“Alas, my Lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts! ’Tis not a life,
’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”
—BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
That night the two miners rolled themselves in their blankets and lay down on the expanse of slippery grass under the pine. Moreau did not sleep soon. The day’s incidents were the first interruption to the monotony of their uneventful summer.
Now, the strong man, lying on his back, looking at the large white stars between the pine boughs, thought of what he had done with perplexity, but without regret. In the still peacefulness of the night he turned over in his mind what he should do when the woman grew stronger. Women were rare in the mining districts, and he knew that the emigrant wife could earn high wages as a servant either in Hangtown or the growing metropolis of Sacramento. The child might hamper her, but he could help her to take care of the child until she got fairly on her feet. He had nothing much to do with his “dust.” Strong and young and in California, that always meant money enough.
So he thought, pushing uneasiness from his mind. Turning on his hard bed he could see the dark bulk of the cabin with a glint of starlight on its window. Above, the black boughs of the pine made a network against the sky sown with stars of an extraordinary size and luster. He could hear the river sleepily murmuring to itself. Once, far off, in the higher mountains, the shrill, weird cry of a California lion tore the silence. He rose on his elbow, looking toward the cabin. The sound was a terrifying one, and he was prepared to see the woman come out, frightened, and had the words of reassurance ready to call to her. But there was no movement from the little hut. She was evidently wrapped in the sleep of utter fatigue.
In the morning he was down at a basin scooped in the stream bed making a hasty toilet, when Fletcher, sleepy-eyed and yawning, came slipping over the bank.
“What are we goin’ to do for breakfast?” he said. “Is that purchase o’ your’n goin’ to git it? She’d oughter do something to show she’s worth the two best horses this side er Hangtown.”
Moreau, with his hair and beard bedewed with his ducking, was about to answer when a sound from above attracted them.
Lucy was standing on the bank. In the clear morning light she looked white and pinched. Her wretched clothes of yesterday, a calico sack and skirt, were augmented by a clean apron of blue check. Her skirt was short and showed her feet in a pair of rusty shoes that were so large they might have been her husband’s.
“Are you comin’ to breakfast?” she said; “it’s ready.” Then she disappeared. The men looked at each other and Moreau shook the drops from his beard and began to try to pat his hair into order. The civilizing influence of woman—even such an unlovely woman as the emigrant’s wife—was beginning its work.
Lucy had evidently been busy. The litter that had disfigured the ground in front of the cabin was cleared away. Through the open door and window a current of resinous mountain air passed which counteracted the effect of the fire. Nevertheless she had evidently feared its heat would be oppressive, and had brought two of the boxes to the rude bench outside the doorway, and on these the breakfast was laid. It was of the simplest—fried bacon, coffee and hot biscuits—but the scent of these, hot and appetizing, was sweet in the nostrils of the hungry men.
Sitting on the bench, they fell to and were not disappointed. The emigrant’s wife had evidently great skill in the preparation of the simple food of the pioneer. With the scanty means at her hand she had concocted a meal that to the men, used to their own primitive cooking, seemed the most toothsome they had eaten since they left San Francisco.
As she retired into the cabin, Fletcher—his mouth full of biscuit—said:
“Well, she can cook anyway. I wonder how she gets her biscuits so all-fired light? They ain’t all saleratus, neither.”
Here she reappeared, carrying the coffee-pot, and, leaning over Fletcher’s shoulder, prepared to refill his tin cup.
“Put it down on the table. He can do it himself,” commanded Moreau suddenly.
She set it down instantly, with her invariable frightened obedience.
“We’re not used to being waited on,” he continued. “Now you sit down here,”—he rose from his end of the bench and pointed to it,—“and next thing we want I’ll go in and get it. You’ve had your own breakfast, of course?”
“No—I ain’t had mine yet,” she answered meekly.
“Well, why ain’t you?” he almost shouted. “What d’ye mean by giving us ours first?”
She looked terrified and shrank a little on the bench. Moreau had a dreadful idea that for a moment she was afraid of being struck.
“Here, take this cup,” he said, giving her his,—“and this bacon,” picking from the pan, which stood in the middle of the table, the choicest pieces, and a biscuit. “There—now eat. I’m done.”
She tried to eat, but it was evidently difficult. Her hands, bent and disfigured with work, shook. At intervals she cast a furtive, questioning look at him where he sat on an overturned box, eying her with good-humored interest. As he met the frightened dog-eyes he smiled encouragingly, but she was grave and returned to her breakfast with nervous haste.
As the men descended the bank to the stream bed, Fletcher said:
“Well, she’s some use in the world. That’s the first decent meal we’ve had since we left Sacramento.”
“She didn’t eat much of it herself,” returned his pard as he began the morning’s work.
“She is the gol-darnedest lookin’ woman I ever seen. Looks as if she’d been fed on shavings. I’ll lay ten to one that emigrant cuss she b’longs to has ’most beat the life out er her.”
Ascending to the cabin an hour later, Moreau came upon the woman, washing the breakfast dishes in the stream that trickled from the spring. She did not hear him approach, and, watching her, he saw that she was slow and feeble in her movements. The sun spattered down through the pine boughs on her thick, brilliant-colored hair, and on the nape of her neck, where the skin was tanned to a coarse, russet brown.
“What are you doing that for?” he said, coming to a standstill in front of her. “You needn’t bother about the pans.”
“They’d oughter be cleaned,” she answered.
“You don’t want to feel,” he said, “that you’ve got to work all the time. I wanted you to rest up a bit. It’s a good place to rest here.”
She made no answer, drying the tin cups on a piece of flour sack.
“I ain’t so awful tired,” she said presently in a low voice.
“Well, don’t you worry about having everything so clean; they’ll do anyway. And the cabin’s pretty clean,—isn’t it?” he asked, somewhat anxiously.
“Yes—awful clean,” she said. Then, after a moment, she continued: “I hadn’t oughter have stayed in the cabin. It’s your’n. Me and the baby’ll be all right in the brush shed with Spotty.”
“What nonsense!” retorted Moreau. “Do you suppose I’d let you and that baby stay in the brush shed, the place where the horses have been kept all summer? You’re going to keep the cabin, and if there’s anything you want—anything that’s short, or that you might need for the baby—why, Fletcher’ll go to Hangtown and get it. Just say what you want. Not having women around, we’re probably short of all sorts of little fixings.”
“I don’t want nothing,” she said with her head down—“I ain’t never been so comfortable sence I was married.”
“Have you been married long?” he asked, less from curiosity than from the desire to make her talk.
“Four years,” she replied; “I was married in St. Louis, just before dad and I was startin’ to cross the plains. Dad was taken sick. He was consumpted, and some one tol’ him to go to California, so we was goin’ to start along with a heap of other folks. We was all waitin’ ’round St. Louis for the weather to settle and that’s how I met Jake.”
“Jake?” said Moreau, interrogatively; “who was Jake?”
“My husband—Jake Shackleton. He was one o’ the drivers of the train. He drove McGinnes’ teams. He was there in camp with us, and up and asked me, and dad was glad to get any one to take care of me, bein’ as he was so consumpted. We was married a week afore the train started. I didn’t favor it much, but dad thought it was a good thing. My father was a Methodist preacher, and knowin’ as how he couldn’t last long, he was powerful glad to get some one to look after me. I was pretty young to be left—just fifteen.”
“Fifteen!” echoed Moreau—then piecing together her scant bits of biography—“Then you’re only nineteen now?”
“That’s my age,” she said with her laconic dryness.
He looked at her in incredulous amaze. Nineteen! A girl, almost a child! A gush of pity and horror welled up in him, and for the moment he could find no words. She went on, evidently desirous of telling him of herself as in duty bound to her new master.
“Dad died before we got to Salt Lake. Then Jake and I settled there and Willie was born, and for two years it wern’t so bad. Jake liked me and was good to me. But he got to know the Mormons and kep’ sayin’ all the time it weren’t no good doin’ anything not bein’ a Mormon. He said they had no use for him, bein’ a Gentile. And then he seen Bessie,—she was a waitress in the Sunset Hotel,—and got powerful set on her. She was a big, strong woman, and could work. Not like me. I couldn’t never work except in the house. I was no good for outdoor work. I was always a sort er drag, he said. So he turned Mormon and married Bessie, and she came to live with us.” She stopped and began rubbing a pan with a piece of flour sack.
“Don’t tell any more if you don’t want to,” said the man, hearing his voice slightly husky.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she answered with her colorless, unemotional intonation; “I couldn’t ever come to feel she was his wife, too. I hadn’t them notions. My father was a preacher. I hated it all, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do. I had to stay. There was no one to go to. Dad was dead and he didn’t have no relations. Then we started to come here, and on the way my little boy died. That was all I had, and I didn’t care then what happened. And only for the other baby I’d er crep’ out er the wagon some night and run away and got lost on them plains. But—”
She stopped and made a gesture of extending her hands outward and then letting them fall at her sides. It was tragic in its complete hopelessness. Of gratitude to Moreau she seemed to have little. She had been so beaten down by misfortune that nothing was left in her but acquiescence. Her very service to him seemed an instinctive thing, the result of rigorous training.
“Well,” he said after a pause, “you’ve had a hard time. But it’s over now. Don’t you think about it any more. You’re going to rest up here, and when you’re strong and well again we’ll think about something for you to do. Time enough for that then. But you can always get work and high pay in Hangtown or Sacramento. Or if you don’t fancy it at any of those places I’ll see to it that you go down to San Francisco. Don’t bother any more anyhow. You’d about got to the bottom of things and now you’re coming up.”
She gathered up her pans and said dully: “Thank you, sir.”
The cry of the baby struck on her ear and she scrambled to her feet, and without more words turned and walked to the cabin.
At dinner she again made her appearance on the bank and called the two men. Again they were greeted by a meal that was singularly appetizing, considering the limited resources. Obeying Moreau’s order, she sat down with them, but ate nothing, at intervals starting to her feet to return to the cabin, then restraining the impulse and sitting rigid and uncomfortable on the upturned box. To wait on the men seemed the only thing she knew how to do, or that gave her ease in the doing.
The child cried once or twice during dinner, and, in the afternoon, working in the pit which was in the stream bed just below the cabin window, Moreau heard it crying again. It seemed a louder and more imperious cry than it had given previously. The miner, whose knowledge of infancy and its ills was of the most limited, wondered if it could be sick.
At sunset, the day’s work over, both men mounted the bank, their takings of dust in two tin cups, from which it was transferred to the buckskin sacks in the box under the bunk. Moreau entered the cabin to get the sacks and found Lucy there curled on the end of the bunk where the baby slept. As his great bulk darkened the door she started up, with her invariable frightened look of apology.
“Don’t move—don’t move,” he said, kneeling by her; “I want to get the box under the bunk.”
She started up, and being nearer the box than he, thrust her hand under and tried to pull it out. It was heavy with the sacks of dust and required a wrench. She rose from the effort, gave a gasp, and, reeling, fell against him. He caught her in his arms, and as her head fell back against his shoulder saw that she was death-white and unconscious.
With terrified care he laid her on Fletcher’s bunk, and, seizing a pan of water, sprinkled her face and hands, then tore one of the tin cups off its nail, and, pouring whisky into it, tried to force it between her lips. A little entered her mouth, though most of it ran down her chin. As he stood staring at her, Fletcher appeared in the doorway.
“Hullo!” he said; “what’s the matter with her? By gum, but she looks bad!” And then, with a quick and practised hand, he pulled her up to a sitting posture, and, prying her mouth open with a fork, poured some of the whisky down. It revived her quickly. She sat up, felt for her sunbonnet, and then said:
“I hadn’t oughter have done that, but it came so quick.”
She tried to get up, but Moreau pushed her back.
“Oh, I ain’t sick,” she said, trying to speak bravely; “I’ve been took like that before. It’s just tiredness. I’m all right now.”
She again tried to rise, stood on her feet for a moment, then reeled back on the bunk, with white lips.
“It’s such a weakness,” she whispered; “such a weakness!”
At this moment the baby woke up, and, lifting up its voice, began a loud, violent wail. The woman looked in terror from one man to the other.
“Oh, my poor baby!” she cried; “what’ll I do? Is that one goin’ to go, too?”
“The baby’s all right,” said Moreau. “Don’t begin to worry about that. All babies cry, don’t they?”
“Oh, my poor baby!” she wailed, unheeding, and suddenly beginning to wring her hands. “It’ll die like Willie. It’ll die, too.”
“Why should it die? What’s the matter with it? It was all right this morning, wasn’t it?” he answered, feeling that there were mysteries here he did not grasp.
“It’ll die because it don’t get nothing to eat,” she cried desperately. “I’ve nothing for it. I’m too sick! I’m too sick! And it’ll starve. Oh, my poor baby!”
She burst into the wild, weak tears of exhaustion, her sobs mingling with the now strident yells of the hungry baby.
The two men looked at each other, sheepishly, beginning to understand the situation. The enfeebled condition of the mother made it impossible for her to nourish the child. It was a predicament for which even the resourceful mind of Fletcher had no remedy. He pushed back his cap, and, scratching slowly at the front of his head, looked at his mate with solemn perplexity, while the cabin echoed to sounds of misery unlike any that had ever before resounded within its peaceful walls.
“Can—can—we get anything?” said Moreau at length—“any—any—sort of food, meat, eggs—er—er any sort of stuff for it to eat?”
“Eat?” exclaimed Fletcher scornfully; “how can it eat? It hasn’t a tooth.”
“How would it do if Fletcher went into Hangtown and brought the doctor?” suggested Moreau, soothingly. “It’ll take twenty-four hours, but he’s a good doctor.”
The woman shook her head.
“A goat,” she sobbed, the menace to her offspring having given her a fictitious courage. “If you could get a goat.”
“A goat!”
The two men looked at each other, horror-stricken at the magnitude of the suggestion.
“She might as well ask us to get an elephant,” muttered Fletcher morosely. “There’s not a goat nearer than San Francisco.”
“And it would take us two weeks anyway to get one up from there and across the mountains from Sacramento,” said Moreau.
“By the time you got it here it’d be the most expensive goat you ever bucked up against,” said his partner disdainfully.
“A cow!” exclaimed Moreau. “Say, Lucy, would a cow do?”
“A cow!” came the muffled answer; “oh, it don’t need a whole cow.”
“But a cow would do? If I could get a cow the baby could be fed on the milk, couldn’t it?”
“Oh, yes; it ’ud do first-rate.”
“Very well, I’ll get a cow. Don’t you bother any more; I’ll have a cow here by to-morrow noon. The baby’ll have to hold out till then, for, not having a decent horse, I can’t get it here any sooner.”
“And where do you calk’late to get a cow?” demanded Fletcher; “cows ain’t much more common than goats round these parts.”
“On the Porter ranch. It’s twelve miles off. I can go in to-night, rest there a bit, and by noon be here with the cow.”
“And is that baby goin’ to yell like this from now till to-morrow noon? You might’s well have a mountain lion tied up in the bunk.”
The difficulty was indeed only half solved. The infant’s lusty cries were unabated. The miserable mother, with tear-drenched face and quivering chin, sat up in the bunk and tried to rise and go to it, but was restrained by Moreau’s hand on her shoulder.
“You stay here and I’ll get it,” he said, then crossed to the other bunk, and gingerly lifted with his huge, hairy hands the shrieking bundle, from which protruded two tiny, red fists, jerking and clawing about, and carried it to its mother. Her practised hand hushed it for a moment, but its pangs were beyond temporary alleviation, and its cries soon broke forth.
“If I could git up and mix it some flour and water,” she said, feebly attempting to rise.
“What’s the matter with us doing that?” queried Moreau. “How do you do it? Just give us the proportions and we’ll dish it up as if we were born to it.”
Under her direction he put flour in one of the dippers, and handed Fletcher a tin cup with the order to fill it with water at the spring. Both men were deeply interested, and Fletcher rushed back from the spring with a dripping cup, as if fearful that the infant would die unless the work of feeding was promptly begun.
“Now go on,” said Moreau, armed with the dipper and a tin teaspoon; “what’s next?”
“Sugar,” she said; “if you put a touch of sugar in it tastes better to them.”
“Here, sugar. Hand it over quick. Now, there we are. How do you mix ’em, Lucy?”
She gave the directions, which the men carefully followed, compounding a white, milky-looking liquid. The crucial moment came when they had to feed this to the crimson and convulsively screaming baby.
To forward matters better they moved two boxes to the doorway, where the glow of sunset streamed in, and seated themselves, Fletcher with the dipper and spoon, Moreau with the baby. Both heads were lowered, both faces eagerly earnest when the first spoonful was administered. It was a tense moment till the tip of the spoon was inserted between the infant’s lips. Her puckered face took on a look of rather annoyed surprise; she caught at it, and then, with an audible smack, slowly drew in the counterfeit. The men looked at each other with heated triumph.
“Takes it like a little man, doesn’t she?” said Moreau proudly.
“She wasn’t hungry,” said Fletcher. “Oh-h, no! Listen to her smack.”
“Here, hold up the dipper. Don’t keep her waiting when she’s so blamed hungry.”
“You’re spilling half of it. You’re getting it on her clothes.”
“Well, she don’t want to eat any faster. That’s the way she likes to eat—just slowly suck it out of the spoon. Take your time, old girl, even if you don’t swallow it all.”
“My! don’t she take it down nice! Look alive there, it’s running outer the corner of her mouth.”
“Give us that bit of flour sack behind you. We ought to have put something round her neck.”
The baby, its round eyes intent, one small red fist still fanning the air, sucked noisily at the tip of the spoon. The mother, sitting up on the bunk in the background, watched it with craned neck and jealous eye.
Finally, when the meal was over, it was triumphantly handed back to her, sticky from end to end, but sleepy and satisfied.
A few hours later, in the star-sown darkness of the early night, Moreau started on his twelve-mile walk to the Porter ranch. The next morning, some time before midday, he reappeared, red and perspiring, but proudly leading by a rope a lean and dejected-looking cow.
The problem of the baby’s nutriment was now satisfactorily solved. The cow proved eminently fitted for the purpose of its purchase, and though the two miners had several unsuccessful bouts in learning to milk it, the handy Fletcher soon overcame this difficulty, and the stock of the cabin was augmented by fresh milk.
The baby throve upon this nourishment. Its cries no longer disturbed the serenity of the cañon. It slept and ate most of the time, but kindly consented to keep awake in the late afternoon and be gentle and patient when the men charily passed it from hand to hand during the rest before supper. Fletcher regarded it tolerantly as an object of amusement. But Moreau, especially since the feeding episode, had developed a deep, delighted affection for it. Its helplessness appealed to all that was tender in him, and the first faint indications of a tiny formed character were miraculous to his fascinated and wondering observation. He was secretly ashamed of letting the sneeringly indifferent Fletcher guess his sudden attachment, and made foolish excuses to account for the trips to the cabin which frequently interrupted his morning’s work in the stream bed.
Lucy’s recovery was slow. The collapse from which she suffered was as much mental as physical. The anguish of the last two years had preyed on the bruised spirit as the hardships of the journey had broken the feeble body. No particular form of ailment developed in her, but she lay for days silent and almost motionless on the bunk, too feeble to move or to speak beyond short sentences. The men watched and tended her, Moreau with clumsy solicitude, Fletcher dutifully, but more through fear of his powerful mate than especial interest in Lucy as a woman or a human being.
In his heart he still violently resented Moreau’s action in acquiring her and parting with the valuable horses. Had she possessed any of the attractions of the human female, he could have understood and probably condoned. But as she now was, plain, helpless, sick, unable even to cook for them, demanding care which took from their work and lessened their profits, his resentment grew instead of diminishing. Moreau saw nothing of this, for Fletcher had long ago read the simple secrets of that generous but impractical nature, and knew too much to bring down on himself wrath which, once aroused, he felt would be implacable.
At the end of two weeks Lucy began to show signs of improvement. The fragrant air that blew through the cabin, the soothing silence of the foothills, broken only by the drowsy prattle of the river or the sad murmuring of the great pine, began its work of healing. The autumn was late that year. The days were still warm and dreamily brilliant, especially in the little cañon, where the sun drew the aromatic odors from the pines till at midday they exhaled a heavy, pungent fragrance like incense rising to the worship of some sylvan god.
Sometimes now, on warm afternoons, Lucy crept out and sat at the root of the pine where she had found her first place of refuge. There her dulled eyes began to note the beauties that surrounded her, the pines mounting in dark rows on the slopes, the blue distances where the cañon folded on itself, the glimpses of chaste, white summits far above against the blue. Her lungs breathed deep of the revivifying air, clean and untainted as the water in the little spring at her feet. The peace of it all entered her soul. Something in her forbade her to look back on the terrible past. A new life was here, and her youth rose up and whispered that it was not yet dead.
During the period of her illness Moreau had begun to see both himself and the cabin through feminine eyes. Discrepancies revealed themselves. He wanted many things heretofore regarded as luxuries. From the tin cups of the table service to the towels made of ripped flour sacks, his domestic arrangements seemed mean and inadequate. They were all right for two prospectors, but not fitting for a woman and child. Lucy’s illness also revealed wants in her equipment that struck him as piteous. Her only boots were the ones he had seen her in on the morning after her arrival. She had no shawl or covering for cold weather. The baby’s clothes were a few torn pieces of calico and flannel. Moreau had washed these many times himself, doing them up in an old flour sack, which was attached to an aspen on the stream’s bank, and then placed in one of the deepest parts of the current. Here it remained for two days, the percolating water cleansing its contents as no washboard could.
One evening, smoking under the pine, he acquainted Fletcher with a design he had been some days formulating. This was that Fletcher should ride into Hangtown the next day and not only replenish the commissariat, but buy all things needful for Lucy and the baby. Spotty was now also recovered, and, though hardly a mettlesome steed, was at least a useful pack horse. But the numerous list of articles suggested by Moreau would have weighted Spotty to the ground. So Fletcher was commissioned to buy a pack burro, and upon it to bring all needful food stuffs for the cabin and the habiliments for Lucy and the baby.
“She’s got no shoes. You want to buy her some shoes, one useful pair and one fancy pair with heels.”
“What size do I git? I ain’t never bought shoes for a woman before.”
This was a poser, and both men cogitated till Moreau suggested leaving it to the shoe dealer, who should be told that Lucy was a woman of average size.
“But her feet ain’t,” said Fletcher spitefully, never having been able to forgive Lucy her lack of beauty.
“Never mind; you’ll have to make a bluff at it. Get the best you can. Then I want a shawl for her. It’ll be cold soon, and she’s got nothing to keep her warm.”
“What kind of a shawl? I don’t know no more about shawls than I do about shoes.”
“A pink crochet shawl,” said Moreau slowly, and with evident sheepish reluctance at having to make this exhibition of unexpected knowledge.
“And what’s that? I dunno what crochet is.”
“I don’t, either”—and then, with desperate courage—“well, anyway, that’s what she said she’d like. I asked her yesterday and she said that. You go into the store and ask for it. That’ll be enough.”
Fletcher grunted.
“And then I want some toys for the kid. Anything you can get that seems the right kind. She’s a girl, so you don’t want a drum, or soldiers, or guns, or things of that kind. Get a doll if you can, and a musical box, or anything tasty and that’s likely to catch a baby’s eye.”
“Why, she can’t hardly see yet. She’s like a blind kitten. Lucy told me herself yesterday she were only six weeks old.”
“Never you mind. She’s a smart kid; knows more now than most babies at six months. You might get a rattle—a nice one with bells; she might fancy that.”
“Silver or gold?” sneered Fletcher, whom this conversation was making meditative.
“The best you can get. Don’t stint yourself for money; everything of the best. Then clothes for her; she is going to be as well dressed as any baby in California. I take it you’d better go to Mrs. Wingate, at the Eldorado Hotel, and get her to make you out a list; then go to the store and buy the list right down.”
“Seems to me you’ll want a pack train, not a burro, to carry it all.”
“Well, if you can’t get everything on Spotty and one burro, buy two. I’ll give you a sack of dust and you can spend it all.”
Fletcher was silent after this, and as he lay rolled in his blanket that night he looked at the stars for many hours, thinking.
Early in the morning he departed on the now brisk and rejuvenated Spotty. Besides his instructions he carried one of Moreau’s buckskin sacks, roughly estimated to contain twelve hundred dollars’ worth of dust, and, he told Moreau, one of his own. He was due to return the next morning. With a short word of farewell, he touched Spotty with the single Mexican spur he wore, and darted away down the rough trail. Moreau watched him out of sight.
The day passed as quietly as its predecessors. The main events that marked their course had been the men’s clean-up, Lucy’s gain in strength and the evidences of increasing intelligence in the child.
To-day Lucy had walked to a point a little distance up the cañon, rested there, and in the afternoon came creeping back with the flush of returning health on her face. It was still there when Moreau ascended from the stream bed with his cup. He had had a good day’s work and was joyful, showing the fine yellow grains in the bottom of the rusty tin. Then he noticed her improved appearance and cried:
“Why, you look blooming. A fellow’d think you’d panned a good day’s work, too.”
To himself he said with a sudden inward wonder:
“She looks almost pretty. And she is only nineteen, I believe.”
The next morning he awaited the coming of Fletcher with impatience. He had wanted to surprise Lucy, having only told her Fletcher had gone to buy a burro and some supplies. But the morning passed away and he had not returned. Then the afternoon slipped by, and Lucy and Moreau took their supper without him, the latter rather taciturn. The delay wore on his patience. His knowledge of Fletcher was limited. He had seen him drunk once in Sacramento, and he wondered if he had gone on a spree and was now lying senseless somewhere, the contents of the sacks squandered.
When the next morning had passed and Fletcher had still not come, his suspicions strengthened and he began to think uneasily of his dust. One sack full was a good deal to lose, now that he had a woman and child on his hands. Lucy, he could see, was also uneasy. Twice he surprised her standing by the trail, evidently listening. When evening drew in and there were still no signs of him, both were frankly anxious and oppressed. Suddenly, as they sat by the box that answered as dinner table, she said:
“Did he have much dust?”
“Yes—one sack of mine and one of his own. They’re equal to about twelve hundred dollars each.”
She gave a startled look at him and sat with her mouth a little open, fear and amaze on her face.
“Where’s the rest?” she asked.
Moreau indicated the box under the bunk. At the same moment her suspicion seized him and he pulled it out and threw up the lid. It was empty of all save a few clothes. Every sack was gone.
Moreau shut down the lid quietly, a little pale. He was not a man of quick mind, and he hardly could realize what had happened. It was Lucy’s voice that explained it as she said:
“He did it while I was out in the morning. I went up the stream to that pool to wash some things at sun-up. He took it then.”