Tales of Trail and Town - Bret Harte (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

foot was lame from ingrowing nails,—deviations that, however, did not tend to correct the original angularities of his frame. His wife, on the other hand, had a pretty figure, which still retained— they were childless—the rounded freshness of maidenhood. Her features were irregular, yet not without a certain piquancy of outline; her hair had the two shades sometimes seen in imperfect blondes, and her complexion the sallowness of combined exposure and alkaline assimilation.

She had lived there since, an angular girl of fifteen, she had been awkwardly helped by Ira from the tail-board of the emigrant wagon in which her mother had died two weeks before, and which was making its first halt on the Californian plains, before Ira’s door. On the second day of their halt Ira had tried to kiss her while she was drawing water, and had received the contents of the bucket instead,—the girl knowing her own value. On the third day Ira had some conversation with her father regarding locations and stock. On the fourth day this conversation was continued in the presence of the girl; on the fifth day the three walked to Parson Davies’ house, four miles away, where Ira and Sue were married. The romance of a week had taken place within the confines of her present view from the doorway; the episode of her life might have been shut in in that last sweep of her sandy lashes.

Nevertheless, at that moment some instinct, she knew not what, impelled her when her husband left the room to put down the dish she was washing, and, with the towel lapped over her bare pretty arms, to lean once more against the doorpost, lazily looking down the plain. A cylindrical cloud of dust trailing its tattered skirt along the stage road suddenly assaulted the house, and for an instant enveloped it. As it whirled away again something emerged, or rather dropped from its skirts behind the little cluster of low bushes which encircled the “One Spring.” It was a man.

“Thar! I knew it was suthin’,” she began aloud, but the words somehow died upon her lips. Then she turned and walked towards the inner door, wherein her husband had disappeared,—but here stopped again irresolutely. Then she suddenly walked through the outer door into the road and made directly for the spring. The figure of a man crouching, covered with dust, half rose from the bushes when she reached them. She was not frightened, for he seemed utterly exhausted, and there was a singular mixture of shame, hesitation, and entreaty in his broken voice as he gasped out:—

“Look here!—I say! hide me somewhere, won’t you? Just for a little. You see—the fact is—I’m chased! They’re hunting me now,—they’re just behind me. Anywhere will do till they go by! Tell you all about it another time. Quick! Please do!”

In all this there was nothing dramatic nor even startling to her. Nor did there seem to be any present danger impending to the man. He did not look like a horse-thief nor a criminal. And he had tried to laugh, half-apologetically, half-bitterly,—the consciousness of a man who had to ask help of a woman at such a moment.

She gave a quick glance towards the house. He followed her eyes, and said hurriedly: “Don’t tell on me. Don’t let any one see me. I’m trusting you.

“Come,” she said suddenly. “Get on THIS side.”

He understood her, and slipped to her side, half-creeping, half-crouching like a dog behind her skirts, but keeping her figure between him and the house as she moved deliberately towards the barn, scarce fifty yards away. When she reached it she opened the half-door quickly, said: “In there—at the top—among the hay”— closed it, and was turning away, when there came a faint rapping from within. She opened the door again impatiently; the man said hastily: “Wanted to tell you—it was a man who insulted a WOMAN! I went for him, you see—and”—

But she shut the door sharply. The fugitive had made a blunder. The importation of her own uncertain sex into the explanation did not help him. She kept on towards the house, however, without the least trace of excitement or agitation in her manner, entered the front door again, walked quietly to the door of the inner room, glanced in, saw that her husband was absorbed in splicing a riata, and had evidently not missed her, and returned quietly to her dish-washing. With this singular difference: a few moments before she had seemed inattentive and careless of what she was doing, as if from some abstraction; now, when she was actually abstracted, her movements were mechanically perfect and deliberate. She carefully held up a dish and examined it minutely for cracks, rubbing it cautiously with the towel, but seeing all the while only the man she had left in the barn. A few moments elapsed. Then there came another rush of wind around the house, a drifting cloud of dust before the door, the clatter of hoofs, and a quick shout.

Her husband reached the door, from the inner room, almost as quickly as she did. They both saw in the road two armed mounted men—one of whom Ira recognized as the sheriff’s deputy.

“Has anybody been here, just now?” he asked sharply.

“No.”

“Seen anybody go by?” he continued.

“No. What’s up?”

“One of them circus jumpers stabbed Hal Dudley over the table in Dolores monte shop last night, and got away this morning. We hunted him into the plain and lost him somewhere in this d–-d dust.”

“Why, Sue reckoned she saw suthin’ just now,” said Ira, with a flash of recollection. “Didn’t ye, Sue?”

“Why the h-ll didn’t she say it before?—I beg your pardon, ma’am; didn’t see you; you’ll excuse haste.”

Both the men’s hats were in their hands, embarrassed yet gratified smiles on their faces, as Sue came forward. There was the faintest of color in her sallow cheek, a keen brilliancy in her eyes; she looked singularly pretty. Even Ira felt a slight antenuptial stirring through his monotonously wedded years.

The young woman walked out, folding the towel around her red hands and forearms—leaving the rounded whiteness of bared elbow and upper arm in charming contrast—and looked gravely past the admiring figures that nearly touched her own. “It was somewhar over thar,” she said lazily, pointing up the road in the opposite direction to the barn, “but I ain’t sure it WAS any one.”

“Then he’d already PASSED the house afore you saw him?” said the deputy.

“I reckon—if it WAS him,” returned Sue.

“He must have got on,” said the deputy; “but then he runs like a deer; it’s his trade.”

“Wot trade?”

“Acrobat.”

“Wot’s that?”

The two men were delighted at this divine simplicity. “A man who runs, jumps, climbs—and all that sort, in the circus.”

“But isn’t he runnin’, jumpin’, and climbin’ away from ye now?” she continued with adorable naivete.

The deputy smiled, but straightened in the saddle. “We’re bound to come up with him afore he reaches Lowville; and between that and this house it’s a dead level, where a gopher couldn’t leave his hole without your spottin’ him a mile off! Good-by!” The words were addressed to Ira, but the parting glance was directed to the pretty wife as the two men galloped away.

An odd uneasiness at this sudden revelation of his wife’s prettiness and its evident effect upon his visitors came over Ira. It resulted in his addressing the empty space before his door with, “Well, ye won’t ketch much if ye go on yawpin’ and dawdlin’ with women-folks like this;” and he was unreasonably delighted at the pretty assent of disdain and scorn which sparkled in his wife’s eyes as she added:—

“Not much, I reckon!”

“That’s the kind of official trash we have to pay taxes to keep up,” said Ira, who somehow felt that if public policy was not amenable to private sentiment there was no value in free government. Mrs. Beasley, however, complacently resumed her dish-washing, and Ira returned to his riata in the adjoining room. For quite an interval there was no sound but the occasional click of a dish laid upon its pile, with fingers that, however, were firm and untremulous. Presently Sue’s low voice was heard.

“Wonder if that deputy caught anything yet. I’ve a good mind to meander up the road and see.”

But the question brought Ira to the door with a slight return of his former uneasiness. He had no idea of subjecting his wife to another admiring interview. “I reckon I’ll go myself,” he said dubiously; “YOU’D better stay and look after the house.”

Her eyes brightened as she carried a pile of plates to the dresser; it was possible she had foreseen this compromise. “Yes,” she said cheerfully, “you could go farther than me.”

Ira reflected. He could also send them about their business if they thought of returning. He lifted his hat from the floor, took his rifle down carefully from its pegs, and slouched out into the road. Sue watched him until he was well away, then flew to the back door, stopping only an instant to look at her face in a small mirror on the wall,—yet without noticing her new prettiness,—then ran to the barn. Casting a backward glance at the diminishing figure of her husband in the distance, she threw open the door and shut it quickly behind her. At first the abrupt change from the dazzling outer plain to the deep shadows of the barn bewildered her. She saw before her a bucket half filled with dirty water, and a quantity of wet straw littering the floor; then lifting her eyes to the hayloft, she detected the figure of the fugitive, unclothed from the waist upward, emerging from the loose hay in which he had evidently been drying himself. Whether it was the excitement of his perilous situation, or whether the perfect symmetry of his bared bust and arms—unlike anything she had ever seen before— clothed him with the cold ideality of a statue, she could not say, but she felt no shock of modesty; while the man, accustomed to the public half-exposure in tights and spangles, was more conscious of detected unreadiness than of shame.

“Gettin’ the dust off me,” he said, in hurried explanation; “be down in a second.” Indeed, in another moment he had resumed his shirt and flannel coat, and swung himself to the floor with a like grace and dexterity, that was to her the revelation of a descending god. She found herself face to face with him,—his features cleansed of dirt and grime, his hair plastered in wet curls on his low forehead. It was a face of cheap adornment, not uncommon in his profession—unintelligent, unrefined, and even unheroic; but she did not know that. Overcoming a sudden timidity, she nevertheless told him briefly and concisely of the arrival and departure of his pursuers.

His low forehead wrinkled. “Thar’s no getting away until they come back,” he said without looking at her. “Could ye keep me in here tonight?”

“Yes,” she returned simply, as if the idea had already occurred to her; “but you must lie low in the loft.”

“And could you”—he hesitated, and went on with a forced smile— “you see, I’ve eaten nothing since last night. Could you”—

“I’ll bring you something,” she said quickly, nodding her head.

“And if you had”—he went on more hesitatingly, glancing down at his travel-torn and frayed garments—“anything like a coat, or any other clothing? It would disguise me also, you see, and put ‘em off the track.”

She nodded her head again rapidly: she had thought of that too; there was a pair of doeskin trousers and a velvet jacket left by a Mexican vaquero who had bought stock from them two years ago. Practical as she was, a sudden conviction that he would look well in the