The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories Part 3

"But," interrupted Madison quickly, "you're mistaken. I wasn't"--

"Hol' on," said McGee, quietly; "I know you got out o' the way without you seein' me or me you, because you didn't know it was me, don't you see? don't you follow? and that's just it! It mout have bin some one from the Bar as seed you instead o' ME. See? That's why you lit out before I could recognize you, and that's why poor Safie was so mighty fl.u.s.tered at first and was for runnin' away until she kem to herself agin. When, of course, she laughed, and agreed you must have mistook me."

"But," gasped Madison quickly, "I WASN'T THERE AT ALL LAST NIGHT."

"What?"

The two men had risen simultaneously and were facing each other. McGee, with a good-natured, half-critical expression, laid his hand on Wayne's shoulder and slightly turned him towards the window, that he might see his face. It seemed to him white and dazed.

"You--wasn't there--last night?" he repeated, with a slow tolerance.

Scarcely a moment elapsed, but the agony of an hour may have thrilled through Wayne's consciousness before he spoke. Then all the blood of his body rushed to his face with his first lie as he stammered, "No! Yes! Of course. I have made a mistake--it WAS I."

"I see--you thought I was riled?" said McGee quietly.

"No; I was thinking it was NIGHT BEFORE LAST! Of course it was last night. I must be getting silly." He essayed a laugh--rare at any time with him--and so forced now that it affected McGee more than his embarra.s.sment. He looked at Wayne thoughtfully, and then said slowly: "I reckon I did come upon you a little too sudden last night, but, you see, I was thinkin' of suthin' else and disremembered you might be there. But I wasn't mad--no! no! and I only spoke about it now that you might be more keerful before folks. You follow me? You understand what I mean?"

He turned and walked to the door, when he halted. "You follow me, don't you? It ain't no cussedness o' mine, or want o' trustin', don't you see?

Mebbe I oughtened have spoken. I oughter remembered that times this sort o' thing must be rather rough on you and her. You follow me? You understand what I mean? Good-night."

He walked slowly down the path towards the river. Had Madison Wayne been watching him, he would have noticed that his head was bent and his step less free. But Madison Wayne was at that moment sitting rigidly in his chair, nursing, with all the gloomy concentration of a monastic nature, a single terrible suspicion.

CHAPTER IV.

Howbeit the sun shone cheerfully over the Bar the next morning and the next; the breath of life and activity was in the air; the settlement never had been more prosperous, and the yield from the opened placers on the drained river-bed that week was enormous. The Brothers Wayne were said to be "rolling in gold." It was thought to be consistent with Madison Wayne's nature that there was no trace of good fortune in his face or manner--rather that he had become more nervous, restless, and gloomy. This was attributed to the joylessness of avarice as contrasted with the spendthrift gayety of the more liberal Arthur, and he was feared and RESPECTED as a miser. His long, solitary walks around the promontory, his incessant watchfulness, his reticence when questioned, were all recognized as the indications of a man whose soul was absorbed in money-getting. The reverence they failed to yield to his religious isolation they were willing to freely accord to his financial abstraction. But Mr. McGee was not so deceived. Overtaking him one day under the fringe of willows, he characteristically chided him with absenting himself from Mrs. McGee and her house since their last interview.

"I reckon you did not harbor malice in your Christianity," he said; "but it looks mighty like ez if ye was throwing off on Safie and me on account of what I said."

In vain Madison gloomily and almost sternly protested.

McGee looked him all over with his clear measuring eye, and for some minutes was singularly silent. At last he said slowly: "I've been thinkin' suthin' o' goin' down to 'Frisco, and I'd be a heap easier in my mind ef you'd promise to look arter Safie now and then."

"You surely are not going to leave her here ALONE?" said Wayne roughly.

"Why not?"

For an instant Wayne hesitated. Then he burst out. "For a hundred reasons! If she ever wanted your protection, before, she surely does now. Do you suppose the Bar is any less heathen or more regenerated than it was when you thought it necessary to guard her with your revolver?

Man! It is a hundred times worse than then! The new claims have filled it with spying adventurers--with wolves like Hamlin and his friends--idolaters who would set up Baal and Ashteroth here--and fill your tents with the curses of Sodom!"

Perhaps it was owing to the Scriptural phrasing, perhaps it was from some unusual authority of the man's manner, but a look of approving relief and admiration came into McGee's clear eyes.

"And YOU'RE just the man to tackle 'em," he said, clapping his hand on Wayne's shoulder. "That's your gait--keep it up! But," he added, in a lower voice, "me and my revolver are played out." There was a strangeness in the tone that arrested Wayne's attention. "Yes,"

continued McGee, stroking his beard slowly, "men like me has their day, and revolvers has theirs; the world turns round and the Bar fills up, and this yer river changes its course--and it's all in the day's work.

You understand what I mean--you follow me? And if anything should happen to me--not that it's like to; but it's in the way o' men--I want you to look arter Safie. It ain't every woman ez has two men, ez like and unlike, to guard her. You follow me--you understand what I mean, don't you?" With these words he parted somewhat abruptly from Wayne, turning into the steep path to the promontory crest and leaving his companion lost in gloomy abstraction. The next day Alexander McGee had departed on a business trip to San Francisco.

In his present frame of mind, with his new responsibility and the carrying out of a plan which he had vaguely conceived might remove the terrible idea that had taken possession of him, Madison Wayne was even relieved when his brother also announced his intention of going to Angel's for a few days.

For since his memorable interview with McGee he had been convinced that Safie had been clandestinely visited by some one. Whether it was the thoughtless and momentary indiscretion of a willful woman, or the sequel to some deliberately planned intrigue, did not concern him so much as the falsity of his own position, and the conniving lie by which he had saved her and her lover. That at this crucial moment he had failed to "testify" to guilt and wickedness; that he firmly believed--such is the inordinate vanity of the religious zealot--that he had denied Him in his effort to s.h.i.+eld HER; and that he had broken faith with the husband who had entrusted to him the custody of his wife's honor, seemed to him more terrible than her faithlessness. In his first horror he had dreaded to see her, lest her very confession--he knew her reckless frankness towards himself--should reveal to him the extent of his complicity. But since then, and during her husband's absence, he had convinced himself that it was his duty to wrestle and strive with her weak spirit, to implore her to reveal her new intrigue to her husband, and then he would help her to sue for his forgiveness. It was a part of the inconsistency of his religious convictions; in his human pa.s.sion he was perfectly unselfish, and had already forgiven her the offense against himself. He would see her at once!

But it happened to be a quiet, intense night, with the tremulous opulence of a full moon that threw quivering shafts of light like summer lightning over the blue river, and laid a wonderful carpet of intricate lace along the path that wound through the willows to the crest. There was the dry, stimulating dust and spice of heated pines from below; the languorous odors of syringa; the faint, feminine smell of southernwood, and the infinite mystery of silence. This silence was at times softly broken with the tender inarticulate whisper of falling leaves, broken sighs from the tree-tops, and the languid stretching of wakened and unclasping boughs. Madison Wayne had not, alas! taken into account this subtle conspiracy of Night and Nature, and as he climbed higher, his steps began to falter with new and strange sensations. The rigidity of purpose which had guided the hard religious convictions that always sustained him, began to relax. A tender sympathy stole over him; a loving mercy to himself as well as others stole into his heart. He thought of HER as she had nestled at his side, hand in hand, upon the moonlit veranda of her father's house, before his hard convictions had chilled and affrighted her. He thought of her fresh simplicity, and what had seemed to him her wonderful girlish beauty, and lo! in a quick turn of the path he stood breathless and tremulous before the house. The moonbeams lay tenderly upon the peaceful eaves; the long blossoms of the Madeira vine seemed sleeping also. The pink flush of the Cherokee rose in the unreal light had become chastely white.

But he was evidently too late for an interview. The windows were blank in the white light; only one--her bedroom--showed a light behind the lowered muslin blind. Her draped shadow once or twice pa.s.sed across it.

He was turning away with soft steps and even bated breath when suddenly he stopped. The exaggerated but unmistakable shadow of a man stood beside her on the blind.

With a fierce leap as of a maniac, he was at the door, pounding, rattling, and uttering hoa.r.s.e and furious outcries. Even through his fury he heard quickened footsteps--her light, reckless, half-hysterical laugh--a bound upon the staircase--the hurried unbolting and opening of distant doors, as the lighter one with which he was struggling at last yielded to his blind rage, and threw him cras.h.i.+ng into the sitting-room.

The back door was wide open. He could hear the rustling and crackling of twigs and branches in different directions down the hillside, where the fugitives had separated as they escaped. And yet he stood there for an instant, dazed and wondering, "What next?"

His eyes fell upon McGee's rifle standing upright in the corner. It was a clean, beautiful, precise weapon, even to the unprofessional eye, its long, laminated hexagonal barrel taking a tenderer blue in the moonlight. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. It was capped and loaded. Without a pause he dashed down the hill.

Only one thought was in his mind now--the crudest, simplest duty. He was there in McGee's place; he should do what McGee would do. G.o.d had abandoned him, but McGee's rifle remained.

In a few minutes' downward plunging he had reached the river bank. The tranquil silver surface quivered and glittered before him. He saw what he knew he would see, the black target of a man's head above it, making for the Bar. He took deliberate aim and fired. There was no echo to that sharp detonation; a distant dog barked, there was a slight whisper in the trees beside him, that was all! But the head of the man was no longer visible, and the liquid silver filmed over again, without a speck or stain.

He shouldered the rifle, and with the automatic action of men in great crises returned slowly and deliberately to the house and carefully replaced the rifle in its old position. He had no concern for the miserable woman who had fled; had she appeared before him at the moment, he would not have noticed her. Yet a strange instinct--it seemed to him the vaguest curiosity--made him ascend the stairs and enter her chamber. The candle was still burning on the table with that awful unconsciousness and simplicity of detail which makes the scene of real tragedy so terrible. Beside it lay a belt and leather pouch. Madison Wayne suddenly dashed forward and seized it, with a wild, inarticulate cry; staggered, fell over the chair, rose to his feet, blindly groped his way down the staircase, burst into the road, and, hugging the pouch to his bosom, fled like a madman down the hill.

The body of Arthur Wayne was picked up two days later a dozen miles down the river. Nothing could be more evident and prosaic than the manner in which he had met his fate. His body was only partly clothed, and the money pouch and belt, which had been securely locked next his skin, after the fas.h.i.+on of all miners, was gone. He was known to have left the Bar with a considerable sum of money; he was undoubtedly dogged, robbed, and murdered during his journey on the river bank by the desperadoes who were beginning to infest the vicinity. The grief and agony of his only brother, sole survivor of that fraternal and religious partners.h.i.+p so well known to the camp, although shown only by a grim and speechless melancholy,--broken by unintelligible outbursts of religious raving,--was so real, that it affected even the callous camp. But scarcely had it regained its feverish distraction, before it was thrilled by another sensation. Alexander McGee had fallen from the deck of a Sacramento steamboat in the Straits of Carquinez, and his body had been swept out to sea. The news had apparently been first to reach the ears of his devoted wife, for when the camp--at this lapse of the old prohibition--climbed to her bower with their rude consolations, the house was found locked and deserted. The fateful influence of the promontory had again prevailed, the grim record of its seclusion was once more unbroken.

For with it, too, drooped and faded the fortunes of the Bar. Madison Wayne sold out his claim, endowed the church at the Cross Roads with the proceeds, and the pulpit with his grim, hopeless, denunciatory presence.

The first rains brought a freshet to the Bar. The river leaped the light barriers that had taken the place of Wayne's peaceful engines, and regained the old channel. The curse that the Rev. Madison Wayne had launched on this riverside Sodom seemed to have been fulfilled. But even this brought no satisfaction to the gloomy prophet, for it was presently known that he had abandoned his terror-stricken flock to take the circuit as revivalist preacher and camp-meeting exhorter, in the rudest and most lawless of gatherings. Desperate ruffians writhed at his feet in impotent terror or more impotent rage; murderers and thieves listened to him with blanched faces and set teeth, restrained only by a more awful fear. Over and over again he took his life with his Bible into his own hands when he rose above the excited mult.i.tude; he was shot at, he was rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweeping over the country, carrying fear and frenzy with him, scouting life and mercy, and crus.h.i.+ng alike the guilty and innocent, he came one Sabbath to a rocky crest of the Sierras--the last tattered and frayed and soiled fringe of civilization on the opened tract of a great highway. And here he was to "testify," as was his wont.

But not as he expected. For as he stood up on a boulder above the thirty or forty men sitting or lying upon other rocks and boulders around him, on the craggy mountain shelf where they had gathered, a man also rose, elbowed past them, and with a hurried impulse tried to descend the declivity. But a cry was suddenly heard from others, quick and clamoring, which called the whole a.s.sembly to its feet, and it was seen that the fugitive had in some blundering way fallen from the precipice.

He was brought up cruelly maimed and mangled, his ribs crushed, and one lung perforated, but still breathing and conscious. He had asked to see the preacher. Death impending, and even then struggling with his breath, made this request imperative. Madison Wayne stopped the service, and stalked grimly and inflexibly to where the dying man lay. But there he started.

"McGee!" he said breathlessly.

"Send these men away," said McGee faintly. "I've got suthin' to tell you."

The men drew back without a word. "You thought I was dead," said McGee, with eyes still undimmed and marvelously clear. "I orter bin, but it don't need no doctor to say it ain't far off now. I left the Bar to get killed; I tried to in a row, but the fellows were skeert to close with me, thinkin' I'd shoot. My reputation was agin me, there! You follow me?

You understand what I mean?"

Kneeling beside him now and grasping both his hands, the changed and horror-stricken Wayne gasped, "But"--

"Hold on! I jumped off the Sacramento boat--I was goin' down the third time--they thought on the boat I was gone--they think so now! But a pa.s.sin' fisherman dived for me. I grappled him--he was clear grit and would have gone down with me, but I couldn't let him die too--havin' so to speak no cause. You follow me--you understand me? I let him save me.

But it was all the same, for when I got to 'Frisco I read as how I was drowned. And then I reckoned it was all right, and I wandered HERE, where I wasn't known--until I saw you."

"But why should you want to die?" said Wayne, almost fiercely. "What right have you to die while others--double-dyed and blood-stained, are condemned to live, 'testify,' and suffer?"

The dying man feebly waved a deprecation with his maimed hand, and even smiled faintly. "I knew you'd say that. I knew what you'd think about it, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I was in the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the man who had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, as you did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I was makin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart--for all she tried to be gentle and gay."

"Great G.o.d in heaven! Will you stop!" said Wayne, springing to his feet in agony. A frightened look--the first that any one had ever seen in the clear eyes of the Bell-ringer of Angel's--pa.s.sed over them, and he murmured tremulously: "All right--I'm stoppin'!"

So, too, was his heart, for the wonderful eyes were now slowly glazing.