Susy, A Story of the Plains - Bret Harte (ebook reader for pc and android txt) 📗

with an awful hand upholding a rope—so! He saw him with these eyes, as I see you. What HE said to him, God knows! The priest, perhaps, for he has made confession!”

In a flash of intelligence Clarence comprehended all. He rose grimly and began to dress himself.

“Not a word of this to the women,—to any one, Nascio, dost thou understand?” he said curtly. “It may be that Jose has been partaking too freely of aguardiente,—it is possible. I will see the priest myself. But what possesses thee? Collect thyself, good Nascio.”

But the man was still trembling.

“It is not all,—Mother of God! it is not all, master!” he stammered, dropping to his knees and still crossing himself. “This morning, beside the corral, they find the horse of Pedro Valdez splashed and spattered on saddle and bridle, and in the stirrup,— dost thou hear? the STIRRUP,—hanging, the torn-off boot of Valdez! Ah, God! The same as HIS! Now do you understand? It is HIS vengeance. No! Jesu forgive me! it is the vengeance of God!”

Clarence was staggered.

“And you have not found Valdez? You have looked for him?” he said, hurriedly throwing on his clothes.

“Everywhere,—all over the plain. The whole rancho has been out since sunrise,—here and there and everywhere. And there is nothing! Of course not. What would you?” He pointed solemnly to the ground.

“Nonsense!” said Clarence, buttoning his coat and seizing his hat. “Follow me.”

He ran down the passage, followed by Incarnacion, through the excited, gesticulating crowd of servants in the patio, and out of the back gate. He turned first along the wall of the casa towards the barred window of the boudoir. Then a cry came from Incarnacion.

They ran quickly forward. Hanging from the grating of the window, like a mass of limp and saturated clothes, was the body of Pedro Valdez, with one unbooted foot dangling within an inch of the ground. His head was passed inside the grating and fixed as at that moment when the first spring of the frightened horse had broken his neck between the bars as in a garrote, and the second plunge of the terrified animal had carried off his boot in the caught stirrup when it escaped.

 

CHAPTER XI.

 

The winter rains were over and gone, and the whole long line of Californian coast was dashed with color. There were miles of yellow and red poppies, leagues of lupines that painted the gently rounded hills with soft primary hues, and long continuous slopes, like low mountain systems, of daisies and dandelions. At Sacramento it was already summer; the yellow river was flashing and intolerable; the tule and marsh grasses were lush and long; the bloom of cottonwood and sycamore whitened the outskirts of the city, and as Cyrus Hopkins and his daughter Phoebe looked from the veranda of the Placer Hotel, accustomed as they were to the cool trade winds of the coast valleys, they felt homesick from the memory of eastern heats.

Later, when they were surveying the long dinner tables at the table d’hote with something of the uncomfortable and shamefaced loneliness of the provincial, Phoebe uttered a slight cry and clutched her father’s arm. Mr. Hopkins stayed the play of his squared elbows and glanced inquiringly at his daughter’s face. There was a pretty animation in it, as she pointed to a figure that had just entered. It was that of a young man attired in the extravagance rather than the taste of the prevailing fashion, which did not, however, in the least conceal a decided rusticity of limb and movement. A long mustache, which looked unkempt, even in its pomatumed stiffness, and lank, dark hair that had bent but never curled under the barber’s iron, made him notable even in that heterogeneous assembly.

“That’s he,” whispered Phoebe.

“Who?” said her father.

Alas for the inconsistencies of love! The blush came with the name and not the vision.

“Mr. Hooker,” she stammered.

It was, indeed, Jim Hooker. But the role of his exaggeration was no longer the same; the remorseful gloom in which he had been habitually steeped had changed into a fatigued, yet haughty, fastidiousness more in keeping with his fashionable garments. He was more peaceful, yet not entirely placable, and, as he sat down at a side table and pulled down his striped cuffs with his clasped fingers, he cast a glance of critical disapproval on the general company. Nevertheless, he seemed to be furtively watchful of his effect upon them, and as one or two whispered and looked towards him, his consciousness became darkly manifest.

All of which might have intimidated the gentle Phoebe, but did not discompose her father. He rose, and crossing over to Hooker’s table, clapped him heartily on the back.

“How do, Hooker? I didn’t recognize you in them fine clothes, but Phoebe guessed as how it was you.”

Flushed, disconcerted, irritated, but always in wholesome awe of Mr. Hopkins, Jim returned his greeting awkwardly and half hysterically. How he would have received the more timid Phoebe is another question. But Mr. Hopkins, without apparently noticing these symptoms, went on:—

“We’re only just down, Phoebe and me, and as I guess we’ll want to talk over old times, we’ll come alongside o’ you. Hold on, and I’ll fetch her.”

The interval gave the unhappy Jim a chance to recover himself, to regain his vanished cuffs, display his heavy watch-chain, curl his mustache, and otherwise reassume his air of blase fastidiousness. But the transfer made, Phoebe, after shaking hands, became speechless under these perfections. Not so her father.

“If there’s anything in looks, you seem to be prospering,” he said grimly; “unless you’re in the tailorin’ line, and you’re only showin’ off stock. What mout ye be doing?”

“Ye ain’t bin long in Sacramento, I reckon?” suggested Jim, with patronizing pity.

“No, we only came this morning,” returned Hopkins.

“And you ain’t bin to the theatre?” continued Jim.

“No.”

“Nor moved much in—in—gin’ral fash’nable sassiety?”

“Not yet,” interposed Phoebe, with an air of faint apology.

“Nor seen any of them large posters on the fences, of ‘The Prairie Flower; or, Red-handed Dick,’—three-act play with five tableaux,— just the biggest sensation out,—runnin’ for forty nights,—money turned away every night,—standin’ room only?” continued Jim, with prolonged toleration.

“No.”

“Well, I play Red-handed Dick. I thought you might have seen it and recognized me. All those people over there,” darkly indicating the long table, “know me. A fellow can’t stand it, you know, being stared at by such a vulgar, low-bred lot. It’s gettin’ too fresh here. I’ll have to give the landlord notice and cut the whole hotel. They don’t seem to have ever seen a gentleman and a professional before.”

“Then you’re a play-actor now?” said the farmer, in a tone which did not, however, exhibit the exact degree of admiration which shone in Phoebe’s eyes.

“For the present,” said Jim, with lofty indifference. “You see I was in—in partnership with McClosky, the manager, and I didn’t like the style of the chump that was doin’ Red-handed Dick, so I offered to take his place one night to show him how. And by Jinks! the audience, after that night, wouldn’t let anybody else play it,— wouldn’t stand even the biggest, highest-priced stars in it! I reckon,” he added gloomily, “I’ll have to run the darned thing in all the big towns in Californy,—if I don’t have to go East with it after all, just for the business. But it’s an awful grind on a man,—leaves him no time, along of the invitations he gets, and what with being run after in the streets and stared at in the hotels he don’t get no privacy. There’s men, and women, too, over at that table, that just lie in wait for me here till I come, and don’t lift their eyes off me. I wonder they don’t bring their opery-glasses with them.”

Concerned, sympathizing, and indignant, poor Phoebe turned her brown head and honest eyes in that direction. But because they were honest, they could not help observing that the other table did not seem to be paying the slightest attention to the distinguished impersonator of Red-handed Dick. Perhaps he had been overheard.

“Then that was the reason ye didn’t come back to your location. I always guessed it was because you’d got wind of the smash-up down there, afore we did,” said Hopkins grimly.

“What smash-up?” asked Jim, with slightly resentful quickness.

“Why, the smash-up of the Sisters’ title,—didn’t you hear that?”

There was a slight movement of relief and a return of gloomy hauteur in Jim’s manner.

“No, we don’t know much of what goes on in the cow counties, up here.”

“Ye mout, considerin’ it concerns some o’ your friends,” returned Hopkins dryly. “For the Sisters’ title went smash as soon as it was known that Pedro Valdez—the man as started it—had his neck broken outside the walls o’ Robles Rancho; and they do say as this yer Brant, YOUR friend, had suthin’ to do with the breaking of it, though it was laid to the ghost of old Peyton. Anyhow, there was such a big skeer that one of the Greaser gang, who thought he’d seen the ghost, being a Papist, to save his everlasting soul went to the priest and confessed. But the priest wouldn’t give him absolution until he’d blown the hull thing, and made it public. And then it turned out that all the dockyments for the title, and even the custom-house paper, were FORGED by Pedro Valdez, and put on the market by his confederates. And that’s just where YOUR friend, Clarence Brant, comes in, for HE had bought up the whole title from them fellers. Now, either, as some say, he was in the fraud from the beginnin’, and never paid anything, or else he was an all-fired fool, and had parted with his money like one. Some allow that the reason was that he was awfully sweet on Mrs. Peyton’s adopted daughter, and ez the parents didn’t approve of him, he did THIS so as to get a holt over them by the property. But he’s a ruined man, anyway, now; for they say he’s such a darned fool that he’s goin’ to pay for all the improvements that the folks who bought under him put into the land, and that’ll take his last cent. I thought I’d tell you that, for I suppose YOU’VE lost a heap in your improvements, and will put in your claim?”

“I reckon I put nearly as much into it as Clar Brant did,” said Jim gloomily, “but I ain’t goin’ to take a cent from him, or go back on him now.”

The rascal could not resist this last mendacious opportunity, although he was perfectly sincere in his renunciation, touched in his sympathy, and there was even a film of moisture in his shifting eyes.

Phoebe was thrilled with the generosity of this noble being, who could be unselfish even in his superior condition. She added softly:—

“And they say that the girl did not care for him at all, but was actually going to run off with Pedro, when he stopped her and sent for Mrs. Peyton.”

To her surprise, Jim’s face flushed violently.

“It’s all a dod-blasted lie,” he said, in a thick stage whisper. “It’s only the hogwash them Greasers and Pike County galoots ladle out to each other around the stove in a county grocery. But,” recalling himself loftily, and with a tolerant wave of his be-diamonded hand, “wot kin you expect from one of them cow counties? They ain’t satisfied till they drive every gentleman out of the darned gopher-holes they call their ‘kentry.’”

In her admiration of what she believed to be a loyal outburst for his friend, Phoebe overlooked the implied sneer at her provincial home. But her father went on with a perfunctory, exasperating, dusty aridity:—

“That mebbee