Away to the right, in the midst of the distant and invisible wheat-field, there was the same intermittent star, which like a living, breathing thing seemed to dilate in glowing respiration, as she had seen it the first night of her visit. Mr. Bent’s forge! It must be nearly daylight now; the poor fellow had been up all night, or else was stealing this early march on the day. She recalled Adele’s sudden eulogium of him. The first natural smile that had come to her lips since the earthquake broke up her nervous restraint, and sent her back more like her old self to her couch.
But she had not proceeded far towards the tent, when she heard the sound of low voices approaching her. It was the major and his wife, who, like herself, had evidently been unable to sleep, and were up betimes. A new instinct of secretiveness, which she felt was partly the effect of her artificial surrounding, checked her first natural instinct to call to them, and she drew back deeper in the shadow to let them pass. But to her great discomfiture the major in a conversational emphasis stopped directly in front of her.
“You are wrong, I tell you, a thousand times wrong. The girl is simply upset by this earthquake. It’s a great pity her father didn’t come instead of telegraphing. And by Jove, rather than hear any more of this, I’ll send for him myself,” said the major, in an energetic but suppressed voice.
“And the girl won’t thank you, and you’ll be a fool for your pains,” returned Mrs. Randolph, with dry persistency.
“But according to your own ideas of propriety, Mallory ought to be the first one to be consulted—and by me, too.”
“Not in this case. Of course, before any actual engagement is on, you can speak of Emile’s attentions.”
“But suppose Mallory has other views. Suppose he declines the honor. The man is no fool.”
“Thank you. But for that very reason he must. Listen to me, major; if he doesn’t care to please his daughter for her own sake, he will have to do so for the sake of decency. Yes, I tell you, she has thoroughly compromised herself—quite enough, if it is ever known, to spoil any other engagement her father may make. Why, ask Adele! The day of the earthquake she ABSOLUTELY had the audacity to send him out of the room upstairs into your study for her fan, and then follow him up there alone. The servants knew it. I knew it, for I was in her room at the time with Father Antonio. The earthquake made it plain to everybody. Decline it! No. Mr. Mallory will think twice about it before he does that. What’s that? Who’s there?”
There was a sudden rustle in the bushes like the passage of some frightened animal—and then all was still again.
CHAPTER V
The sun, an hour high, but only just topping the greenish crests of the wheat, was streaming like the morning breeze through the open length of Tom Bent’s workshed. An exaggerated and prolonged shadow of the young inventor himself at work beside his bench was stretching itself far into the broken-down ranks of stalks towards the invisible road, and falling at the very feet of Rose Mallory as she emerged from them.
She was very pale, very quiet, and very determined. The traveling mantle thrown over her shoulders was dusty, the ribbons that tied her hat under her round chin had become unloosed. She advanced, walking down the line of shadow directly towards him.
“I am afraid I will have to trouble you once more,” she said with a faint smile, which did not, however, reach her perplexed eyes. “Could you give me any kind of a conveyance that would take me to San Jose at once?”
The young man had started at the rustling of her dress in the shavings, and turned eagerly. The faintest indication of a loss of interest was visible for an instant in his face, but it quickly passed into a smile of recognition. Yet she felt that he had neither noticed any change in her appearance, nor experienced any wonder at seeing her there at that hour.
“I did not take a buggy from the house,” she went on quickly, “for I left early, and did not want to disturb them. In fact, they don’t know that I am gone. I was worried at not hearing news from my father in San Francisco since the earthquake, and I thought I would run down to San Jose to inquire without putting them to any trouble. Anything will do that you have ready, if I can take it at once.”
Still without exhibiting the least surprise, Bent nodded affirmatively, put down his tools, begged her to wait a moment, and ran off in the direction of the cabin. As he disappeared behind the wheat, she lapsed quite suddenly against the work bench, but recovered herself a moment later, leaning with her back against it, her hands grasping it on either side, and her knit brows and determined little face turned towards the road. Then she stood erect again, shook the dust out of her skirts, lifted her veil, wiped her cheeks and brow with the corner of a small handkerchief, and began walking up and down the length of the shed as Bent reappeared.
He was accompanied by the man who had first led her through the wheat. He gazed upon her with apparently all the curiosity and concern that the other had lacked.
“You want to get to San Jose as quick as you can?” he said interrogatively.
“Yes,” she said quickly, “if you can help me.”
“You walked all the way from the major’s here?” he continued, without taking his eyes from her face.
“Yes,” she answered with an affectation of carelessness she had not shown to Bent. “But I started very early, it was cool and pleasant, and didn’t seem far.”
“I’ll put you down in San Jose inside the hour. You shall have my horse and trotting sulky, and I’ll drive you myself. Will that do?”
She looked at him wonderingly. She had not forgotten his previous restraint and gravity, but now his face seemed to have relaxed with some humorous satisfaction. She felt herself coloring slightly, but whether with shame or relief she could not tell.
“I shall be so much obliged to you,” she replied hesitatingly, “and so will my father, I know.”
“I reckon,” said the man with the same look of amused conjecture; then, with a quick, assuring nod, he turned away, and dived into the wheat again.
“You’re all right now, Miss Mallory,” said Bent, complacently. “Dawson will fix it. He’s got a good horse, and he’s a good driver, too.” He paused, and then added pleasantly, “I suppose they’re all well up at the house?”
It was so evident that his remark carried no personal meaning to herself that she was obliged to answer carelessly, “Oh, yes.”
“I suppose you see a good deal of Miss Randolph—Miss Adele, I think you call her?” he remarked tentatively, and with a certain boyish enthusiasm, which she had never conceived possible to his nature.
“Yes,” she replied a little dryly, “she is the only young lady there.” She stopped, remembering Adele’s naive description of the man before her, and said abruptly, “You know her, then?”
“A little,” replied the young man, modestly. “I see her pretty often when I am passing the upper end of the ranch. She’s very well brought up, and her manners are very refined—don’t you think so?—and yet she’s just as simple and natural as a country girl. There’s a great deal in education after all, isn’t there?” he went on confidentially, “and although”—he lowered his voice and looked cautiously around him—“I believe that some of us here don’t fancy her mother much, there’s no doubt that Mrs. Randolph knows how to bring up her children. Some people think that kind of education is all artificial, and don’t believe in it, but I do!”
With the consciousness that she was running away from these people and the shameful disclosure she had heard last night—with the recollection of Adele’s scandalous interpretation of her most innocent actions and her sudden and complete revulsion against all that she had previously admired in that household, to hear this man who had seemed to her a living protest against their ideas and principles, now expressing them and holding them up for emulation, almost took her breath away.
“I suppose that means you intend to fix Major Randolph’s well for him?” she said dryly.
“Yes,” he returned without noticing her manner; “and I think I can find that water again. I’ve been studying it up all night, and do you know what I’m going to do? I am going to make the earthquake that lost it help me to find it again.” He paused, and looked at her with a smile and a return of his former enthusiasm. “Do you remember the crack in the adobe field that stopped you yesterday?”
“Yes,” said the girl, with a slight shiver.
“I told you then that the same crack was a split in the rock outcrop further up the plain, and was deeper. I am satisfied now, from what I have seen, that it is really a rupture of the whole strata all the way down. That’s the one weak point that the imprisoned water is sure to find, and that’s where the borer will tap it—in the new well that the earthquake itself has sunk.”
It seemed to her now that she understood his explanation perfectly, and she wondered the more that he had been so mistaken in his estimate of Adele. She turned away a little impatiently and looked anxiously towards the point where Dawson had disappeared. Bent followed her eyes.
“He’ll be here in a moment, Miss Mallory. He has to drive slowly through the grain, but I hear the wheels.” He stopped, and his voice took up its previous note of boyish hesitation. “By the way—I’ll—I’ll be going up to the Rancho this afternoon to see the major. Have you any message for Mrs. Randolph—or for—for Miss Adele?”
“No”—said Rose, hesitatingly, “and—and”—
“I see,” interrupted Bent, carelessly. “You don’t want anything said about your coming here. I won’t.”
It struck her that he seemed to have no ulterior meaning in the suggestion. But before she could make any reply, Dawson reappeared, driving a handsome mare harnessed to a light, spider-like vehicle. He had also assumed, evidently in great haste, a black frock coat buttoned over his waistcoatless and cravatless shirt, and a tall black hat that already seemed to be cracking in the sunlight. He drove up, at once assisted her to the narrow perch beside him, and with a nod to Bent drove off. His breathless expedition relieved the leave-taking of these young people of any ceremony.
“I suppose,” said Mr. Dawson, giving a half glance over his shoulder as they struck into the dusty highway,—“I suppose you don’t care to see anybody before you get to San Jose?”
“No-o-o,” said Rose, timidly.
“And I reckon you wouldn’t mind my racin’ a bit if anybody kem up?”
“No.”
“The mare’s sort o’ fastidious about takin’ anybody’s dust.”
“Is she?” said Rose, with a faint smile.
“Awful,” responded her companion; “and the queerest thing of all is, she can’t bear to have any one behind her, either.”
He leaned forward with his expression of humorous enjoyment of some latent joke and did something with the reins—Rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to LENGTHEN herself and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, shimmering green hedge. So perfect was the mare’s action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort; so harmonious the whole movement that the light skeleton wagon seemed only a prolonged process of that long, slim body and free, collarless neck, both straight as the thin shafts on each side and straighter than the delicate ribbon-like traces which, in what seemed a mere affectation of conscious power, hung at times almost limp between the whiffle-tree and the narrow breast band which was all that confined the animal’s powerful fore-quarters. So superb was the reach of its long easy stride that Rose could scarcely see any undulations in the brown shining back on which she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly.
The rapidity of motion which kept them both with heads bent forward and seemed to force back any utterance that rose to their lips spared Rose the obligation of conversation, and her companion was equally reticent. But it was evident to her that he half suspected she was running away from the Randolphs, and that she wished to avoid the embarrassment of being overtaken even in persuasive pursuit. It was not possible that he knew the cause of her flight, and yet she could not account for his evident desire to befriend her, nor, above all, for his apparently humorous enjoyment of the situation. Had he taken it gravely, she might have been tempted to partly confide in him and ask his advice. Was she doing right, after all? Ought she not to have stayed long enough to speak her mind to Mrs. Randolph and demand to be sent home? No! She had not only shrunk from repeating the infamous slander she had overheard, but she had a terrible fear that if she had done so, Mrs. Randolph was capable of denying it, or even charging her of being still under the influence of the earthquake shock and of walking in her sleep. No! She could not trust her—she could trust no one there. Had not even the major listened to those infamous lies? Had she not seen that he was helpless in the hands of this cabal in his own household?—a cabal that she herself had thoughtlessly joined against him.
They had reached the first slight ascent. Her companion drew out his watch, looked at it with satisfaction, and changed the position of his hands on the reins. Without being able to detect the difference, she felt they were slackening speed. She turned inquiringly towards him; he nodded his head, with a half smile and a gesture to her to look ahead. The spires of San Jose were already faintly uplifting from the distant fringe of oaks.
So soon! In fifteen minutes she would be there—and THEN! She remembered suddenly she had not yet determined what to do. Should she go on at once to San Francisco, or telegraph to her father and await him at San Jose? In either case a new fear of the precipitancy of her action and the inadequacy of her reasons had sprung up in her mind. Would her father understand her? Would he underrate the cause and be mortified at the insult she had given the family of his old friend, or, more dreadful still, would he exaggerate her wrongs and seek a personal quarrel with the major. He was a man of quick temper, and had the Western ideas of redress. Perhaps even now she was precipitating a duel between them. Her cheeks grew wan again, her breath came quickly, tears gathered in her eyes. Oh, she was a dreadful girl, she knew it; she was an utterly miserable one, and she knew that too!
The reins were tightened. The pace lessened and at last fell to a walk. Conscious of her telltale eyes and troubled face, she dared not turn to her companion to ask him why, but glanced across the fields.
“When you first came I didn’t get to know your name, Miss Mallory, but I reckon I know your father.”
Her father! What made him say that? She wanted to speak, but she felt she could not. In another moment, if he went on, she must do SOMETHING—she would cry!
“I reckon you’ll be wanting to go to the hotel first, anyway?”
There!—she knew it! He WOULD keep on! And now she had burst into tears.
The mare was still walking slowly; the man was lazily bending forward over the shafts as if nothing had occurred. Then suddenly, illogically, and without a moment’s warning, the pride that had sustained her crumbled and became as the dust of the road.
She burst out and told him—this stranger!—this man she had disliked!—all and EVERYTHING. How she had felt, how she had been deceived, and what she had overheard!
“I thought as much,” said her companion, quietly, “and that’s why I sent for your father.”
“You sent for my father!—when?—where?” echoed Rose, in astonishment.
“Yesterday. He was to come to-day, and if we don’t find him at the hotel it will be because he has already started to come here by the upper and longer road. But you leave it to ME, and don’t you say anything to him of this now. If he’s at the hotel, I’ll say I drove you down there to show off the mare. Sabe? If he isn’t, I’ll leave you there and come back here to find him. I’ve got something to tell him that will set YOU all right.” He smiled grimly, lifted the reins, the mare started forward again, and the vehicle and its occupants disappeared in a vanishing dust cloud.
CHAPTER VI
It was nearly noon when Mr. Dawson finished rubbing down his sweating mare in the little stable shed among the wheat. He had left Rose at the hotel, for they found Mr. Mallory had previously started by a circuitous route for the wheat ranch. He had resumed not only his working clothes but his working expression. He was now superintending the unloading of a wain of stores and implements when the light carryall of the Randolphs rolled into the field. It contained only Mrs. Randolph and the driver. A slight look of intelligence passed between the latter and the nearest one of Dawson’s companions, succeeded, however, by a dull look of stupid vacancy on the faces of all the others, including Dawson. Mrs. Randolph noticed it, and was forewarned. She reflected that no human beings ever looked NATURALLY as stupid as that and were able to work. She smiled sarcastically, and then began with dry distinctness and narrowing lips.
“Miss Mallory, a young lady visiting us, went out for an early walk this morning and has not returned. It is possible she may have lost her way among your wheat. Have you seen anything of her?”
Dawson raised his eyes from his work and glanced slowly around at his companions, as if taking the heavy sense of the assembly. One or two shook their heads mechanically, and returned to their suspended labor. He said, coolly:—
“Nobody here seems to.”
She felt that they were lying. She was only a woman against five men. She was only a petty domestic tyrant; she might have been a larger one. But she had all the courage of that possibility.
“Major Randolph and my son are away,” she went on, drawing herself erect. “But I know that the major will pay liberally if these men will search the field, besides making it all right with your—EMPLOYERS—for the loss of time.”
Dawson uttered a single word in a low voice to the man nearest him, who apparently communicated it to the others, for the four men stopped unloading, and moved away one after the other—even the driver joining in the exodus. Mrs. Randolph smiled sarcastically; it was plain that these people, with all their boasted independence, were quite amenable to pecuniary considerations. Nevertheless, as Dawson remained looking quietly at her, she said:—
“Then I suppose they’ve concluded to go and see?”
“No; I’ve sent them away so that they couldn’t HEAR.”
“Hear what?”
“What I’ve got to say to you.”
She looked at him suddenly. Then she said, with a disdainful glance around her: “I see I am helpless here, and—thanks to your trickery—alone. Have a care, sir; I warn you that you will have to answer to Major Randolph for any insolence.”
“I reckon you won’t tell Major Randolph what I have to say to you,” he returned coolly.
Her lips were nearly a grayish hue, but she said scornfully: “And why not? Do you know who you are talking to?”
The man came lazily forward to the carryall, carelessly brushed aside the slack reins, and resting his elbows on the horse’s back, laid his chin on his hands, as he looked up in the woman’s face.
“Yes; I know who I’m talking to,” he said coolly. “But as the major don’t, I reckon you won’t tell him.”
“Stand away from that horse!” she said, her whole face taking the grayish color of her lips, but her black eyes growing smaller and brighter. “Hand me those reins, and let me pass! What canaille are you to stop me?”
“I thought so,” returned the man, without altering his position; “you don’t know ME. You never saw ME before. Well, I’m Jim Dawson, the nephew of L’Hommadieu, YOUR OLD MASTER!”
She gripped the iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that seemed stamped there. It was remarkable that with that smile she flung away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face appeared to have changed.
“I don’t say,” continued the man quietly, “that he didn’t MARRY you before he died. But you know as well as I do that the laws of his State didn’t recognize the marriage of a master with his octoroon slave! And you know as well as I do that even if he had freed you, he couldn’t change your blood. Why, if I’d been willing to stay at Avoyelles to be a nigger-driver like him, the plantation of ‘de Fontanges’—whose name you have taken—would have been left to me. If YOU had stayed there, you might have been my property instead of YOUR owning a square man like Randolph. You didn’t think of that when you came here, did you?” he said composedly.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” she said, dropping rapidly into a different accent, with her white teeth and fixed mirthless smile, “so it is a claim for PROPERTY, eh? You’re wanting money—you? Tres bien, you forget we are in California, where one does not own a slave. And you have a fine story there, my poor friend. Very pretty, but very hard to prove, m’sieu. And these peasants are in it, eh, working it on shares like the farm, eh?”
“Well,” said Dawson, slightly changing his position, and passing his hand over the horse’s neck with a half-wearied contempt, “one of these men is from Plaquemine, and the other from Coupee. They know all the l’Hommadieus’ history. And they know a streak of the tar brush when they see it. They took your measure when they came here last year, and sized you up fairly. So had I, for the matter of that, when I FIRST saw you. And we compared notes. But the major is a square man, for all he is your husband, and we reckoned he had a big enough contract on his hands to take care of you and l’Hommadieu’s half-breeds, and so”—he tossed the reins contemptuously aside—“we kept this to ourselves.”
“And now you want—what—eh?”
“We want an end to this foolery,” he broke out roughly, stepping back from the vehicle, and facing her suddenly, with his first angry gesture. “We want an end to these airs and grimaces, and all this dandy nigger business; we want an end to this ‘cake-walking’ through the wheat, and flouting of the honest labor of your betters. We want you and your ‘de Fontanges’ to climb down. And we want an end to this roping-in of white folks to suit your little game; we want an end to your trying to mix your nigger blood with any one here, and we intend to stop it. We draw the line at the major.”
Lashed as she had been by those words apparently out of all semblance of her former social arrogance, a lower and more stubborn resistance seemed to have sprung up in her, as she sat sideways, watching him with her set smile and contracting eyes.
“Ah,” she said dryly, “so SHE IS HERE. I thought so. Which of you is it, eh? It’s a good spec—Mallory’s a rich man. She’s not particular.”
The man had stopped as if listening, his head turned towards the road. Then he turned carelessly, and facing her again, waved his hand with a gesture of tired dismissal, and said, “Go! You’ll find your driver over there by the tool-shed. He has heard nothing yet—but I’ve given you fair warning. Go!”
He walked slowly back towards the shed, as the woman, snatching up the reins, drove violently off in the direction where the men had disappeared. But she turned aside, ignoring her waiting driver in her wild and reckless abandonment of all her old conventional attitudes, and lashing her horse forward with the same set smile on her face, the same odd relaxation of figure, and the same squaring of her elbows.
Avoiding the main road, she pushed into a narrow track that intersected another nearer the scene of the accident to Rose’s buggy three weeks before. She had nearly passed it when she was hailed by a strange voice, and looking up, perceived a horseman floundering in the mazes of the wheat to one side of the track. Whatever mean thought of her past life she was flying from, whatever mean purpose she was flying to, she pulled up suddenly, and as suddenly resumed her erect, aggressive stiffness. The stranger was a middle-aged man; in dress and appearance a dweller of cities. He lifted his hat as he perceived the occupant of the wagon to be a lady.
“I beg your pardon, but I fear I’ve lost my way in trying to make a short cut to the Excelsior Company’s Ranch.”
“You are in it now,” said Mrs. Randolph, quickly.
“Thank you, but where can I find the farmhouse?”
“There is none,” she returned, with her old superciliousness, “unless you choose to give that name to the shanties and sheds where the laborers and servants live, near the road.”
The stranger looked puzzled. “I’m looking for a Mr. Dawson,” he said reflectively, “but I may have made some mistake. Do you know Major Randolph’s house hereabouts?”
“I do. I am Mrs. Randolph,” she said stiffly.
The stranger’s brow cleared, and he smiled pleasantly. “Then this is a fortunate meeting,” he said, raising his hat again as he reined in his horse beside the wagon, “for I am Mr. Mallory, and I was looking forward to the pleasure of presenting myself to you an hour or two later. The fact is, an old acquaintance, Mr. Dawson, telegraphed me yesterday to meet him here on urgent business, and I felt obliged to go there first.”
Mrs. Randolph’s eyes sparkled with a sudden gratified intelligence, but her manner seemed rather to increase than abate its grim precision.
“Our meeting this morning, Mr. Mallory, is both fortunate and unfortunate, for I regret to say that your daughter, who has not been quite herself since the earthquake, was missing early this morning and has not yet been found, though we have searched everywhere. Understand me,” she said, as the stranger started, “I have no fear for her PERSONAL safety, I am only concerned for any INDISCRETION that she may commit in the presence of these strangers whose company she would seem to prefer to ours.”
“But I don’t understand you, madam,” said Mallory, sternly; “you are speaking of my daughter, and”—
“Excuse me, Mr. Mallory,” said Mrs. Randolph, lifting her hand with her driest deprecation and her most desiccating smile, “I’m not passing judgment or criticism. I am of a foreign race, and consequently do not understand the freedom of American young ladies, and their familiarity with the opposite sex. I make no charges, I only wish to assure you that she will no doubt be found in the company and under the protection of her own countrymen. There is,” she a