From Sand Hill to Pine Part 10

"You and me!"

He looked where she pointed. The pool had settled, resumed its mirror-like calm, and reflected distinctly, not only their two bending faces, but their two figures kneeling side by side. Two tall redwoods rose on either side of them, like the columns before an altar.

There was a moment of silence. The drone of a b.u.mble-bee near by seemed to make the silence swim drowsily in their ears; far off they heard the faint beat of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r. The suggestion of their kneeling figures in this magic mirror was vague, unreasoning, yet for the moment none the less irresistible. His arm instinctively crept around her little waist as he whispered,--he scarce knew what he said,--"Perhaps here is the treasure I am seeking."

The girl laughed, released herself, and sprang up; the pan sank ingloriously to the bottom of the pool, where Fleming had to grope for it, a.s.sisted by Tinka, who rolled up her sleeve to her elbow. For a minute or two they washed gravely, but with no better success than attended his own individual efforts. The result in the bottom of the pan was the same. Fleming laughed.

"You see," he said gayly, "the Mammon of unrighteousness is not for me--at least, so near your father's tabernacle."

"That makes no difference now," said the girl quickly, "for dad is goin'

to move, anyway, farther up the mountains. He says it's gettin' too crowded for him here--when the last settler took up a section three miles off."

"And are YOU going too?" asked the young man earnestly.

Tinka nodded her brown head. Fleming heaved a genuine sigh. "Well, I'll try my hand here a little longer. I'll put up a notice of claim; I don't suppose your father would object. You know he couldn't LEGALLY."

"I reckon ye might do it ef ye wanted--ef ye was THAT keen on gettin'

gold!" said Tinka, looking away. There was something in the girl's tone which this budding lover resented. He had become sensitive.

"Oh, well," he said, "I see that it might make unpleasantness with your father. I only thought," he went on, with tenderer tentativeness, "that it would be pleasant to work here near you."

"Ye'd be only wastin' yer time," she said darkly.

Fleming rose gravely. "Perhaps you're right," he answered sadly and a little bitterly, "and I'll go at once."

He walked to the spring, and gathered up his tools. "Thank you again for your kindness, and good-by."

He held out his hand, which she took pa.s.sively, and he moved away.

But he had not gone far before she called him. He turned to find her still standing where he had left her, her little hands clinched at her side, and her widely opened eyes staring at him. Suddenly she ran at him, and, catching the lapels of his coat in both hands, held him rigidly fast.

"No! no! ye sha'n't go--ye mustn't go!" she said, with hysterical intensity. "I want to tell ye something! Listen!--you--you--Mr. Fleming!

I've been a wicked, wicked girl! I've told lies to dad--to mammy--to YOU! I've borne false witness--I'm worse than Sapphira--I've acted a big lie. Oh, Mr. Fleming, I've made you come back here for nothing!

Ye didn't find no gold the other day. There wasn't any. It was all me!

I--I--SALTED THAT PAN!"

"Salted it!" echoed Fleming, in amazement.

"Yes, 'salted it,'" she faltered; "that's what dad says they call it--what those wicked sons of Mammon do to their claims to sell them.

I--put gold in the pan myself; it wasn't there before."

"But why?" gasped Fleming.

She stopped. Then suddenly the fountains in the deep of her blue eyes were broken up; she burst into a sob, and buried her head in her hands, and her hands on his shoulder. "Because--because"--she sobbed against him--"I WANTED YOU to come back!"

He folded her in his arms. He kissed her lovingly, forgivingly, gratefully, tearfully, smilingly--and paused; then he kissed her sympathetically, understandingly, apologetically, explanatorily, in lieu of other conversation. Then, becoming coherent, he asked,--

"But WHERE did you get the gold?"

"Oh," she said between fitful and despairing sobs, "somewhere!--I don't know--out of the old Run--long ago--when I was little! I didn't never dare say anything to dad--he'd have been crazy mad at his own daughter diggin'--and I never cared nor thought a single bit about it until I saw you."

"And you have never been there since?"

"Never."

"Nor anybody else?"

"No."

Suddenly she threw back her head; her chip hat fell back from her face, rosy with a dawning inspiration! "Oh, say, Jack!--you don't think that--after all this time--there might"--She did not finish the sentence, but, grasping his hand, cried, "Come!"

She caught up the pan, he seized the shovel and pick, and they raced like boy and girl down the hill. When within a few hundred feet of the house she turned at right angles into the clearing, and saying, "Don't be skeered; dad's away," ran boldly on, still holding his hand, along the little valley. At its farther extremity they came to the "Run," a half-dried watercourse whose rocky sides were marked by the erosion of winter torrents. It was apparently as wild and secluded as the forest spring. "n.o.body ever came here," said the girl hurriedly, "after dad sunk the well at the house."

One or two pools still remained in the Run from the last season's flow, water enough to wash out several pans of dirt.

Selecting a spot where the white quartz was visible, Fleming attacked the bank with the pick. After one or two blows it began to yield and crumble away at his feet. He washed out a panful perfunctorily, more intent on the girl than his work; she, eager, alert, and breathless, had changed places with him, and become the anxious prospector! But the result was the same. He threw away the pan with a laugh, to take her little hand! But she whispered, "Try again."

He attacked the bank once more with such energy that a great part of it caved and fell, filling the pan and even burying the shovel in the debris. He unearthed the latter while Tinka was struggling to get out the pan.

"The mean thing is stuck and won't move," she said pettishly. "I think it's broken now, too, just like ours."

Fleming came laughingly forward, and, putting one arm around the girl's waist, attempted to a.s.sist her with the other. The pan was immovable, and, indeed, seemed to be broken and bent. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation and began hurriedly to brush away the dirt and throw the soil out of the pan.

In another moment he had revealed a fragment of decomposed quartz, like discolored honeycombed cheese, half filling the pan. But on its side, where the pick had struck it glancingly, there was a yellow streak like a ray of suns.h.i.+ne! And as he strove to lift it he felt in that unmistakable omnipotency of weight that it was seamed and celled with gold.

The news of Mr. Fleming's engagement, two weeks later, to the daughter of the recluse religious hunter who had made a big strike at Lone Run, excited some skeptical discussion, even among the honest congratulations of his partners.

"That's a mighty queer story how Jack got that girl sweet on him just by borrowin' a prospectin' pan of her," said Faulkner, between the whiffs of his pipe under the trees. "You and me might have borrowed a hundred prospectin' pans and never got even a drink thrown in. Then to think of that old preachin' c.o.o.n-hunter hevin' to give in and pa.s.s his strike over to his daughter's feller, jest because he had scruples about gold diggin' himself. He'd hev booted you and me outer his ranch first."

"Lord, ye ain't takin' no stock in that hogwash," responded the other.

"Why, everybody knows old man Jallinger pretended to be sick o' miners and minin' camps, and couldn't bear to hev 'em near him, only jest because he himself was all the while secretly prospectin' the whole lode and didn't want no interlopers. It was only when Fleming nippled in by gettin' hold o' the girl that Jallinger knew the secret was out, and that's the way he bought him off. Why, Jack wasn't no miner--never was--ye could see that. HE never struck anything. The only treasure he found in the woods was Tinka Jallinger!"

A BELLE OF CANADA CITY

Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small gla.s.s at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level--the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy's world--her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the gla.s.s, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the hollows of her temples. Like others of her s.e.x, she was a poor critic of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek as in her bright eyes and expression. Nevertheless, she was somewhat consoled by the ravis.h.i.+ng effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and turned away not wholly dissatisfied. Indeed, as the acknowledged belle of Canada City and the daughter of its princ.i.p.al banker, small wonder that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her faults--and her attractions.

She bounded down the stairs and into the front parlor, for their house possessed the unheard-of luxury of a double drawing-room, albeit the second apartment contained a desk, and was occasionally used by Cissy's father in private business interviews with anxious seekers of "advances"

who shunned the publicity of the bank. Here she instantly flew into the arms of her bosom friend, Miss Piney Tibbs, a girl only a shade or two less pretty than herself, who, always more or less ill at ease in these splendors, was awaiting her impatiently. For Miss Tibbs was merely the daughter of the hotel-keeper; and although Tibbs was a Southerner, and had owned "his own n.i.g.g.e.rs" in the States, she was of inferior position and a protegee of Cissy's.

"Thank goodness you've come," exclaimed Miss Tibbs, "for I've bin sittin' here till I nigh took root. What kep' ye?"

"How does it look?" responded Cissy, as a relevant reply.

The "it" referred to Cissy's new hat, and to the young girl the coherence was perfectly plain. Miss Tibbs looked at "it" severely. It would not do for a protegee to be too complaisant.