the comparative merits of San Francisco
sandhill and water lots; the jocular occupants of the middle seat
were still engrossed with the lady.  Clarence slipped out of the
stage and entered the bar-room with some ostentation.  The complete
ignoring of his person by the barkeeper and his customers, however,
somewhat disconcerted him.  He hesitated a moment, and then
returned gravely to the stage door and opened it.

"Would you mind taking a drink with me, sir?" said Clarence
politely, addressing the farmer-looking passenger who had been most
civil to him.  A dead silence followed.  The two men on the middle
seat faced entirely around to gaze at him.

"The Commodore asks if you'll take a drink with him," explained one
of the men to Clarence's friend with the greatest seriousness.

"Eh?  Oh, yes, certainly," returned that gentleman, changing his
astonished expression to one of the deepest gravity, "seeing it's
the Commodore."

"And perhaps you and your friend will join, too?" said Clarence
timidly to the passenger who had explained; "and you too, sir?" he
added to the dark man.

"Really, gentlemen, I don't see how we can refuse," said the
latter, with the greatest formality, and appealing to the others.
"A compliment of this kind from our distinguished friend is not to
be taken lightly."

"I have observed, sir, that the Commodore's head is level,"
returned the other man with equal gravity.

Clarence could have wished they had not treated his first
hospitable effort quite so formally, but as they stepped from the
coach with unbending faces he led them, a little frightened, into
the bar-room.  Here, unfortunately, as he was barely able to reach
over the counter, the barkeeper would have again overlooked him but
for a quick glance from the dark man, which seemed to change even
the barkeeper's perfunctory smiling face into supernatural gravity.

"The Commodore is standing treat," said the dark man, with unbroken
seriousness, indicating Clarence, and leaning back with an air of
respectful formality.  "I will take straight whiskey.  The
Commodore, on account of just changing climate, will, I believe,
for the present content himself with lemon soda."

Clarence had previously resolved to take whiskey, like the others,
but a little doubtful of the politeness of countermanding his
guest's order, and perhaps slightly embarrassed by the fact that
all the other customers seemed to have gathered round him and his
party with equally immovable faces, he said hurriedly:

"Lemon soda for me, please."

"The Commodore," said the barkeeper with impassive features, as he
bent forward and wiped the counter with professional deliberation,
"is right.  No matter how much a man may be accustomed all his life
to liquor, when he is changing climate, gentlemen, he says 'Lemon
soda for me' all the time."

"Perhaps," said Clarence, brightening, "you will join too?"

"I shall be proud on this occasion, sir."

"I think," said the tall man, still as ceremoniously unbending as
before, "that there can be but one toast here, gentlemen.  I give
you the health of the Commodore.  May his shadow never be less."

The health was drunk solemnly.  Clarence felt his cheeks tingle and
in his excitement drank his own health with the others.  Yet he was
disappointed that there was not more joviality; he wondered if men
always drank together so stiffly.  And it occurred to him that it
would be expensive.  Nevertheless, he had his purse all ready
ostentatiously in his hand; in fact, the paying for it out of his
own money was not the least manly and independent pleasure he had
promised himself.  "How much?" he asked, with an affectation of
carelessness.

The barkeeper cast his eye professionally over the barroom.  "I
think you said treats for the crowd; call it twenty dollars to make
even change."

Clarence's heart sank.  He had heard already of the exaggeration of
California prices.  Twenty dollars!  It was half his fortune.
Nevertheless, with an heroic effort, he controlled himself, and
with slightly nervous fingers counted out the money.  It struck
him, however, as curious, not to say ungentlemanly, that the
bystanders craned their necks over his shoulder to look at the
contents of his purse, although some slight explanation was offered
by the tall man.

"The Commodore's purse, gentlemen, is really a singular one.
Permit me," he said, taking it from Clarence's hand with great
politeness.  "It is one of the new pattern, you observe, quite
worthy of inspection."  He handed it to a man behind him, who in
turn handed it to another, while a chorus of "suthin quite new,"
"the latest style," followed it in its passage round the room, and
indicated to Clarence its whereabouts.  It was presently handed
back to the barkeeper, who had begged also to inspect it, and who,
with an air of scrupulous ceremony insisted upon placing it himself
in Clarence's side pocket, as if it were an important part of his
function.  The driver here called "all aboard."  The passengers
hurriedly reseated themselves, and the episode abruptly ended.
For, to Clarence's surprise, these attentive friends of a moment
ago at once became interested in the views of a new passenger
concerning the local politics of San Francisco, and he found
himself utterly forgotten.  The bonnetless woman had changed her
position, and her head was no longer visible.  The disillusion and
depression that overcame him suddenly were as complete as his
previous expectations and hopefulness had been extravagant.  For
the first time his utter unimportance in the world and his
inadequacy to this new life around him came upon him crushingly.

The heat and jolting of the stage caused him to fall into a slight
slumber and when he awoke he found his two neighbors had just got
out at a wayside station.  They had evidently not cared to waken
him to say "Good-by."  From the conversation of the other
passengers he learned that the tall man was a well-known gambler,
and the one who looked like a farmer was a ship captain who had
become a wealthy merchant.  Clarence thought he understood now why
the latter had asked him if he came off a voyage, and that the
nickname of "Commodore" given to him, Clarence, was some joke
intended for the captain's understanding.  He missed them, for he
wanted to talk to them about his relative at Sacramento, whom he
was now so soon to see.  At last, between sleeping and waking, the
end of his journey was unexpectedly reached.  It was dark, but,
being "steamer night," the shops and business places were still
open, and Mr. Peyton had arranged that the stage-driver should
deliver Clarence at the address of his relative in "J Street,"--an
address which Clarence had luckily remembered.  But the boy was
somewhat discomfited to find that it was a large office or banking-
house.  He, however, descended from the stage, and with his small
pack in his hand entered the building as the stage drove off, and,
addressing one of the busy clerks, asked for "Mr. Jackson Brant."

There was no such person in the office.  There never had been any
such person.  The bank had always occupied that building.  Was
there not some mistake in the number?  No; the name, number, and
street had been deeply engrafted in the boy's recollection.  Stop!
it might be the name of a customer who had given his address at the
bank.  The clerk who made this suggestion disappeared promptly to
make inquiries in the counting-room.  Clarence, with a rapidly
beating heart, awaited him.  The clerk returned.  There was no such
name on the books.  Jackson Brant was utterly unknown to every one
in the establishment.

For an instant the counter against which the boy was leaning seemed
to yield with his weight; he was obliged to steady himself with
both hands to keep from falling.  It was not his disappointment,
which was terrible; it was not a thought of his future, which
seemed hopeless; it was not his injured pride at appearing to have
willfully deceived Mr. Peyton, which was more dreadful than all
else; but it was the sudden, sickening sense that HE himself had
been deceived, tricked, and fooled!  For it flashed upon him for
the first time that the vague sense of wrong which had always
haunted him was this--that this was the vile culmination of a plan
to GET RID OF HIM, and that he had been deliberately lost and led
astray by his relatives as helplessly and completely as a useless
cat or dog!

Perhaps there was something of this in his face, for the clerk,
staring at him, bade him sit down for a moment, and again vanished
into the mysterious interior.  Clarence had no conception how long
he was absent, or indeed anything but his own breathless thoughts,
for he was conscious of wondering afterwards why the clerk was
leading him through a door in the counter into an inner room of
many desks, and again through a glass door into a smaller office,
where a preternaturally busy-looking man sat writing at a desk.
Without looking up, but pausing only to apply a blotting-pad to the
paper before him, the man said crisply--

"So you've been consigned to some one who don't seem to turn up,
and can't be found, eh?  Never mind that," as Clarence laid
Peyton's letter before him.  "Can't read it now.  Well, I suppose
you want to be shipped back to Stockton?"

"No!" said the boy, recovering his voice with an effort.

"Eh, that's business, though.  Know anybody here?"

"Not a living soul; that's why they sent me," said the boy, in
sudden reckless desperation.  He was the more furious that he knew
the tears were standing in his eyes.

The idea seemed to strike the man amusingly.  "Looks a little like
it, don't it?" he said, smiling grimly at the paper before him.
"Got any money?"

"A little."

"How much?"

"About twenty dollars," said Clarence hesitatingly.  The man opened
a drawer at his side, mechanically, for he did not raise his eyes,
and took out two ten-dollar gold pieces.  "I'll go twenty better,"
he said, laying them down on the desk.  "That'll give you a chance
to look around.  Come back here, if you don't see your way clear."
He dipped his pen into the ink with a significant gesture as if
closing the interview.

Clarence pushed back the coin.  "I'm not a beggar," he said
doggedly.

The man this time raised his head and surveyed the boy with two
keen eyes.  "You're not, hey?  Well, do I look like one?"

"No," stammered Clarence, as he glanced into the man's haughty
eyes.

"Yet, if I were in your fix, I'd take that money and be glad to get
it."

"If you'll let me pay you back again," said Clarence, a little
ashamed, and considerably frightened at his implied accusation of
the man before him.

"You can," said the man, bending over his desk again.

Clarence took up the money and awkwardly drew out his purse. But it
was the first time he had touched it since it was returned to him
in the bar-room, and it struck him that it was heavy and full--
indeed, so full that on opening it a few coins rolled out on to the
floor.  The man looked up abruptly.

"I thought you said you had only twenty dollars?" he remarked
grimly.

"Mr. Peyton gave me forty," returned Clarence, stupefied and
blushing.  "I spent twenty dollars for drinks at the bar--and," he
stammered, "I--I--I don't know how the rest came here."

"You spent twenty dollars for DRINKS?" said the man, laying down
his pen, and leaning back in his chair to gaze at the boy.

"Yes--that is--I treated some gentlemen of the stage, sir, at
Davidson's Crossing."

"Did you treat the whole stage company?"

"No, sir, only about four or five--and the bar-keeper. But
everything's so dear in California.  I know that."

"Evidently.  But it don't seem to make much difference with YOU,"
said the man, glancing at the purse.

"They wanted my purse to look at," said Clarence hurriedly, "and
that's how the thing happened.  Somebody put HIS OWN MONEY back
into MY purse by accident."

"Of course," said the man grimly.

"Yes, that's the reason," said Clarence, a little relieved, but
somewhat embarrassed by the man's persistent eyes.

"Then, of course," said the other quietly, "you don't require my
twenty dollars now."

"But," returned Clarence hesitatingly, "this isn't MY money.  I
must find out who it belongs to, and give it back again.  Perhaps,"
he added timidly, "I might leave it here with you, and call for it
when I find the man, or send him here."

With the greatest gravity he here separated the surplus from what
was left of Peyton's gift and the twenty dollars he had just
received.  The balance unaccounted for was forty dollars.  He laid
it on the desk before the man, who, still looking at him, rose and
opened the door.

"Mr. Reed."

The clerk who had shown Clarence in appeared.

"Open an account with--"  He stopped and turned interrogatively to
Clarence.

"Clarence Brant," said Clarence, coloring with excitement.

"With Clarence Brant.  Take that deposit"--pointing to the money--
"and give him a receipt."  He paused as the clerk retired with a
wondering gaze at the money, looked again at Clarence, said, "I
think YOU'LL do," and reentered the private office, closing the
door behind him.

I hope it will not be deemed inconceivable that Clarence, only a
few moments before crushed with bitter disappointment and the
hopeless revelation of his abandonment by his relatives, now felt
himself lifted up suddenly into an imaginary height of independence
and manhood.  He was leaving the bank, in which he stood a minute
before a friendless boy, not as a successful beggar, for this
important man had disclaimed the idea, but absolutely as a
customer! a depositor! a business man like the grown-up clients who
were thronging the outer office, and before the eyes of the clerk
who had pitied him!  And he, Clarence, had been spoken to by this
man, whose name he now recognized as the one that was on the door
of the building--a man of whom his fellow-passengers had spoken
with admiring envy--a banker famous in all California!  Will it be
deemed incredible that this imaginative and hopeful boy, forgetting
all else, the object of his visit, and even the fact that he
considered this money was not his own, actually put his hat a
little on one side as he strolled out on his way to the streets and
prospective fortune?

Two hours later the banker had another visitor.  It chanced to be
the farmer-looking man who had been Clarence's fellow-passenger.
Evidently a privileged person, he was at once ushered as "Captain
Stevens" into the presence of the banker.  At the end of a familiar
business interview the captain asked carelessly--

"Any letters for me?"

The busy banker pointed with his pen to the letter "S" in a row of
alphabetically labeled pigeon-holes against the wall.  The captain,
having selected his correspondence, paused with a letter in his
hand.

"Look here, Carden, there are letters here for some chap called
'John Silsbee.'  They were here when I called, ten weeks ago."

"Well?"

"That's the name of that Pike County man who was killed by Injins
in the plains.  The 'Frisco papers had all the particulars last
night; may be it's for that fellow.  It hasn't got a postmark.  Who
left it here?"

Mr. Carden summoned a clerk.  It appeared that the letter had been
left by a certain Brant Fauquier, to be called for.

Captain Stevens smiled.  "Brant's been too busy dealin' faro to
think of 'em agin, and since that shootin' affair at Angels' I hear
he's skipped to the southern coast somewhere.  Cal Johnson, his old
chum, was in the up stage from Stockton this afternoon."

"Did you come by the up stage from Stockton this afternoon?" said
Carden, looking up.

"Yes, as far as Ten-mile Station--rode the rest of the way here."

"Did you notice a queer little old-fashioned kid--about so high--
like a runaway school-boy?"

"Did I?  By G--d, sir, he treated me to drinks."

Carden jumped from his chair.  "Then he wasn't lying!"

"No!  We let him do it; but we made it good for the little chap
afterwards.  Hello!  What's up?"

But Mr. Carden was already in the outer office beside the clerk who
had admitted Clarence.

"You remember that boy Brant who was here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where did he go?"

"Don't know, sir."

"Go and find him somewhere and somehow.  Go to all the hotels,
restaurants, and gin-mills near here, and hunt him up.  Take some
one with you, if you can't do it alone.  Bring him back here,
quick!"

It was nearly midnight when the clerk fruitlessly returned.  It was
the fierce high noon of "steamer nights"; light flashed brilliantly
from shops, counting-houses, drinking-saloons, and gambling-hells.
The streets were yet full of eager, hurrying feet--swift of
fortune, ambition, pleasure, or crime.  But from among these deeper
harsher footfalls the echo of the homeless boy's light, innocent
tread seemed to have died out forever.


CHAPTER VIII


When Clarence was once more in the busy street before the bank, it
seemed clear to his boyish mind that, being now cast adrift upon
the world and responsible to no one, there was no reason why he
should not at once proceed to the nearest gold mines!  The idea of
returning to Mr. Peyton and Susy, as a disowned and abandoned
outcast, was not to be thought of.  He would purchase some kind of
an outfit, such as he had seen the miners carry, and start off as
soon as he had got his supper.  But although one of his most
delightful anticipations had been the unfettered freedom of
ordering a meal at a restaurant, on entering the first one he found
himself the object of so much curiosity, partly from his size and
partly from his dress, which the unfortunate boy was beginning to
suspect was really preposterous, and he turned away with a
stammered excuse, and did not try another.  Further on he found a
baker's shop, where he refreshed himself with some gingerbread and
lemon soda.  At an adjacent grocery he purchased some herrings,
smoked beef, and biscuits, as future provisions for his "pack" or
kit.  Then began his real quest for an outfit.  In an hour he had
secured--ostensibly for some friend, to avoid curious inquiry--a
pan, a blanket, a shovel and pick, all of which he deposited at the
baker's, his unostentatious headquarters, with the exception of a
pair of disguising high boots that half hid his sailor trousers,
which he kept to put on at the last.  Even to his inexperience the
cost of these articles seemed enormous; when his purchases were
complete, of his entire capital scarcely four dollars remained!
Yet in the fond illusions of boyhood these rude appointments seemed
possessed of far more value than the gold he had given in exchange
for them, and he had enjoyed a child's delight in testing the
transforming magic of money.

Meanwhile, the feverish contact of the crowded street had, strange
to say, increased his loneliness, while the ruder joviality of its
dissipations began to fill him with vague uneasiness.  The passing
glimpse of dancing halls and gaudily whirled figures that seemed
only feminine in their apparel; the shouts and boisterous choruses
from concert rooms; the groups of drunken roisterers that
congregated around the doors of saloons or, hilariously charging
down the streets, elbowed him against the wall, or humorously
insisted on his company, discomposed and frightened him.  He had
known rude companionship before, but it was serious, practical, and
under control.  There was something in this vulgar degradation of
intellect and power--qualities that Clarence had always boyishly
worshiped--which sickened and disillusioned him.  Later on a pistol
shot in a crowd beyond, the rush of eager men past him, the
disclosure of a limp and helpless figure against the wall, the
closing of the crowd again around it, although it stirred him with
a fearful curiosity, actually shocked him less hopelessly than
their brutish enjoyments and abandonment.

It was in one of these rushes that he had been crushed against a
swinging door, which, giving way to his pressure, disclosed to his
wondering eyes a long, glitteringly adorned, and brightly lit room,
densely filled with a silent, attentive throng in attitudes of
decorous abstraction and preoccupation, that even the shouts and
tumult at its very doors could not disturb.  Men of all ranks and
conditions, plainly or elaborately clad, were grouped together
under this magic spell of silence and attention.  The tables before
them were covered with cards and loose heaps of gold and silver.  A
clicking, the rattling of an ivory ball, and the frequent, formal,
lazy reiteration of some unintelligible sentence was all that he
heard.  But by a sudden instinct he UNDERSTOOD it all.  It was a
gambling saloon!

Encouraged by the decorous stillness, and the fact that everybody
appeared too much engaged to notice him, the boy drew timidly
beside one of the tables.  It was covered with a number of cards,
on which were placed certain sums of money.  Looking down, Clarence
saw that he was standing before a card that as yet had nothing on
it.  A single player at his side looked up, glanced at Clarence
curiously, and then placed half a dozen gold pieces on the vacant
card.  Absorbed in the general aspect of the room and the players,
Clarence did not notice that his neighbor won twice, and even
THRICE, upon that card.  Becoming aware, however, that the player
while gathering in his gains, was smilingly regarding him he moved
in some embarrassment to the other end of the table, where there
seemed another gap in the crowd.  It so chanced that there was also
another vacant card.  The previous neighbor of Clarence instantly
shoved a sum of money across the table on the vacant card and won!
At this the other players began to regard Clarence singularly, one
or two of the spectators smiled, and the boy, coloring, moved
awkwardly away.  But his sleeve was caught by the successful
player, who, detaining him gently, put three gold pieces into his
hand.

"That's YOUR share, sonny," he whispered.

"Share--for what?" stammered the astounded Clarence.

"For bringing me 'the luck,'" said the man.

Clarence stared.  "Am I--to--to play with it?" he said, glancing at
the coins and then at the table, in ignorance of the stranger's
meaning.

"No, no!" said the man hurriedly, "don't do that.  You'll lose it,
sonny, sure!  Don't you see, YOU BRING THE LUCK TO OTHERS, not to
yourself.  Keep it, old man, and run home!"

"I don't want it!  I won't have it!" said Clarence with a swift
recollection of the manipulation of his purse that morning, and a
sudden distrust of all mankind.

"There!"  He turned back to the table and laid the money on the
first vacant card he saw.  In another moment, as it seemed to him,
it was raked away by the dealer.  A sense of relief came over him.

"There!" said the man, with an awed voice and a strange, fatuous
look in his eye.  "What did I tell you?  You see, it's allus so!
Now," he added roughly, "get up and get out o' this, afore you lose
the boots and shirt off ye."

Clarence did not wait for a second command.  With another glance
round the room, he began to make his way through the crowd towards
the front.  But in that parting glance he caught a glimpse of a
woman presiding over a "wheel of fortune" in a corner, whose face
seemed familiar.  He looked again, timidly.  In spite of an
extraordinary head-dress or crown that she wore as the "Goddess of
Fortune," he recognized, twisted in its tinsel, a certain scarlet
vine which he had seen before; in spite of the hoarse formula which
she was continually repeating, he recognized the foreign accent.
It was the woman of the stage-coach!  With a sudden dread that she
might recognize him, and likewise demand his services "for luck,"
he turned and fled.

Once more in the open air, there came upon him a vague loathing and
horror of the restless madness and feverish distraction of this
half-civilized city.  It was the more powerful that it was vague,
and the outcome of some inward instinct.  He found himself longing
for the pure air and sympathetic loneliness of the plains and
wilderness; he began to yearn for the companionship of his humble
associates--the teamster, the scout Gildersleeve, and even Jim
Hooker.  But above all and before all was the wild desire to get
away from these maddening streets and their bewildering occupants.
He ran back to the baker's, gathered his purchases together, took
advantage of a friendly doorway to strap them on his boyish
shoulders, slipped into a side street, and struck out at once for
the outskirts.

It had been his first intention to take stage to the nearest mining
district, but the diminution of his small capital forbade that
outlay, and he decided to walk there by the highroad, of whose
general direction he had informed himself.  In half an hour the
lights of the flat, struggling city, and their reflection in the
shallow, turbid river before it, had sunk well behind him.  The air
was cool and soft; a yellow moon swam in the slight haze that rose
above the tules; in the distance a few scattered cottonwoods and
sycamores marked like sentinels the road.  When he had walked some
distance he sat down beneath one of them to make a frugal supper
from the dry rations in his pack, but in the absence of any spring
he was forced to quench his thirst with a glass of water in a
wayside tavern.  Here he was good-humoredly offered something
stronger, which he declined, and replied to certain curious
interrogations by saying that he expected to overtake his friends
in a wagon further on.  A new distrust of mankind had begun to make
the boy an adept in innocent falsehood, the more deceptive as his
careless, cheerful manner, the result of his relief at leaving the
city, and his perfect ease in the loving companionship of night and
nature, certainly gave no indication of his homelessness and
poverty.

It was long past midnight, when, weary in body, but still hopeful
and happy in mind, he turned off the dusty road into a vast rolling
expanse of wild oats, with the same sense of security of rest as a
traveler to his inn.  Here, completely screened from view by the
tall stalks of grain that rose thickly around him to the height of
a man's shoulder, he beat down a few of them for a bed, on which he
deposited his blanket.  Placing his pack for a pillow, he curled
himself up in his blanket, and speedily fell asleep.

He awoke at sunrise, refreshed, invigorated, and hungry.  But he
was forced to defer his first self-prepared breakfast until he had
reached water, and a less dangerous place than the wild-oat field
to build his first camp fire.  This he found a mile further on,
near some dwarf willows on the bank of a half-dry stream.  Of his
various efforts to prepare his first meal, the fire was the most
successful; the coffee was somewhat too substantially thick, and
the bacon and herring lacked definiteness of quality from having
been cooked in the same vessel.  In this boyish picnic he missed
Susy, and recalled, perhaps a little bitterly, her coldness at
parting.  But the novelty of his situation, the brilliant sunshine
and sense of freedom, and the road already awakening to dusty life
with passing teams, dismissed everything but the future from his
mind.  Readjusting his pack, he stepped on cheerily.  At noon he
was overtaken by a teamster, who in return for a match to light his
pipe gave him a lift of a dozen miles.  It is to be feared that
Clarence's account of himself was equally fanciful with his
previous story, and that the teamster parted from him with a
genuine regret, and a hope that he would soon be overtaken by his
friends along the road.  "And mind that you ain't such a fool agin
to let 'em make you tote their dod-blasted tools fur them!" he
added unsuspectingly, pointing to Clarence's mining outfit.  Thus
saved the heaviest part of the day's journey, for the road was
continually rising from the plains during the last six miles,
Clarence was yet able to cover a considerable distance on foot
before he halted for supper.  Here he was again fortunate.  An
empty lumber team watering at the same spring, its driver offered
to take Clarence's purchases--for the boy had profited by his late
friend's suggestion to personally detach himself from his
equipment--to Buckeye Mills for a dollar, which would also include
a "shakedown passage" for himself on the floor of the wagon.  "I
reckon you've been foolin' away in Sacramento the money yer parents
give yer for return stage fare, eh?  Don't lie, sonny," he added
grimly, as the now artful Clarence smiled diplomatically, "I've
been thar myself!"  Luckily, the excuse that he was "tired and
sleepy" prevented further dangerous questioning, and the boy was
soon really in deep slumber on the wagon floor.

He awoke betimes to find himself already in the mountains.  Buckeye
Mills was a straggling settlement, and Clarence prudently stopped
any embarrassing inquiry from his friend by dropping off the wagon
with his equipment as they entered it, and hurriedly saying "Good-
by" from a crossroad through the woods.  He had learned that the
nearest mining camp was five miles away, and its direction was
indicated by a long wooden "flume," or water-way, that alternately
appeared and disappeared on the flank of the mountain opposite.
The cooler and drier air, the grateful shadow of pine and bay, and
the spicy balsamic odors that everywhere greeted him, thrilled and
exhilarated him.  The trail plunging sometimes into an undisturbed
forest, he started the birds before him like a flight of arrows
through its dim recesses; at times he hung breathlessly over the
blue depths of canyons where the same forests were repeated a
thousand feet below.  Towards noon he struck into a rude road--
evidently the thoroughfare of the locality--and was surprised to
find that it, as well as the adjacent soil wherever disturbed, was
a deep Indian red.  Everywhere, along its sides, powdering the
banks and boles of trees with its ruddy stain, in mounds and
hillocks of piled dirt on the road, or in liquid paint-like pools,
when a trickling stream had formed a gutter across it, there was
always the same deep sanguinary color.  Once or twice it became
more vivid in contrast with the white teeth of quartz that peeped
through it from the hillside or crossed the road in crumbled
strata.  One of those pieces Clarence picked up with a quickening
pulse.  It was veined and streaked with shining mica and tiny
glittering cubes of mineral that LOOKED like gold!

The road now began to descend towards a winding stream, shrunken by
drought and ditching, that glared dazzingly in the sunlight from
its white bars of sand, or glistened in shining sheets and
channels.  Along its banks, and even encroaching upon its bed, were
scattered a few mud cabins, strange-looking wooden troughs and
gutters, and here and there, glancing through the leaves, the white
canvas of tents.  The stumps of felled trees and blackened spaces,
as of recent fires, marked the stream on either side.  A sudden
sense of disappointment overcame Clarence.  It looked vulgar,
common, and worse than all--FAMILIAR.  It was like the unlovely
outskirts of a dozen other prosaic settlements he had seen in less
romantic localities.  In that muddy red stream, pouring out of a
wooden gutter, in which three or four bearded, slouching, half-
naked figures were raking like chiffonniers, there was nothing to
suggest the royal metal.  Yet he was so absorbed in gazing at the
scene, and had walked so rapidly during the past few minutes, that
he was startled, on turning a sharp corner of the road, to come
abruptly upon an outlying dwelling.

It was a nondescript building, half canvas and half boards.  The
interior seen through the open door was fitted up with side
shelves, a counter carelessly piled with provisions, groceries,
clothing, and hardware--with no attempt at display or even ordinary
selection--and a table, on which stood a demijohn and three or four
dirty glasses.  Two roughly dressed men, whose long, matted beards
and hair left only their eyes and lips visible in the tangled
hirsute wilderness below their slouched hats, were leaning against
the opposite sides of the doorway, smoking.  Almost thrown against
them in the rapid momentum of his descent, Clarence halted
violently.

"Well, sonny, you needn't capsize the shanty," said the first man,
without taking his pipe from his lips.

"If yer looking fur yer ma, she and yer Aunt Jane hev jest gone
over to Parson Doolittle's to take tea," observed the second man
lazily.  "She allowed that you'd wait."

"I'm--I'm--going to--to the mines," explained Clarence, with some
hesitation.  "I suppose this is the way."

The two men took their pipes from their lips, looked at each other,
completely wiped every vestige of expression from their faces with
the back of their hands, turned their eyes into the interior of the
cabin, and said, "Will yer come yer, now WILL yer?"  Thus adjured,
half a dozen men, also bearded and carrying pipes in their mouths,
straggled out of the shanty, and, filing in front of it, squatted
down, with their backs against the boards, and gazed comfortably at
the boy.  Clarence began to feel uneasy.

"I'll give," said one, taking out his pipe and grimly eying
Clarence, "a hundred dollars for him as he stands."

"And seein' as he's got that bran-new rig-out o' tools," said
another, "I'll give a hundred and fifty--and the drinks.  I've
been," he added apologetically, "wantin' sunthin' like this a long
time."

"Well, gen'lemen," said the man who had first spoken to him,
"lookin' at him by and large; takin' in, so to speak, the gin'ral
gait of him in single harness; bearin' in mind the perfect
freshness of him, and the coolness and size of his cheek--the easy
downyness, previousness, and utter don't-care-a-damnativeness of
his coming yer, I think two hundred ain't too much for him, and
we'll call it a bargain."

Clarence's previous experience of this grim, smileless Californian
chaff was not calculated to restore his confidence.  He drew away
from the cabin, and repeated doggedly, "I asked you if this was the
way to the mines."

"It ARE the mines, and these yere are the miners," said the first
speaker gravely.  "Permit me to interdoose 'em.  This yere's Shasta
Jim, this yere's Shotcard Billy, this is Nasty Bob, and this
Slumgullion Dick.  This yere's the Dook o' Chatham Street, the
Livin' Skeleton, and me!"

"May we ask, fair young sir," said the Living Skeleton, who,
however, seemed in fairly robust condition, "whence came ye on the
wings of the morning, and whose Marble Halls ye hev left desolate?"

"I came across the plains, and got into Stockton two days ago on
Mr. Peyton's train," said Clarence, indignantly, seeing no reason
now to conceal anything.  "I came to Sacramento to find my cousin,
who isn't living there any more.  I don't see anything funny in
THAT!  I came here to the mines to dig gold--because---because Mr.
Silsbee, the man who was to bring me here and might have found my
cousin for me, was killed by Indians."

"Hold up, sonny.  Let me help ye," said the first speaker, rising
to his feet.  "YOU didn't get killed by Injins because you got lost
out of a train with Silsbee's infant darter.  Peyton picked you up
while you was takin' care of her, and two days arter you kem up to
the broken-down Silsbee wagons, with all the folks lyin' there
slartered."

"Yes, sir," said Clarence, breathlessly with astonishment.

"And," continued the man, putting his hand gravely to his head as
if to assist his memory, "when you was all alone on the plains with
that little child you saw one of those redskins, as near to you as
I be, watchin' the train, and you didn't breathe or move while he
was there?"

"Yes, sir," said Clarence eagerly.

"And you was shot at by Peyton, he thinkin' you was an Injun in the
mesquite grass?  And you once shot a buffalo that had been pitched
with you down a gully--all by yourself?"

"Yes," said Clarence, crimson with wonder and pleasure.  "You know
me, then?"

"Well, ye-e-es," said the man gravely, parting his mustache with
his fingers.  "You see, YOU'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE."

"Before!  Me?" repeated the astounded Clarence.

"Yes, before.  Last night.  You was taller then, and hadn't cut
your hair.  You cursed a good deal more than you do now.  You drank
a man's share of whiskey, and you borrowed fifty dollars to get to
Sacramento with.  I reckon you haven't got it about you now, eh?"

Clarence's brain reeled in utter confusion and hopeless terror.

Was he going crazy, or had these cruel men learned his story from
his faithless friends, and this was a part of the plot?  He
staggered forward, but the men had risen and quickly encircled him,
as if to prevent his escape.  In vague and helpless desperation he
gasped--

"What place is this?"

"Folks call it Deadman's Gulch."

Deadman's Gulch!  A flash of intelligence lit up the boy's blind
confusion.  Deadman's Gulch!  Could it have been Jim Hooker who had
really run away, and had taken his name?  He turned half-
imploringly to the first speaker.

"Wasn't he older than me, and bigger?  Didn't he have a smooth,
round face and little eyes?  Didn't he talk hoarse?  Didn't he--"
He stopped hopelessly.

"Yes; oh, he wasn't a bit like you," said the man musingly.  "Ye
see, that's the h-ll of it!  You're altogether TOO MANY and TOO
VARIOUS fur this camp."

"I don't know who's been here before, or what they have said," said
Clarence desperately, yet even in that desperation retaining the
dogged loyalty to his old playmate, which was part of his nature.
"I don't know, and I don't care--there!  I'm Clarence Brant of
Kentucky; I started in Silsbee's train from St. Jo, and I'm going
to the mines, and you can't stop me!"

The man who had first spoken started, looked keenly at Clarence,
and then turned to the others.  The gentleman known as the living
skeleton had obtruded his huge bulk in front of the boy, and,
gazing at him, said reflectively, "Darned if it don't look like one
of Brant's pups--sure!"

"Air ye any relation to Kernel Hamilton Brant of Looeyville?" asked
the first speaker.

Again that old question!  Poor Clarence hesitated, despairingly.
Was he to go through the same cross-examination he had undergone
with the Peytons?  "Yes," he said doggedly, "I am--but he's dead,
and you know it."

"Dead--of course."  "Sartin."  "He's dead."  "The Kernel's
planted," said the men in chorus.

"Well, yes," reflected the Living Skeleton ostentatiously, as one
who spoke from experience.  "Ham Brant's about as bony now as they
make 'em."

"You bet!  About the dustiest, deadest corpse you kin turn out,"
corroborated Slumgullion Dick, nodding his head gloomily to the
others; "in point o' fack, es a corpse, about the last one I should
keer to go huntin' fur."

"The Kernel's tech 'ud be cold and clammy," concluded the Duke of
Chatham Street, who had not yet spoken, "sure.  But what did yer
mammy say about it?  Is she gettin' married agin?  Did SHE send ye
here?"

It seemed to Clarence that the Duke of Chatham Street here received
a kick from his companions; but the boy repeated doggedly--

"I came to Sacramento to find my cousin, Jackson Brant; but he
wasn't there."

"Jackson Brant!" echoed the first speaker, glancing at the others.
"Did your mother say he was your cousin?"

"Yes," said Clarence wearily.  "Good-by."

"Hullo, sonny, where are you going?"

"To dig gold," said the boy.  "And you know you can't prevent me,
if it isn't on your claim.  I know the law."  He had heard Mr.
Peyton discuss it at Stockton, and he fancied that the men, who
were whispering among themselves, looked kinder than before, and as
if they were no longer "acting" to him.  The first speaker laid his
hand on his shoulder, and said, "All right, come with me, and I'll
show you where to dig."

"Who are you?" said Clarence.  "You called yourself only 'me.'"

"Well, you can call me Flynn--Tom Flynn."

"And you'll show me where I can dig--myself?"

"I will."

"Do you know," said Clarence timidly, yet with a half-conscious
smile, "that I--I kinder bring luck?"

The man looked down upon him, and said gravely, but, as it struck
Clarence, with a new kind of gravity, "I believe you."

"Yes," said Clarence eagerly, as they walked along together, "I
brought luck to a man in Sacramento the other day."  And he related
with great earnestness his experience in the gambling saloon.  Not
content with that--the sealed fountains of his childish deep being
broken up by some mysterious sympathy--he spoke of his hospitable
exploit with the passengers at the wayside bar, of the finding of
his Fortunatus purse and his deposit at the bank.  Whether that
characteristic old-fashioned reticence which had been such an
important factor for good or ill in his future had suddenly
deserted him, or whether some extraordinary prepossession in his
companion had affected him, he did not know; but by the time the
pair had reached the hillside Flynn was in possession of all the
boy's history.  On one point only was his reserve unshaken.
Conscious although he was of Jim Hooker's duplicity, he affected to
treat it as a comrade's joke.

They halted at last in the middle of an apparently fertile
hillside.  Clarence shifted his shovel from his shoulders, unslung
his pan, and looked at Flynn.  "Dig anywhere here, where you like,"
said his companion carelessly, "and you'll be sure to find the
color.  Fill your pan with the dirt, go to that sluice, and let the
water run in on the top of the pan--workin' it round so," he added,
illustrating a rotary motion with the vessel.  "Keep doing that
until all the soil is washed out of it, and you have only the black
sand at the bottom.  Then work that the same way until you see the
color.  Don't be afraid of washing the gold out of the pan--you
couldn't do it if you tried.  There, I'll leave you here, and you
wait till I come back."  With another grave nod and something like
a smile in the only visible part of his bearded face--his eyes--he
strode rapidly away.

Clarence did not lose time.  Selecting a spot where the grass was
less thick, he broke through the soil and turned up two or three
spadefuls of red soil.  When he had filled the pan and raised it to
his shoulder, he was astounded at its weight.  He did not know that
it was due to the red precipitate of iron that gave it its color.
Staggering along with his burden to the running sluice, which
looked like an open wooden gutter, at the foot of the hill, he
began to carefully carry out Flynn's direction.  The first dip of
the pan in the running water carried off half the contents of the
pan in liquid paint-like ooze.  For a moment he gave way to boyish
satisfaction in the sight and touch of this unctuous solution, and
dabbled his fingers in it.  A few moments more of rinsing and he
came to the sediment of fine black sand that was beneath it.
Another plunge and swilling of water in the pan, and--could he
believe his eyes!--a few yellow tiny scales, scarcely larger than
pins' heads, glittered among the sand.  He poured it off.  But his
companion was right; the lighter sand shifted from side to side
with the water, but the glittering points remained adhering by
their own tiny specific gravity to the smooth surface of the
bottom.  It was "the color"--gold!

Clarence's heart seemed to give a great leap within him.  A vision
of wealth, of independence, of power, sprang before his dazzled
eyes, and--a hand lightly touched him on the shoulder.

He started.  In his complete preoccupation and excitement, he had
not heard the clatter of horse-hoofs, and to his amazement Flynn
was already beside him, mounted, and leading a second horse.

"You kin ride?" he said shortly.

"Yes" stammered Clarence; "but--"

"BUT--we've only got two hours to reach Buckeye Mills in time to
catch the down stage.  Drop all that, jump up, and come with me!"

"But I've just found gold," said the boy excitedly.

"And I've just found your--cousin.  Come!"

He spurred his horse across Clarence's scattered implements, half
helped, half lifted, the boy into the saddle of the second horse,
and, with a cut of his riata over the animal's haunches, the next
moment they were both galloping furiously away.


CHAPTER IX


Torn suddenly from his prospective future, but too much dominated
by the man beside him to protest, Clarence was silent until a rise
in the road, a few minutes later, partly abated their headlong
speed, and gave him chance to recover his breath and courage.

"Where is my cousin?" he asked.

"In the Southern county, two hundred miles from here."

"Are we going to him?"

"Yes."

They rode furiously forward again.  It was nearly half an hour
before they came to a longer ascent.  Clarence could see that Flynn
was from time to time examining him curiously under his slouched
hat.  This somewhat embarrassed him, but in his singular confidence
in the man no distrust mingled with it.

"Ye never saw your--cousin?" he asked.

"No," said Clarence; "nor he me.  I don't think he knew me much,
any way.

"How old mout ye be, Clarence?"

"Eleven."

"Well, as you're suthin of a pup"--Clarence started, and recalled
Peyton's first criticism of him--"I reckon to tell ye suthin.  Ye
ain't goin' to be skeert, or afeard, or lose yer sand, I kalkilate,
for skunkin' ain't in your breed.  Well, wot ef I told ye that
thish yer--thish yer--COUSIN o' yours was the biggest devil onhung;
that he'd just killed a man, and had to lite out elsewhere, and
THET'S why he didn't show up in Sacramento--what if I told you
that?"

Clarence felt that this was somehow a little too much.  He was
perfectly truthful, and lifting his frank eyes to Flynn, he said,

"I should think you were talking a good deal like Jim Hooker!"

His companion stared, and suddenly reined up his horse; then,
bursting into a shout of laughter, he galloped ahead, from time to
time shaking his head, slapping his legs, and making the dim woods
ring with his boisterous mirth.  Then as suddenly becoming
thoughtful again, he rode on rapidly for half an hour, only
speaking to Clarence to urge him forward, and assisting his
progress by lashing the haunches of his horse.  Luckily, the boy
was a good rider--a fact which Flynn seemed to thoroughly
appreciate--or he would have been unseated a dozen times.

At last the straggling sheds of Buckeye Mills came into softer
purple view on the opposite mountain.  Then laying his hand on
Clarence's shoulder as he reined in at his side, Flynn broke the
silence.

"There, boy," he said, wiping the mirthful tears from his eyes.  "I
was only foolin'--only tryin' yer grit!  This yer cousin I'm taking
you to be as quiet and soft-spoken and as old-fashioned ez you be.
Why, he's that wrapped up in books and study that he lives alone in
a big adobe rancherie among a lot o' Spanish, and he don't keer to
see his own countrymen!  Why, he's even changed his name, and
calles himself Don Juan Robinson!  But he's very rich; he owns
three leagues of land and heaps of cattle and horses, and,"
glancing approvingly at Clarence's seat in the saddle, "I reckon
you'll hev plenty of fun thar."

"But," hesitated Clarence, to whom this proposal seemed only a
repetition of Peyton's charitable offer, "I think I'd better stay
here and dig gold--WITH YOU."

"And I think you'd better not," said the man, with a gravity that
was very like a settled determination.

"But my cousin never came for me to Sacramento--nor sent, nor even
wrote," persisted Clarence indignantly.

"Not to YOU, boy; but he wrote to the man whom he reckoned would
bring you there--Jack Silsbee--and left it in the care of the bank.
And Silsbee, being dead, didn't come for the letter; and as you
didn't ask for it when you came, and didn't even mention Silsbee's
name, that same letter was sent back to your cousin through me,
because the bank thought we knew his whereabouts.  It came to the
gulch by an express rider, whilst you were prospectin' on the
hillside.  Rememberin' your story, I took the liberty of opening
it, and found out that your cousin had told Silsbee to bring you
straight to him.  So I'm only doin' now what Silsbee would have
done."

Any momentary doubt or suspicion that might have risen in
Clarence's mind vanished as he met his companion's steady and
masterful eye.  Even his disappointment was forgotten in the charm
of this new-found friendship and protection.  And as its outset had
been marked by an unusual burst of confidence on Clarence's part,
the boy, in his gratitude, now felt something of the timid shyness
of a deeper feeling, and once more became reticent.

They were in time to snatch a hasty meal at Buckeye Mills before
the stage arrived, and Clarence noticed that his friend, despite
his rough dress and lawless aspect, provoked a marked degree of
respect from those he met--in which, perhaps, a wholesome fear was
mingled.  It is certain that the two best places in the stage were
given up to them without protest, and that a careless, almost
supercilious invitation to drink from Flynn was responded to with
singular alacrity by all, including even two fastidiously dressed
and previously reserved passengers.  I am afraid that Clarence
enjoyed this proof of his friend's singular dominance with a boyish
pride, and, conscious of the curious eyes of the passengers,
directed occasionally to himself, was somewhat ostentatious in his
familiarity with this bearded autocrat.

At noon the next day they left the stage at a wayside road station,
and Flynn briefly informed Clarence that they must again take
horses.  This at first seemed difficult in that out-of-the-way
settlement, where they alone had stopped, but a whisper from the
driver in the ear of the station-master produced a couple of fiery
mustangs, with the same accompaniment of cautious awe and mystery.
For the next two days they traveled on horseback, resting by night
at the lodgings of one or other of Flynn's friends in the outskirts
of a large town, where they arrived in the darkness, and left
before day.  To any one more experienced than the simple-minded boy
it would have been evident that Flynn was purposely avoiding the
more traveled roads and conveyances; and when they changed horses
again the next day's ride was through an apparently unbroken
wilderness of scattered wood and rolling plain.  Yet to Clarence,
with his pantheistic reliance and joyous sympathy with nature, the
change was filled with exhilarating pleasure.  The vast seas of
tossing wild oats, the hillside still variegated with strange
flowers, the virgin freshness of untrodden woods and leafy aisles,
whose floors of moss or bark were undisturbed by human footprint,
were a keen delight and novelty.  More than this, his quick eye,
trained perceptions, and frontier knowledge now stood him in good
stead.  His intuitive sense of distance, instincts of woodcraft,
and his unerring detection of those signs, landmarks, and
guideposts of nature, undistinguishable to aught but birds and
beasts and some children, were now of the greatest service to his
less favored companion.  In this part of their strange pilgrimage
it was the boy who took the lead.  Flynn, who during the past two
days seemed to have fallen into a mood of watchful reserve, nodded
his approbation.  "This sort of thing's yer best holt, boy," he
said.  "Men and cities ain't your little game."

At the next stopping-place Clarence had a surprise.  They had again
entered a town at nightfall, and lodged with another friend of
Flynn's in rooms which from vague sounds appeared to be over a
gambling saloon.  Clarence woke late in the morning, and,
descending into the street to mount for the day's journey, was
startled to find that Flynn was not on the other horse, but that a
well-dressed and handsome stranger had taken his place.  But a
laugh, and the familiar command, "Jump up, boy," made him look
again.  It WAS Flynn, but completely shaven of beard and mustache,
closely clipped of hair, and in a fastidiously cut suit of black!

"Then you didn't know me?" said Flynn.

"Not till you spoke," replied Clarence.

"So much the better," said his friend sententiously, as he put
spurs to his horse.  But as they cantered through the street,
Clarence, who had already become accustomed to the stranger's
hirsute adornment, felt a little more awe of him.  The profile of
the mouth and chin now exposed to his sidelong glance was hard and
stern, and slightly saturnine.  Although unable at the time to
identify it with anybody he had ever known, it seemed to the
imaginative boy to be vaguely connected with some sad experience.
But the eyes were thoughtful and kindly, and the boy later believed
that if he had been more familiar with the face he would have loved
it better.  For it was the last and only day he was to see it, as,
late that afternoon, after a dusty ride along more traveled
highways, they reached their journey's end.

It was a low-walled house, with red-tiled roofs showing against the
dark green of venerable pear and fig trees, and a square court-yard
in the centre, where they had dismounted.  A few words in Spanish
from Flynn to one of the lounging peons admitted them to a wooden
corridor, and thence to a long, low room, which to Clarence's eyes
seemed literally piled with books and engravings.  Here Flynn
hurriedly bade him stay while he sought the host in another part of
the building.  But Clarence did not miss him; indeed, it may be
feared, he forgot even the object of their journey in the new
sensations that suddenly thronged upon him, and the boyish vista of
the future that they seemed to open.  He was dazed and intoxicated.
He had never seen so many books before; he had never conceived of
such lovely pictures.  And yet in some vague way he thought he must
have dreamt of them at some time.  He had mounted a chair, and was
gazing spellbound at an engraving of a sea-fight when he heard
Flynn's voice.

His friend had quietly reentered the room, in company with an
oldish, half-foreign-looking man, evidently his relation.  With no
helping recollection, with no means of comparison beyond a vague
idea that his cousin might look like himself, Clarence stood
hopelessly before him.  He had already made up his mind that he
would have to go through the usual cross-questioning in regard to
his father and family; he had even forlornly thought of inventing
some innocent details to fill out his imperfect and unsatisfactory
recollection.  But, glancing up, he was surprised to find that his
elderly cousin was as embarrassed as he was, Flynn, as usual,
masterfully interposed.

"Of course ye don't remember each other, and thar ain't much that
either of you knows about family matters, I reckon," he said
grimly; "and as your cousin calls himself Don Juan Robinson," he
added to Clarence, "it's just as well that you let 'Jackson Brant'
slide.  I know him better than you, but you'll get used to him, and
he to you, soon enough.  At least, you'd better," he concluded,
with his singular gravity.

As he turned as if to leave the room with Clarence's embarrassed
relative--much to that gentleman's apparent relief--the boy looked
up at the latter and said timidly--

"May I look at those books?"

His cousin stopped, and glanced at him with the first expression of
interest he had shown.

"Ah, you read; you like books?"

"Yes," said Clarence.  As his cousin remained still looking at him
thoughtfully, he added, "My hands are pretty clean, but I can wash
them first, if you like."

"You may look at them," said Don Juan smilingly; "and as they are
old books you can wash your hands afterwards."  And, turning to
Flynn suddenly, with an air of relief, "I tell you what I'll do--
I'll teach him Spanish!"

They left the room together, and Clarence turned eagerly to the
shelves.  They were old books, some indeed very old, queerly bound,
and worm-eaten.  Some were in foreign languages, but others in
clear, bold English type, with quaint wood-cuts and illustrations.
One seemed to be a chronicle of battles and sieges, with pictured
representations of combatants spitted with arrows, cleanly lopped
off in limb, or toppled over distinctly by visible cannon-shot.  He
was deep in its perusal when he heard the clatter of a horse's
hoofs in the court-yard and the voice of Flynn.  He ran to the
window, and was astonished to see his friend already on horseback,
taking leave of his host.

For one instant Clarence felt one of those sudden revulsions of
feeling common to his age, but which he had always timidly hidden
under dogged demeanor.  Flynn, his only friend!  Flynn, his only
boyish confidant!  Flynn, his latest hero, was going away and
forsaking him without a word of parting!  It was true that he had
only agreed to take him to his guardian, but still Flynn need not
have left him without a word of hope or encouragement!  With any
one else Clarence would probably have taken refuge in his usual
Indian stoicism, but the same feeling that had impelled him to
offer Flynn his boyish confidences on their first meeting now
overpowered him.  He dropped his book, ran out into the corridor,
and made his way to the court-yard, just as Flynn galloped out from
the arch.

But the boy uttered a despairing shout that reached the rider.  He
drew rein, wheeled, halted, and sat facing Clarence impatiently.
To add to Clarence's embarrassment his cousin had lingered in the
corridor, attracted by the interruption, and a peon, lounging in
the archway, obsequiously approached Flynn's bridle-rein.  But the
rider waved him off, and, turning sternly to Clarence, said:--

"What's the matter now?"

"Nothing," said Clarence, striving to keep back the hot tears that
rose in his eyes.  "But you were going away without saying 'good-
by.'  You've been very kind to me, and--and--I want to thank you!"

A deep flush crossed Flynn's face.  Then glancing suspiciously
towards the corridor, he said hurriedly,--

"Did HE send you?"

"No, I came myself.  I heard you going."

"All right.  Good-by."  He leaned forward as if about to take
Clarence's outstretched hand, checked himself suddenly with a grim
smile, and taking from his pocket a gold coin handed it to the boy.

Clarence took it, tossed it with a proud gesture to the waiting
peon, who caught it thankfully, drew back a step from Flynn, and
saying, with white cheeks, "I only wanted to say good-by," dropped
his hot eyes to the ground.  But it did not seem to be his own
voice that had spoken, nor his own self that had prompted the act.

There was a quick interchange of glances between the departing
guest and his late host, in which Flynn's eyes flashed with an odd,
admiring fire, but when Clarence raised his head again he was gone.
And as the boy turned back with a broken heart towards the
corridor, his cousin laid his hand upon his shoulder.

"Muy hidalgamente, Clarence," he said pleasantly.  "Yes, we shall
make something of you!"


CHAPTER X


Then followed to Clarence three uneventful years.  During that
interval he learnt that Jackson Brant, or Don Juan Robinson--for
the tie of kinship was the least factor in their relations to each
other, and after the departure of Flynn was tacitly ignored by
both--was more Spanish than American.  An early residence in Lower
California, marriage with a rich Mexican widow, whose dying
childless left him sole heir, and some strange restraining
idiosyncrasy of temperament had quite denationalized him.  A
bookish recluse, somewhat superfastidious towards his own
countrymen, the more Clarence knew him the more singular appeared
his acquaintance with Flynn; but as he did not exhibit more
communicativeness on this point than upon their own kinship,
Clarence finally concluded that it was due to the dominant
character of his former friend, and thought no more about it.  He
entered upon the new life at El Refugio with no disturbing past.
Quickly adapting himself to the lazy freedom of this hacienda
existence, he spent the mornings on horseback ranging the hills
among his cousin's cattle, and the afternoons and evenings busied
among his cousin's books with equally lawless and undisciplined
independence.  The easy-going Don Juan, it is true, attempted to
make good his rash promise to teach the boy Spanish, and actually
set him a few tasks; but in a few weeks the quick-witted Clarence
acquired such a colloquial proficiency from his casual acquaintance
with vaqueros and small traders that he was glad to leave the
matter in his young kinsman's hands.  Again, by one of those
illogical sequences which make a lifelong reputation depend upon a
single trivial act, Clarence's social status was settled forever at
El Refugio Rancho by his picturesque diversion of Flynn's parting
gift.  The grateful peon to whom the boy had scornfully tossed the
coin repeated the act, gesture, and spirit of the scene to his
companion, and Don Juan's unknown and youthful relation was at once
recognized as hijo de la familia, and undeniably a hidalgo born and
bred.  But in the more vivid imagination of feminine El Refugio the
incident reached its highest poetic form.  "It is true, Mother of
God," said Chucha of the Mill; "it was Domingo who himself relates
it as it were the Creed.  When the American escort had arrived with
the young gentleman, this escort, look you, being not of the same
quality, he is departing again without a word of permission.  Comes
to him at this moment my little hidalgo.  'You have yourself
forgotten to take from me your demission,' he said.  This escort,
thinking to make his peace with a mere muchacho, gives to him a
gold piece of twenty pesos.  The little hidalgo has taken it SO,
and with the words, 'Ah! you would make of me your almoner to my
cousin's people,' has given it at the moment to Domingo, and with a
grace and fire admirable."  But it is certain that Clarence's
singular simplicity and truthfulness, a faculty of being
picturesquely indolent in a way that suggested a dreamy abstraction
of mind rather than any vulgar tendency to bodily ease and comfort,
and possibly the fact that he was a good horseman, made him a
popular hero at El Refugio.  At the end of three years Don Juan
found that this inexperienced and apparently idle boy of fourteen
knew more of the practical ruling of the rancho than he did
himself; also that this unlettered young rustic had devoured nearly
all the books in his library with boyish recklessness of digestion.
He found, too, that in spite of his singular independence of
action, Clarence was possessed of an invincible loyalty of
principle, and that, asking no sentimental affection, and indeed
yielding none, he was, without presuming on his relationship,
devoted to his cousin's interest.  It seemed that from being a
glancing ray of sunshine in the house, evasive but never obtrusive,
he had become a daily necessity of comfort and security to his
benefactor.

Clarence was, however, astonished, when, one morning, Don Juan,
with the same embarrassed manner he had shown at their first
meeting, suddenly asked him, "what business he expected to follow."
It seemed the more singular, as the speaker, like most abstracted
men, had hitherto always studiously ignored the future, in their
daily intercourse.  Yet this might have been either the habit of
security or the caution of doubt.  Whatever it was, it was some
sudden disturbance of Don Juan's equanimity, as disconcerting to
himself as it was to Clarence.  So conscious was the boy of this
that, without replying to his cousin's question, but striving in
vain to recall some delinquency of his own, he asked, with his
usual boyish directness--

"Has anything happened?  Have I done anything wrong?"

"No, no," returned Don Juan hurriedly.  "But, you see, it's time
that you should think of your future--or at least prepare for it.
I mean you ought to have some more regular education.  You will
have to go to school.  It's too bad," he added fretfully, with a
certain impatient forgetfulness of Clarence's presence, and as if
following his own thought.  "Just as you are becoming of service to
me, and justifying your ridiculous position here--and all this d--d
nonsense that's gone before--I mean, of course, Clarence," he
interrupted himself, catching sight of the boy's whitening cheek
and darkening eye, "I mean, you know--this ridiculousness of my
keeping you from school at your age, and trying to teach you
myself--don't you see."

"You think it is--ridiculous," repeated Clarence, with dogged
persistency.

"I mean I am ridiculous," said Don Juan hastily.  "There! there!
let's say no more about it.  To-morrow we'll ride over to San Jose
and see the Father Secretary at the Jesuits' College about your
entering at once.  It's a good school, and you'll always be near
the rancho!"  And so the interview ended.

I am afraid that Clarence's first idea was to run away.  There are
few experiences more crushing to an ingenuous nature than the
sudden revelation of the aspect in which it is regarded by others.
The unfortunate Clarence, conscious only of his loyalty to his
cousin's interest and what he believed were the duties of his
position, awoke to find that position "ridiculous."  In an
afternoon's gloomy ride through the lonely hills, and later in the
sleepless solitude of his room at night, he concluded that his
cousin was right.  He would go to school; he would study hard--so
hard that in a little, a very little while, he could make a living
for himself.  He awoke contented.  It was the blessing of youth
that this resolve and execution seemed as one and the same thing.

The next day found him installed as a pupil and boarder in the
college.  Don Juan's position and Spanish predilections naturally
made his relation acceptable to the faculty; but Clarence could not
help perceiving that Father Sobriente, the Principal, regarded him
at times with a thoughtful curiosity that made him suspect that his
cousin had especially bespoken that attention, and that he
occasionally questioned him on his antecedents in a way that made
him dread a renewal of the old questioning about his progenitor.
For the rest, he was a polished, cultivated man; yet, in the
characteristic, material criticism of youth, I am afraid that
Clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large hands, whose
soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose equally
large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed
leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly--rather than to
ostentatiously crush--the obstacles that beset the path of the
young student.  In the cloistered galleries of the court-yard
Clarence sometimes felt himself borne down by the protecting weight
of this paternal hand; in the midnight silence of the dormitory he
fancied he was often conscious of the soft browsing tread and
snuffly muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor.

His relations with his school-fellows were at first far from
pleasant. Whether they suspected favoritism; whether they resented
that old and unsympathetic manner which sprang from his habits of
association with his elders; or whether they rested their
objections on the broader grounds of his being a stranger, I do not
know, but they presently passed from cruel sneers to physical
opposition.  It was then found that this gentle and reserved youth
had retained certain objectionable, rude, direct, rustic qualities
of fist and foot, and that, violating all rules and disdaining the
pomp and circumstance of school-boy warfare, of which he knew
nothing, he simply thrashed a few of his equals out of hand, with
or without ceremony, as the occasion or the insult happened.  In
this emergency one of the seniors was selected to teach this
youthful savage his proper position.  A challenge was given, and
accepted by Clarence with a feverish alacrity that surprised
himself as much as his adversary.  This was a youth of eighteen,
his superior in size and skill.

The first blow bathed Clarence's face in his own blood.  But the
sanguinary chrism, to the alarm of the spectators, effected an
instantaneous and unhallowed change in the boy.  Instantly closing
with his adversary, he sprang at his throat like an animal, and
locking his arm around his neck began to strangle him.  Blind to
the blows that rained upon him, he eventually bore his staggering
enemy by sheer onset and surprise to the earth.  Amidst the general
alarm, the strength of half a dozen hastily summoned teachers was
necessary to unlock his hold.  Even then he struggled to renew the
conflict.  But his adversary had disappeared, and from that day
forward Clarence was never again molested.

Seated before Father Sobriente in the infirmary, with swollen and
bandaged face, and eyes that still seemed to see everything in the
murky light of his own blood, Clarence felt the soft weight of the
father's hand upon his knee.

"My son," said the priest gently, "you are not of our religion, or
I should claim as a right to ask a question of your own heart at
this moment.  But as to a good friend, Claro, a good friend," he
continued, patting the boy's knee, "you will tell me, old Father
Sobriente, frankly and truthfully, as is your habit, one little
thing.  Were you not afraid?"

"No," said Clarence doggedly. "I'll lick him again to-morrow."

"Softly, my son!  It was not of HIM I speak, but of something more
terrible and awful.  Were you not afraid of--of--" he paused, and
suddenly darting his clear eyes into the very depths of Clarence's
soul, added--"of YOURSELF?"

The boy started, shuddered, and burst into tears.

"So, so," said the priest gently, "we have found our real enemy.
Good!  Now, by the grace of God, my little warrior, we shall fight
HIM and conquer."

Whether Clarence profited by this lesson, or whether this brief
exhibition of his quality prevented any repetition of the cause,
the episode was soon forgotten.  As his school-fellows had never
been his associates or confidants, it mattered little to him
whether they feared or respected him, or were hypocritically
obsequious, after the fashion of the weaker.  His studies, at all
events, profited by this lack of distraction.  Already his two
years of desultory and omnivorous reading had given him a facile
familiarity with many things, which left him utterly free of the
timidity, awkwardness, or non-interest of a beginner.  His usually
reserved manner, which had been lack of expression rather than of
conviction, had deceived his tutors.  The audacity of a mind that
had never been dominated by others, and owed no allegiance to
precedent, made his merely superficial progress something
marvelous.

At the end of the first year he was a phenomenal scholar, who
seemed capable of anything.  Nevertheless, Father Sobriente had an
interview with Don Juan, and as a result Clarence was slightly kept
back in his studies, a little more freedom from the rules was
conceded to him, and he was even encouraged to take some diversion.
Of such was the privilege to visit the neighboring town of Santa
Clara unrestricted and unattended.  He had always been liberally
furnished with pocket-money, for which, in his companionless state
and Spartan habits, he had a singular and unboyish contempt.
Nevertheless, he always appeared dressed with scrupulous neatness,
and was rather distinguished-looking in his older reserve and
melancholy self-reliance.

Lounging one afternoon along the Alameda, a leafy avenue set out by
the early Mission Fathers between the village of San Jose and the
convent of Santa Clara, he saw a double file of young girls from
the convent approaching, on their usual promenade.  A view of this
procession being the fondest ambition of the San Jose collegian,
and especially interdicted and circumvented by the good Fathers
attending the college excursions, Clarence felt for it the profound
indifference of a boy who, in the intermediate temperate zone of
fifteen years, thinks that he is no longer young and romantic!  He
was passing them with a careless glance, when a pair of deep violet
eyes caught his own under the broad shade of a coquettishly
beribboned hat, even as it had once looked at him from the depths
of a calico sunbonnet.  Susy!  He started, and would have spoken;
but with a quick little gesture of caution and a meaning glance at
the two nuns who walked at the head and foot of the file, she
indicated him to follow.  He did so at a respectful distance,
albeit wondering.  A little further on Susy dropped her
handkerchief, and was obliged to dart out and run back to the end
of the file to recover it.  But she gave another swift glance of
her blue eyes as she snatched it up and demurely ran back to her
place.  The procession passed on, but when Clarence reached the
spot where she had paused he saw a three-cornered bit of paper
lying in the grass.  He was too discreet to pick it up while the
girls were still in sight, but continued on, returning to it later.
It contained a few words in a schoolgirl's hand, hastily scrawled
in pencil: "Come to the south wall near the big pear-tree at six."

Delighted as Clarence felt, he was at the same time embarrassed.
He could not understand the necessity of this mysterious
rendezvous.  He knew that if she was a scholar she was under
certain conventual restraints; but with the privileges of his
position and friendship with his teachers, he believed that Father
Sobriente would easily procure him an interview with this old play-
fellow, of whom he had often spoken, and who was, with himself, the
sole survivor of his tragical past.  And trusted as he was by
Sobriente, there was something in this clandestine though innocent
rendezvous that went against his loyalty.  Nevertheless, he kept
the appointment, and at the stated time was at the south wall of
the convent, over which the gnarled boughs of the distinguishing
pear-tree hung.  Hard by in the wall was a grated wicket door that
seemed unused.

Would she appear among the boughs or on the edge of the wall?
Either would be like the old Susy.  But to his surprise he heard
the sound of the key turning in the lock.  The grated door suddenly
swung on its hinges, and Susy slipped out.  Grasping his hand, she
said, "Let's run, Clarence," and before he could reply she started
off with him at a rapid pace.  Down the lane they flew--very much,
as it seemed to Clarence's fancy, as they had flown from the old
emigrant wagon on the prairie, four years before.  He glanced at
the fluttering, fairy-like figure beside him.  She had grown taller
and more graceful; she was dressed in exquisite taste, with a
minuteness of luxurious detail that bespoke the spoilt child; but
there was the same prodigal outburst of rippling, golden hair down
her back and shoulders, violet eyes, capricious little mouth, and
the same delicate hands and feet he had remembered.  He would have
preferred a more deliberate survey, but with a shake of her head
and an hysteric little laugh she only said, "Run, Clarence, run,"
and again darted forward.  Arriving at the cross-street, they
turned the corner, and halted breathlessly.

"But you're not running away from school, Susy, are you?" said
Clarence anxiously.

"Only a little bit.  Just enough to get ahead of the other girls,"
she said, rearranging her brown curls and tilted hat.  "You see,
Clarence," she condescended to explain, with a sudden assumption of
older superiority, "mother's here at the hotel all this week, and
I'm allowed to go home every night, like a day scholar.  Only
there's three or four other girls that go out at the same time with
me, and one of the Sisters, and to-day I got ahead of 'em just to
see YOU."

"But" began Clarence.

"Oh, it's all right; the other girls knew it, and helped me.  They
don't start out for half an hour yet, and they'll say I've just run
ahead, and when they and the Sister get to the hotel I'll be there
already--don't you see?"

"Yes," said Clarence dubiously.

"And we'll go to an ice-cream saloon now, shan't we?  There's a
nice one near the hotel.  I've got some money," she added quickly,
as Clarence looked embarrassed.

"So have I," said Clarence, with a faint accession of color.
"Let's go!"  She had relinquished his hand to smooth out her frock,
and they were walking side by side at a more moderate pace.  "But,"
he continued, clinging to his first idea with masculine
persistence, and anxious to assure his companion of his power, of
his position, "I'm in the college, and Father Sobriente, who knows
your lady superior, is a good friend of mine and gives me
privileges; and--and--when he knows that you and I used to play
together--why, he'll fix it that we may see each other whenever we
want."

"Oh, you silly!" said Susy.  "WHAT!--when you're--"

"When I'm WHAT?"

The young girl shot a violet blue ray from under her broad hat.
"Why--when we're grown up now?"  Then with a certain precision,
"Why, they're VERY particular about young gentlemen!  Why,
Clarence, if they suspected that you and I were--"  Another violet
ray from under the hat completed this unfinished sentence.

Pleased and yet confused, Clarence looked straight ahead with
deepening color.  "Why," continued Susy, "Mary Rogers, that was
walking with me, thought you were ever so old--and a distinguished
Spaniard!  And I," she said abruptly--"haven't I grown?  Tell me,
Clarence," with her old appealing impatience, "haven't I grown?  Do
tell me!"

"Very much," said Clarence.

"And isn't this frock pretty--it's only my second best--but I've a
prettier one with lace all down in front; but isn't this one
pretty, Clarence, tell me?"

Clarence thought the frock and its fair owner perfection, and said
so.  Whereat Susy, as if suddenly aware of the presence of passers-
by, assumed an air of severe propriety, dropped her hands by her
side, and with an affected conscientiousness walked on, a little
further from Clarence's side, until they reached the ice-cream
saloon.

"Get a table near the back, Clarence," she said, in a confidential
whisper, "where they can't see us--and strawberry, you know, for
the lemon and vanilla here are just horrid!"

They took their seats in a kind of rustic arbor in the rear of the
shop, which gave them the appearance of two youthful but somewhat
over-dressed and over-conscious shepherds.  There was an interval
of slight awkwardness, which Susy endeavored to displace.  "There
has been," she remarked, with easy conversational lightness, "quite
an excitement about our French teacher being changed.  The girls in
our class think it most disgraceful."

And this was all she could say after a separation of four years!
Clarence was desperate, but as yet idealess and voiceless.  At
last, with an effort over his spoon, he gasped a floating
recollection: "Do you still like flapjacks, Susy?"

"Oh, yes," with a laugh, "but we don't have them now."

"And Mose" (a black pointer, who used to yelp when Susy sang),
"does he still sing with you?"

"Oh, HE'S been lost ever so long," said Susy composedly; "but I've
got a Newfoundland and a spaniel and a black pony;" and here, with
a rapid inventory of her other personal effects, she drifted into
some desultory details of the devotion of her adopted parents, whom
she now readily spoke of as "papa" and "mamma," with evidently no
disturbing recollection of the dead.  From which it appeared that
the Peytons were very rich, and, in addition to their possessions
in the lower country, owned a rancho in Santa Clara and a house in
San Francisco.  Like all children, her strongest impressions were
the most recent.  In the vain hope to lead her back to this
material yesterday, he said--

"You remember Jim Hooker?"

"Oh, HE ran away, when you left.  But just think of it!  The other
day, when papa and I went into a big restaurant in San Francisco,
who should be there WAITING on the table--yes, Clarence, a real
waiter--but Jim Hooker!  Papa spoke to him; but of course," with a
slight elevation of her pretty chin, "I couldn't, you know; fancy--
a waiter!"

The story of how Jim Hooker had personated him stopped short upon
Clarence's lips.  He could not bring himself now to add that
revelation to the contempt of his small companion, which, in spite
of its naivete, somewhat grated on his sensibilities.

"Clarence," she said, suddenly turning towards him mysteriously,
and indicating the shopman and his assistants, "I really believe
these people suspect us."

"Of what?" said the practical Clarence.

"Don't be silly!  Don't you see how they are staring?"

Clarence was really unable to detect the least curiosity on the
part of the shopman, or that any one exhibited the slightest
concern in him or his companion.  But he felt a return of the
embarrassed pleasure he was conscious of a moment before.

"Then you're living with your father?" said Susy, changing the
subject.

"You mean my COUSIN," said Clarence, smiling.  "You know my father
died long before I ever knew you."

"Yes; that's what YOU used to say, Clarence, but papa says it isn't
so."  But seeing the boy's wondering eyes fixed on her with a
troubled expression, she added quickly, "Oh, then, he IS your
cousin!"

"Well, I think I ought to know," said Clarence, with a smile, that
was, however, far from comfortable, and a quick return of his old
unpleasant recollections of the Peytons.  "Why, I was brought to
him by one of his friends."  And Clarence gave a rapid boyish
summary of his journey from Sacramento, and Flynn's discovery of
the letter addressed to Silsbee.  But before he had concluded he
was conscious that Susy was by no means interested in these
details, nor in the least affected by the passing allusion to her
dead father and his relation to Clarence's misadventures.  With her
rounded chin in her hand, she was slowly examining his face, with a
certain mischievous yet demure abstraction.  "I tell you what,
Clarence," she said, when he had finished, "you ought to make your
cousin get you one of those sombreros, and a nice gold-braided
serape.  They'd just suit you.  And then--then you could ride up
and down the Alameda when we are going by."

"But I'm coming to see you at--at your house, and at the convent,"
he said eagerly.  "Father Sobriente and my cousin will fix it all
right."

But Susy shook her head, with superior wisdom.  "No; they must
never know our secret!--neither papa nor mamma, especially mamma.
And they mustn't know that we've met again--AFTER THESE YEARS!"  It
is impossible to describe the deep significance which Susy's blue
eyes gave to this expression.  After a pause she went on--

"No!  We must never meet again, Clarence, unless Mary Rogers helps.
She is my best, my ONLIEST friend, and older than I; having had
trouble herself, and being expressly forbidden to see him again.
You can speak to her about Suzette--that's my name now; I was
rechristened Suzette Alexandra Peyton by mamma.  And now,
Clarence," dropping her voice and glancing shyly around the saloon,
"you may kiss me just once under my hat, for good-by."  She
adroitly slanted her broad-brimmed hat towards the front of the
shop, and in its shadow advanced her fresh young cheek to Clarence.

Coloring and laughing, the boy pressed his lips to it twice.  Then
Susy arose, with the faintest affectation of a sigh, shook out her
skirt, drew on her gloves with the greatest gravity, and saying,
"Don't follow me further than the door--they're coming now," walked
with supercilious dignity past the preoccupied proprietor and
waiters to the entrance.  Here she said, with marked civility,
"Good-afternoon, Mr. Brant," and tripped away towards the hotel.
Clarence lingered for a moment to look after the lithe and elegant
little figure, with its shining undulations of hair that fell over
the back and shoulders of her white frock like a golden mantle, and
then turned away in the opposite direction.

He walked home in a state, as it seemed to him, of absurd
perplexity.  There were many reasons why his encounter with Susy
should have been of unmixed pleasure.  She had remembered him of
her own free will, and, in spite of the change in her fortune, had
made the first advances.  Her doubts about her future interviews
had affected him but little; still less, I fear, did he think of
the other changes in her character and disposition, for he was of
that age when they added only a piquancy and fascination to her--as
of one who, in spite of her weakness of nature, was still devoted
to him!  But he was painfully conscious that this meeting had
revived in him all the fears, vague uneasiness, and sense of wrong
that had haunted his first boyhood, and which he thought he had
buried at El Refugio four years ago.  Susy's allusion to his father
and the reiteration of Peyton's skepticism awoke in his older
intellect the first feeling of suspicion that was compatible with
his open nature.  Was this recurring reticence and mystery due to
any act of his father's?  But, looking back upon it in after-years,
he concluded that the incident of that day was a premonition rather
than a recollection.


CHAPTER XI


When he reached the college the Angelus had long since rung.  In
the corridor he met one of the Fathers, who, instead of questioning
him, returned his salutation with a grave gentleness that struck
him.  He had turned into Father Sobriente's quiet study with the
intention of reporting himself, when he was disturbed to find him
in consultation with three or four of the faculty, who seemed to be
thrown into some slight confusion by his entrance.  Clarence was
about to retire hurriedly when Father Sobriente, breaking up the
council with a significant glance at the others, called him back.
Confused and embarrassed, with a dread of something impending, the
boy tried to avert it by a hurried account of his meeting with
Susy, and his hopes of Father Sobriente's counsel and assistance.
Taking upon himself the idea of suggesting Susy's escapade, he
confessed the fault.  The old man gazed into his frank eyes with a
thoughtful, half-compassionate smile.  "I was just thinking of
giving you a holiday with--with Don Juan Robinson."  The unusual
substitution of this final title for the habitual "your cousin"
struck Clarence uneasily.  "But we will speak of that later.  Sit
down, my son; I am not busy.  We shall talk a little.  Father Pedro
says you are getting on fluently with your translations.  That is
excellent, my son, excellent."

Clarence's face beamed with relief and pleasure.  His vague fears
began to dissipate.

"And you translate even from dictation!  Good!  We have an hour to
spare, and you shall give to me a specimen of your skill.  Eh?
Good!  I will walk here and dictate to you in my poor English, and
you shall sit there and render it to me in your good Spanish.  Eh?
So we shall amuse and instruct ourselves."

Clarence smiled.  These sporadic moments of instruction and
admonition were not unusual to the good Father.  He cheerfully
seated himself at the Padre's table before a blank sheet of paper,
with a pen in his hand.  Father Sobriente paced the apartment, with
his usual heavy but noiseless tread.  To his surprise, the good
priest, after an exhaustive pinch of snuff, blew his nose, and
began, in his most lugubrious style of pulpit exhortation:--

"It has been written that the sins of the father shall be visited
upon the children, and the unthinking and worldly have sought
refuge from this law by declaring it harsh and cruel.  Miserable
and blind!  For do we not see that the wicked man, who in the pride
of his power and vainglory is willing to risk punishment to
HIMSELF--and believes it to be courage--must pause before the awful
mandate that condemns an equal suffering to those he loves, which
he cannot withhold or suffer for?  In the spectacle of these
innocents struggling against disgrace, perhaps disease, poverty, or
desertion, what avails his haughty, all-defying spirit?  Let us
imagine, Clarence."

"Sir?" said the literal Clarence, pausing in his exercise.

"I mean," continued the priest, with a slight cough, "let the
thoughtful man picture a father: a desperate, self-willed man, who
scorned the laws of God and society--keeping only faith with a
miserable subterfuge he called 'honor,' and relying only on his own
courage and his knowledge of human weakness.  Imagine him cruel and
bloody--a gambler by profession, an outlaw among men, an outcast
from the Church; voluntarily abandoning friends and family,--the
wife he should have cherished, the son he should have reared and
educated--for the gratification of his deadly passions.  Yet
imagine that man suddenly confronted with the thought of that
heritage of shame and disgust which he had brought upon his
innocent offspring--to whom he cannot give even his own desperate
recklessness to sustain its vicarious suffering.  What must be the
feelings of a parent--"

"Father Sobriente," said Clarence softly.

To the boy's surprise, scarcely had he spoken when the soft
protecting palm of the priest was already upon his shoulder, and
the snuffy but kindly upper lip, trembling with some strange
emotion, close beside his cheek.

"What is it, Clarence?" he said hurriedly.  "Speak, my son, without
fear!  You would ask--"

"I only wanted to know if 'padre' takes a masculine verb here,"
replied Clarence naively.

Father Sobriente blew his nose violently.  "Truly--though used for
either gender, by the context masculine," he responded gravely.
"Ah," he added, leaning over Clarence, and scanning his work
hastily, "Good, very good!  And now, possibly," he continued,
passing his hand like a damp sponge over his heated brow, "we shall
reverse our exercise.  I shall deliver to you in Spanish what you
shall render back in English, eh?  And--let us consider--we shall
make something more familiar and narrative, eh?"

To this Clarence, somewhat bored by these present solemn
abstractions, assented gladly, and took up his pen.  Father
Sobriente, resuming his noiseless pacing, began:

"On the fertile plains of Guadalajara lived a certain caballero,
possessed of flocks and lands, and a wife and son.  But, being also
possessed of a fiery and roving nature, he did not value them as he
did perilous adventure, feats of arms, and sanguinary encounters.
To this may be added riotous excesses, gambling and drunkenness,
which in time decreased his patrimony, even as his rebellious and
quarrelsome spirit had alienated his family and neighbors.  His
wife, borne down by shame and sorrow, died while her son was still
an infant.  In a fit of equal remorse and recklessness the
caballero married again within the year.  But the new wife was of a
temper and bearing as bitter as her consort.  Violent quarrels
ensued between them, ending in the husband abandoning his wife and
son, and leaving St. Louis--I should say Guadalajara--for ever.
Joining some adventurers in a foreign land, under an assumed name,
he pursued his reckless course, until, by one or two acts of
outlawry, he made his return to civilization impossible.  The
deserted wife and step-mother of his child coldly accepted the
situation, forbidding his name to be spoken again in her presence,
announced that he was dead, and kept the knowledge of his existence
from his own son, whom she placed under the charge of her sister.
But the sister managed to secretly communicate with the outlawed
father, and, under a pretext, arranged between them, of sending the
boy to another relation, actually dispatched the innocent child to
his unworthy parent.  Perhaps stirred by remorse, the infamous man--"

"Stop!" said Clarence suddenly.

He had thrown down his pen, and was standing erect and rigid before
the Father.

"You are trying to tell me something, Father Sobriente," he said,
with an effort.  "Speak out, I implore you.  I can stand anything
but this mystery.  I am no longer a child.  I have a right to know
all.  This that you are telling me is no fable--I see it in your
face, Father Sobriente; it is the story of--of--"

"Your father, Clarence!" said the priest, in a trembling voice.

The boy drew back, with a white face.  "My father!" he repeated.
"Living, or dead?"

"Living, when you first left your home," said the old man
hurriedly, seizing Clarence's hand, "for it was he who in the name
of your cousin sent for you.  Living--yes, while you were here, for
it was he who for the past three years stood in the shadow of this
assumed cousin, Don Juan, and at last sent you to this school.
Living, Clarence, yes; but living under a name and reputation that
would have blasted you!  And now DEAD--dead in Mexico, shot as an
insurgent and in a still desperate career!  May God have mercy on
his soul!"

"Dead!" repeated Clarence, trembling, "only now?"

"The news of the insurrection and his fate came only an hour
since," continued the Padre quickly; "his complicity with it and
his identity were known only to Don Juan.  He would have spared you
any knowledge of the truth, even as this dead man would; but I and
my brothers thought otherwise.  I have broken it to you badly, my
son, but forgive me?"

An hysterical laugh broke from Clarence and the priest recoiled
before him.  "Forgive YOU!  What was this man to me?" he said, with
boyish vehemence.  "He never LOVED me!  He deserted me; he made my
life a lie.  He never sought me, came near me, or stretched a hand
to me that I could take?"

"Hush! hush!" said the priest, with a horrified look, laying his
huge hand upon the boy's shoulder and bearing him down to his seat.
"You know not what you say.  Think--think, Clarence!  Was there
none of all those who have befriended you--who were kind to you in
your wanderings--to whom your heart turned unconsciously?  Think,
Clarence!  You yourself have spoken to me of such a one.  Let your
heart speak again, for his sake--for the sake of the dead."

A gentler light suffused the boy's eyes, and he started.  Catching
convulsively at his companion's sleeve, he said in an eager, boyish
whisper, "There was one, a wicked, desperate man, whom they all
feared--Flynn, who brought me from the mines.  Yes, I thought that
he was my cousin's loyal friend--more than all the rest; and I told
him everything--all, that I never told the man I thought my cousin,
or anyone, or even you; and I think, I think, Father, I liked him
best of all.  I thought since it was wrong," he continued, with a
trembling smile, "for I was foolishly fond even of the way the
others feared him, he that I feared not, and who was so kind to me.
Yet he, too, left me without a word, and when I would have followed
him--"  But the boy broke down, and buried his face in his hands.

"No, no," said Father Sobriente, with eager persistence, "that was
his foolish pride to spare you the knowledge of your kinship with
one so feared, and part of the blind and mistaken penance he had
laid upon himself.  For even at that moment of your boyish
indignation, he never was so fond of you as then.  Yes, my poor
boy, this man, to whom God led your wandering feet at Deadman's
Gulch; the man who brought you here, and by some secret hold--I
know not what--on Don Juan's past, persuaded him to assume to be
your relation; this man Flynn, this Jackson Brant the gambler, this
Hamilton Brant the outlaw--WAS YOUR FATHER!  Ah, yes!  Weep on, my
son; each tear of love and forgiveness from thee hath vicarious
power to wash away his sin."

With a single sweep of his protecting hand he drew Clarence towards
his breast, until the boy slowly sank upon his knees at his feet.
Then, lifting his eyes towards the ceiling, he said softly in an
older tongue, "And THOU, too, unhappy and perturbed spirit, rest!"

       .       .       .       .       .       .       .

It was nearly dawn when the good Padre wiped the last tears from
Clarence's clearer eyes.  "And now, my son," he said, with a gentle
smile, as he rose to his feet, "let us not forget the living.
Although your step-mother has, through her own act, no legal claim
upon you, far be it from me to indicate your attitude towards her.
Enough that YOU are independent."  He turned, and, opening a drawer
in his secretaire, took out a bank-book, and placed it in the hands
of the wondering boy.

"It was HIS wish, Clarence, that even after his death you should
never have to prove your kinship to claim your rights.  Taking
advantage of the boyish deposit you had left with Mr. Carden at the
bank, with his connivance and in your name he added to it, month by
month and year by year; Mr. Carden cheerfully accepting the trust
and management of the fund.  The seed thus sown has produced a
thousandfold, Clarence, beyond all expectations.  You are not only
free, my son, but of yourself and in whatever name you choose--your
own master."

"I shall keep my father's name," said the boy simply.

"Amen!" said Father Sobriente.


Here closes the chronicle of Clarence Brant's boyhood.  How he
sustained his name and independence in after years, and who, of
those already mentioned in these pages, helped him to make or mar it,
may be a matter for future record.