IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS

by Bret Harte




CHAPTER I.


The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods.  The few shafts of
sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in
unfathomable depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on
the enormous trunks of the redwoods.  For a time the dull red of
their vast columns, and the dull red of their cast-off bark which
matted the echoless aisles, still seemed to hold a faint glow of
the dying day.  But even this soon passed.  Light and color fled
upwards.  The dark interlaced treetops, that had all day made an
impenetrable shade, broke into fire here and there; their lost
spires glittered, faded, and went utterly out.  A weird twilight
that did not come from the outer world, but seemed born of the
wood itself, slowly filled and possessed the aisles.  The
straight, tall, colossal trunks rose dimly like columns of upward
smoke.  The few fallen trees stretched their huge length into
obscurity, and seemed to lie on shadowy trestles.  The strange
breath that filled these mysterious vaults had neither coldness
nor moisture; a dry, fragrant dust arose from the noiseless foot
that trod their bark-strewn floor; the aisles might have been
tombs, the fallen trees enormous mummies; the silence the
solitude of a forgotten past.

And yet this silence was presently broken by a recurring sound
like breathing, interrupted occasionally by inarticulate and
stertorous gasps.  It was not the quick, panting, listening
breath of some stealthy feline or canine animal, but indicated a
larger, slower, and more powerful organization, whose progress
was less watchful and guarded, or as if a fragment of one of the
fallen monsters had become animate.  At times this life seemed to
take visible form, but as vaguely, as misshapenly, as the phantom
of a nightmare.  Now it was a square object moving sideways,
endways, with neither head nor tail and scarcely visible feet;
then an arched bulk rolling against the trunks of the trees and
recoiling again, or an upright cylindrical mass, but always
oscillating and unsteady, and striking the trees on either hand.
The frequent occurrence of the movement suggested the figures of
some weird rhythmic dance to music heard by the shape alone.
Suddenly it either became motionless or faded away.

There was the frightened neighing of a horse, the sudden jingling
of spurs, a shout and outcry, and the swift apparition of three
dancing torches in one of the dark aisles; but so intense was the
obscurity that they shed no light on surrounding objects, and
seemed to advance of their own volition without human guidance,
until they disappeared suddenly behind the interposing bulk of
one of the largest trees.  Beyond its eighty feet of circumference
the light could not reach, and the gloom remained inscrutable.
But the voices and jingling spurs were heard distinctly.

"Blast the mare!  She's shied off that cursed trail again."

"Ye ain't lost it again, hev ye?" growled a second voice.

"That's jist what I hev.  And these blasted pine-knots don't give
light an inch beyond 'em.  D--d if I don't think they make this
cursed hole blacker."

There was a laugh--a woman's laugh--hysterical, bitter,
sarcastic, exasperating.  The second speaker, without heeding it,
went on:--

"What in thunder skeert the hosses?  Did you see or hear
anything?"

"Nothin'.  The wood is like a graveyard."

The woman's voice again broke into a hoarse, contemptuous laugh.
The man resumed angrily:--

"If you know anything, why in h-ll don't you say so, instead of
cackling like a d--d squaw there?  P'raps you reckon you ken find
the trail too."

"Take this rope off my wrist," said the woman's voice, "untie my
hands, let me down, and I'll find it."  She spoke quickly and
with a Spanish accent.

It was the men's turn to laugh.  "And give you a show to snatch
that six-shooter and blow a hole through me, as you did to the
Sheriff of Calaveras, eh?  Not if this court understands itself,"
said the first speaker dryly.

"Go to the devil, then," she said curtly.

"Not before a lady," responded the other.  There was another
laugh from the men, the spurs jingled again, the three torches
reappeared from behind the tree, and then passed away in the
darkness.

For a time silence and immutability possessed the woods; the
great trunks loomed upwards, their fallen brothers stretched
their slow length into obscurity.  The sound of breathing again
became audible; the shape reappeared in the aisle, and
recommenced its mystic dance.  Presently it was lost in the
shadow of the largest tree, and to the sound of breathing
succeeded a grating and scratching of bark.  Suddenly, as if
riven by lightning, a flash broke from the center of the tree-
trunk, lit up the woods, and a sharp report rang through it.
After a pause the jingling of spurs and the dancing of torches
were revived from the distance.

"Hallo?"

No answer.

"Who fired that shot?"

But there was no reply.  A slight veil of smoke passed away to
the right, there was the spice of gunpowder in the air, but
nothing more.

The torches came forward again, but this time it could be seen
they were held in the hands of two men and a woman.  The woman's
hands were tied at the wrist to the horse-hair reins of her mule,
while a riata, passed around her waist and under the mule's
girth, was held by one of the men, who were both armed with
rifles and revolvers.  Their frightened horses curveted, and it
was with difficulty they could be made to advance.

"Ho! stranger, what are you shooting at?"

The woman laughed and shrugged her shoulders.  "Look yonder at
the roots of the tree.  You're a d--d smart man for a sheriff,
ain't you?"

The man uttered an exclamation and spurred his horse forward, but
the animal reared in terror.  He then sprang to the ground and
approached the tree.  The shape lay there, a scarcely
distinguishable bulk.

"A grizzly, by the living Jingo!  Shot through the heart."

It was true.  The strange shape lit up by the flaring torches
seemed more vague, unearthly, and awkward in its dying throes,
yet the small shut eyes, the feeble nose, the ponderous
shoulders, and half-human foot armed with powerful claws were
unmistakable.  The men turned by a common impulse and peered into
the remote recesses of the wood again.

"Hi, Mister! come and pick up your game.  Hallo there!"

The challenge fell unheeded on the empty woods.

"And yet," said he whom the woman had called the sheriff, "he
can't be far off.  It was a close shot, and the bear hez dropped
in his tracks.  Why, wot's this sticking in his claws?"

The two men bent over the animal.  "Why, it's sugar, brown sugar--
look!"  There was no mistake.  The huge beast's fore paws and
muzzle were streaked with the unromantic household provision, and
heightened the absurd contrast of its incongruous members.  The
woman, apparently indifferent, had taken that opportunity to
partly free one of her wrists.

"If we hadn't been cavorting round this yer spot for the last
half hour, I'd swear there was a shanty not a hundred yards
away," said the sheriff.

The other man, without replying, remounted his horse instantly.

"If there is, and it's inhabited by a gentleman that kin make
centre shots like that in the dark, and don't care to explain
how, I reckon I won't disturb him."

The sheriff was apparently of the same opinion, for he followed
his companion's example, and once more led the way.  The spurs
tinkled, the torches danced, and the cavalcade slowly reentered
the gloom.  In another moment it had disappeared.

The wood sank again into repose, this time disturbed by neither
shape nor sound.  What lower forms of life might have crept close
to its roots were hidden in the ferns, or passed with deadened
tread over the bark-strewn floor.  Towards morning a coolness
like dew fell from above, with here and there a dropping twig or
nut, or the crepitant awakening and stretching-out of cramped and
weary branches.  Later a dull, lurid dawn, not unlike the last
evening's sunset, filled the aisles.  This faded again, and a
clear gray light, in which every object stood out in sharp
distinctness, took its place.  Morning was waiting outside in all
its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured
and sobered day.

Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the
dead bear lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk,
and showed in its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the
ground, partly hidden by hanging strips of bark which had fallen
across it.  Suddenly one of these strips was pushed aside, and a
young man leaped lightly down.

But for the rifle he carried and some modern peculiarities of
dress, he was of a grace so unusual and unconventional that he
might have passed for a faun who was quitting his ancestral home.
He stepped to the side of the bear with a light elastic movement
that was as unlike customary progression as his face and figure
were unlike the ordinary types of humanity.  Even as he leaned
upon his rifle, looking down at the prostrate animal, he
unconsciously fell into an attitude that in any other mortal
would have been a pose, but with him was the picturesque and
unstudied relaxation of perfect symmetry.

"Hallo, Mister!"

He raised his head so carelessly and listlessly that he did not
otherwise change his attitude.  Stepping from behind the tree,
the woman of the preceding night stood before him.  Her hands
were free except for a thong of the riata, which was still
knotted around one wrist, the end of the thong having been torn
or burnt away.  Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair hung over
her shoulders in one long black braid.

"I reckoned all along it was YOU who shot the bear," she said;
"at least some one hiding yer," and she indicated the hollow tree
with her hand.  "It wasn't no chance shot."  Observing that the
young man, either from misconception or indifference, did not
seem to comprehend her, she added, "We came by here, last night,
a minute after you fired."

"Oh, that was YOU kicked up such a row, was it?" said the young
man, with a shade of interest.

"I reckon," said the woman, nodding her head, "and them that was
with me."

"And who are they?"

"Sheriff Dunn, of Yolo, and his deputy."

"And where are they now?"

"The deputy--in h-ll, I reckon; I don't know about the sheriff."

"I see," said the young man quietly; "and you?"

"I--got away," she said savagely.  But she was taken with a
sudden nervous shiver, which she at once repressed by tightly
dragging her shawl over her shoulders and elbows, and folding her
arms defiantly.

"And you're going?"

"To follow the deputy, may be," she said gloomily.  "But come, I
say, ain't you going to treat?  It's cursed cold here."

"Wait a moment."  The young man was looking at her, with his
arched brows slightly knit and a half smile of curiosity.  "Ain't
you Teresa?"

She was prepared for the question, but evidently was not certain
whether she would reply defiantly or confidently.  After an
exhaustive scrutiny of his face she chose the latter, and said,
"You can bet your life on it, Johnny."

"I don't bet, and my name isn't Johnny.  Then you're the woman
who stabbed Dick Curson over at Lagrange's?"

She became defiant again.

"That's me, all the time.  What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing.  And you used to dance at the Alhambra?"  She whisked
the shawl from her shoulders, held it up like a scarf, and made
one or two steps of the sembicuacua.  There was not the least
gayety, recklessness, or spontaneity in the action; it was simply
mechanical bravado.  It was so ineffective, even upon her own
feelings, that her arms presently dropped to her side, and she
coughed embarrassedly.  "Where's that whiskey, pardner?" she
asked.

The young man turned toward the tree he had just quitted, and
without further words assisted her to mount to the cavity.  It
was an irregular-shaped vaulted chamber, pierced fifty feet above
by a shaft or cylindrical opening in the decayed trunk, which was
blackened by smoke, as if it had served the purpose of a chimney.
In one corner lay a bearskin and blanket; at the side were two
alcoves or indentations, one of which was evidently used as a
table, and the other as a cupboard.  In another hollow, near the
entrance, lay a few small sacks of flour, coffee, and sugar, the
sticky contents of the latter still strewing the floor.  From
this storehouse the young man drew a wicker flask of whiskey, and
handed it, with a tin cup of water, to the woman.  She waved the
cup aside, placed the flask to her lips, and drank the undiluted
spirit.  Yet even this was evidently bravado, for the water
started to her eyes, and she could not restrain the paroxysm of
coughing that followed.

"I reckon that's the kind that kills at forty rods," she said,
with a hysterical laugh.  "But I say, pardner, you look as if you
were fixed here to stay," and she stared ostentatiously around
the chamber.  But she had already taken in its minutest details,
even to observing that the hanging strips of bark could be
disposed so as to completely hide the entrance.

"Well, yes," he replied; "it wouldn't be very easy to pull up the
stakes and move the shanty further on."

Seeing that either from indifference or caution he had not
accepted her meaning, she looked at him fixedly, and said,--

"What is your little game?"

"Eh?"

"What are you hiding for--here, in this tree?"

"But I'm not hiding."

"Then why didn't you come out when they hailed you last night?"

"Because I didn't care to."

Teresa whistled incredulously.  "All right--then if you're not
hiding, I'm going to."  As he did not reply, she went on: "If I
can keep out of sight for a couple of weeks, this thing will blow
over here, and I can get across into Yolo.  I could get a fair
show there, where the boys know me.  Just now the trails are all
watched, but no one would think of lookin' here."

"Then how did you come to think of it?" he asked carelessly.

"Because I knew that bear hadn't gone far for that sugar; because
I know he hadn't stole it from a cache--it was too fresh, and
we'd have seen the torn-up earth; because we had passed no camp;
and because I knew there was no shanty here.  And, besides," she
added in a low voice, "maybe I was huntin' a hole myself to die
in--and spotted it by instinct."

There was something in this suggestion of a hunted animal that,
unlike anything she had previously said or suggested, was not
exaggerated, and caused the young man to look at her again.  She
was standing under the chimney-like opening, and the light from
above illuminated her head and shoulders.  The pupils of her eyes
had lost their feverish prominence, and were slightly suffused
and softened as she gazed abstractedly before her.  The only
vestige of her previous excitement was in her left-hand fingers,
which were incessantly twisting and turning a diamond ring upon
her right hand, but without imparting the least animation to her
rigid attitude.  Suddenly, as if conscious of his scrutiny, she
stepped aside out of the revealing light and by a swift feminine
instinct raised her hand to her head as if to adjust her straggling
hair.  It was only for a moment, however, for, as if aware of the
weakness, she struggled to resume her aggressive pose.

"Well," she said.  "Speak up.  Am I goin' to stop here, or have I
got to get up and get?"

"You can stay," said the young man quietly; "but as I've got my
provisions and ammunition here, and haven't any other place to go
to just now, I suppose we'll have to share it together."

She glanced at him under her eyelids, and a half-bitter, half-
contemptuous smile passed across her face.  "All right, old man,"
she said, holding out her hand, "it's a go.  We'll start in
housekeeping at once, if you like."

"I'll have to come here once or twice a day," he said, quite
composedly, "to look after my things, and get something to eat;
but I'll be away most of the time, and what with camping out
under the trees every night I reckon my share won't incommode
you."

She opened her black eyes upon him, at this original proposition.
Then she looked down at her torn dress.  "I suppose this style of
thing ain't very fancy, is it?" she said, with a forced laugh.

"I think I know where to beg or borrow a change for you, if you
can't get any," he replied simply.

She stared at him again.  "Are you a family man?"

"No."

She was silent for a moment.  "Well," she said, "you can tell
your girl I'm not particular about its being in the latest
fashion."

There was a slight flush on his forehead as he turned toward the
little cupboard, but no tremor in his voice as he went on:
"You'll find tea and coffee here, and, if you're bored, there's a
book or two.  You read, don't you--I mean English?"

She nodded, but cast a look of undisguised contempt upon the two
worn, coverless novels he held out to her.  "You haven't got last
week's 'Sacramento Union,' have you?  I hear they have my case
all in; only them lying reporters made it out against me all the
time."

"I don't see the papers," he replied curtly.

"They say there's a picture of me in the 'Police Gazette,' taken
in the act," and she laughed.

He looked a little abstracted, and turned as if to go.  "I think
you'll do well to rest a while just now, and keep as close hid as
possible until afternoon.  The trail is a mile away at the
nearest point, but some one might miss it and stray over here.
You're quite safe if you're careful, and stand by the tree.  You
can build a fire here," he stepped under the chimney-like
opening, "without its being noticed.  Even the smoke is lost and
cannot be seen so high."

The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it
had on hers.  She looked at him intently.

"You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don't you?" she
said, with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its
quality; "but I don't see how you pick up a living by it in the
Carquinez Woods.  So you're going, are you?  You might be more
sociable.  Good-by."

"Good-by!"  He leaped from the opening.

"I say pardner!"

He turned a little impatiently.  She had knelt down at the
entrance, so as to be nearer his level, and was holding out her
hand.  But he did not notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.

"If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?"

He smiled.  "Don't wait to hear."

"But suppose I wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?"

He hesitated.  "Call me--Lo."

"Lo, the poor Indian?"*

"Exactly."


* The first word of Pope's familiar apostrophe is humorously used
in the Far West as a distinguishing title for the Indian.


It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young
man's height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular
gravity of demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion.
He did not look like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as
a youthful chief might have looked.  There was a further
suggestion in his fringed buckskin shirt and moccasins; but
before she could utter the half-sarcastic comment that rose to
her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as an Indian might
have done.

She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,
dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance.  Yet this
did not darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more
vigorous light through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof
than that which came from the dim woodland aisles below.
Nevertheless, she shivered, and drawing her shawl closely around
her began to collect some half-burnt fragments of wood in the
chimney to make a fire.  But the preoccupation of her thoughts
rendered this a tedious process, as she would from time to time
stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of rapt
abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth.  When she had at
last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue
smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it
reached the top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it,
fixed her eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern, and became
motionless.

What did she see through that shadow?

Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents
of the preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten;
things that would not have happened but for another thing--the
thing before which everything faded!  A ball-room; the sounds of
music; the one man she had cared for insulting her with the
flaunting ostentation of his unfaithfulness; herself despised,
put aside, laughed at, or worse, jilted.  And then the moment of
delirium, when the light danced; the one wild act that lifted
her, the despised one, above them all--made her the supreme
figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by half-
startled, half-admiring men!  "Yes," she laughed; but struck by
the sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern
nervously, and then dropped again into her old position.

As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that
he was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her
revenge against others; he who had taught her to strike when she
was insulted; and it was only fit he should reap what he had
sown.  She was what he, what other men, had made her.  And what
was she now?  What had she been once?

She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might
have been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her
precocious little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with
either; and then left her with a circus troupe, where she first
tasted the power of her courage, her beauty, and her
recklessness.  She remembered those flashes of triumph that left
a fever in her veins--a fever that when it failed must be
stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything that would
keep her name a wonder in men's mouths, an envious fear to women.
She recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap
pleasures, and cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa!
the daring Teresa! the reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman,
invincible as a boy; dancing, flirting, fencing, shooting,
swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting Teresa!  "Oh, yes; she had
been loved, perhaps--who knows?--but always feared.  Why should
she change now?  Ha, he should see."

She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with
gestures, ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate
apostrophes, but with this strange and unexpected result.
Heretofore she had always been sustained and kept up by an
audience of some kind or quality, if only perhaps a humble
companion; there had always been some one she could fascinate or
horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their eyes.
Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had
been something.  But she was alone now.  Her words fell on
apathetic solitude; she was acting to viewless space.  She rushed
to the opening, dashed the hanging bark aside, and leaped to the
ground.

She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.

"Hallo!" she cried.  "Look, 'tis I, Teresa!"

The profound silence remained unbroken.  Her shrillest tones were
lost in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had
faded into pure ether.  She stretched out her clenched fists as
if to defy the pillared austerities of the vaults around her.

"Come and take me if you dare!"

The challenge was unheeded.  If she had thrown herself violently
against the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken
more breathless than she was by the compact, embattled solitude
that encompassed her.  The hopelessness of impressing these cold
and passive vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a
vague fear.  In her rage of the previous night she had not seen
the wood in its profound immobility.  Left alone with the majesty
of those enormous columns, she trembled and turned faint.  The
silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed to her
less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous
witnesses of her weakness.  Like a wounded quail with lowered
crest and trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding place.

Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her.  She
picked up the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside, only to
let it fall again in utter weariness.  For a moment her feminine
curiosity was excited by the discovery of an old book, in whose
blank leaves were pressed a variety of flowers and woodland
grasses.  As she could not conceive that these had been kept for
any but a sentimental purpose, she was disappointed to find that
underneath each was a sentence in an unknown tongue, that even to
her untutored eye did not appear to be the language of passion.
Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and blankets, and,
imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely different
character, lay down to pursue her reveries.  But nature asserted
herself, and ere she knew it she was asleep.

So intense and prolonged had been her previous excitement that,
the tension once relieved, she passed into a slumber of
exhaustion so deep that she seemed scarce to breathe.  High noon
succeeded morning, the central shaft received a single ray of
upper sunlight, the afternoon came and went, the shadows gathered
below, the sunset fires began to eat their way through the
groined roof, and she still slept.  She slept even when the bark
hangings of the chamber were put aside, and the young man
reentered.

He laid down a bundle he was carrying and softly approached the
sleeper.  For a moment he was startled from his indifference; she
lay so still and motionless.  But this was not all that struck
him; the face before him was no longer the passionate, haggard
visage that confronted him that morning; the feverish air, the
burning color, the strained muscles of mouth and brow, and the
staring eyes were gone; wiped away, perhaps, by the tears that
still left their traces on cheek and dark eyelash.  It was the
face of a handsome woman of thirty, with even a suggestion of
softness in the contour of the cheek and arching of her upper
lip, no longer rigidly drawn down in anger, but relaxed by sleep
on her white teeth.

With the lithe, soft tread that was habitual to him, the young
man moved about, examining the condition of the little chamber
and its stock of provisions and necessaries, and withdrew
presently, to reappear as noiselessly with a tin bucket of water.
This done, he replenished the little pile of fuel with an armful
of bark and pine cones, cast an approving glance about him, which
included the sleeper, and silently departed.

It was night when she awoke.  She was surrounded by a profound
darkness, except where the shaft-like opening made a nebulous
mist in the corner of her wooden cavern.  Providentially she
struggled back to consciousness slowly, so that the solitude and
silence came upon her gradually, with a growing realization of
the events of the past twenty-four hours, but without a shock.
She was alone here, but safe still, and every hour added to her
chances of ultimate escape.  She remembered to have seen a candle
among the articles on the shelf, and she began to grope her way
towards the matches.  Suddenly she stopped.  What was that panting?

Was it her own breathing, quickened with a sudden nameless
terror? or was there something outside?  Her heart seemed to stop
beating while she listened.  Yes! it was a panting outside--a
panting now increased, multiplied, redoubled, mixed with the
sounds of rustling, tearing, craunching, and occasionally a
quick, impatient snarl.  She crept on her hands and knees to the
opening and looked out.  At first the ground seemed to be
undulating between her and the opposite tree.  But a second
glance showed her the black and gray, bristling, tossing backs of
tumbling beasts of prey, charging the carcass of the bear that
lay at its roots, or contesting for the prize with gluttonous,
choked breath, sidelong snarls, arched spines, and recurved
tails.  One of the boldest had leaped upon a buttressing root of
her tree within a foot of the opening.  The excitement, awe, and
terror she had undergone culminated in one wild, maddened scream,
that seemed to pierce even the cold depths of the forest, as she
dropped on her face, with her hands clasped over her eyes in an
agony of fear.

Her scream was answered, after a pause, by a sudden volley of
firebrands and sparks into the midst of the panting, crowding
pack; a few smothered howls and snaps, and a sudden dispersion of
the concourse.  In another moment the young man, with a blazing
brand in either hand, leaped upon the body of the bear.

Teresa raised her head, uttered a hysterical cry, slid down the
tree, flew wildly to his side, caught convulsively at his sleeve,
and fell on her knees beside him.

"Save me! save me!" she gasped, in a voice broken by terror.
"Save me from those hideous creatures.  No, no!" she implored, as
he endeavored to lift her to her feet.  "No--let me stay here
close beside you.  So," clutching the fringe of his leather
hunting-shirt, and dragging herself on her knees nearer him--
"so--don't leave me, for God's sake!"

"They are gone," he replied, gazing down curiously at her, as she
wound the fringe around her hand to strengthen her hold; "they're
only a lot of cowardly coyotes and wolves, that dare not attack
anything that lives and can move."

The young woman responded with a nervous shudder.  "Yes, that's
it," she whispered, in a broken voice; "it's only the dead they
want.  Promise me--swear to me, if I'm caught, or hung, or shot,
you won't let me be left here to be torn and--ah! my God! what's
that?"

She had thrown her arms around his knees, completely pinioning
him to her frantic breast.  Something like a smile of disdain
passed across his face as he answered, "It's nothing.  They will
not return.  Get up!"

Even in her terror she saw the change in his face.  "I know, I
know!" she cried.  "I'm frightened--but I cannot bear it any
longer.  Hear me!  Listen!  Listen--but don't move!  I didn't
mean to kill Curson--no! I swear to God, no!  I didn't mean to
kill the sheriff--and I didn't.  I was only bragging--do you
hear?  I lied!  I lied--don't move, I swear to God I lied.  I've
made myself out worse than I was.  I have.  Only don't leave me
now--and if I die--and it's not far off, may be--get me away from
here--and from THEM.  Swear it!"

"All right," said the young man, with a scarcely concealed
movement of irritation.  "But get up now, and go back to the
cabin."

"No; not THERE alone."  Nevertheless, he quietly but firmly
released himself.

"I will stay here," he replied.  "I would have been nearer to
you, but I thought it better for your safety that my camp-fire
should be further off.  But I can build it here, and that will
keep the coyotes off."

"Let me stay with you--beside you," she said imploringly.

She looked so broken, crushed, and spiritless, so unlike the
woman of the morning that, albeit with an ill grace, he tacitly
consented, and turned away to bring his blankets.  But in the
next moment she was at his side, following him like a dog, silent
and wistful, and even offering to carry his burden.  When he had
built the fire, for which she had collected the pine-cones and
broken branches near them, he sat down, folded his arms, and
leaned back against the tree in reserved and deliberate silence.

Humble and submissive, she did not attempt to break in upon a
reverie she could not help but feel had little kindliness to
herself.  As the fire snapped and sparkled, she pillowed her head
upon a root, and lay still to watch it.

It rose and fell, and dying away at times to a mere lurid glow,
and again, agitated by some breath scarcely perceptible to them,
quickening into a roaring flame.  When only the embers remained,
a dead silence filled the wood.  Then the first breath of morning
moved the tangled canopy above, and a dozen tiny sprays and
needles detached from the interlocked boughs winged their soft
way noiselessly to the earth.  A few fell upon the prostrate
woman like a gentle benediction, and she slept.  But even then,
the young man, looking down, saw that the slender fingers were
still aimlessly but rigidly twisted in the leather fringe of his
hunting-shirt.


CHAPTER II.


It was a peculiarity of the Carquinez Wood that it stood apart
and distinct in its gigantic individuality.  Even where the
integrity of its own singular species was not entirely preserved,
it admitted no inferior trees.  Nor was there any diminishing
fringe on its outskirts; the sentinels that guarded the few
gateways of the dim trails were as monstrous as the serried ranks
drawn up in the heart of the forest.  Consequently, the red
highway that skirted the eastern angle was bare and shadeless,
until it slipped a league off into a watered valley and refreshed
itself under lesser sycamores and willows.  It was here the newly
born city of Excelsior, still in its cradle, had, like an infant
Hercules, strangled the serpentine North Fork of the American
river, and turned its life current into the ditches and flumes of
the Excelsior mines.

Newest of the new houses that seemed to have accidentally formed
its single, straggling street was the residence of the Rev.
Winslow Wynn, not unfrequently known as "Father Wynn," pastor of
the First Baptist church.  The "pastorage," as it was cheerfully
called, had the glaring distinction of being built of brick, and
was, as had been wickedly pointed out by idle scoffers, the only
"fireproof" structure in town.  This sarcasm was not, however,
supposed to be particularly distasteful to "Father Wynn," who
enjoyed the reputation of being "hail fellow, well met" with the
rough mining element, who called them by their Christian names,
had been known to drink at the bar of the Polka Saloon while
engaged in the conversion of a prominent citizen, and was
popularly said to have no "gospel starch" about him.  Certain
conscious outcasts and transgressors were touched at this
apparent unbending of the spiritual authority.  The rigid tenets
of Father Wynn's faith were lost in the supposed catholicity of
his humanity.  "A preacher that can jine a man when he's histin'
liquor into him, without jawin' about it, ought to be allowed to
wrestle with sinners and splash about in as much cold water as he
likes," was the criticism of one of his converts.  Nevertheless,
it was true that Father Wynn was somewhat loud and intolerant in
his tolerance.  It was true that he was a little more rough, a
little more frank, a little more hearty, a little more impulsive
than his disciples.  It was true that often the proclamation of
his extreme liberality and brotherly equality partook somewhat of
an apology.  It is true that a few who might have been most
benefited by this kind of gospel regarded him with a singular
disdain.  It is true that his liberality was of an ornamental,
insinuating quality, accompanied with but little sacrifice; his
acceptance of a collection taken up in a gambling saloon for the
rebuilding of his church, destroyed by fire, gave him a
popularity large enough, it must be confessed, to cover the sins
of the gamblers themselves, but it was not proven that HE had
ever organized any form of relief.  But it was true that local
history somehow accepted him as an exponent of mining
Christianity, without the least reference to the opinions of the
Christian miners themselves.

The Rev. Mr. Wynn's liberal habits and opinions were not,
however, shared by his only daughter, a motherless young lady of
eighteen.  Nellie Wynn was in the eye of Excelsior an
unapproachable divinity, as inaccessible and cold as her father
was impulsive and familiar.  An atmosphere of chaste and proud
virginity made itself felt even in the starched integrity of her
spotless skirts, in her neatly gloved finger-tips, in her clear
amber eyes, in her imperious red lips, in her sensitive nostrils.
Need it be said that the youth and middle age of Excelsior were
madly, because apparently hopelessly, in love with her?  For the
rest, she had been expensively educated, was profoundly ignorant
in two languages, with a trained misunderstanding of music and
painting, and a natural and faultless taste in dress.

The Rev. Mr. Wynn was engaged in a characteristic hearty parting
with one of his latest converts, upon his own doorstep, with
admirable al fresco effect.  He had just clapped him on the
shoulder.  "Good-by, good-by, Charley, my boy, and keep in the
right path; not up, or down, or round the gulch, you know--ha,
ha!--but straight across lots to the shining gate."  He had
raised his voice under the stimulus of a few admiring spectators,
and backed his convert playfully against the wall.  "You see!
we're goin' in to win, you bet.  Good-by!  I'd ask you to step in
and have a chat, but I've got my work to do, and so have you.
The gospel mustn't keep us from that, must it, Charley?  Ha, ha!"

The convert (who elsewhere was a profane expressman, and had
become quite imbecile under Mr. Wynn's active heartiness and
brotherly horse-play before spectators) managed, however, to
feebly stammer with a blush something about "Miss Nellie."

"Ah, Nellie.  She, too, is at her tasks--trimming her lamp--you
know, the parable of the wise virgins," continued Father Wynn
hastily, fearing that the convert might take the illustration
literally.  "There, there--good-by.  Keep in the right path."
And with a parting shove he dismissed Charley and entered his own
house.

That "wise virgin," Nellie, had evidently finished with the lamp,
and was now going out to meet the bridegroom, as she was fully
dressed and gloved, and had a pink parasol in her hand, as her
father entered the sitting-room.  His bluff heartiness seemed to
fade away as he removed his soft, broad-brimmed hat and glanced
across the too fresh-looking apartment.  There was a smell of
mortar still in the air, and a faint suggestion that at any
moment green grass might appear between the interstices of the
red-brick hearth.  The room, yielding a little in the point of
coldness, seemed to share Miss Nellie's fresh virginity, and,
barring the pink parasol, set her off as in a vestal's cell.

"I supposed you wouldn't care to see Brace, the expressman, so I
got rid of him at the door," said her father, drawing one of the
new chairs towards him slowly, and sitting down carefully, as if
it were a hitherto untried experiment.

Miss Nellie's face took a tint of interest.  "Then he doesn't go
with the coach to Indian Spring to-day?"

"No; why?"

"I thought of going over myself to get the Burnham girls to come
to choir-meeting," replied Miss Nellie carelessly, "and he might
have been company."

"He'd go now, if he knew you were going," said her father; "but
it's just as well he shouldn't be needlessly encouraged.  I
rather think that Sheriff Dunn is a little jealous of him.  By
the way, the sheriff is much better.  I called to cheer him up
to-day" (Mr. Wynn had in fact tumultuously accelerated the sick
man's pulse), "and he talked of you, as usual.  In fact, he said
he had only two things to get well for.  One was to catch and
hang that woman Teresa, who shot him; the other--can't you guess
the other?" he added archly, with a faint suggestion of his other
manner.

Miss Nellie coldly could not.

The Rev. Mr. Wynn's archness vanished.  "Don't be a fool," he
said dryly.  "He wants to marry you, and you know it."

"Most of the men here do," responded Miss Nellie, without the
least trace of coquetry.  "Is the wedding or the hanging to take
place first, or together, so he can officiate at both?"

"His share in the Union Ditch is worth a hundred thousand
dollars," continued her father; "and if he isn't nominated for
district judge this fall, he's bound to go to the legislature,
anyway.  I don't think a girl with your advantages and education
can afford to throw away the chance of shining in Sacramento, San
Francisco, or, in good time, perhaps even Washington."

Miss Nellie's eyes did not reflect entire disapproval of this
suggestion, although she replied with something of her father's
practical quality.

"Mr. Dunn is not out of his bed yet, and they say Teresa's got
away to Arizona, so there isn't any particular hurry."

"Perhaps not; but see here, Nellie, I've some important news for
you.  You know your young friend of the Carquinez Woods--Dorman,
the botanist, eh?  Well, Brace knows all about him.  And what do
you think he is?"

Miss Nellie took upon herself a few extra degrees of cold, and
didn't know.

"An Injin!  Yes, an out-and-out Cherokee.  You see he calls
himself Dorman--Low Dorman.  That's only French for 'Sleeping
Water,' his Injin name!--'Low Dorman.'"

"You mean 'L'Eau Dormante,'" said Nellie.

"That's what I said.  The chief called him 'Sleeping Water' when
he was a boy, and one of them French Canadian trappers translated
it into French when he brought him to California to school.  But
he's an Injin, sure.  No wonder he prefers to live in the woods."

"Well?" said Nellie.

"Well," echoed her father impatiently, "he's an Injin, I tell
you, and you can't of course have anything to do with him.  He
mustn't come here again."

"But you forget," said Nellie imperturbably, "that it was you who
invited him here, and were so much exercised over him.  You
remember you introduced him to the Bishop and those Eastern
clergymen as a magnificent specimen of a young Californian.  You
forget what an occasion you made of his coming to church on
Sunday, and how you made him come in his buckskin shirt and walk
down the street with you after service!"

"Yes, yes," said the Rev. Mr. Wynn, hurriedly.

"And," continued Nellie carelessly, "how you made us sing out of
the same book 'Children of our Father's Fold,' and how you
preached at him until he actually got a color!"

"Yes," said her father; "but it wasn't known then he was an
Injin, and they are frightfully unpopular with those Southwestern
men among whom we labor.  Indeed, I am quite convinced that when
Brace said 'the only good Indian was a dead one' his expression,
though extravagant, perhaps, really voiced the sentiments of the
majority.  It would be only kindness to the unfortunate creature
to warn him from exposing himself to their rude but conscientious
antagonism."

"Perhaps you'd better tell him, then, in your own popular way,
which they all seem to understand so well," responded the
daughter.  Mr. Wynn cast a quick glance at her, but there was no
trace of irony in her face--nothing but a half-bored indifference
as she walked toward the window.

"I will go with you to the coach-office," said her father, who
generally gave these simple paternal duties the pronounced
character of a public Christian example.

"It's hardly worth while," replied Miss Nellie.  "I've to stop at
the Watsons', at the foot of the hill, and ask after the baby; so
I shall go on to the Crossing and pick up the coach when it
passes.  Good-by."

Nevertheless, as soon as Nellie had departed, the Rev. Mr. Wynn
proceeded to the coach-office, and publicly grasping the hand of
Yuba Bill, the driver, commended his daughter to his care in the
name of the universal brotherhood of man and the Christian
fraternity.  Carried away by his heartiness, he forgot his
previous caution, and confided to the expressman Miss Nellie's
regrets that she was not to have that gentleman's company.  The
result was that Miss Nellie found the coach with its passengers
awaiting her with uplifted hats and wreathed smiles at the
Crossing, and the box seat (from which an unfortunate stranger,
who had expensively paid for it, had been summarily ejected) at
her service beside Yuba Bill, who had thrown away his cigar and
donned a new pair of buckskin gloves to do her honor.  But a more
serious result to the young beauty was the effect of the Rev. Mr.
Wynn's confidences upon the impulsive heart of Jack Brace, the
expressman.  It has been already intimated that it was his "day
off."  Unable to summarily reassume his usual functions beside
the driver without some practical reason, and ashamed to go so
palpably as a mere passenger, he was forced to let the coach
proceed without him.  Discomfited for the moment, he was not,
however, beaten.  He had lost the blissful journey by her side,
which would have been his professional right, but--she was going
to Indian Spring! could he not anticipate her there?  Might they
not meet in the most accidental manner?  And what might not come
from that meeting away from the prying eyes of their own town?
Mr. Brace did not hesitate, but saddling his fleet Buckskin, by
the time the stage-coach had passed the Crossing in the high-road
he had mounted the hill and was dashing along the "cutoff" in the
same direction, a full mile in advance.  Arriving at Indian
Spring, he left his horse at a Mexican posada on the confines of
the settlement, and from the piled debris of a tunnel excavation
awaited the slow arrival of the coach.  On mature reflection he
could give no reason why he had not boldly awaited it at the
express office, except a certain bashful consciousness of his own
folly, and a belief that it might be glaringly apparent to the
bystanders.  When the coach arrived and he had overcome this
consciousness, it was too late.  Yuba Bill had discharged his
passengers for Indian Spring and driven away.  Miss Nellie was in
the settlement, but where?  As time passed he became more
desperate and bolder.  He walked recklessly up and down the main
street, glancing in at the open doors of shops, and even in the
windows of private dwellings.  It might have seemed a poor
compliment to Miss Nellie, but it was an evidence of his complete
preoccupation, when the sight of a female face at a window, even
though it was plain or perhaps painted, caused his heart to
bound, or the glancing of a skirt in the distance quickened his
feet and his pulses.  Had Jack contented himself with remaining
at Excelsior he might have vaguely regretted, but as soon become
as vaguely accustomed to, Miss Nellie's absence.  But it was not
until his hitherto quiet and passive love took this first step of
action that it fully declared itself.  When he had made the tour
of the town a dozen times unsuccessfully, he had perfectly made
up his mind that marriage with Nellie or the speedy death of
several people, including possibly himself, was the only
alternative.  He regretted he had not accompanied her; he
regretted he had not demanded where she was going; he
contemplated a course of future action that two hours ago would
have filled him with bashful terror.  There was clearly but one
thing to do--to declare his passion the instant he met her, and
return with her to Excelsior an accepted suitor, or not to return
at all.

Suddenly he was vexatiously conscious of hearing his name lazily
called, and looking up found that he was on the outskirts of the
town, and interrogated by two horsemen.

"Got down to walk, and the coach got away from you, Jack, eh?"

A little ashamed of his preoccupation, Brace stammered something
about "collections."  He did not recognize the men, but his own
face, name, and business were familiar to everybody for fifty
miles along the stage-road.

"Well, you can settle a bet for us, I reckon.  Bill Dacre thar
bet me five dollars and the drinks that a young gal we met at the
edge of the Carquinez Woods, dressed in a long brown duster and
half muffled up in a hood, was the daughter of Father Wynn of
Excelsior.  I did not get a fair look at her, but it stands to
reason that a high-toned young lady like Nellie Wynn don't go
trap'sing along the wood like a Pike County tramp.  I took the
bet.  May be you know if she's here or in Excelsior?"

Mr. Brace felt himself turning pale with eagerness and
excitement.  But the near prospect of seeing her presently gave
him back his caution, and he answered truthfully that he had left
her in Excelsior, and that in his two hours' sojourn in Indian
Spring he had not met her once.  "But," he added, with a
Californian's reverence for the sanctity of a bet, "I reckon
you'd better make it a stand-off for twenty-four hours, and I'll
find out and let you know."  Which, it is only fair to say, he
honestly intended to do.

With a hurried nod of parting, he continued in the direction of
the Woods.  When he had satisfied himself that the strangers had
entered the settlement, and would not follow him for further
explanation, he quickened his pace.  In half an hour he passed
between two of the gigantic sentinels that guarded the entrance
to a trail.  Here he paused to collect his thoughts.  The Woods
were vast in extent, the trail dim and uncertain--at times
apparently breaking off, or intersecting another trail as faint
as itself.  Believing that Miss Nellie had diverged from the
highway only as a momentary excursion into the shade, and that
she would not dare to penetrate its more sombre and unknown
recesses, he kept within sight of the skirting plain.  By degrees
the sedate influence of the silent vaults seemed to depress him.
The ardor of the chase began to flag.  Under the calm of their
dim roof the fever of his veins began to subside; his pace
slackened; he reasoned more deliberately.  It was by no means
probable that the young woman in a brown duster was Nellie; it
was not her habitual traveling dress; it was not like her to walk
unattended in the road; there was nothing in her tastes and
habits to take her into this gloomy forest, allowing that she had
even entered it; and on this absolute question of her identity
the two witnesses were divided.  He stopped irresolutely, and
cast a last, long, half-despairing look around him.  Hitherto he
had given that part of the wood nearest the plain his greatest
attention.  His glance now sought its darker recesses.  Suddenly
he became breathless.  Was it a beam of sunlight that had pierced
the groined roof above, and now rested against the trunk of one
of the dimmer, more secluded giants?  No, it was moving; even as
he gazed it slipped away, glanced against another tree, passed
across one of the vaulted aisles, and then was lost again.  Brief
as was the glimpse, he was not mistaken--it was the figure of a
woman.

In another moment he was on her track, and soon had the
satisfaction of seeing her reappear at a lesser distance.  But
the continual intervention of the massive trunks made the chase
by no means an easy one, and as he could not keep her always in
sight he was unable to follow or understand the one intelligent
direction which she seemed to invariably keep.  Nevertheless, he
gained upon her breathlessly, and, thanks to the bark-strewn
floor, noiselessly.  He was near enough to distinguish and
recognize the dress she wore, a pale yellow, that he had admired
when he first saw her.  It was Nellie, unmistakably; if it were
she of the brown duster, she had discarded it, perhaps for
greater freedom.  He was near enough to call out now, but a
sudden nervous timidity overcame him; his lips grew dry.  What
should he say to her?  How account for his presence?  "Miss
Nellie, one moment!" he gasped.  She darted forward and--vanished.

At this moment he was not more than a dozen yards from her.  He
rushed to where she had been standing, but her disappearance was
perfect and complete.  He made a circuit of the group of trees
within whose radius she had last appeared, but there was neither
trace of her, nor a suggestion of her mode of escape.  He called
aloud to her; the vacant Woods let his helpless voice die in
their unresponsive depths.  He gazed into the air and down at the
bark-strewn carpet at his feet.  Like most of his vocation, he
was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his fashion.
Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence
the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor,
he accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness,
threw his hat upon the ground, put his hands in his pockets, and
said--

"Well, I'm d--d!"


CHAPTER III.


Out of compliment to Miss Nellie Wynn, Yuba Bill, on reaching
Indian Spring, had made a slight detour to enable him to
ostentatiously set down his fair passenger before the door of the
Burnhams.  When it had closed on the admiring eyes of the
passengers and the coach had rattled away, Miss Nellie, without
any undue haste or apparent change in her usual quiet demeanor,
managed, however, to dispatch her business promptly, and, leaving
an impression that she would call again before her return to
Excelsior, parted from her friends and slipped away through a
side street to the General Furnishing Store of Indian Spring.  In
passing this emporium, Miss Nellie's quick eye had discovered a
cheap brown linen duster hanging in its window.  To purchase it,
and put it over her delicate cambric dress, albeit with a
shivering sense that she looked like a badly folded brown-paper
parcel, did not take long.  As she left the shop it was with
mixed emotions of chagrin and security that she noticed that her
passage through the settlement no longer turned the heads of its
male inhabitants.  She reached the outskirts of Indian Spring and
the high-road at about the time Mr. Brace had begun his fruitless
patrol of the main street.  Far in the distance a faint olive-
green table mountain seemed to rise abruptly from the plain.  It
was the Carquinez Woods.  Gathering her spotless skirts beneath
her extemporized brown domino, she set out briskly towards them.

But her progress was scarcely free or exhilarating.  She was not
accustomed to walking in a country where "buggy-riding" was
considered the only genteel young-lady-like mode of progression,
and its regular provision the expected courtesy of mankind.
Always fastidiously booted, her low-quartered shoes were charming
to the eye, but hardly adapted to the dust and inequalities of
the highroad.  It was true that she had thought of buying a
coarser pair at Indian Spring, but once face to face with their
uncompromising ugliness, she had faltered and fled.  The sun was
unmistakably hot, but her parasol was too well known and offered
too violent a contrast to the duster for practical use.  Once she
stopped with an exclamation of annoyance, hesitated, and looked
back.  In half an hour she had twice lost her shoe and her
temper; a pink flush took possession of her cheeks, and her eyes
were bright with suppressed rage.  Dust began to form grimy
circles around their orbits; with cat-like shivers she even felt
it pervade the roots of her blond hair.  Gradually her breath
grew more rapid and hysterical, her smarting eyes became humid,
and at last, encountering two observant horsemen in the road, she
turned and fled, until, reaching the wood, she began to cry.

Nevertheless she waited for the two horsemen to pass, to satisfy
herself that she was not followed; then pushed on vaguely, until
she reached a fallen tree, where, with a gesture of disgust, she
tore off her hapless duster and flung it on the ground.  She then
sat down sobbing, but after a moment dried her eyes hurriedly and
started to her feet.  A few paces distant, erect, noiseless, with
outstretched hand, the young solitary of the Carquinez Woods
advanced towards her.  His hand had almost touched hers, when he
stopped.

"What has happened?" he asked gravely.

"Nothing," she said, turning half away, and searching the ground
with her eyes, as if she had lost something.  "Only I must be
going back now."

"You shall go back at once, if you wish it," he said, flushing
slightly.  "But you have been crying; why?"

Frank as Miss Nellie wished to be, she could not bring herself to
say that her feet hurt her, and the dust and heat were ruining
her complexion.  It was therefore with a half-confident belief
that her troubles were really of a moral quality that she
answered, "Nothing--nothing, but--but--it's wrong to come here."

"But you did not think it was wrong when you agreed to come, at
our last meeting," said the young man, with that persistent logic
which exasperates the inconsequent feminine mind.  "It cannot be
any more wrong to-day."

"But it was not so far off," murmured the young girl, without
looking up.

"Oh, the distance makes it more improper, then," he said
abstractedly; but after a moment's contemplation of her half-
averted face, he asked gravely, "Has anyone talked to you about me?"

Ten minutes before, Nellie had been burning to unburthen herself
of her father's warning, but now she felt she would not.  "I wish
you wouldn't call yourself Low," she said at last.

"But it's my name," he replied quietly.

"Nonsense!  It's only a stupid translation of a stupid nickname.
They might as well call you 'Water' at once."

"But you said you liked it."

"Well, so I do.  But don't you see--I--oh dear! you don't
understand."

Low did not reply, but turned his head with resigned gravity
towards the deeper woods.  Grasping the barrel of his rifle with
his left hand, he threw his right arm across his left wrist and
leaned slightly upon it with the habitual ease of a Western
hunter--doubly picturesque in his own lithe, youthful symmetry.
Miss Nellie looked at him from under her eyelids, and then half
defiantly raised her head and her dark lashes.  Gradually an
almost magical change came over her features; her eyes grew
larger and more and more yearning, until they seemed to draw and
absorb in their liquid depths the figure of the young man before
her; her cold face broke into an ecstasy of light and color; her
humid lips parted in a bright, welcoming smile, until, with an
irresistible impulse, she arose, and throwing back her head
stretched towards him two hands full of vague and trembling
passion.

In another moment he had seized them, kissed them, and, as he
drew her closer to his embrace, felt them tighten around his
neck.  "But what name do you wish to call me?" he asked, looking
down into her eyes.

Miss Nellie murmured something confidentially to the third button
of his hunting shirt.  "But that," he replied, with a smile,
"THAT wouldn't be any more practical, and you wouldn't want
others to call me dar--"  Her fingers loosened around his neck,
she drew her head back, and a singular expression passed over her
face, which to any calmer observer than a lover would have
seemed, however, to indicate more curiosity than jealousy.

"Who else DOES call you so?" she added earnestly.  "How many, for
instance?"

Low's reply was addressed not to her ear, but her lips.  She did
not avoid it, but added, "And do you kiss them all like that?"
Taking him by the shoulders, she held him a little way from her,
and gazed at him from head to foot.  Then drawing him again to
her embrace, she said, "I don't care, at least no woman has
kissed you like that."  Happy, dazzled, and embarrassed, he was
beginning to stammer the truthful protestation that rose to his
lips, but she stopped him: "No, don't protest! say nothing!  Let
ME love YOU--that is all.  It is enough."  He would have caught
her in his arms again, but she drew back.  "We are near the
road," she said quietly.  "Come!  You promised to show me where
you camped.  Let US make the most of our holiday.  In an hour I
must leave the woods."

"But I shall accompany you, dearest."

"No, I must go as I came--alone."

"But Nellie--"

"I tell you no," she said, with an almost harsh practical
decision, incompatible with her previous abandonment.  "We might
be seen together."

"Well, suppose we are; we must be seen together eventually," he
remonstrated.

The young girl made an involuntary gesture of impatient negation,
but checked herself.  "Don't let us talk of that now.  Come,
while I am here under your own roof--" she pointed to the high
interlaced boughs above them--"you must be hospitable.  Show me
your home; tell me, isn't it a little gloomy sometimes?"

"It never has been; I never thought it WOULD be until the moment
you leave it to-day."

She pressed his hand briefly and in a half-perfunctory way, as if
her vanity had accepted and dismissed the compliment.  "Take me
somewhere," she said inquisitively, "where you stay most; I do
not seem to see you HERE," she added, looking around her with a
slight shiver.  "It is so big and so high.  Have you no place
where you eat and rest and sleep?"

"Except in the rainy season, I camp all over the place--at any
spot where I may have been shooting or collecting."

"Collecting?" queried Nellie.

"Yes; with the herbarium, you know."

"Yes," said Nellie dubiously.  "But you told me once--the first
time we ever talked together," she added, looking in his eyes--
"something about your keeping your things like a squirrel in a
tree.  Could we not go there?  Is there not room for us to sit
and talk without being brow-beaten and looked down upon by these
supercilious trees?"

"It's too far away," said Low truthfully, but with a somewhat
pronounced emphasis, "much too far for you just now; and it lies
on another trail that enters the wood beyond.  But come, I will
show you a spring known only to myself, the wood ducks, and the
squirrels.  I discovered it the first day I saw you, and gave it
your name.  But you shall christen it yourself.  It will be all
yours, and yours alone, for it is so hidden and secluded that I
defy any feet but my own or whoso shall keep step with mine to
find it.  Shall that foot be yours, Nellie?"

Her face beamed with a bright assent.  "It may be difficult to
track it from here," he said, "but stand where you are a moment,
and don't move, rustle, nor agitate the air in any way.  The
woods are still now."  He turned at right angles with the trail,
moved a few paces into the ferns and underbrush, and then stopped
with his finger on his lips.  For an instant both remained
motionless; then with his intent face bent forward and both arms
extended, he began to sink slowly upon one knee and one side,
inclining his body with a gentle, perfectly-graduated movement
until his ear almost touched the ground.  Nellie watched his
graceful figure breathlessly, until, like a bow unbent, he stood
suddenly erect again, and beckoned to her without changing the
direction of his face.

"What is it?" she asked eagerly.

"All right; I have found it," he continued, moving forward
without turning his head.

"But how?  What did you kneel for?"  He did not reply, but taking
her hand in his continued to move slowly on through the
underbrush, as if obeying some magnetic attraction.  "How did you
find it?" again asked the half-awed girl, her voice unconsciously
falling to a whisper.  Still silent, Low kept his rigid face and
forward tread for twenty yards further; then he stopped and
released the girl's half-impatient hand.  "How did you find it?"
she repeated sharply.

"With my ears and nose," replied Low gravely.

"With your nose?"

"Yes; I smelt it."

Still fresh with the memory of his picturesque attitude, the
young man's reply seemed to involve something more irritating to
her feelings than even that absurd anticlimax.  She looked at him
coldly and critically, and appeared to hesitate whether to
proceed.  "Is it far?" she asked.

"Not more than ten minutes now, as I shall go."

"And you won't have to smell your way again?"

"No; it is quite plain now," he answered seriously, the young
girl's sarcasm slipping harmlessly from his Indian stolidity.
"Don't you smell it yourself?"

But Miss Nellie's thin, cold nostrils refused to take that vulgar
interest.

"Nor hear it?  Listen!"

"You forget I suffer the misfortune of having been brought up
under a roof," she replied coldly.

"That's true," repeated Low, in all seriousness; "it's not your
fault.  But do you know, I sometimes think I am peculiarly
sensitive to water; I feel it miles away.  At night, though I may
not see it or even know where it is, I am conscious of it.  It is
company to me when I am alone, and I seem to hear it in my
dreams.  There is no music as sweet to me as its song.  When you
sang with me that day in church, I seemed to hear it ripple in
your voice.  It says to me more than the birds do, more than the
rarest plants I find.  It seems to live with me and for me.  It
is my earliest recollection; I know it will be my last, for I
shall die in its embrace.  Do you think, Nellie," he continued,
stopping short and gazing earnestly in her face--"do you think
that the chiefs knew this when they called me 'Sleeping Water'?"

To Miss Nellie's several gifts I fear the gods had not added
poetry.  A slight knowledge of English verse of a select
character, unfortunately, did not assist her in the
interpretation of the young man's speech, nor relieve her from
the momentary feeling that he was at times deficient in
intellect.  She preferred, however, to take a personal view of
the question, and expressed her sarcastic regret that she had not
known before that she had been indebted to the great flume and
ditch at Excelsior for the pleasure of his acquaintance.  This
pert remark occasioned some explanation, which ended in the
girl's accepting a kiss in lieu of more logical argument.
Nevertheless, she was still conscious of an inward irritation--
always distinct from her singular and perfectly material passion--
which found vent as the difficulties of their undeviating
progress through the underbrush increased.  At last she lost her
shoe again, and stopped short.  "It's a pity your Indian friends
did not christen you 'Wild Mustard' or 'Clover,'" she said
satirically, "that you might have had some sympathies and
longings for the open fields instead of these horrid jungles!  I
know we will not get back in time."

Unfortunately, Low accepted this speech literally and with his
remorseless gravity.  "If my name annoys you, I can get it
changed by the legislature, you know, and I can find out what my
father's name was, and take that.  My mother, who died in giving
me birth, was the daughter of a chief."

"Then your mother was really an Indian?" said Nellie, "and you
are--"  She stopped short.

"But I told you all this the day we first met," said Low, with
grave astonishment.  "Don't you remember our long talk coming
from church?"

"No," said Nellie coldly, "you didn't tell me."  But she was
obliged to drop her eyes before the unwavering, undeniable
truthfulness of his.

"You have forgotten," he said calmly; "but it is only right you
should have your own way in disposing of a name that I have cared
little for; and as you're to have a share of it--"

"Yes, but it's getting late, and if we are not going forward--"
interrupted the girl impatiently.

"We ARE going forward," said Low imperturbably; "but I wanted to
tell you, as we were speaking on THAT subject" (Nellie looked at
her watch), "I've been offered the place of botanist and
naturalist in Professor Grant's survey of Mount Shasta, and if I
take it--why, when I come back, darling--well--"

"But you're not going just yet," broke in Nellie, with a new
expression in her face.

"No."

"Then we need not talk of it now," she said, with animation.

Her sudden vivacity relieved him.  "I see what's the matter," he
said gently, looking down at her feet; "these little shoes were
not made to keep step with a moccasin.  We must try another way."
He stooped as if to secure the erring buskin, but suddenly lifted
her like a child to his shoulder.  "There," he continued, placing
her arm round his neck, "you are clear of the ferns and brambles
now, and we can go on.  Are you comfortable?"  He looked up, read
her answer in her burning eyes and the warm lips pressed to his
forehead at the roots of his straight dark hair, and again moved
onward as in a mesmeric dream.  But he did not swerve from his
direct course, and with a final dash through the undergrowth
parted the leafy curtain before the spring.

At first the young girl was dazzled by the strong light that came
from a rent in the interwoven arches of the wood.  The breach had
been caused by the huge bulk of one of the great giants that had
half fallen, and was lying at a steep angle against one of its
mightiest brethren, having borne down a lesser tree in the arc of
its downward path.  Two of the roots, as large as younger trees,
tossed their blackened and bare limbs high in the air.  The
spring--the insignificant cause of this vast disruption--gurgled,
flashed, and sparkled at the base; the limpid baby fingers that
had laid bare the foundations of that fallen column played with
the still clinging rootlets, laved the fractured and twisted
limbs, and, widening, filled with sleeping water the graves from
which they had been torn.

"It had been going on for years, down there," said Low, pointing
to a cavity from which the fresh water now slowly welled, "but it
had been quickened by the rising of the subterranean springs and
rivers which always occurs at a certain stage of the dry season.
I remember that on that very night--for it happened a little
after midnight, when all sounds are more audible--I was troubled
and oppressed in my sleep by what you would call a nightmare; a
feeling as if I was kept down by bonds and pinions that I longed
to break.  And then I heard a crash in this direction, and the
first streak of morning brought me the sound and scent of water.
Six months afterwards I chanced to find my way here, as I told
you, and gave it your name.  I did not dream that I should ever
stand beside it with you, and have you christen it yourself."

He unloosened the cup from his flask, and filling it at the
spring handed it to her.  But the young girl leant over the pool,
and pouring the water idly back said, "I'd rather put my feet in
it.  Mayn't I?"

"I don't understand you," he said wonderingly.

"My feet are SO hot and dusty.  The water looks deliciously cool.
May I?"

"Certainly."

He turned away as Nellie, with apparent unconsciousness, seated
herself on the bank, and removed her shoes and stockings.  When
she had dabbled her feet a few moments in the pool, she said over
her shoulder--

"We can talk just as well, can't we?"

"Certainly."

"Well, then, why didn't you come to church more often, and why
didn't you think of telling father that you were convicted of sin
and wanted to be baptized?"

"I don't know," hesitated the young man.

"Well, you lost the chance of having father convert you, baptize
you, and take you into full church fellowship."

"I never thought--" he began.

"You never thought.  Aren't you a Christian?"

"I suppose so."

"He supposes so!  Have you no convictions--no profession?"

"But, Nellie, I never thought that you--"

"Never thought that I--what?  Do you think that I could ever be
anything to a man who did not believe in justification by faith,
or in the covenant of church fellowship?  Do you think father
would let me?"

In his eagerness to defend himself he stepped to her side.  But
seeing her little feet shining through the dark water, like
outcroppings of delicately veined quartz, he stopped embarrassed.
Miss Nellie, however, leaped to one foot, and, shaking the other
over the pool, put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself.
"You haven't got a towel--or," she said dubiously, looking at her
small handkerchief, "anything to dry them on?"

But Low did not, as she perhaps expected, offer his own handkerchief.

"If you take a bath after our fashion," he said gravely, "you
must learn to dry yourself after our fashion."

Lifting her again lightly in his arms, he carried her a few steps
to the sunny opening, and bade her bury her feet in the dried
mosses and baked withered grasses that were bleaching in a
hollow.  The young girl uttered a cry of childish delight, as the
soft ciliated fibres touched her sensitive skin.

"It is healing, too," continued Low; "a moccasin filled with it
after a day on the trail makes you all right again."

But Miss Nellie seemed to be thinking of something else.

"Is that the way the squaws bathe and dry themselves?"

"I don't know; you forget I was a boy when I left them."

"And you're sure you never knew any?"

"None."

The young girl seemed to derive some satisfaction in moving her
feet up and down for several minutes among the grasses in the
hollow; then, after a pause, said, "You are quite certain I am
the first woman that ever touched this spring?"

"Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except
myself."

"How nice!"

They had taken each other's hands; seated side by side, they
leaned against a curving elastic root that half supported, half
encompassed, them.  The girl's capricious, fitful manner
succumbed as before to the near contact of her companion.
Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a sweet, selfish lover's
monologue, descriptive of his past and present feelings towards
her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a slight
exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity.  The sun had
painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting
tree-trunk, and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the
water mingling with their whispers came as one sound to the
listening ear; even their eloquent silences were as deep, and, I
wot, perhaps as dangerous, as the darkened pool that filled so
noiselessly a dozen yards away.  So quiet were they that the
tremor of invading wings once or twice shook the silence, or the
quick scamper of frightened feet rustled the dead grass.  But in
the midst of a prolonged stillness the young man sprang up so
suddenly that Nellie was still half clinging to his neck as he
stood erect.  "Hush!" he whispered; "some one is near!"

He disengaged her anxious hands gently, leaped upon the slanting
tree-trunk, and running half-way up its incline with the agility
of a squirrel, stretched himself at full length upon it and
listened.

To the impatient, inexplicably startled girl, it seemed an age
before he rejoined her.

"You are safe," he said; "he is going by the western trail
towards Indian Spring."

"Who is HE?" she asked, biting her lips with a poorly restrained
gesture of mortification and disappointment.

"Some stranger," replied Low.

"As long as he wasn't coming here, why did you give me such a
fright?" she said pettishly.  "Are you nervous because a single
wayfarer happens to stray here?"

"It was no wayfarer, for he tried to keep near the trail," said
Low.  "He was a stranger to the wood, for he lost his way every
now and then.  He was seeking or expecting some one, for he
stopped frequently and waited or listened.  He had not walked
far, for he wore spurs that tinkled and caught in the brush; and
yet he had not ridden here, for no horse's hoofs passed the road
since we have been here.  He must have come from Indian Spring."

"And you heard all that when you listened just now?" asked Nellie,
half disdainfully.

Impervious to her incredulity Low turned his calm eyes on her
face.  "Certainly, I'll bet my life on what I say.  Tell me: do
you know anybody in Indian Spring who would likely spy upon you?"

The young girl was conscious of a certain ill-defined uneasiness,
but answered, "No."

"Then it was not YOU he was seeking," said Low thoughtfully.
Miss Nellie had not time to notice the emphasis, for he added,
"You must go at once, and lest you have been followed I will show
you another way back to Indian Spring.  It is longer, and you
must hasten.  Take your shoes and stockings with you until we are
out of the bush."

He raised her again in his arms and strode once more out through
the covert into the dim aisles of the wood.  They spoke but
little; she could not help feeling that some other discordant
element, affecting him more strongly than it did her, had come
between them, and was half perplexed and half frightened.  At the
end of ten minutes he seated her upon a fallen branch, and
telling her he would return by the time she had resumed her shoes
and stockings glided from her like a shadow.  She would have
uttered an indignant protest at being left alone, but he was gone
ere she could detain him.  For a moment she thought she hated
him.  But when she had mechanically shod herself once more, not
without nervous shivers at every falling needle, he was at her side.

"Do you know anyone who wears a frieze coat like that?" he asked,
handing her a few torn shreds of wool affixed to a splinter of bark.

Miss Nellie instantly recognized the material of a certain
sporting coat worn by Mr. Jack Brace on festive occasions, but a
strange yet infallible instinct that was part of her nature made
her instantly disclaim all knowledge of it.

"No," she said.

"Not anyone who scents himself with some doctor's stuff like
cologne?" continued Low, with the disgust of keen olfactory
sensibilities.

Again Miss Nellie recognized the perfume with which the gallant
expressman was wont to make redolent her little parlor, but again
she avowed no knowledge of its possessor.  "Well," returned Low
with some disappointment, "such a man has been here.  Be on your
guard.  Let us go at once."

She required no urging to hasten her steps, but hurried
breathlessly at his side.  He had taken a new trail by which they
left the wood at right angles with the highway, two miles away.
Following an almost effaced mule track along a slight depression
of the plain, deep enough, however, to hide them from view, he
accompanied her, until, rising to the level again, she saw they
were beginning to approach the highway and the distant roofs of
Indian Spring.  "Nobody meeting you now," he whispered, "would
suspect where you had been.  Good night! until next week--remember."

They pressed each other's hands, and standing on the slight ridge
outlined against the paling sky, in full view of the highway,
parting carelessly, as if they had been chance met travelers.
But Nellie could not restrain a parting backward glance as she
left the ridge.  Low had descended to the deserted trail, and was
running swiftly in the direction of the Carquinez Woods.


CHAPTER IV


Teresa awoke with a start.  It was day already, but how far
advanced the even, unchanging, soft twilight of the woods gave no
indication.  Her companion had vanished, and to her bewildered
senses so had the camp-fire, even to its embers and ashes.  Was
she awake, or had she wandered away unconsciously in the night?
One glance at the tree above her dissipated the fancy.  There was
the opening of her quaint retreat and the hanging strips of bark,
and at the foot of the opposite tree lay the carcass of the bear.
It had been skinned, and, as Teresa thought with an inward
shiver, already looked half its former size.

Not yet accustomed to the fact that a few steps in either
direction around the circumference of those great trunks produced
the sudden appearance or disappearance of any figure, Teresa
uttered a slight scream as her young companion unexpectedly
stepped to her side.  "You see a change here," he said; "the
stamped-out ashes of the camp-fire lie under the brush," and he
pointed to some cleverly scattered boughs and strips of bark
which completely effaced the traces of last night's bivouac.  "We
can't afford to call the attention of any packer or hunter who
might straggle this way to this particular spot and this
particular tree; the more naturally," he added, "as they always
prefer to camp over an old fire."  Accepting this explanation
meekly, as partly a reproach for her caprice of the previous
night, Teresa hung her head.

"I'm very sorry," she said, "but wouldn't that," pointing to the
carcass of the bear, "have made them curious?"

But Low's logic was relentless.

"By this time there would have been little left to excite curiosity,
if you had been willing to leave those beasts to their work."

"I'm very sorry," repeated the woman, her lips quivering.

"They are the scavengers of the wood," he continued in a lighter
tone; "if you stay here you must try to use them to keep your
house clean."

Teresa smiled nervously.

"I mean that they shall finish their work to-night," he added,
"and I shall build another camp-fire for us a mile from here
until they do."

But Teresa caught his sleeve.

"No," she said hurriedly, "don't, please, for me.  You must not
take the trouble, nor the risk.  Hear me; do, please.  I can bear
it, I WILL bear it--to-night.  I would have borne it last night,
but it was so strange--and"--she passed her hands over her
forehead--"I think I must have been half mad.  But I am not so
foolish now."

She seemed so broken and despondent that he replied reassuringly:
"Perhaps it would be better that I should find another hiding-
place for you, until I can dispose of that carcass so that it
will not draw dogs after the wolves, and men after THEM.
Besides, your friend the sheriff will probably remember the bear
when he remembers anything, and try to get on its track again."

"He's a conceited fool," broke in Teresa in a high voice, with a
slight return of her old fury, "or he'd have guessed where that
shot came from; and," she added in a lower tone, looking down at
her limp and nerveless fingers, "he wouldn't have let a poor,
weak, nervous wretch like me get away."

"But his deputy may put two and two together, and connect your
escape with it."

Teresa's eyes flashed.  "It would be like the dog, just to save
his pride, to swear it was an ambush of my friends, and that he
was overpowered by numbers.  Oh yes! I see it all!" she almost
screamed, lashing herself into a rage at the bare contemplation
of this diminution of her glory.  "That's the dirty lie he tells
everywhere, and is telling now."

She stamped her feet and glanced savagely around, as if at any
risk to proclaim the falsehood.  Low turned his impassive,
truthful face towards her.

"Sheriff Dunn," he began gravely, "is a politician, and a fool
when he takes to the trail as a hunter of man or beast.  But he
is not a coward nor a liar.  Your chances would be better if he
were--if he laid your escape to an ambush of your friends, than
if his pride held you alone responsible."

"If he's such a good man, why do you hesitate?" she replied
bitterly.  "Why don't you give me up at once, and do a service to
one of your friends?"

"I do not even know him," returned Low opening his clear eyes
upon her.  "I've promised to hide you here, and I shall hide you
as well from him as from anybody."

Teresa did not reply, but suddenly dropping down upon the ground
buried her face in her hands and began to sob convulsively.  Low
turned impassively away, and putting aside the bark curtain
climbed into the hollow tree.  In a few moments he reappeared,
laden with provisions and a few simple cooking utensils, and
touched her lightly on the shoulder.  She looked up timidly; the
paroxysm had passed, but her lashes yet glittered.

"Come," he said, "come and get some breakfast.  I find you have
eaten nothing since you have been here--twenty-four hours."

"I didn't know it," she said, with a faint smile.  Then seeing
his burden, and possessed by a new and strange desire for some
menial employment, she said hurriedly, "Let me carry something--
do, please," and even tried to disencumber him.

Half annoyed, Low at last yielded, and handing his rifle said,
"There, then, take that; but be careful--it's loaded!"

A cruel blush burnt the woman's face to the roots of her hair as
she took the weapon hesitatingly in her hand.

"No!" she stammered, hurriedly lifting her shame-suffused eyes to
his; "no! no!"

He turned away with an impatience which showed her how completely
gratuitous had been her agitation and its significance, and said,
"Well, then, give it back if you are afraid of it."  But she as
suddenly declined to return it; and shouldering it deftly, took
her place by his side.  Silently they moved from the hollow tree
together.

During their walk she did not attempt to invade his taciturnity.
Nevertheless she was as keenly alive and watchful of his every
movement and gesture as if she had hung enchanted on his lips.
The unerring way with which he pursued a viewless, undeviating
path through those trackless woods, his quick reconnaissance of
certain trees or openings, his mute inspection of some almost
imperceptible footprint of bird or beast, his critical
examination of certain plants which he plucked and deposited in
his deerskin haversack, were not lost on the quick-witted woman.
As they gradually changed the clear, unencumbered aisles of the
central woods for a more tangled undergrowth, Teresa felt that
subtle admiration which culminates in imitation, and simulating
perfectly the step, tread, and easy swing of her companion,
followed so accurately his lead that she won a gratified
exclamation from him when their goal was reached--a broken,
blackened shaft, splintered by long-forgotten lightning, in the
centre of a tangled carpet of wood-clover.

"I don't wonder you distanced the deputy," he said cheerfully,
throwing down his burden, "if you can take the hunting-path like
that.  In a few days, if you stay here, I can venture to trust
you alone for a little pasear when you are tired of the tree."

Teresa looked pleased, but busied herself with arrangements for
the breakfast, while he gathered the fuel for the roaring fire
which soon blazed beside the shattered tree.

Teresa's breakfast was a success.  It was a revelation to the
young nomad, whose ascetic habits and simple tastes were usually
content with the most primitive forms of frontier cookery.  It
was at least a surprise to him to know that without extra trouble
kneaded flour, water, and saleratus need not be essentially
heavy; that coffee need not be boiled with sugar to the
consistency of syrup; that even that rarest delicacy, small
shreds of venison covered with ashes and broiled upon the end of
a ramrod boldly thrust into the flames, would be better and even
more expeditiously cooked upon burning coals.  Moved in his
practical nature, he was surprised to find this curious creature
of disorganized nerves and useless impulses informed with an
intelligence that did not preclude the welfare of humanity or the
existence of a soul.  He respected her for some minutes, until in
the midst of a culinary triumph a big tear dropped and spluttered
in the saucepan.  But he forgave the irrelevancy by taking no
notice of it, and by doing full justice to that particular dish.

Nevertheless, he asked several questions based upon these
recently discovered qualities.  It appeared that in the old days
of her wanderings with the circus troupe she had often been
forced to undertake this nomadic housekeeping.  But she "despised
it," had never done it since, and always had refused to do it for
"him"--the personal pronoun referring, as Low understood, to her
lover, Curson.  Not caring to revive these memories further, Low
briefly concluded: "I don't know what you were, or what you may
be, but from what I see of you you've got all the sabe of a
frontierman's wife."

She stopped and looked at him, and then with an impulse of
imprudence that only half concealed a more serious vanity, asked,
"Do you think I might have made a good squaw?"

"I don't know," he replied quietly.  "I never saw enough of them
to know."

Teresa, confident from his clear eyes that he spoke the truth,
but having nothing ready to follow this calm disposal of her
curiosity, relapsed into silence.

The meal finished, Teresa washed their scant table equipage in a
little spring near the camp-fire; where, catching sight of her
disordered dress and collar, she rapidly threw her shawl, after
the national fashion, over her shoulder and pinned it quickly.
Low cached the remaining provisions and the few cooking utensils
under the dead embers and ashes, obliterating all superficial
indication of their camp-fire as deftly and artistically as he
had before.

"There isn't the ghost of a chance," he said in explanation,
"that anybody but you or I will set foot here before we come back
to supper, but it's well to be on guard.  I'll take you back to
the cabin now, though I bet you could find your way there as well
as I can."

On their way back Teresa ran ahead of her companion, and plucking
a few tiny leaves from a hidden oasis in the bark-strewn trail
brought them to him.

"That's the kind you're looking for, isn't it?" she said, half
timidly.

"It is," responded Low, in gratified surprise; "but how did you
know it?  You're not a botanist, are you?"

"I reckon not," said Teresa; "but you picked some when we came,
and I noticed what they were."

Here was indeed another revelation.  Low stopped and gazed at her
with such frank, open, utterly unabashed curiosity that her black
eyes fell before him.

"And do you think," he asked with logical deliberation, "that you
could find any plant from another I should give you?"

"Yes."

"Or from a drawing of it"

"Yes; perhaps even if you described it to me."

A half-confidential, half-fraternal silence followed.

"I tell you what.  I've got a book--"

"I know it," interrupted Teresa; "full of these things."

"Yes.  Do you think you could--"

"Of course I could," broke in Teresa, again.

"But you don't know what I mean," said the imperturbable Low.

"Certainly I do.  Why, find 'em, and preserve all the different
ones for you to write under--that's it, isn't it?"

Low nodded his head, gratified but not entirely convinced that
she had fully estimated the magnitude of the endeavor.

"I suppose," said Teresa, in the feminine postscriptum voice
which it would seem entered even the philosophical calm of the
aisles they were treading--"I suppose that SHE places great value
on them?"

Low had indeed heard Science personified before, nor was it at
all impossible that the singular woman walking by his side had
also.  He said "Yes;" but added, in mental reference to the
Linnean Society of San Francisco, that "THEY were rather
particular about the rarer kinds."

Content as Teresa had been to believe in Low's tender relations
with some favored ONE of her sex, this frank confession of a
plural devotion staggered her.

"They?" she repeated.

"Yes," he continued calmly.  "The Botanical Society I correspond
with are more particular than the Government Survey."

"Then you are doing this for a society?" demanded Teresa, with a
stare.

"Certainly.  I'm making a collection and classification of
specimens.  I intend--but what are you looking at?"

Teresa had suddenly turned away.  Putting his hand lightly on her
shoulder, the young man brought her face to face him again.

She was laughing.

"I thought all the while it was for a girl," she said; "and--"
But here the mere effort of speech sent her off into an audible
and genuine outburst of laughter.  It was the first time he had
seen her even smile other than bitterly.  Characteristically
unconscious of any humor in her error, he remained unembarrassed.
But he could not help noticing a change in the expression of her
face, her voice, and even her intonation.  It seemed as if that
fit of laughter had loosed the last ties that bound her to a
self-imposed character, had swept away the last barrier between
her and her healthier nature, had dispossessed a painful
unreality, and relieved the morbid tension of a purely nervous
attitude.  The change in her utterance and the resumption of her
softer Spanish accent seemed to have come with her confidences,
and Low took leave of her before their sylvan cabin with a
comrade's heartiness, and a complete forgetfulness that her voice
had ever irritated him.

When he returned that afternoon he was startled to find the cabin
empty.  But instead of bearing any appearance of disturbance or
hurried flight, the rude interior seemed to have magically
assumed a decorous order and cleanliness unknown before.  Fresh
bark hid the inequalities of the floor.  The skins and blankets
were folded in the corners, the rude shelves were carefully
arranged, even a few tall ferns and bright but quickly fading
flowers were disposed around the blackened chimney.  She had
evidently availed herself of the change of clothing he had
brought her, for her late garments were hanging from the hastily-
devised wooden pegs driven in the wall.  The young man gazed
around him with mixed feelings of gratification and uneasiness.
His presence had been dispossessed in a single hour; his ten
years of lonely habitation had left no trace that this woman had
not effaced with a deft move of her hand.  More than that, it
looked as if she had always occupied it; and it was with a
singular conviction that even when she should occupy it no longer
it would only revert to him as her dwelling that he dropped the
bark shutters athwart the opening, and left it to follow her.

To his quick ear, fine eye, and abnormal senses, this was easy
enough.  She had gone in the direction of this morning's camp.
Once or twice he paused with a half-gesture of recognition and a
characteristic "Good!" at the place where she had stopped, but
was surprised to find that her main course had been as direct as
his own.  Deviating from this direct line with Indian precaution,
he first made a circuit of the camp, and approached the shattered
trunk from the opposite direction.  He consequently came upon
Teresa unawares.  But the momentary astonishment and
embarrassment were his alone.

He scarcely recognized her.  She was wearing the garments he had
brought her the day before--a certain discarded gown of Miss
Nellie Wynn, which he had hurriedly begged from her under the
pretext of clothing the wife of a distressed overland emigrant
then on the way to the mines.  Although he had satisfied his
conscience with the intention of confessing the pious fraud to
her when Teresa was gone and safe from pursuit, it was not
without a sense of remorse that he witnessed the sacrilegious
transformation.  The two women were nearly the same height and
size; and although Teresa's maturer figure accented the outlines
more strongly, it was still becoming enough to increase his
irritation.

Of this becomingness she was doubtless unaware at the moment that
he surprised her.  She was conscious of having "a change," and
this had emboldened her to "do her hair" and otherwise compose
herself.  After their greeting she was the first to allude to the
dress, regretting that it was not more of a rough disguise, and
that, as she must now discard the national habit of wearing her
shawl "manta" fashion over her head, she wanted a hat.  "But you
must not," she said, "borrow any more dresses for me from your
young woman.  Buy them for me at some shop.  They left me enough
money for that."  Low gently put aside the few pieces of gold she
had drawn from her pocket, and briefly reminded her of the
suspicion such a purchase by him would produce.  "That's so," she
said, with a laugh.  "Caramba! what a mule I'm becoming!  Ah!
wait a moment.  I have it!  Buy me a common felt hat--a man's
hat--as if for yourself, as a change to that animal," pointing to
the fox-tailed cap he wore summer and winter, "and I'll show you
a trick.  I haven't run a theatrical wardrobe for nothing."  Nor
had she, for the hat thus procured, a few days later, became, by
the aid of a silk handkerchief and a bluejay's feather, a
fascinating "pork pie."

Whatever cause of annoyance to Low still lingered in Teresa's
dress, it was soon forgotten in a palpable evidence of Teresa's
value as a botanical assistant.  It appeared that during the
afternoon she had not only duplicated his specimens, but had
discoverd one or two rare plants as yet unclassified in the flora
of the Carquinez Woods.  He was delighted, and in turn, over the
campfire, yielded up some details of his present life and some of
his earlier recollections.

"You don't remember anything of your father?" she asked.  "Did he
ever try to seek you out?"

"No!  Why should he?" replied the imperturbable Low; "he was not
a Cherokee."

"No, he was a beast," responded Teresa promptly.  "And your
mother--do you remember her?"

"No, I think she died."

"You THINK she died?  Don't you know?"

"No!"

"Then you're another!" said Teresa.  Notwithstanding this
frankness, they shook hands for the night: Teresa nestling like a
rabbit in a hollow by the side of the campfire; Low with his feet
towards it, Indian-wise, and his head and shoulders pillowed on
his haversack, only half distinguishable in the darkness beyond.

With such trivial details three uneventful days slipped by.
Their retreat was undisturbed, nor could Low detect, by the least
evidence to his acute perceptive faculties, that any intruding
feet had since crossed the belt of shade.  The echoes of passing
events at Indian Spring had recorded the escape of Teresa as
occurring at a remote and purely imaginative distance, and her
probable direction the county of Yolo.

"Can you remember," he one day asked her, "what time it was when
you cut the riata and got away?"

Teresa pressed her hands upon her eyes and temples.

"About three, I reckon."

"And you were here at seven; you could have covered some ground
in four hours?"

"Perhaps--I don't know," she said, her voice taking up its old
quality again.  "Don't ask me--I ran all the way."

Her face was quite pale as she removed her hands from her eyes,
and her breath came as quickly as if she had just finished that
race for life.

"Then you think I am safe here?" she added, after a pause.

"Perfectly--until they find you are NOT in Yolo.  Then they'll
look here.  And THAT'S the time for you to go THERE."  Teresa
smiled timidly.

"It will take them some time to search Yolo--unless," she added,
"you're tired of me here."  The charming non sequitur did not,
however, seem to strike the young man.  "I've got time yet to
find a few more plants for you," she suggested.

"Oh, certainly!"

"And give you a few more lessons in cooking."

"Perhaps."

The conscientious and literal Low was beginning to doubt if she
were really practical.  How otherwise could she trifle with such
a situation?

It must be confessed that that day and the next she did trifle
with it.  She gave herself up to a grave and delicious languor
that seemed to flow from shadow and silence and permeate her
entire being.  She passed hours in a thoughtful repose of mind
and spirit that seemed to fall like balm from those steadfast
guardians, and distill their gentle ether in her soul; or
breathed into her listening ear immunity from the forgotten past,
and security for the present.  If there was no dream of the
future in this calm, even recurrence of placid existence, so much
the better.  The simple details of each succeeding day, the
quaint housekeeping, the brief companionship and coming and going
of her young host--himself at best a crystallized personification
of the sedate and hospitable woods--satisfied her feeble
cravings.  She no longer regretted the inferior position that her
fears had obliged her to take the first night she came; she began
to look up to this young man--so much younger than herself--
without knowing what it meant; it was not until she found that
this attitude did not detract from his picturesqueness that she
discovered herself seeking for reasons to degrade him from this
seductive eminence.

A week had elapsed with little change.  On two days he had been
absent all day, returning only in time to sup in the hollow tree,
which, thanks to the final removal of the dead bear from its
vicinity, was now considered a safer retreat than the exposed
camp-fire.  On the first of these occasions she received him with
some preoccupation, paying but little heed to the scant gossip he
brought from Indian Spring, and retiring early under the plea of
fatigue, that he might seek his own distant camp-fire, which,
thanks to her stronger nerves and regained courage, she no longer
required so near.  On the second occasion, he found her writing a
letter more or less blotted with her tears.  When it was
finished, she begged him to post it at Indian Spring, where in
two days an answer would be returned, under cover, to him.

"I hope you will be satisfied then," she added.

"Satisfied with what?" queried the young man.

"You'll see," she replied, giving him her cold hand.  "Good-night."

"But can't you tell me now?" he remonstrated, retaining her hand.

"Wait two days longer--it isn't much," was all she vouchsafed to
answer.

The two days passed.  Their former confidence and good fellowship
were fully restored when the morning came on which he was to
bring the answer from the post-office at Indian Spring.  He had
talked again of his future, and had recorded his ambition to
procure the appointment of naturalist to a Government Surveying
Expedition.  She had even jocularly proposed to dress herself in
man's attire and "enlist" as his assistant.

"But you will be safe with your friends, I hope, by that time,"
responded Low.

"Safe with my friends," she repeated in a lower voice.  "Safe
with my friends--yes!"  An awkward silence followed; Teresa broke
it gayly: "But your girl, your sweetheart, my benefactor--will
SHE let you go?"

"I haven't told her yet," said Low, gravely, "but I don't see why
she should object."

"Object, indeed!" interrupted Teresa in a high voice and a sudden
and utterly gratuitous indignation; "how should she?  I'd like to
see her do it!"

She accompanied him some distance to the intersection of the
trail, where they parted in good spirits.  On the dusty plain
without a gale was blowing that rocked the high tree-tops above
her, but, tempered and subdued, entered the low aisles with a
fluttering breath of morning and a sound like the cooing of
doves.  Never had the wood before shown so sweet a sense of
security from the turmoil and tempest of the world beyond; never
before had an intrusion from the outer life--even in the shape of
a letter--seemed so wicked a desecration.  Tempted by the
solicitation of air and shade, she lingered, with Low's herbarium
slung on her shoulder.

A strange sensation, like a shiver, suddenly passed across her
nerves, and left them in a state of rigid tension.  With every
sense morbidly acute, with every faculty strained to its utmost,
the subtle instincts of Low's woodcraft transformed and possessed
her.  She knew it now!  A new element was in the wood--a strange
being--another life--another man approaching!  She did not even
raise her head to look about her, but darted with the precision
and fleetness of an arrow in the direction of her tree.  But her
feet were arrested, her limbs paralzyed, her very existence
suspended, by the sound of a voice:--

"Teresa!"

It was a voice that had rung in her ears for the last two years
in all phases of intensity, passion, tenderness, and anger; a
voice upon whose modulations, rude and unmusical though they
were, her heart and soul had hung in transport or anguish.  But
it was a chime that had rung its last peal to her senses as she
entered the Carquinez Woods, and for the last week had been as
dead to her as a voice from the grave.  It was the voice of her
lover--Dick Curson!


CHAPTER V


The wind was blowing towards the stranger, so that he was nearly
upon her when Teresa first took the alarm.  He was a man over six
feet in height, strongly built, with a slight tendency to a
roundness of bulk which suggested reserved rather than impeded
energy.  His thick beard and mustache were closely cropped around
a small and handsome mouth that lisped except when he was
excited, but always kept fellowship with his blue eyes in a
perpetual smile of half-cynical good-humor.  His dress was
superior to that of the locality; his general expression that of
a man of the world, albeit a world of San Francisco, Sacramento,
and Murderer's Bar.  He advanced towards her with a laugh and an
outstretched hand.

"YOU here!" she gasped, drawing back.

Apparently neither surprised nor mortified at this reception, he
answered frankly, "Yeth.  You didn't expect me, I know.  But
Doloreth showed me the letter you wrote her, and--well--here I
am, ready to help you, with two men and a thpare horthe waiting
outside the woodth on the blind trail."

"You--YOU--here?" she only repeated.

Curson shrugged his shoulders.  "Yeth."  Of courth you never
expected to thee me again, and leatht of all HERE.  I'll admit
that; I'll thay I wouldn't if I'd been in your plathe.  I'll go
further, and thay you didn't want to thee me again--anywhere.
But it all cometh to the thame thing; here I am.  I read the
letter you wrote Doloreth.  I read how you were hiding here,
under Dunn'th very nothe, with his whole pothe out, cavorting
round and barkin' up the wrong tree.  I made up my mind to come
down here with a few nathty friends of mine and cut you out under
Dunn'th nothe, and run you over into Yuba--that'th all."

"How dared she show you my letter--YOU of all men?  How dared she
ask YOUR help?" continued Teresa, fiercely.

"But she didn't athk my help," he responded coolly.  "D--d if I
don't think she jutht calculated I'd be glad to know you were
being hunted down and thtarving, that I might put Dunn on your
track."

"You lie!" said Teresa, furiously; "she was my friend.  A better
friend than those who professed--more," she added, with a
contemptuous drawing away of her skirt as if she feared Curson's
contamination.

"All right.  Thettle that with her when you go back," continued
Curson philosophically.  "We can talk of that on the way.  The
thing now ith to get up and get out of thethe woods.  Come!"

Teresa's only reply was a gesture of scorn.

"I know all that," continued Curson half soothingly, "but they're
waiting."

"Let them wait.  I shall not go."

"What will you do?"

"Stay here--till the wolves eat me."

"Teresa, listen.  D--- it all--Teresa--Tita! see here," he said
with sudden energy.  "I swear to God it's all right.  I'm willing
to let by-gones be by-gones and take a new deal.  You shall come
back as if nothing had happened, and take your old place as
before.  I don't mind doing the square thing, all round.  If
that's what you mean, if that's all that stands in the way, why,
look upon the thing as settled.  There, Tita, old girl, come."

Careless or oblivious of her stony silence and starting eyes, he
attempted to take her hand.  But she disengaged herself with a
quick movement, drew back, and suddenly crouched like a wild
animal about to spring.  Curson folded his arms as she leaped to
her feet; the little dagger she had drawn from her garter flashed
menacingly in the air, but she stopped.

The man before her remained erect, impassive, and silent; the
great trees around and beyond her remained erect, impassive, and
silent; there was no sound in the dim aisles but the quick
panting of her mad passion, no movement in the calm, motionless
shadow but the trembling of her uplifted steel.  Her arm bent and
slowly sank, her fingers relaxed, the knife fell from her hand.

"That'th quite enough for a thow," he said, with a return to his
former cynical ease and a perceptible tone of relief in his
voice.  "It'th the thame old Theretha.  Well, then, if you won't
go with me, go without me; take the led horthe and cut away.
Dick Athley and Petereth will follow you over the county line.
If you want thome money, there it ith."  He took a buckskin purse
from his pocket.  "If you won't take it from me--he hesitated as
she made no reply--"Athley'th flush and ready to lend you thome."

She had not seemed to hear him, but had stooped in some
embarrassment, picked up the knife and hastily hid it, then with
averted face and nervous fingers was beginning to tear strips of
loose bark from the nearest trunk.

"Well, what do you thay?"

"I don't want any money, and I shall stay here."  She hesitated,
looked around her, and then added, with an effort, "I suppose you
meant well.  Be it so!  Let by-gones be by-gones.  You said just
now, 'It's the same old Teresa.'  So she is, and seeing she's the
same she's better here than anywhere else."

There was enough bitterness in her tone to call for Curson's
half-perfunctory sympathy.

"That be d--d," he responded quickly.  "Jutht thay you'll come,
Tita, and--"

She stopped his half-spoken sentence with a negative gesture.
"You don't understand.  I shall stay here."

"But even if they don't theek you here, you can't live here
forever.  The friend that you wrote about who wath tho good to
you, you know, can't keep you here alwayth; and are you thure you
can alwayth trutht her?"

"It isn't a woman; it's a man."  She stopped short, and colored
to the line of her forehead.  "Who said it was a woman?" she
continued fiercely, as if to cover her confusion with a burst of
gratuitous anger.  "Is that another of your lies?"

Curson's lips, which for a moment had completely lost their
smile, were now drawn together in a prolonged whistle.  He gazed
curiously at her gown, at her hat, at the bow of bright ribbon
that tied her black hair, and said, "Ah!"

"A poor man who has kept my secret," she went on hurriedly--"a
man as friendless and lonely as myself.  Yes," disregarding
Curson's cynical smile, "a man who has shared everything--"

"Naturally," suggested Curson.

"And turned himself out of his only shelter to give me a roof and
covering," she continued mechanically, struggling with the new
and horrible fancy that his words awakened.

"And thlept every night at Indian Thpring to save your reputation,"
said Curson.  "Of courthe."

Teresa turned very white.  Curson was prepared for an outburst of
fury--perhaps even another attack.  But the crushed and beaten
woman only gazed at him with frightened and imploring eyes.  "For
God's sake, Dick, don't say that!"

The amiable cynic was staggered.  His good-humor and a certain
chivalrous instinct he could not repress got the better of him.
He shrugged his shoulders.  "What I thay, and what you DO,
Teretha, needn't make us quarrel.  I've no claim on you--I know
it.  Only--" a vivid sense of the ridiculous, powerful in men of
his stamp, completed her victory--"only don't thay anything about
my coming down here to cut you out from the--the--THE SHERIFF."
He gave utterance to a short but unaffected laugh, made a slight
grimace, and turned to go.

Teresa did not join in his mirth.  Awkward as it would have been
if he had taken a severer view of the subject, she was mortified
even amidst her fears and embarrassment at his levity.  Just as
she had become convinced that his jealousy had made her over-
conscious, his apparent good-humored indifference gave that over-
consciousness a guilty significance.  Yet this was lost in her
sudden alarm as her companion, looking up, uttered an
exclamation, and placed his hand upon his revolver.  With a
sinking conviction that the climax had come, Teresa turned her
eyes.  From the dim aisles beyond, Low was approaching.  The
catastrophe seemed complete.

She had barely time to utter an imploring whisper: "In the name
of God, not a word to him."  But a change had already come over
her companion.  It was no longer a parley with a foolish woman;
he had to deal with a man like himself.  As Low's dark face and
picturesque figure came nearer, Mr. Curson's proposed method of
dealing with him was made audible.

"Ith it a mulatto or a Thircuth, or both?" he asked, with
affected anxiety.

Low's Indian phlegm was impervious to such assault.  He turned to
Teresa, without apparently noticing her companion.  "I turned
back," he said quietly, "as soon as I knew there were strangers
here; I thought you might need me."  She noticed for the first
time that, in addition to his rifle, he carried a revolver and
hunting knife in his belt.

"Yeth," returned Curson, with an ineffectual attempt to imitate
Low's phlegm; "but ath I didn't happen to be a sthranger to this
lady, perhaps it wathn't nethethary, particularly ath I had two
friends--"

"Waiting at the edge of the wood with a led horse," interrupted
Low, without addressing him, but apparently continuing his
explanation to Teresa.  But she turned to Low with feverish
anxiety.

"That's so--he is an old friend--" she gave a quick, imploring
glance at Curson--"an old friend who came to help me away--he is
very kind," she stammered, turning alternately from the one to
the other; "but I told him there was no hurry--at least to-day--
that you--were--very good--too, and would hide me a little
longer, until your plan--you know YOUR plan," she added, with a
look of beseeching significance to Low--"could be tried."  And
then, with a helpless conviction that her excuses, motives, and
emotions were equally and perfectly transparent to both men, she
stopped in a tremble.

"Perhapth it 'th jutht ath well, then, that the gentleman came
thtraight here, and didn't tackle my two friendth when he pathed
them," observed Curson, half sarcastically.

"I have not passed your friends, nor have I been near them," said
Low, looking at him for the first time, with the same
exasperating calm, "or perhaps I should not be HERE or they
THERE.  I knew that one man entered the wood a few moments ago,
and that two men and four horses remained outside."

"That's true," said Teresa to Curson excitedly--"that's true.  He
knows all.  He can see without looking, hear without listening.
He--he--" she stammered, colored, and stopped.

The two men had faced each other.  Curson, after his first good-
natured impulse, had retained no wish to regain Teresa, whom he
felt he no longer loved, and yet who, for that very reason
perhaps, had awakened his chivalrous instincts.  Low, equally on
his side, was altogether unconscious of any feeling which might
grow into a passion, and prevent him from letting her go with
another if for her own safety.  They were both men of a certain
taste and refinement.  Yet, in spite of all this, some vague
instinct of the baser male animal remained with them, and they
were moved to a mutually aggressive attitude in the presence of
the female.

One word more, and the opening chapter of a sylvan Iliad might
have begun.  But this modern Helen saw it coming, and arrested it
with an inspiration of feminine genius.  Without being observed,
she disengaged her knife from her bosom and let it fall as if by
accident.  It struck the ground with the point of its keen blade,
bounded and rolled between them.  The two men started and looked
at each other with a foolish air.  Curson laughed.

"I reckon she can take care of herthelf," he said, extending his
hand to Low.  "I'm off.  But if I'm wanted SHE'LL know where to
find me."  Low took the proffered hand, but neither of the two
men looked at Teresa.  The reserve of antagonism once broken, a
few words of caution, advice, and encouragement passed between
them, in apparent obliviousness of her presence or her personal
responsibility.  As Curson at last nodded a farewell to her, Low
insisted upon accompanying him as far as the horses, and in
another moment she was again alone.

She had saved a quarrel between them at the sacrifice of herself,
for her vanity was still keen enough to feel that this exhibition
of her old weakness had degraded her in their eyes, and, worse,
had lost the respect her late restraint had won from Low.  They
had treated her like a child or a crazy woman, perhaps even now
were exchanging criticisms upon her--perhaps pitying her!  Yet
she had prevented a quarrel, a fight; possibly the death of
either one or the other of these men who despised her, for none
better knew than she the trivial beginning and desperate end of
these encounters.  Would they--would Low ever realize it, and
forgive her?  Her small, dark hands went up to her eyes and she
sank upon the ground.  She looked through tear-veiled lashes upon
the mute and giant witnesses of her deceit and passion, and tried
to draw, from their immovable calm, strength and consolation as
before.  But even they seemed to stand apart, reserved and forbidding.

When Low returned she hoped to gather from his eyes and manner
what had passed between him and her former lover.  But beyond a
mere gentle abstraction at times he retained his usual calm.  She
was at last forced to allude to it herself with simulated
recklessness.

"I suppose I didn't get a very good character from my last
place?" she said, with a laugh.

"I don't understand you," he replied, in evident sincerity.

She bit her lip and was silent.  But as they were returning home,
she said gently, "I hope you were not angry with me for the lie I
told when I spoke of 'your plan.'  I could not give the real
reason for not returning with--with--that man.  But it's not all
a lie.  I have a plan--if you haven't.  When you are ready to go
to Sacramento to take your place, dress me as an Indian boy,
paint my face, and let me go with you.  You can leave me--there--
you know."

"It's not a bad idea," he responded gravely.  "We will see."

On the next day, and the next, the rencontre seemed to be
forgotten.  The herbarium was already filled with rare specimens.
Teresa had even overcome her feminine repugnance to "bugs" and
creeping things so far as to assist in his entomological
collection.  He had drawn from a sacred cache in the hollow of a
tree the few worn text-books from which he had studied.

"They seem very precious," she said, with a smile.

"Very," he replied gravely.  "There was one with plates that the
ants ate up, and it will be six months before I can afford to buy
another."

Teresa glanced hurriedly over his well-worn buckskin suit, at his
calico shirt with its pattern almost obliterated by countless
washings, and became thoughtful.

"I suppose you couldn't buy one at Indian Spring?" she said
innocently.

For once Low was startled out of his phlegm.  "Indian Spring!" he
ejaculated; "perhaps not even in San Francisco.  These came from
the States."

"How did you get them?" persisted Teresa.

"I bought them for skins I got over the ridge."

"I didn't mean that--but no matter.  Then you mean to sell that
bearskin, don't you?" she added.

Low had, in fact, already sold it, the proceeds having been
invested in a gold ring for Miss Nellie, which she scrupulously
did not wear except in his presence.  In his singular
truthfulness he would have frankly confessed it to Teresa, but
the secret was not his own.  He contented himself with saying
that he had disposed of it at Indian Spring.

Teresa started, and communicated unconsciously some of her
nervousness to her companion.  They gazed in each other's eyes
with a troubled expression.

"Do you think it was wise to sell that particular skin, which
might be identified?" she asked timidly.

Low knitted his arched brows, but felt a strange sense of relief.
"Perhaps not," he said carelessly; "but it's too late now to mend
matters."

That afternoon she wrote several letters, and tore them up.  One,
however, she retained, and handed it to Low to post at Indian
Spring, whither he was going.  She called his attention to the
superscription, being the same as the previous letter, and added,
with affected gayety, "But if the answer isn't as prompt, perhaps
it will be pleasanter than the last."  Her quick feminine eye
noticed a little excitement in his manner and a more studious
attention to his dress.  Only a few days before she would not
have allowed this to pass without some mischievous allusion to
his mysterious sweetheart; it troubled her greatly now to find
that she could not bring herself to this household pleasantry,
and that her lip trembled and her eye grew moist as he parted
from her.

The afternoon passed slowly; he had said he might not return to
supper until late, nevertheless a strange restlessness took
possession of her as the day wore on.  She put aside her work,
the darning of his stockings, and rambled aimlessly through the
woods.  She had wandered she knew not how far, when she was
suddenly seized with the same vague sense of a foreign presence
which she had felt before.  Could it be Curson again, with a word
of warning?  No! she knew it was not he; so subtle had her sense
become that she even fancied that she detected in the invisible
aura projected by the unknown no significance or relation to
herself or Low, and felt no fear.  Nevertheless she deemed it
wisest to seek the protection of her sylvan bower, and hurried
swiftly thither.

But not so quickly nor directly that she did not once or twice
pause in her flight to examine the new-comer from behind a
friendly trunk.  He was a stranger--a young fellow with a brown
mustache, wearing heavy Mexican spurs in his riding-boots, whose
tinkling he apparently did not care to conceal.  He had perceived
her, and was evidently pursuing her, but so awkwardly and timidly
that she eluded him with ease.  When she had reached the security
of the hollow tree and pulled the curtain of bark before the
narrow opening, with her eye to the interstices, she waited his
coming.  He arrived breathlessly in the open space before the
tree where the bear once lay; the dazed, bewildered, and half-
awed expression of his face, as he glanced around him and through
the openings of the forest aisles, brought a faint smile to her
saddened face.  At last he called in a half-embarrassed voice:--

"Miss Nellie!"

The smile faded from Teresa's cheek.  Who was "Miss Nellie?"  She
pressed her ear to the opening.  "Miss Wynn!" the voice again
called, but was lost in the echoless woods.  Devoured with a new
gratuitous curiosity, in another moment Teresa felt she would
have disclosed herself at any risk, but the stranger rose and
began to retrace his steps.  Long after his tinkling spurs were
lost in the distance, Teresa remained like a statue, staring at
the place where he had stood.  Then she suddenly turned like a
mad woman, glanced down at the gown she was wearing, tore it from
her back as if it had been a polluted garment, and stamped upon
it in a convulsion of rage.  And then, with her beautiful bare
arms clasped together over her head, she threw herself upon her
couch in a tempest of tears.


CHAPTER VI


When Miss Nellie reached the first mining extension of Indian
Spring, which surrounded it like a fosse, she descended for one
instant into one of its trenches, opened her parasol, removed her
duster, hid it under a bowlder, and with a few shivers and cat-
like strokes of her soft hands not only obliterated all material
traces of the stolen cream of Carquinez Woods, but assumed a
feline demureness quite inconsistent with any moral dereliction.
Unfortunately, she forgot to remove at the same time a certain
ring from her third finger, which she had put on with her duster
and had worn at no other time.  With this slight exception, the
benignant fate which always protected that young person brought
her in contact with the Burnham girls at one end of the main
street as the returning coach to Excelsior entered the other, and
enabled her to take leave of them before the coach office with a
certain ostentation of parting which struck Mr. Jack Brace, who
was lingering at the doorway, into a state of utter bewilderment.

Here was Miss Nellie Wynn, the belle of Excelsior, calm, quiet,
self-possessed, her chaste cambric skirts and dainty shoes as
fresh as when she had left her father's house; but where was the
woman of the brown duster, and where the yellow-dressed
apparition of the woods?  He was feebly repeating to himself his
mental adjuration of a few hours before when he caught her eye,
and was taken with a blush and a fit of coughing.  Could he have
been such an egregious fool, and was it not plainly written on
his embarrassed face for her to read?

"Are we going down together?" asked Miss Nellie with an
exceptionally gracious smile.

There was neither affectation nor coquetry in this advance.  The
girl had no idea of Brace's suspicion of her, nor did any uneasy
desire to placate or deceive a possible rival of Low's prompt her
graciousness.  She simply wished to shake off in this encounter
the already stale excitement of the past two hours, as she had
shaken the dust of the woods from her clothes.  It was
characteristic of her irresponsible nature and transient
susceptibilities that she actually enjoyed the relief of change;
more than that, I fear, she looked upon this infidelity to a past
dubious pleasure as a moral principle.  A mild, open flirtation
with a recognized man like Brace, after her secret passionate
tryst with a nameless nomad like Low, was an ethical equipoise
that seemed proper to one of her religious education.

Brace was only too happy to profit by Miss Nellie's condescension;
he at once secured the seat by her side, and spent the four hours
and a half of their return journey to Excelsior in blissful but
timid communion with her.  If he did not dare to confess his past
suspicions, he was equally afraid to venture upon the boldness he
had premeditated a few hours before.  He was therefore obliged to
take a middle course of slightly egotistical narration of his own
personal adventures, with which he beguiled the young girl's ear.
This he only departed from once, to describe to her a valuable
grizzly bearskin which he had seen that day for sale at Indian
Spring, with a view to divining her possible acceptance of it
for a "buggy robe;" and once to comment upon a ring which she
had inadvertently disclosed in pulling off her glove.

"It's only an old family keepsake," she added, with easy
mendacity; and affecting to recognize in Mr. Brace's curiosity a
not unnatural excuse for toying with her charming fingers, she
hid them in chaste and virginal seclusion in her lap, until she
could recover the ring and resume her glove.

A week passed--a week of peculiar and desiccating heat for even
those dry Sierra table-lands.  The long days were filled with
impalpable dust and acrid haze suspended in the motionless air;
the nights were breathless and dewless; the cold wind which
usually swept down from the snow line was laid to sleep over a
dark monotonous level, whose horizon was pricked with the eating
fires of burning forest crests.  The lagging coach of Indian
Spring drove up at Excelsior, and precipitated its passengers
with an accompanying cloud of dust before the Excelsior Hotel.
As they emerged from the coach, Mr. Brace, standing in the
doorway, closely scanned their begrimed and almost unrecognizable
faces.  They were the usual type of travelers: a single
professional man in dusty black, a few traders in tweeds and
flannels, a sprinkling of miners in red and gray shirts, a
Chinaman, a negro, and a Mexican packer or muleteer.  This latter
for a moment mingled with the crowd in the bar-room, and even
penetrated the corridor and dining-room of the hotel, as if
impelled by a certain semi-civilized curiosity, and then strolled
with a lazy, dragging step--half impeded by the enormous leather
leggings, chains, and spurs, peculiar to his class--down the main
street.  The darkness was gathering, but the muleteer indulged in
the same childish scrutiny of the dimly lighted shops, magazines,
and saloons, and even of the occasional groups of citizens at the
street corners.  Apparently young, as far as the outlines of his
figure could be seen, he seemed to show even more than the usual
concern of masculine Excelsior in the charms of womankind.  The
few female figures about at that hour, or visible at window or
veranda, received his marked attention; he respectfully followed
the two auburn-haired daughters of Deacon Johnson on their way to
choir meeting to the door of the church.  Not content with that
act of discreet gallantry, after they had entered he managed to
slip unperceived behind them.

The memorial of the Excelsior gamblers' generosity was a modern
building, large and pretentious, for even Mr. Wynn's popularity,
and had been good-humoredly known, in the characteristic language
of the generous donors, as one of the "biggest religious bluffs"
on record.  Its groined rafters, which were so new and spicy that
they still suggested their native forest aisles, seldom covered
more than a hundred devotees, and in the rambling choir, with its
bare space for the future organ, the few choristers, gathered
round a small harmonium, were lost in the deepening shadow of
that summer evening.  The muleteer remained hidden in the
obscurity of the vestibule.  After a few moments' desultory
conversation, in which it appeared that the unexpected absence of
Miss Nellie Wynn, their leader, would prevent their practicing,
the choristers withdrew.  The stranger, who had listened eagerly,
drew back in the darkness as they passed out, and remained for a
few moments a vague and motionless figure in the silent church.
Then coming cautiously to the window, the flapping broad-brimmed
hat was put aside, and the faint light of the dying day shone in
the black eyes of Teresa!  Despite her face, darkened with dye
and disfigured with dust, the matted hair piled and twisted
around her head, the strange dress and boyish figure, one swift
glance from under her raised lashes betrayed her identity.

She turned aside mechanically into the first pew, picked up and
opened a hymn-book.  Her eyes became riveted on a name written on
the title-page, "Nellie Wynn."  HER name, and HER book.  The
instinct that had guided her here was right; the slight gossip of
her fellow-passengers was right; this was the clergyman's
daughter, whose praise filled all mouths.  This was the unknown
girl the stranger was seeking, but who in turn perhaps had been
seeking Low--the girl who absorbed his fancy--the secret of his
absences, his preoccupation, his coldness!  This was the girl
whom to see, perhaps in his arms, she was now periling her
liberty and her life unknown to him!  A slight odor, some faint
perfume of its owner, came from the book; it was the same she had
noticed in the dress Low had given her.  She flung the volume to
the ground, and, throwing her arms over the back of the pew
before her, buried her face in her hands.

In that light and attitude she might have seemed some rapt
acolyte abandoned to self-communion.  But whatever yearning her
soul might have had for higher sympathy or deeper consolation, I
fear that the spiritual Tabernacle of Excelsior and the Reverend
Mr. Wynn did not meet that requirement.  She only felt the dry,
oven-like heat of that vast shell, empty of sentiment and beauty,
hollow in its pretense and dreary in its desolation.  She only
saw in it a chief altar for the glorification of this girl who
had absorbed even the pure worship of her companion, and
converted and degraded his sublime paganism to her petty creed.
With a woman's withering contempt for her own art displayed in
another woman, she thought how she herself could have touched him
with the peace that the majesty of their woodland aisles--so
unlike this pillared sham--had taught her own passionate heart,
had she but dared.  Mingling with this imperfect theology, she
felt she could have proved to him also that a brunette and a
woman of her experience was better than an immature blonde.  She
began to loathe herself for coming hither, and dreaded to meet
his face.  Here a sudden thought struck her.  What if he had not
come here?  What if she had been mistaken?  What if her rash
interpretation of his absence from the wood that night was simple
madness?  What if he should return--if he had already returned?
She rose to her feet, whitening yet joyful with the thought.  She
could return at once; what was the girl to her now?  Yet there
was time to satisfy herself if he were at HER house.  She had
been told where it was; she could find it in the dark; an open
door or window would betray some sign or sound of the occupants.
She rose, replaced her hat over her eyes, knotted her flaunting
scarf around her throat, groped her way to the door, and glided
into the outer darkness.


CHAPTER VII


It was quite dark when Mr. Jack Brace stopped before Father
Wynn's open door.  The windows were also invitingly open to the
wayfarer, as were the pastoral counsels of Father Wynn, delivered
to some favored guest within, in a tone of voice loud enough for
a pulpit.  Jack Brace paused.  The visitor was the convalescent
sheriff, Jim Dunn, who had publicly commemorated his recovery by
making his first call upon the father of his inamorata.  The
Reverend Mr. Wynn had been expatiating upon the unremitting heat
of a possible precursor of forest fires, and exhibiting some
catholic knowledge of the designs of a Deity in that regard, and
what should be the policy of the Legislature, when Mr. Brace
concluded to enter.  Mr. Wynn and the wounded man, who occupied
an arm-chair by the window, were the only occupants of the room.
But in spite of the former's ostentatious greeting, Brace could
see that his visit was inopportune and unwelcome.  The sheriff
nodded a quick, impatient recognition, which, had it not been
accompanied by an anathema on the heat, might have been taken as
a personal insult.  Neither spoke of Miss Nellie, although it was
patent to Brace that they were momentarily expecting her.  All of
which went far to strengthen a certain wavering purpose in his
mind.

"Ah, ha! strong language, Mr. Dunn," said Father Wynn, referring
to the sheriff's adjuration, "but 'out of the fullness of the
heart the mouth speaketh.'  Job, sir, cursed, we are told, and
even expressed himself in vigorous Hebrew regarding his birthday.
Ha, ha!  I'm not opposed to that.  When I have often wrestled
with the spirit I confess I have sometimes said, 'D--n you.'
Yes, sir, 'D--n you.'"

There was something so unutterably vile in the reverend
gentleman's utterance and emphasis of this oath that the two men,
albeit both easy and facile blasphemers, felt shocked; as the
purest of actresses is apt to overdo the rakishness of a gay
Lothario, Father Wynn's immaculate conception of an imprecation
was something terrible.  But he added, "The law ought to
interfere with the reckless use of camp-fires in the woods in
such weather by packers and prospectors."

"It isn't so much the work of white men," broke in Brace, "as it
is of Greasers, Chinamen, and Diggers, especially Diggers.
There's that blasted Low, ranges the whole Carquinez Woods as if
they were his.  I reckon he ain't particular just where he throws
his matches."

"But he's not a Digger; he's a Cherokee, and only a half-breed at
that," interpolated Wynn.  "Unless," he added, with the artful
suggestion of the betrayed trust of a too credulous Christian,
"he deceived me in this as in other things."

In what other things Low had deceived him he did not say; but, to
the astonishment of both men, Dunn growled a dissent to Brace's
proposition.  Either from some secret irritation with that
possible rival, or impatience at the prolonged absence of Nellie,
he had "had enough of that sort of hog-wash ladled out to him for
genuine liquor."  As to the Carquinez Woods, he [Dunn] "didn't
know why Low hadn't as much right there as if he'd grabbed it
under a preemption law and didn't live there."  With this hint at
certain speculations of Father Wynn in public lands for a
homestead, he added that "If they [Brace and Wynn] could bring
him along any older American settler than an Indian, they might
rake down his [Dunn's] pile."  Unprepared for this turn in the
conversation, Wynn hastened to explain that he did not refer to
the pure aborigine, whose gradual extinction no one regretted
more than himself, but to the mongrel, who inherited only the
vices of civilization.  "There should be a law, sir, against the
mingling of races.  There are men, sir, who violate the laws of
the Most High by living with Indian women--squaw men, sir, as
they are called."

Dunn rose with a face livid with weakness and passion.  "Who
dares say that?  They are a d--d sight better than sneaking
Northern Abolitionists, who married their daughters to buck
niggers like--"  But a spasm of pain withheld this Parthian shot
at the politics of his two companions, and he sank back
helplessly in his chair.

An awkward silence ensued.  The three men looked at each other in
embarrassment and confusion.  Dunn felt that he had given way to
a gratuitous passion; Wynn had a vague presentiment that he had
said something that imperiled his daughter's prospects; and Brace
was divided between an angry retort and the secret purpose
already alluded to.

"It's all the blasted heat," said Dunn, with a forced smile,
pushing away the whisky which Wynn had ostentatiously placed
before him.

"Of course," said Wynn hastily; "only it's a pity Nellie ain't
here to give you her smelling-salts.  She ought to be back now,"
he added, no longer mindful of Brace's presence; "the coach is
over-due now, though I reckon the heat made Yuba Bill take it
easy at the up grade."

"If you mean the coach from Indian Spring," said Brace quietly,
"it's in already; but Miss Nellie didn't come on it."

"May be she got out at the Crossing," said Wynn cheerfully; "she
sometimes does."

"She didn't take the coach at Indian Spring," returned Brace,
"because I saw it leave, and passed it on Buckskin ten minutes
ago, coming up the hills."

"She's stopped over at Burnham's," said Wynn reflectively.  Then,
in response to the significant silence of his guests, he added,
in a tone of chagrin which his forced heartiness could not
disguise, "Well, boys, it's a disappointment all round; but we
must take the lesson as it comes.  I'll go over to the coach
office and see if she's sent any word.  Make yourselves at home
until I return."

When the door had closed behind him, Brace arose and took his hat
as if to go.  With his hand on the lock, he turned to his rival,
who, half hidden in the gathering darkness, still seemed unable
to comprehend his ill-luck.

"If you're waiting for that bald-headed fraud to come back with
the truth about his daughter," said Brace coolly, "you'd better
send for your things and take up your lodgings here."

"What do you mean?" said Dunn sternly.

"I mean that she's not at the Burnhams'; I mean that he either
does or does not know WHERE she is, and that in either case he is
not likely to give you information.  But I can."

"You can?"

"Yes."

"Then, where is she?"

"In the Carquinez Woods, in the arms of the man you were just
defending--Low, the half-breed."

The room had become so dark that from the road nothing could be
distinguished.  Only the momentary sound of struggling feet was
heard.

"Sit down," said Brace's voice, "and don't be a fool.  You're too
weak, and it ain't a fair fight.  Let go your hold.  I'm not
lying--I wish to God I was!"

There was silence, and Brace resumed, "We've been rivals, I know.
May be I thought my chance as good as yours.  If what I say ain't
truth, we'll stand as we stood before; and if you're on the
shoot, I'm your man when you like, where you like, or on sight if
you choose.  But I can't bear to see another man played upon as
I've been played upon--given dead away as I've been.  It ain't on
the square.

"There," he continued, after a pause, "that's right, now steady.
Listen.  A week ago that girl went down just like this to Indian
Spring.  It was given out, like this, that she went to the
Burnhams'.  I don't mind saying, Dunn, that I went down myself,
all on the square, thinking I might get a show to talk to her,
just as YOU might have done, you know, if you had my chance.  I
didn't come across her anywhere.  But two men that I met thought
they recognized her in a disguise going into the woods.  Not
suspecting anything, I went after her; saw her at a distance in
the middle of the woods in another dress that I can swear to, and
was just coming up to her when she vanished--went like a squirrel
up a tree, or down like a gopher in the ground, but vanished."

"Is that all?" said Dunn's voice.  "And just because you were a
d--d fool, or had taken a little too much whisky, you thought--"

"Steady.  That's just what I said to myself," interrupted Brace
coolly, "particularly when I saw her that same afternoon in
another dress, saying 'Good-by' to the Burnhams, as fresh as a
rose and as cold as those snow-peaks.  Only one thing--she had a
ring on her finger she never wore before, and didn't expect me to
see."

"What if she did?  She might have bought it.  I reckon she hasn't
to consult you," broke in Dunn's voice sternly.

"She didn't buy it," continued Brace quietly.  "Low gave that Jew
trader a bearskin in exchange for it, and presented it to her.  I
found that out two days afterwards.  I found out that out of the
whole afternoon she spent less than an hour with the Burnhams.  I
found out that she bought a duster like the disguise the two men
saw her in.  I found the yellow dress she wore that day hanging
up in Low's cabin--the place where I saw her go--THE RENDEZVOUS
WHERE SHE MEETS HIM.  Oh, you're listenin', are you?  Stop!  SIT
DOWN!

"I discovered it by accident," continued the voice of Brace when
all was again quiet; "it was hidden as only a squirrel or an
Injin can hide when they improve upon nature.  When I was
satisfied that the girl had been in the woods, I was determined
to find out where she vanished, and went there again.
Prospecting around, I picked up at the foot of one of the biggest
trees this yer old memorandum-book, with grasses and herbs stuck
in it.  I remembered that I'd heard old Wynn say that Low, like
the d--d Digger that he was, collected these herbs; only he
pretended it was for science.  I reckoned the book was his and
that he mightn't be far away.  I lay low and waited.  Bimeby I
saw a lizard running down the root.  When he got sight of me he
stopped."

"D--n the lizard!  What's that got to do with where she is now?"

"Everything.  That lizard had a piece of sugar in his mouth.
Where did it come from?  I made him drop it, and calculated he'd
go back for more.  He did.  He scooted up that tree and slipped
in under some hanging strips of bark.  I shoved 'em aside, and
found an opening to the hollow where they do their housekeeping."

"But you didn't see her there--and how do you know she is there
now?"

"I determined to make it sure.  When she left to-day, I started
an hour ahead of her, and hid myself at the edge of the woods.
An hour after the coach arrived at Indian Spring, she came there
in a brown duster and was joined by him.  I'd have followed them,
but the d--d hound has the ears of a squirrel, and though I was
five hundred yards from him he was on his guard."

"Guard be blessed!  Wasn't you armed?  Why didn't you go for
him?" said Dunn, furiously.

"I reckoned I'd leave that for you," said Brace coolly.  "If he'd
killed me, and if he'd even covered me with his rifle, he'd been
sure to let daylight through me at double the distance.  I
shouldn't have been any better off, nor you either.  If I'd
killed HIM, it would have been your duty as sheriff to put me in
jail; and I reckon it wouldn't have broken your heart, Jim Dunn,
to have got rid of TWO rivals instead of one.  Hullo!  Where are
you going?"

"Going?" said Dunn hoarsely.  "Going to the Carquinez Woods, by
God! to kill him before her.  I'LL risk it, if you daren't.  Let
me succeed, and you can hang ME and take the girl yourself."

"Sit down, sit down.  Don't be a fool, Jim Dunn!  You wouldn't
keep the saddle a hundred yards.  Did I say I wouldn't help you?
No.  If you're willing, we'll run the risk together, but it must
be in my way.  Hear me.  I'll drive you down there in a buggy
before daylight, and we'll surprise them in the cabin or as they
leave the wood.  But you must come as if to arrest him for some
offense--say, as an escaped Digger from the Reservation, a
dangerous tramp, a destroyer of public property in the forests, a
suspected road agent, or anything to give you the right to hunt
him.  The exposure of him and Nellie, don't you see, must be
accidental.  If he resists, kill him on the spot, and nobody'll
blame you; if he goes peaceably with you, and you once get him in
Excelsior jail, when the story gets out that he's taken the belle
of Excelsior for his squaw, if you'd the angels for your posse
you couldn't keep the boys from hanging him to the first tree.
What's that?"

He walked to the window, and looked out cautiously.

"If it was the old man coming back and listening," he said, after
a pause, "it can't he helped.  He'll hear it soon enough, if he
don't suspect something already."

"Look yer, Brace," broke in Dunn hoarsely.  "D--d if I understand
you or you me.  That dog Low has got to answer to ME, not to the
LAW!  I'll take my risk of killing him, on sight and on the
square.  I don't reckon to handicap myself with a warrant, and I
am not going to draw him out with a lie.  You hear me?  That's me
all the time!"

"Then you calkilate to go down thar," said Brace contemptuously,
"yell out for him and Nellie, and let him line you on a rest from
the first tree as if you were a grizzly."

There was a pause.  "What's that you were saying just now about a
bearskin he sold?" asked Dunn slowly, as if reflecting.

"He exchanged a bearskin," replied Brace, "with a single hole
right over the heart.  He's a dead shot, I tell you."

"D--n his shooting," said Dunn.  "I'm not thinking of that.  How
long ago did he bring in that bearskin?"

"About two weeks, I reckon.  Why?"

"Nothing!  Look yer, Brace, you mean well--thar's my hand.  I'll
go down with you there, but not as the sheriff.  I'm going there
as Jim Dunn, and you can come along as a white man, to see things
fixed on the square.  Come!"

Brace hesitated.  "You'll think better of my plan before you get
there; but I've said I'd stand by you, and I will.  Come, then.
There's no time to lose."

They passed out into the darkness together.

"What are you waiting for?" said Dunn impatiently, as Brace, who
was supporting him by the arm, suddenly halted at the corner of
the house.

"Some one was listening--did you not see him?  Was it the old
man?" asked Brace hurriedly.

"Blast the old man!  It was only one of them Mexican packers
chock-full of whisky, and trying to hold up the house.  What are
you thinking of?  We shall be late."

In spite of his weakness, the wounded man hurriedly urged Brace
forward, until they reached the latter's lodgings .  To his
surprise, the horse and buggy were already before the door.

"Then you reckoned to go, any way?" said Dunn, with a searching
look at his companion.

"I calkilated SOMEBODY would go," returned Brace, evasively,
patting the impatient Buckskin; "but come in and take a drink
before we leave."

Dunn started out of a momentary abstraction, put his hand on his
hip, and mechanically entered the house.  They had scarcely
raised the glasses to their lips when a sudden rattle of wheels
was heard in the street.  Brace set down his glass and ran to the
window.

"It's the mare bolted," he said, with an oath.  "We've kept her
too long standing.  Follow me," and he dashed down the staircase
into the street.  Dunn followed with difficulty; when he reached
the door he was already confronted by his breathless companion.
"She's gone off on a run, and I'll swear there was a man in the
buggy!"  He stopped and examined the halter-strap, still fastened
to the fence.  "Cut! by God!"

Dunn turned pale with passion.  "Who's got another horse and
buggy?" he demanded.

"The new blacksmith in Main Street; but we won't get it by
borrowing," said Brace.

"How then?" asked Dunn savagely.

"Seize it, as the sheriff of Yuba and his deputy, pursuing a
confederate of the Injin Low--THE HORSE THIEF!"


CHAPTER VIII


The brief hour of darkness that preceded the dawn was that night
intensified by a dense smoke, which, after blotting out horizon
and sky, dropped a thick veil on the high road and the silent
streets of Indian Spring.  As the buggy containing Sheriff Dunn
and Brace dashed through the obscurity, Brace suddenly turned to
his companion.

"Some one ahead!"

The two men bent forward over the dashboard.  Above the steady
plunging of their own horse-hoofs they could hear the quicker
irregular beat of other hoofs in the darkness before them.

"It's that horse thief!" said Dunn, in a savage whisper.  "Bear
to the right, and hand me the whip."

A dozen cuts of the cruel lash, and their maddened horse,
bounding at each stroke, broke into a wild canter.  The frail
vehicle swayed from side to side at each spring of the elastic
shafts.  Steadying himself by one hand on the low rail, Dunn drew
his revolver with the other.  "Sing out to him to pull up, or
we'll fire.  My voice is clean gone," he added, in a husky whisper.

They were so near that they could distinguish the bulk of a
vehicle careering from side to side in the blackness ahead.  Dunn
deliberately raised his weapon.  "Sing out!" he repeated
impatiently.  But Brace, who was still keeping in the shadow,
suddenly grasped his companion's arm.

"Hush!  It's NOT Buckskin," he whispered hurriedly.

"Are you sure?"

"DON'T YOU SEE WE'RE GAINING ON HIM?" replied the other
contemptuously.  Dunn grasped his companion's hand and pressed it
silently.  Even in that supreme moment this horseman's tribute to
the fugitive Buckskin forestalled all baser considerations of
pursuit and capture!

In twenty seconds they were abreast of the stranger, crowding his
horse and buggy nearly into the ditch; Brace keenly watchful,
Dunn suppressed and pale.  In half a minute they were leading him
a length; and when their horse again settled down to his steady
work, the stranger was already lost in the circling dust that
followed them.  But the victors seemed disappointed.  The
obscurity had completely hidden all but the vague outlines of the
mysterious driver.

"He's not our game, anyway," whispered Dunn.  "Drive on."

"But if it was some friend of his," suggested Brace uneasily,
"what would you do?"

"What I SAID I'd do," responded Dunn savagely.  "I don't want
five minutes to do it in, either; we'll be half an hour ahead of
that d--d fool, whoever he is.  Look here; all you've got to do
is to put me in the trail to that cabin.  Stand back of me, out
of gun-shot, alone, if you like, as my deputy, or with any number
you can pick up as my posse.  If he gets by me as Nellie's lover,
you may shoot him or take him as a horse thief, if you like."

"Then you won't shoot him on sight?"

"Not till I've had a word with him."

"But--"

"I've chirped," said the sheriff gravely.  "Drive on."

For a few moments only the plunging hoofs and rattling wheels
were heard.  A dull, lurid glow began to define the horizon.
They were silent until an abatement of the smoke, the vanishing
of the gloomy horizon line, and a certain impenetrability in the
darkness ahead showed them they were nearing the Carquinez Woods.
But they were surprised on entering them to find the dim aisles
alight with a faint mystic Aurora.  The tops of the towering
spires above them had caught the gleam of the distant forest
fires, and reflected it as from a gilded dome.

"It would be hot work if the Carquinez Woods should conclude to
take a hand in this yer little game that's going on over on the
Divide yonder," said Brace, securing his horse and glancing at
the spires overhead.  "I reckon I'd rather take a back seat at
Injin Spring when the show commences."

Dunn did not reply, but, buttoning his coat, placed one hand on
his companion's shoulder, and sullenly bade him "lead the way."
Advancing slowly and with difficulty the desperate man might have
been taken for a peaceful invalid returning from an early morning
stroll.  His right hand was buried thoughtfully in the side
pocket of his coat.  Only Brace knew that it rested on the handle
of his pistol.

From time to time the latter stopped and consulted the faint
trail with a minuteness that showed recent careful study.
Suddenly he paused.  "I made a blaze hereabouts to show where to
leave the trail.  There it is," he added, pointing to a slight
notch cut in the trunk of an adjoining tree.

"But we've just passed one," said Dunn, "if that's what you are
looking after, a hundred yards back."

Brace uttered an oath, and ran back in the direction signified by
his companion.  Presently he returned with a smile of triumph.

"They've suspected something.  It's a clever trick, but it won't
hold water.  That blaze which was done to muddle you was cut with
an axe; this which I made was done with a bowie-knife.  It's the
real one.  We're not far off now.  Come on."

They proceeded cautiously, at right angles with the "blazed"
tree, for ten minutes more.  The heat was oppressive; drops of
perspiration rolled from the forehead of the sheriff, and at
times, when he attempted to steady his uncertain limbs, his hands
shrank from the heated, blistering bark he touched with ungloved
palms.

"Here we are," said Brace, pausing at last.  "Do you see that
biggest tree, with the root stretching out halfway across to the
opposite one?"

"No, it's further to the right and abreast of the dead brush,"
interrupted Dunn quickly, with a sudden revelation that this was
the spot where he had found the dead bear in the night Teresa
escaped.

"That's so," responded Brace, in astonishment.

"And the opening is on the other side, opposite the dead brush,"
said Dunn.

"Then you know it?" said Brace suspiciously.

"I reckon!" responded Dunn, grimly.  "That's enough!  Fall back!"

To the surprise of his companion, he lifted his head erect, and
with a strong, firm step walked directly to the tree.  Reaching
it, he planted himself squarely before the opening.

"Halloo!" he said.

There was no reply.  A squirrel scampered away close to his feet.
Brace, far in the distance, after an ineffectual attempt to
distinguish his companion through the intervening trunks, took
off his coat, leaned against a tree, and lit a cigar.

"Come out of that cabin!" continued Dunn, in a clear, resonant
voice.  "Come out before I drag you out!"

"All right, 'Captain Scott.'  Don't shoot, and I'll come down,"
said a voice as clear and as high as his own.  The hanging strips
of bark were dashed aside, and a woman leaped lightly to the
ground.

Dunn staggered back.  "Teresa! by the Eternal!"

It was Teresa! the old Teresa!  Teresa, a hundred times more
vicious, reckless, hysterical, extravagant, and outrageous than
before.  Teresa, staring with tooth and eye, sunburnt and
embrowned, her hair hanging down her shoulders, and her shawl
drawn tightly around her neck.

"Teresa it is! the same old gal!  Here we are again!  Return of
the favorite in her original character!  For two weeks only!
Houp la!  Tshk!" and, catching her yellow skirt with her fingers,
she pirouetted before the astounded man, and ended in a pose.
Recovering himself with an effort, Dunn dashed forward and seized
her by the wrist.

"Answer me, woman!  Is that Low's cabin?"

"It is."

"Who occupies it besides?"

"I do."

"And who else?"

"Well," drawled Teresa slowly, with an extravagant affectation of
modesty, "nobody else but us, I reckon.  Two's company, you know,
and three's none."

"Stop!  Will you swear that there isn't a young girl, his--his
sweetheart--concealed there with you?"

The fire in Teresa's eye was genuine as she answered steadily,
"Well, it ain't my style to put up with that sort of thing; at
least, it wasn't over at Yolo, and you know it, Jim Dunn, or I
wouldn't be here."

"Yes, yes," said Dunn hurriedly.  "But I'm a d--d fool, or worse,
the fool of a fool.  Tell me, Teresa, is this man Low your lover?"

Teresa lowered her eyes as if in maidenly confusion.  "Well, if
I'd known that YOU had any feeling of your own about it--if you'd
spoken sooner--"

"Answer me, you devil!"

"He is."

"And he has been with you here--yesterday--to-night?"

"He has."

"Enough."  He laughed a weak, foolish laugh, and, turning pale,
suddenly lapsed against a tree.  He would have fallen, but with a
quick instinct Teresa sprang to his side, and supported him
gently to a root.  The action over, they both looked astounded.

"I reckon that wasn't much like either you or me," said Dunn
slowly, "was it?  But if you'd let me drop then you'd have
stretched out the biggest fool in the Sierras."  He paused, and
looked at her curiously.  "What's come over you; blessed if I
seem to know you now."

She was very pale again, and quiet; that was all.

"Teresa!  d--n it, look here!  When I was laid up yonder in
Excelsior I said I wanted to get well for only two things.  One
was to hunt you down, the other to marry Nellie Wynn.  When I
came here I thought that last thing could never be.  I came here
expecting to find her here with Low, and kill him--perhaps kill
her too.  I never once thought of you; not once.  You might have
risen up before me--between me and him--and I'd have passed you
by.  And now that I find it's all a mistake, and it was you, not
her, I was looking for, why--"

"Why," she interrupted bitterly, "you'll just take me, of course,
to save your time and earn your salary.  I'm ready."

"But I'M not, just yet," he said faintly.  "Help me up."

She mechanically assisted him to his feet.

"Now stand where you are," he added, "and don't move beyond this
tree till I return."

He straightened himself with an effort, clenched his fists until
the nails were nearly buried in his palms, and strode with a
firm, steady step in the direction he had come.  In a few moments
he returned and stood before her.

"I've sent away my deputy--the man who brought me here, the fool
who thought you were Nellie.  He knows now he made a mistake.
But who it was he mistook for Nellie he does not know, nor shall
ever know, nor shall any living being know, other than myself.
And when I leave the wood to-day I shall know it no longer.  You
are safe here as far as I am concerned, but I cannot screen you
from others prying.  Let Low take you away from here as soon as
he can."

"Let him take me away?  Ah, yes.  For what?"

"To save you," said Dunn.  "Look here, Teresa!  Without knowing
it, you lifted me out of hell just now, and because of the wrong
I might have done her--for HER sake, I spare you and shirk my duty."

"For her sake!" gasped the woman--"for her sake!  Oh, yes!  Go on."

"Well," said Dunn gloomily, "I reckon perhaps you'd as lieve left
me in hell, for all the love you bear me.  And may be you've
grudge enough agin me still to wish I'd found her and him together."

"You think so?" she said, turning her head away.

"There, d--n it!  I didn't mean to make you cry.  May be you
wouldn't, then.  Only tell that fellow to take you out of this,
and not run away the next time he sees a man coming."

"He didn't run," said Teresa, with flashing eyes.  "I--I--I sent
him away," she stammered.  Then, suddenly turning with fury upon
him, she broke out, "Run!  Run from you!  Ha, ha!  You said just
now I'd a grudge against you.  Well, listen, Jim Dunn.  I'd only
to bring you in range of that young man's rifle, and you'd have
dropped in your tracks like--"

"Like that bar, the other night," said Dunn, with a short laugh.
"So THAT was your little game?"  He checked his laugh suddenly--a
cloud passed over his face.  "Look here, Teresa," he said, with
an assumption of carelessness that was as transparent as it was
utterly incompatible with his frank, open selfishness.  "What
became of that bar?  The skin--eh?  That was worth something?"

"Yes," said Teresa quietly.  "Low exchanged it and got a ring for
me from that trader Isaacs.  It was worth more, you bet.  And the
ring didn't fit either--"

"Yes," interrupted Dunn, with an almost childish eagerness.

"And I made him take it back, and get the value in money.  I hear
that Isaacs sold it again and made another profit; but that's
like those traders."  The disingenuous candor of Teresa's manner
was in exquisite contrast to Dunn.  He rose and grasped her hand
so heartily she was forced to turn her eyes away.

"Good-by!" he said.

"You look tired," she murmured, with a sudden gentleness that
surprised him; "let me go with you a part of the way."

"It isn't safe for you just now," he said, thinking of the
possible consequences of the alarm Brace had raised.

"Not the way YOU came," she replied; "but one known only to
myself."

He hesitated only a moment.  "All right, then," he said finally,
"let us go at once.  It's suffocating here, and I seem to feel
this dead bark crinkle under my feet."

She cast a rapid glance around her, and then seemed to sound with
her eyes the far-off depths of the aisles, beginning to grow pale
with the advancing day, but still holding a strange quiver of
heat in the air.  When she had finished her half-abstracted
scrutiny of the distance, she cast one backward glance at her own
cabin and stopped.

"Will you wait a moment for me?" she asked gently.

"Yes--but--no tricks, Teresa!  It isn't worth the time."

She looked him squarely in the eyes without a word.

"Enough," he said; "go!"

She was absent for some moments.  He was beginning to become
uneasy, when she made her appearance again, clad in her old faded
black dress.  Her face was very pale, and her eyes were swollen,
but she placed his hand on her shoulder, and bidding him not to
fear to lean upon her, for she was quite strong, led the way.

"You look more like yourself now, and yet--blast it all!--you
don't either," said Dunn, looking down upon her.  "You've changed
in some way.  What is it?  Is it on account of that Injin?
Couldn't you have found a white man in his place?"

"I reckon he's neither worse nor better for that," she replied
bitterly; "and perhaps he wasn't as particular in his taste as a
white man might have been.  But," she added, with a sudden spasm
of her old rage, "it's a lie; he's NOT an Indian, no more than I
am.  Not unless being born of a mother who scarcely knew him, of
a father who never even saw him, and being brought up among white
men and wild beasts--less cruel than they were--could make him one!"

Dunn looked at her in surprise not unmixed with admiration.  "If
Nellie," he thought, "could but love ME like that!"  But he only
said:

"For all that, he's an Injin.  Why, look at his name.  It ain't
Low.  It's L'Eau Dormante, Sleeping Water, an Injin name."

"And what does that prove?" returned Teresa.  "Only that Indians
clap a nick-name on any stranger, white or red, who may camp with
them.  Why, even his own father, a white man, the wretch who
begot him and abandoned him,--HE had an Indian name--Loup Noir."

"What name did you say?"

"Le Loup Noir, the Black Wolf.  I suppose you'd call him an
Indian, too?  Eh!  What's the matter?  We're walking too fast.
Stop a moment and rest.  There--there, lean on me!"

She was none too soon; for, after holding him upright a moment,
his limbs failed, and stooping gently she was obliged to support
him half reclining against a tree.

"Its the heat!" he said.  "Give me some whisky from my flask.
Never mind the water," he added faintly, with a forced laugh,
after he had taken a draught at the strong spirit.  "Tell me more
about the other water--the Sleeping Water--you know.  How do you
know all this about him and his--father?"

"Partly from him and partly from Curson, who wrote to me about
him," she answered with some hesitation.

But Dunn did not seem to notice this incongruity of correspondence
with a former lover.  "And HE told you?"

"Yes; and I saw the name on an old memorandum book he has, which
he says belonged to his father.  It's full of old accounts of
some trading post on the frontier.  It's been missing for a day
or two, but it will turn up.  But I can swear I saw it."

Dunn attempted to rise to his feet.  "Put your hand in my
pocket," he said in a hurried whisper.  "No, there!--bring out a
book.  There, I haven't looked at it yet.  Is that it?" he added,
handing her the book Brace had given him a few hours before.

"Yes," said Teresa, in surprise.  "Where did you find it?"

"Never mind!  Now let me see it, quick.  Open it, for my sight is
failing.  There--thank you--that's all!"

"Take more whisky," said Teresa, with a strange anxiety creeping
over her.  "You are faint again."

"Wait!  Listen, Teresa--lower--put your ear lower.  Listen!  I
came near killing that chap Low to-day.  Wouldn't it have been
ridiculous?"

He tried to smile, but his head fell back.  He had fainted.


CHAPTER IX


For the first time in her life Teresa lost her presence of mind
in an emergency.  She could only sit staring at the helpless man,
scarcely conscious of his condition, her mind filled with a
sudden prophetic intuition of the significance of his last words.
In the light of that new revelation she looked into his pale,
haggard face for some resemblance to Low, but in vain.  Yet her
swift feminine instinct met the objection.  "It's the mother's
blood that would show," she murmured, "not this man's."

Recovering herself, she began to chafe his hands and temples, and
moistened his lips with the spirit.  When his respiration
returned with a faint color to his cheeks, she pressed his hands
eagerly and leaned over him.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Of what?" he whispered faintly.

"That Low is really your son?"

"Who said so?" he asked, opening his round eyes upon her.

"You did yourself, a moment ago," she said quickly.  "Don't you
remember?"

"Did I?"

"You did.  Is it not so?"

He smiled faintly.  "I reckon."

She held her breath in expectation.  But only the ludicrousness
of the discovery seemed paramount to his weakened faculties.
"Isn't it just about the ridiculousest thing all round?" he said,
with a feeble chuckle.  "First YOU nearly kill me before you know
I am Low's father; then I'm just spoilin' to kill him before I
know he's my son; then that god-forsaken fool Jack Brace mistakes
you for Nellie and Nellie for you.  Ain't it just the biggest
thing for the boys to get hold of?  But we must keep it dark
until after I marry Nellie, don't you see?  Then we'll have a
good time all round, and I'll stand the drinks.  Think of it,
Teresha!  You don' no me, I do' no you, nobody knowsh anybody
elsh.  I try kill Lo'.  Lo' wants kill Nellie.  No thath no ri--'"
but the potent liquor, overtaking his exhausted senses,
thickened, impeded, and at last stopped his speech.  His head
slipped to her shoulder, and he became once more unconscious.

Teresa breathed again.  In that brief moment she had abandoned
herself to a wild inspiration of hope which she could scarcely
define.  Not that it was entirely a wild inspiration; she tried
to reason calmly.  What if she revealed the truth to him?  What
if she told the wretched man before her that she had deceived
him; that she had overheard his conversation with Brace; that she
had stolen Brace's horse to bring Low warning; that, failing to
find Low in his accustomed haunts, or at the campfire, she had
left a note for him pinned to the herbarium, imploring him to fly
with his companion from the danger that was coming; and that,
remaining on watch, she had seen them both--Brace and Dunn--
approaching, and had prepared to meet them at the cabin?  Would
this miserable and maddened man understand her self-abnegation?
Would he forgive Low and Nellie?--she did not ask for herself.
Or would the revelation turn his brain, if it did not kill him
outright?  She looked at the sunken orbits of his eyes and hectic
on his cheek, and shuddered.

Why was this added to the agony she already suffered?  She had
been willing to stand between them with her life, her liberty,
and even--the hot blood dyed her cheek at the thought--with the
added shame of being thought the cast-off mistress of that man's
son.  Yet all this she had taken upon herself in expiation of
something--she knew not clearly what; no, for nothing--only for
HIM.  And yet this very situation offered her that gleam of hope
which had thrilled her; a hope so wild in its improbability, so
degrading in its possibility, that at first she knew not whether
despair was not preferable to its shame.  And yet was it
unreasonable?  She was no longer passionate; she would be calm
and think it out fairly.

She would go to Low at once.  She would find him somewhere--and
even if with that girl, what mattered?--and she would tell him
all.  When he knew that the life and death of his father lay in
the scale, would he let his brief, foolish passion for Nellie
stand in the way?  Even if he were not influenced by filial
affection or mere compassion, would his pride let him stoop to a
rivalry with the man who had deserted his youth?  Could he take
Dunn's promised bride, who must have coquetted with him to have
brought him to this miserable plight?  Was this like the calm,
proud young god she knew?  Yet she had an uneasy instinct that
calm, proud young gods and goddesses did things like this, and
felt the weakness of her reasoning flush her own conscious cheek.

"Teresa!"

She started.  Dunn was awake, and was gazing at her curiously.

"I was reckoning it was the only square thing for Low to stop
this promiscuous picnicking here and marry you out and out."

"Marry me!" said Teresa in a voice that, with all her efforts,
she could not make cynical.

"Yes," he repeated, "after I've married Nellie; tote you down to
San Angeles, and there take my name like a man, and give it to
you.  Nobody'll ask after TERESA, sure--you bet your life.  And
if they do, and he can't stop their jaw, just you call on the old
man.  It's mighty queer, ain't it, Teresa, to think of your being
my daughter-in-law?"

It seemed here as if he was about to lapse again into unconsciousness
over the purely ludicrous aspect of the subject, but he haply
recovered his seriousness.  "He'll have as much money from me as he
wants to go into business with.  What's his line of business,
Teresa?" asked this prospective father-in-law, in a large, liberal way.

"He is a botanist!" said Teresa, with a sudden childish animation
that seemed to keep up the grim humor of the paternal suggestion;
"and oh, he is too poor to buy books!  I sent for one or two for
him myself, the other day--" she hesitated--"it was all the money
I had, but it wasn't enough for him to go on with his studies."

Dunn looked at her sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks, and became
thoughtful.  "Curson must have been a d--d fool," he said finally.

Teresa remained silent.  She was beginning to be impatient and
uneasy, fearing some mischance that might delay her dreaded, yet
longed-for meeting with Low.  Yet she could not leave this sick
and exhausted man, HIS FATHER, now bound to her by more than mere
humanity.

"Couldn't you manage," she said gently, "to lean on me a few
steps further, until I could bring you to a cooler spot and
nearer assistance?"

He nodded.  She lifted him almost like a child to his feet.  A
spasm of pain passed over his face.  "How far is it?" he asked.

"Not more than ten minutes," she replied.

"I can make a spurt for that time," he said coolly, and began to
walk slowly but steadily on.  Only his face, which was white and
set, and the convulsive grip of his hand on her arm betrayed the
effort.  At the end of ten minutes she stopped.  They stood
before the splintered, lightning-scarred shaft in the opening of
the woods, where Low had built her first camp-fire.  She
carefully picked up the herbarium, but her quick eye had already
detected in the distance, before she had allowed Dunn to enter
the opening with her, that her note was gone.  Low had been there
before them; he had been warned, as his absence from the cabin
showed; he would not return there.  They were free from
interruption--but where had he gone?

The sick man drew a long breath of relief as she seated him in
the clover-grown hollow where she had slept the second night of
her stay.  "It's cooler than those cursed woods," he said.  "I
suppose it's because it's a little like a grave.  What are you
going to do now?" he added, as she brought a cup of water and
placed it at his side.

"I am going to leave you here for a little while," she said
cheerfully, but with a pale face and nervous hands.  "I'm going
to leave you while I seek Low."

The sick man raised his head.  "I'm good for a spurt, Teresa,
like that I've just got through, but I don't think I'm up to a
family party.  Couldn't you issue cards later on?"

"You don't understand," she said.  "I'm going to get Low to send
some one of your friends to you here.  I don't think he'll
begrudge leaving HER a moment for that," she added to herself
bitterly.

"What's that you're saying?" he queried, with the nervous
quickness of an invalid.

"Nothing--but that I'm going now."  She turned her face aside to
hide her moistened eyes.  "Wish me good luck, won't you?" she
asked, half sadly, half pettishly.

"Come here!"

She came and bent over him.  He suddenly raised his hands, and,
drawing her face down to his own, kissed her forehead.

"Give that to HIM," he whispered, "from ME."

She turned and fled, happily for her sentiment, not hearing the
feeble laugh that followed, as Dunn, in sheer imbecility, again
referred to the extravagant ludicrousness of the situation.  "It
is about the biggest thing in the way of a sell all round," he
repeated, lying on his back, confidentially to the speck of
smoke-obscured sky above him.  He pictured himself repeating it,
not to Nellie--her severe propriety might at last overlook the
fact, but would not tolerate the joke--but to her father!  It
would be one of those characteristic Californian jokes Father
Wynn would admire.

To his exhaustion fever presently succeeded, and he began to grow
restless.  The heat too seemed to invade his retreat, and from
time to time the little patch of blue sky was totally obscured by
clouds of smoke.  He amused himself with watching a lizard who
was investigating a folded piece of paper, whose elasticity gave
the little creature lively apprehensions of its vitality.  At
last he could stand the stillness of his retreat and his supine
position no longer, and rolled himself out of the bed of leaves
that Teresa had so carefully prepared for him.  He rose to his
feet stiff and sore, and, supporting himself by the nearest tree,
moved a few steps from the dead ashes of the camp-fire.  The
movement frightened the lizard, who abandoned the paper and fled.
With a satirical recollection of Brace and his "ridiculous"
discovery through the medium of this animal, he stooped and
picked up the paper.  "Like as not," he said to himself, with
grim irony, "these yer lizards are in the discovery business.
P'r'aps this may lead to another mystery," and he began to unfold
the paper with a smile.  But the smile ceased as his eye suddenly
caught his own name.

A dozen lines were written in pencil on what seemed to be a blank
leaf originally torn from some book.  He trembled so that he was
obliged to sit down to read these words:--


"When you get this keep away from the woods.  Dunn and another
man are in deadly pursuit of you and your companion.  I overheard
their plan to surprise you in our cabin.  DON'T GO THERE, and I
will delay them and put them off the scent.  Don't mind me.  God
bless you, and if you never see me again think sometimes of

"TERESA."


His trembling ceased; he did not start, but rose in an abstracted
way, and made a few deliberate steps in the direction Teresa had
gone.  Even then he was so confused that he was obliged to refer
to the paper again, but with so little effect that he could only
repeat the last words, "think sometimes of Teresa."  He was
conscious that this was not all; he had a full conviction of
being deceived, and knew that he held the proof in his hand, but
he could not formulate it beyond that sentence.  "Teresa"--yes,
he would think of her.  She would explain it.  And here she was
returning.

In that brief interval her face and manner had again changed.
Her face was pale and quite breathless.  She cast a swift glance
at Dunn and the paper he mechanically held out, walked up to him,
and tore it from his hand.

"Well," she said hoarsely, "what are you going to do about it?"

He attempted to speak, but his voice failed him.  Even then he
was conscious that if he had spoken he would have only repeated,
"think sometimes of Teresa."  He looked longingly but helplessly
at the spot where she had thrown the paper, as if it had
contained his unuttered words.

"Yes," she went on to herself, as if he was a mute, indifferent
spectator--"yes, they're gone.  That ends it all.  The game's
played out.  Well!" suddenly turning upon him, "now you know it
all.  Your Nellie WAS here with him, and is with him now.  Do you
hear?  Make the most of it; you've lost them--but here I am."

"Yes," he said eagerly--"yes, Teresa."

She stopped, stared at him; then taking him by the hand led him
like a child back to his couch.  "Well," she said, in half-savage
explanation, "I told you the truth when I said the girl wasn't at
the cabin last night, and that I didn't know her.  What are you
glowerin' at?  No!  I haven't lied to you, I swear to God, except
in one thing.  Did you know what that was?  To save him I took
upon me a shame I don't deserve.  I let you think I was his
mistress.  You think so now, don't you?  Well, before God to-day--
and He may take me when He likes--I'm no more to him than a
sister!  I reckon your Nellie can't say as much."

She turned away, and with the quick, impatient stride of some
caged animal made the narrow circuit of the opening, stopping a
moment mechanically before the sick man, and again, without
looking at him, continuing her monotonous round.  The heat had
become excessive, but she held her shawl with both hands drawn
tightly over her shoulders.  Suddenly a wood-duck darted out of
the covert blindly into the opening, struck against the blasted
trunk, fell half stunned near her feet, and then, recovering,
fluttered away.  She had scarcely completed another circuit
before the irruption was followed by a whirring bevy of quail, a
flight of jays, and a sudden tumult of wings swept through the
wood like a tornado.  She turned inquiringly to Dunn, who had
risen to his feet, but the next moment she caught convulsively at
his wrist; a wolf had just dashed through the underbrush not a
dozen yards away, and on either side of them they could hear the
scamper and rustle of hurrying feet like the outburst of a summer
shower.  A cold wind arose from the opposite direction, as if to
contest this wild exodus, but it was followed by a blast of
sickening heat.  Teresa sank at Dunn's feet in an agony of terror.

"Don't let them touch me!" she gasped; "keep them off!  Tell me,
for God's sake, what has happened!"

He laid his hand firmly on her arm, and lifted her in his turn to
her feet like a child.  In that supreme moment of physical
danger, his strength, reason, and manhood returned in their
plenitude of power.  He pointed coolly to the trail she had
quitted, and said,

"The Carquinez Woods are on fire!"


CHAPTER X


The nest of the tuneful Burnhams, although in the suburbs of
Indian Spring, was not in ordinary weather and seasons hidden
from the longing eyes of the youth of that settlement.  That
night, however, it was veiled in the smoke that encompassed the
great highway leading to Excelsior.  It is presumed that the
Burnham brood had long since folded their wings, for there was no
sign of life nor movement in the house as a rapidly-driven horse
and buggy pulled up before it.  Fortunately, the paternal Burnham
was an early bird, in the habit of picking up the first stirring
mining worm, and a resounding knock brought him half dressed to
the street door.  He was startled at seeing Father Wynn before
him, a trifle flushed and abstracted.

"Ah ha! up betimes, I see, and ready.  No sluggards here--ha,
ha!" he said heartily, slamming the door behind him, and by a
series of pokes in the ribs genially backing his host into his
own sitting-room.  "I'm up, too, and am here to see Nellie.
She's here, eh--of course?" he added, darting a quick look at
Burnham.

But Mr. Burnham was one of those large, liberal Western husbands
who classified his household under the general title of "woman
folk," for the integers of which he was not responsible.  He
hesitated, and then propounded over the balusters to the upper
story the direct query--

"You don't happen to have Nellie Wynn up there, do ye?"

There was an interval of inquiry proceeding from half a dozen
reluctant throats, more or less cottony and muffled, in those
various degrees of grievance and mental distress which indicate
too early roused young womanhood.  The eventual reply seemed to
be affirmative, albeit accompanied with a suppressed giggle, as
if the young lady had just been discovered as an answer to an
amusing conundrum.

"All right," said Wynn, with an apparent accession of boisterous
geniality.  "Tell her I must see her, and I've only got a few
minutes to spare.  Tell her to slip on anything and come down;
there's no one here but myself, and I've shut the front door on
Brother Burnham.  Ha, ha!" and suiting the action to the word, he
actually bundled the admiring Brother Burnham out on his own
doorstep.  There was a light pattering on the staircase, and
Nellie Wynn, pink with sleep, very tall, very slim, hastily
draped in a white counterpane with a blue border and a general
classic suggestion, slipped into the parlor.  At the same moment
her father shut the door behind her, placed one hand on the knob,
and with the other seized her wrist.

"Where were you yesterday?" he asked.

Nellie looked at him, shrugged her shoulders, and said, "Here."

"You were in the Carquinez Woods with Low Dorman; you went there
in disguise; you've met him there before.  He is your clandestine
lover; you have taken pledges of affection from him; you have--"

"Stop!" she said.

He stopped.

"Did he tell you this?" she asked, with an expression of disdain.

"No; I overheard it.  Dunn and Brace were at the house waiting
for you.  When the coach did not bring you, I went to the office
to inquire.  As I left our door I thought I saw somebody
listening at the parlor windows.  It was only a drunken Mexican
muleteer leaning against the house; but if HE heard nothing, I
did.  Nellie, I heard Brace tell Dunn that he had tracked you in
your disguise to the woods--do you hear? that when you pretended
to be here with the girls you were with Low--alone; that you wear
a ring that Low got of a trader here; that there was a cabin in
the woods--"

"Stop!" she repeated.

Wynn again paused.

"And what did YOU do?" she asked.

"I heard they were starting down there to surprise you and him
together, and I harnessed up and got ahead of them in my buggy."

"And found me here," she said, looking full into his eyes.

He understood her and returned the look.  He recognized the full
importance of the culminating fact conveyed in her words, and was
obliged to content himself with its logical and worldly
significance.  It was too late now to take her to task for mere
filial disobedience; they must become allies.

"Yes," he said hurriedly; "but if you value your reputation, if
you wish to silence both these men, answer me fully."

"Go on," she said.

"Did you go to the cabin in the woods yesterday?"

"No."

"Did you ever go there with Low?"

"No; I do not know even where it is."

Wynn felt that she was telling the truth.  Nellie knew it; but as
she would have been equally satisfied with an equally efficacious
falsehood, her face remained unchanged.

"And when did he leave you?"

"At nine o'clock, here.  He went to the hotel."

"He saved his life, then, for Dunn is on his way to the woods to
kill him."

The jeopardy of her lover did not seem to affect the young girl
with alarm, although her eyes betrayed some interest.

"Then Dunn has gone to the woods?" she said thoughtfully.

"He has," replied Wynn.

"Is that all?" she asked.

"I want to know what you are going to do?"

"I WAS going back to bed."

"This is no time for trifling, girl."

"I should think not," she said, with a yawn; "it's too early, or
too late."

Wynn grasped her wrist more tightly.  "Hear me!  Put whatever
face you like on this affair, you are compromised--and compromised
with a man you can't marry."

"I don't know that I ever wanted to marry Low, if you mean him,"
she said quietly.

"And Dunn wouldn't marry you now."

"I'm not so sure of that, either."

"Nellie," said Wynn excitedly, "do you want to drive me mad?
Have you nothing to say--nothing to suggest?"

"Oh, you want me to help you, do you!  Why didn't you say that
first?  Well, go and bring Dunn here."

"Are you mad?  The man has gone already in pursuit of your lover,
believing you with him."

"Then he will the more readily come and talk with me without him.
Will you take the invitation--yes or no?"

"Yes, but--"

"Enough.  On your way there you will stop at the hotel and give
Low a letter from me."

"Nellie!"

"You shall read it, of course," she said scornfully, "for it will
be your text for the conversation you will have with him.  Will
you please take your hand from the lock and open the door?"

Wynn mechanically opened the door.  The young girl flew up-
stairs.  In a very few moments she returned with two notes: one
contained a few lines of formal invitation to Dunn; the other
read as follows:


"DEAR MR. DORMAN,--My father will tell you how deeply I regret
that our recent botanical excursions in the Carquinez Woods have
been a source of serious misapprehensions to those who had a
claim to my consideration, and that I shall be obliged to
discontinue them for the future.  At the same time he wishes me
to express my gratitude for your valuable instruction and
assistance in that pleasing study, even though approaching events
may compel me to relinquish it for other duties.  May I beg you
to accept the inclosed ring as a slight recognition of my
obligations to you?

"Your grateful pupil,

"NELLIE WYNN."


When he had finished reading the letter, she handed him a ring,
which he took mechanically.  He raised his eyes to hers with
perfectly genuine admiration.  "You're a good girl, Nellie," he
said, and, in a moment of parental forgetfulness, unconsciously
advanced his lips towards her cheek.  But she drew back in time
to recall him to a sense of that human weakness.

"I suppose I'll have time for a nap yet," she said, as a gentle
hint to her embarrassed parent.  He nodded and turned towards the
door.

"If I were you," she continued, repressing a yawn, "I'd manage to
be seen on good terms with Low at the hotel; so perhaps you need
not give the letter to him until the last thing.  Good-by."

The sitting-room door opened and closed behind her as she slipped
up-stairs, and her father, without the formality of leave-taking,
quietly let himself out by the front door.

When he drove into the high road again, however, an overlooked
possibility threatened for a moment to indefinitely postpone his
amiable intentions regarding Low.  The hotel was at the further
end of the settlement towards the Carquinez Woods, and as Wynn
had nearly reached it he was recalled to himself by the sounds of
hoofs and wheels rapidly approaching from the direction of the
Excelsior turnpike.  Wynn made no doubt it was the sheriff and
Brace.  To avoid recognition at that moment, he whipped up his
horse, intending to keep the lead until he could turn into the
first cross-road.  But the coming travelers had the fleetest
horse, and finding it impossible to distance them he drove close
to the ditch, pulling up suddenly as the strange vehicle was
abreast of him, and forcing them to pass him at full speed, with
the result already chronicled.  When they had vanished in the
darkness, Mr. Wynn, with a heart overflowing with Christian
thankfulness and universal benevolence, wheeled round, and drove
back to the hotel he had already passed.  To pull up at the
veranda with a stentorian shout, to thump loudly at the deserted
bar, to hilariously beat the panels of the landlord's door, and
commit a jocose assault and battery upon that half-dresssed and
half-awakened man, was eminently characteristic of Wynn, and part
of his amiable plans that morning.

"Something to wash this wood smoke from my throat, Brother
Carter, and about as much again to prop open your eyes," he said,
dragging Carter before the bar, "and glasses round for as many of
the boys as are up and stirring after a hard-working Christian's
rest.  How goes the honest publican's trade, and who have we here?"

"Thar's Judge Robinson and two lawyers from Sacramento, Dick
Curson over from Yolo," said Carter, "and that ar young Injin
yarb doctor from the Carquinez Woods.  I reckon he's jist up--I
noticed a light under his door as I passed."

"He's my man for a friendly chat before breakfast," said Wynn.
"You needn't come up.  I'll find the way.  I don't want a light;
I reckon my eyes ain't as bright nor as young as his, but they'll
see almost as far in the dark--he! he!"  And, nodding to Brother
Carter, he strode along the passage, and with no other introduction
than a playful and preliminary "Boo!" burst into one of the rooms.
Low, who by the light of a single candle was bending over the plates
of a large quarto, merely raised his eyes and looked at the intruder.
The young man's natural imperturbability, always exasperating to
Wynn, seemed accented that morning by contrast with his own
over-acted animation.

"Ah ha!--wasting the midnight oil instead of imbibing the morning
dews," said Father Wynn archly, illustrating his metaphor with a
movement of his hand to his lips.  "What have we here?"

"An anonymous gift," replied Low simply, recognizing the father
of Nellie by rising from his chair.  "It's a volume I've longed
to possess, but never could afford to buy.  I cannot imagine who
sent it to me."

Wynn was for a moment startled by the thought that this recipient
of valuable gifts might have influential friends.  But a glance
at the bare room, which looked like a camp, and the strange,
unconventional garb of its occupant, restored his former
convictions.  There might be a promise of intelligence, but
scarcely of prosperity, in the figure before him.

"Ah!  We must not forget that we are watched over in the night
season," he said, laying his hand on Low's shoulder, with an
illustration of celestial guardianship that would have been
impious but for its palpable grotesqueness.  "No, sir, we know
not what a day may bring forth."

Unfortunately, Low's practical mind did not go beyond a mere
human interpretation.  It was enough, however, to put a new light
in his eye and a faint color in his cheek.

"Could it have been Miss Nellie?" he asked, with half-boyish
hesitation.

Mr. Wynn was too much of a Christian not to bow before what
appeared to him the purely providential interposition of this
suggestion.  Seizing it and Low at the same moment, he playfully
forced him down again in his chair.

"Ah, you rascal!" he said, with infinite archness; "that's your
game, is it?  You want to trap poor Father Wynn.  You want to
make him say 'No.'  You want to tempt him to commit himself.  No,
sir!--never, sir!--no, no!"

Firmly convinced that the present was Nellie's, and that her
father only good-humoredly guessed it, the young man's simple,
truthful nature was embarrassed.  He longed to express his
gratitude, but feared to betray the young girl's trust.  The
Reverend Mr. Wynn speedily relieved his mind.

"No" he continued, bestriding a chair, and familiarly confronting
Low over its back.  "No, sir--no!  And you want me to say 'No,'
don't you, regarding the little walks of Nellie and a certain
young man in the Carquinez Woods?--ha, ha!  You'd like me to say
that I knew nothing of the botanizings, and the herb collectings,
and the picknickings there--he, he!--you sly dog!  Perhaps you'd
like to tempt Father Wynn further, and make him swear he knows
nothing of his daughter disguising herself in a duster and
meeting another young man--isn't it another young man?--all
alone, eh?  Perhaps you want poor old Father Wynn to say No.  No,
sir, nothing of the kind ever occurred.  Ah, you young rascal!"

Slightly troubled, in spite of Wynn's hearty manner, Low, with
his usual directness, however, said, "I do not want anyone to
deny that I have seen Miss Nellie."

"Certainly, certainly," said Wynn, abandoning his method,
considerably disconcerted by Low's simplicity, and a certain
natural reserve that shook off his familiarity.  "Certainly it's
a noble thing to be able to put your hand on your heart and say
to the world, 'Come on, all of you!  Observe me; I have nothing
to conceal.  I walk with Miss Wynn in the woods as her
instructor--her teacher, in fact.  We cull a flower here and
there; we pluck an herb fresh from the hands of the Creator.  We
look, so to speak, from Nature to Nature's God.'  Yes, my young
friend, we should be the first to repel the foul calumny that
could misinterpret our most innocent actions."

"Calumny?" repeated Low, starting to his feet.  "What calumny?"

"My friend, my noble young friend, I recognize your indignation.
I know your worth.  When I said to Nellie, my only child, my
perhaps too simple offspring--a mere wildflower like yourself--
when I said to her, 'Go, my child, walk in the woods with this
young man, hand in hand.  Let him instruct you from the humblest
roots, for he has trodden in the ways of the Almighty.  Gather
wisdom from his lips, and knowledge from his simple woodman's
craft.  Make, in fact, a collection not only of herbs, but of
moral axioms and experience'--I knew I could trust you, and,
trusting you, my young friend, I felt I could trust the world.
Perhaps I was weak, foolish.  But I thought only of her welfare.
I even recall how that to preserve the purity of her garments, I
bade her don a simple duster; that, to secure her from the
trifling companionship of others, I bade her keep her own
counsel, and seek you at seasons known but to yourselves."

"But . . . did Nellie . . . understand you?" interrupted Low
hastily.

"I see you read her simple nature.  Understand me?  No, not at
first!  Her maidenly instinct--perhaps her duty to another--took
the alarm.  I remember her words.  'But what will Dunn say?' she
asked.  'Will he not be jealous?'"

"Dunn! jealous!  I don't understand," said Low, fixing his eyes
on Wynn.

"That's just what I said to Nellie.  'Jealous!' I said.  'What,
Dunn, your affianced husband, jealous of a mere friend--a
teacher, a guide, a philosopher.  It is impossible.'  Well, sir,
she was right.  He is jealous.  And, more than that, he has
imparted his jealousy to others!  In other words, he has made a
scandal!"

Low's eyes flashed.  "Where is your daughter now?" he said sternly.

"At present in bed, suffering from a nervous attack brought on by
these unjust suspicions.  She appreciates your anxiety, and,
knowing that you could not see her, told me to give you this."
He handed Low the ring and the letter.

The climax had been forced, and, it must be confessed, was by no
means the one Mr. Wynn had fully arranged in his own inner
consciousness.  He had intended to take an ostentatious leave of
Low in the bar-room, deliver the letter with archness, and escape
before a possible explosion.  He consequently backed towards the
door for an emergency.  But he was again at fault.  That
unaffected stoical fortitude in acute suffering, which was the
one remaining pride and glory of Low's race, was yet to be
revealed to Wynn's civilized eyes.

The young man took the letter, and read it without changing a
muscle, folded the ring in it, and dropped it into his haversack.
Then he picked up his blanket, threw it over his shoulder, took
his trusty rifle in his hand, and turned towards Wynn as if
coldly surprised that he was still standing there.

"Are you--are you--going?" stammered Wynn.

"Are you NOT?" replied Low dryly, leaning on his rifle for a
moment as if waiting for Wynn to precede him.  The preacher
looked at him a moment, mumbled something, and then shambled
feebly and ineffectively down the staircase before Low, with a
painful suggestion to the ordinary observer of being occasionally
urged thereto by the moccasin of the young man behind him.

On reaching the lower hall, however, he endeavored to create a
diversion in his favor by dashing into the bar-room and clapping
the occupants on the back with indiscriminate playfulness.  But
here again he seemed to be disappointed.  To his great
discomfiture, a large man not only returned his salutation with
powerful levity, but with equal playfulness seized him in his
arms, and after an ingenious simulation of depositing him in the
horse-trough set him down in affected amazement.  "Bleth't if I
didn't think from the weight of your hand it wath my old friend,
Thacramento Bill," said Curson apologetically, with a wink at the
bystanders.  "That'th the way Bill alwayth uthed to tackle hith
friendth, till he wath one day bounthed by a prithe-fighter in
Frithco, whom he had mithtaken for a mithionary."  As Mr.
Curson's reputation was of a quality that made any form of
apology from him instantly acceptable, the amused spectators made
way for him as, recognizing Low, who was just leaving the hotel,
he turned coolly from them and walked towards him.

"Halloo!" he said, extending his hand.  "You're the man I'm
waiting for.  Did you get a book from the exthpreth offithe latht
night?"

"I did.  Why?"

"It'th all right.  Ath I'm rethponthible for it, I only wanted to
know."

"Did YOU send it?" asked Low, quickly fixing his eyes on his
face.

"Well, not exactly ME.  But it'th not worth making a mythtery of
it.  Teretha gave me a commithion to buy it and thend it to you
anonymouthly.  That'th a woman'th nonthenth, for how could thee
get a retheipt for it?"

"Then it was HER present," said Low gloomily.

"Of courthe.  It wathn't mine, my boy.  I'd have thent you a
Tharp'th rifle in plathe of that muthle loader you carry, or
thomething thenthible.  But, I thay! what'th up?  You look ath if
you had been running all night."

Low grasped his hand.  "Thank you," he said hurriedly; "but it's
nothing.  Only I must be back to the woods early.  Good-by."

But Curson retained Low's hand in his own powerful grip.

"I'll go with you a bit further," he said.  "In fact, I've got
thomething to thay to you; only don't be in thuch a hurry; the
woodth can wait till you get there."  Quietly compelling Low to
alter his own characteristic Indian stride to keep pace with his,
he went on: "I don't mind thaying I rather cottoned to you from
the time you acted like a white man--no offenthe--to Teretha.
She thayth you were left when a child lying round, jutht ath
promithcuouthly ath she wath; and if I can do anything towardth
putting you on the trail of your people, I'll do it.  I know
thome of the voyageurth who traded with the Cherokeeth, and your
father wath one-wathn't he?"  He glanced at Low's utterly
abstracted and immobile face.  "I thay, you don't theem to take a
hand in thith game, pardner.  What'th the row?  Ith anything
wrong over there?" and he pointed to the Carquinez Woods, which
were just looming out of the morning horizon in the distance.

Low stopped.  The last words of his companion seemed to recall
him to himself.  He raised his eyes automatically to the woods
and started.

"There IS something wrong over there," he said breathlessly.
"Look!"

"I thee nothing," said Curson, beginning to doubt Low's sanity;
"nothing more than I thaw an hour ago."

"Look again.  Don't you see that smoke rising straight up?  It
isn't blown over there from the Divide; it's new smoke!  The fire
is in the woods!"

"I reckon that'th so," muttered Curson, shading his eyes with his
hand.  "But, hullo! wait a minute!  We'll get hortheth.  I say!"
he shouted, forgetting his lisp in his excitement--"stop!"  But
Low had already lowered his head and darted forward like an arrow.

In a few moments he had left not only his companion but the last
straggling houses of the outskirts far behind him, and had struck
out in a long, swinging trot for the disused "cut-off."  Already
he fancied he heard the note of clamor in Indian Spring, and
thought he distinguished the sound of hurrying hoofs on the great
highway.  But the sunken trail hid it from his view.  From the
column of smoke now plainly visible in the growing morning light
he tried to locate the scene of the conflagration.  It was
evidently not a fire advancing regularly from the outer skirt of
the wood, communicated to it from the Divide; it was a local
outburst near its centre.  It was not in the direction of his
cabin in the tree.  There was no immediate danger to Teresa,
unless fear drove her beyond the confines of the wood into the
hands of those who might recognize her.  The screaming of jays
and ravens above his head quickened his speed, as it heralded the
rapid advance of the flames; and the unexpected apparition of a
bounding body, flattened and flying over the yellow plain, told
him that even the secure retreat of the mountain wild-cat had
been invaded.  A sudden recollection of Teresa's uncontrollable
terror that first night smote him with remorse and redoubled his
efforts.  Alone in the track of these frantic and bewildered
beasts, to what madness might she not be driven!

The sharp crack of a rifle from the high road turned his course
momentarily in that direction.  The smoke was curling lazily over
the heads of the party of men in the road, while the huge hulk of
a grizzly was disappearing in the distance.  A battue of the
escaping animals had commenced!  In the bitterness of his heart
he caught at the horrible suggestion, and resolved to save her
from them or die with her there.

How fast he ran, or the time it took him to reach the woods, has
never been known.  Their outlines were already hidden when he
entered them.  To a sense less keen, a courage less desperate,
and a purpose less unaltered than Low's, the wood would have been
impenetrable.  The central fire was still confined to the lofty
tree tops, but the downward rush of wind from time to time drove
the smoke into the aisles in blinding and suffocating volumes.
To simulate the creeping animals, and fall to the ground on hands
and knees, feel his way through the underbrush when the smoke was
densest, or take advantage of its momentary lifting, and without
uncertainty, mistake, or hesitation glide from tree to tree in
one undeviating course, was possible only to an experienced
woodsman.  To keep his reason and insight so clear as to be able
in the midst of this bewildering confusion to shape that course
so as to intersect the wild and unknown tract of an inexperienced,
frightened wanderer belonged to Low, and Low alone.  He was making
his way against the wind towards the fire.  He had reasoned that
she was either in comparative safety to windward of it, or he
should meet her being driven towards him by it, or find her
succumbed and fainting at its feet.  To do this he must penetrate
the burning belt, and then pass under the blazing dome.  He was
already upon it; he could see the falling fire dropping like rain
or blown like gorgeous blossoms of the conflagration across his
path.  The space was lit up brilliantly.  The vast shafts of dull
copper cast no shadow below, but there was no sign nor token of any
human being.  For a moment the young man was at fault.  It was true
this hidden heart of the forest bore no undergrowth; the cool matted
carpet of the aisles seemed to quench the glowing fragments as they
fell.  Escape might be difficult, but not impossible, yet every
moment was precious.  He leaned against a tree, and sent his voice
like a clarion before him: "Teresa!"  There was no reply.  He called
again.  A faint cry at his back from the trail he had just traversed
made him turn.  Only a few paces behind him, blinded and staggering,
but following like a beaten and wounded animal, Teresa, halted,
knelt, clasped her hands, and dumbly held them out before her.
"Teresa!" he cried again, and sprang to her side.

She caught him by the knees, and lifted her face imploringly to his.

"Say that again!" she cried, passionately.  "Tell me it was
Teresa you called, and no other!  You have come back for me!  You
would not let me die here alone!"

He lifted her tenderly in his arms, and cast a rapid glance
around him.  It might have been his fancy, but there seemed a
dull glow in the direction he had come.

"You do not speak!" she said.  "Tell me!  You did not come here
to seek her?"

"Whom?" he said quickly.

"Nellie!"

With a sharp cry he let her slip to the ground.  All the pent-up
agony, rage, and mortification of the last hour broke from him in
that inarticulate outburst.  Then, catching her hands again, he
dragged her to his level.

"Hear me!" he cried, disregarding the whirling smoke and the
fiery baptism that sprinkled them--"hear me!  If you value your
life, if you value your soul, and if you do not want me to cast
you to the beasts like Jezebel of old, never--never take that
accursed name again upon your lips.  Seek her--HER?  Yes!  Seek
her to tie her like a witch's daughter of hell to that blazing
tree!"  He stopped.  "Forgive me," he said in a changed voice.
"I'm mad, and forgetting myself and you.  Come."

Without noticing the expression of half-savage delight that had
passed across her face, he lifted her in his arms.

"Which way are you going?" she asked, passing her hands vaguely
across his breast, as if to reassure herself of his identity.

"To our camp by the scarred tree," he replied.

"Not there, not there," she said, hurriedly.  "I was driven from
there just now.  I thought the fire began there until I came here."

Then it was as he feared.  Obeying the same mysterious law that
had launched this fatal fire like a thunderbolt from the burning
mountain crest five miles away into the heart of the Carquinez
Woods, it had again leaped a mile beyond, and was hemming them
between two narrowing lines of fire.  But Low was not daunted.
Retracing his steps through the blinding smoke, he strode off at
right angles to the trail near the point where he had entered the
wood.  It was the spot where he had first lifted Nellie in his
arms to carry her to the hidden spring.  If any recollection of
it crossed his mind at that moment, it was only shown in his
redoubled energy.  He did not glide through the thick underbrush,
as on that day, but seemed to take a savage pleasure in breaking
through it with sheer brute force.  Once Teresa insisted upon
relieving him of the burden of her weight, but after a few steps
she staggered blindly against him, and would fain have recourse
once more to his strong arms.  And so, alternately staggering,
bending, crouching, or bounding and crashing on, but always in
one direction, they burst through the jealous rampart, and came
upon the sylvan haunt of the hidden spring.  The great angle of
the half-fallen tree acted as a harrier to the wind and drifting
smoke, and the cool spring sparkled and bubbled in the almost
translucent air.  He laid her down beside the water, and bathed
her face and hands.  As he did so his quick eye caught sight of a
woman's handkerchief lying at the foot of the disrupted root.
Dropping Teresa's hand, he walked towards it, and with the toe of
his moccasin gave it one vigorous kick into the ooze at the
overflow of the spring.  He turned to Teresa, but she evidently
had not noticed the act.

"Where are you?" she asked, with a smile.

Something in her movement struck him!  He came towards her, and
bending down looked into her face.  "Teresa!  Good God!--look at
me!  What has happened?"

She raised her eyes to his.  There was a slight film across them;
the lids were blackened; the beautiful lashes gone forever!

"I see you a little now, I think," she said, with a smile,
passing her hands vaguely over his face.  "It must have happened
when he fainted, and I had to drag him through the blazing brush;
both my hands were full, and I could not cover my eyes."

"Drag whom?" said Low, quickly.

"Why, Dunn."

"Dunn!  He here?" said Low, hoarsely.

"Yes; didn't you read the note I left on the herbarium?  Didn't
you come to the camp-fire?" she asked hurriedly, clasping his
hands.  "Tell me quickly!"

"No!"

"Then you were not there--then you didn't leave me to die?"

"No!  I swear it, Teresa!" the stoicism that had upheld his own
agony breaking down before her strong emotion.

"Thank God!"  She threw her arms around him, and hid her aching
eyes in his troubled breast.

"Tell me all, Teresa," he whispered in her listening ear.  "Don't
move; stay there, and tell me all."

With her face buried in his bosom, as if speaking to his heart
alone, she told him part, but not all.  With her eyes filled with
tears, but a smile on her lips, radiant with new-found happiness,
she told him how she had overheard the plans of Dunn and Brace,
how she had stolen their conveyance to warn him in time.  But
here she stopped, dreading to say a word that would shatter the
hope she was building upon his sudden revulsion of feeling for
Nellie.  She could not bring herself to repeat their interview--
that would come later, when they were safe and out of danger; now
not even the secret of his birth must come between them with its
distraction, to mar their perfect communion.  She faltered that
Dunn had fainted from weakness, and that she had dragged him out
of danger.  "He will never interfere with us--I mean," she said
softly, "with ME again.  I can promise you that as well as if he
had sworn it."

"Let him pass, now," said Low; "that will come later on," he
added, unconsciously repeating her thought in a tone that made
her heart sick.  "But tell me, Teresa, why did you go to
Excelsior?"

She buried her head still deeper, as if to hide it.  He felt her
broken heart beat against his own; he was conscious of a depth of
feeling her rival had never awakened in him.  The possibility of
Teresa loving him had never occurred to his simple nature.  He
bent his head and kissed her.  She was frightened, and unloosed
her clinging arms; but he retained her hand, and said, "We will
leave this accursed place, and you shall go with me as you said
you would; nor need you ever leave me, unless you wish it."

She could hear the beating of her own heart through his words;
she longed to look at the eyes and lips that told her this, and
read the meaning his voice alone could not entirely convey.  For
the first time she felt the loss of her sight.  She did not know
that it was, in this moment of happiness, the last blessing
vouchsafed to her miserable life.

A few moments of silence followed, broken only by the distant
rumor of the conflagration and the crash of falling boughs.

"It may be an hour yet," he whispered, "before the fire has swept
a path for us to the road below.  We are safe here, unless some
sudden current should draw the fire down upon us.  You are not
frightened?"  She pressed his hand; she was thinking of the pale
face of Dunn, lying in the secure retreat she had purchased for
him at such a sacrifice.  Yet the possibility of danger to him
now for a moment marred her present happiness and security.  "You
think the fire will not go north of where you found me?" she
asked softly.

"I think not," he said, "but I will reconnoitre.  Stay where you
are."

They pressed hands, and parted.  He leaped upon the slanting
trunk and ascended it rapidly.  She waited in mute expectation.

There was a sudden movement of the root on which she sat, a
deafening crash, and she was thrown forward on her face.

The vast bulk of the leaning tree, dislodged from its aerial
support by the gradual sapping of the spring at its roots, or by
the crumbling of the bark from the heat, had slipped, made a half
revolution, and, falling, overbore the lesser trees in its path,
and tore, in its resistless momentum, a broad opening to the
underbrush.

With a cry to Low, Teresa staggered to her feet.  There was an
interval of hideous silence, but no reply.  She called again.
There was a sudden deepening roar, the blast of a fiery furnace
swept through the opening, a thousand luminous points around her
burst into fire, and in an instant she was lost in a whirlwind of
smoke and flame!  From the onset of its fury to its culmination
twenty minutes did not elapse; but in that interval a radius of
two hundred yards around the hidden spring was swept of life and
light and motion.

For the rest of that day and part of the night a pall of smoke
hung above the scene of desolation.  It lifted only towards the
morning, when the moon, rising high, picked out in black and
silver the shrunken and silent columns of those roofless vaults,
shorn of base and capital.  It flickered on the still,
overflowing pool of the hidden spring, and shone upon the white
face of Low, who, with a rootlet of the fallen tree holding him
down like an arm across his breast, seemed to be sleeping
peacefully in the sleeping water.

       .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Contemporaneous history touched him as briefly, but not as
gently.  "It is now definitely ascertained," said "The
Slumgullion Mirror," "that Sheriff Dunn met his fate in the
Carquinez Woods in the performance of his duty; that fearless man
having received information of the concealment of a band of horse
thieves in their recesses.  The desperadoes are presumed to have
escaped, as the only remains found are those of two wretched
tramps, one of whom is said to have been a digger, who supported
himself upon roots and herbs, and the other a degraded half-white
woman.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that the fire
originated through their carelessness, although Father Wynn of
the First Baptist Church, in his powerful discourse of last
Sunday, pointed at the warning and lesson of such catastrophes.
It may not be out of place here to say that the rumors regarding
an engagement between the pastor's accomplished daughter and the
late lamented sheriff are utterly without foundation, as it has
been an on dit for some time in all well-informed circles that
the indefatigable Mr. Brace, of Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Express,
will shortly lead the lady to the hymeneal altar."