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

and shame swept over the young girl and left its high tide on her cheek. But even then it was closely followed by the feminine instinct of defence and defiance. The REAL hero—the GENTLEMAN—she reasoned bitterly, would have spared her all this knowledge.

“But why,” she said, with knitted brows, “why, if you knew it was so precious and so harmless—why did you fire upon it?”

“Because,” he said almost fiercely, turning upon her, “because you SCREAMED, and THEN I KNEW IT HAD FRIGHTENED YOU!” He stopped instantly as she momentarily recoiled from him, but the very brusqueness of his action had dislodged a tear from his dark eyes that fell warm on the back of her hand, and seemed to blot out the indignity. “Listen, Miss,” he went on hurriedly, as if to cover up his momentary unmanliness. “I knew the bear was missing tonight, and when I heard the horses scurrying about I reckoned what was up. I knew no harm could come to you, for the horses were unharnessed and away from the wagon. I pelted down that trail ahead of them all like grim death, calkilatin’ to get there before the bear; they wouldn’t have understood me; I was too high up to call to the creature when he did come out, and I kinder hoped you wouldn’t see him. Even when he turned towards the wagon, I knew it wasn’t YOU he was after, but suthin’ else, and I kinder hoped, Miss, that you, being different and quicker-minded than the rest, would see it too. All the while them folks were yellin’ behind me to fire—as if I didn’t know my work. I was half-way down—and then you screamed! And then I forgot everything,—everything but standing clear of hitting you,—and I fired. I was that savage that I wanted to believe that he’d gone mad, and would have touched you, till I got down there and found the honey-pot lying alongside of him. But there,—it’s all over now! I wouldn’t have let on a word to you only I couldn’t bear to take YOUR THANKS for it, and I couldn’t bear to have you thinking me a brute for dodgin’ them.” He stopped, walked to the fire, leaned against the chimney under the shallow pretext of kicking the dull embers into a blaze, which, however, had only the effect of revealing his two glistening eyes as he turned back again and came towards her. “Well,” he said, with an ineffectual laugh, “it’s all over now, it’s all in the day’s work, I reckon,—and now, Miss, if you’re ready, and will just fix yourself your own way so as to ride easy, I’ll carry you down.” And slightly bending his strong figure, he dropped on one knee beside her with extended arms.

Now it is one thing to be carried up a hill in temperate, unconscious blood and practical business fashion by a tall, powerful man with steadfast, glowering eyes, but quite another thing to be carried down again by the same man, who has been crying, and when you are conscious that you are going to cry too, and your tears may be apt to mingle. So Miss Amy Forester said: “Oh, wait, please! Sit down a moment. Oh, Mr. Tenbrook, I am so very, very sorry,” and, clapping her hand to her eyes, burst into tears.

“Oh, please, please don’t, Miss Forester,” said Jack, sitting down on the end of the bunk with frightened eyes, “please don’t do that! It ain’t worth it. I’m only a brute to have said anything.”

“No, no! You are SO noble, SO forgiving!” sobbed Miss Forester, “and I have made you go and kill the only thing you cared for, that was all your own.”

“No, Miss,—not all my own, either,—and that makes it so rough. For it was only left in trust with me by a friend. It was her only companion.”

“HER only companion?” echoed Miss Forester, sharply lifting her bowed head.

“Except,” said Jack hurriedly, miscomprehending the emphasis with masculine fatuity,—“except the dying man for whom she lived and sacrificed her whole life. She gave me this ring, to always remind me of my trust. I suppose,” he added ruefully, looking down upon it, “it’s no use now. I’d better take it off.”

Then Amy eyed the monstrous object with angelic simplicity. “I certainly should,” she said with infinite sweetness; “it would only remind you of your loss. But,” she added, with a sudden, swift, imploring look of her blue eyes, “if you could part with it to me, it would be such a reminder and token of—of your forgiveness.”

Jack instantly handed it to her. “And now,” he said, “let me carry you down.”

“I think,” she said hesitatingly, “that—I had better try to walk,” and she rose to her feet.

“Then I shall know that you have not forgiven me,” said Jack sadly.

“But I have no right to trouble”—

Alas! she had no time to finish her polite objection, for the next moment she felt herself lifted in the air, smelled the bark thatch within an inch of her nose, saw the firelight vanish behind her, and subsiding into his curved arms as in a hammock, the two passed forth into the night together.

“I can’t find, your bracelet anywhere, Amy,” said her father, when they reached the wagon.

“It was on the floor in the lint,” said Amy reproachfully. “But, of course, you never thought of that!”

 

… …

 

My pen halts with some diffidence between two conclusions to this veracious chronicle. As they agree in result, though not in theory or intention, I may venture to give them both. To one coming from the lips of the charming heroine herself I naturally yield the precedence. “Oh, the bear story! I don’t really remember whether that was before I was engaged to John or after. But I had known him for some time; father introduced him at the Governor’s ball at Sacramento. Let me see!—I think it was in the winter of ‘56. Yes! it was very amusing; I always used to charge John with having trained that bear to attack our carriage so that he might come in as a hero! Oh, of course, there are a hundred absurd stories about him,—they used to say that he lived all alone in a cabin like a savage, and all that sort of thing, and was a friend of a dubious woman in the locality, whom the common people made a heroine of,— Miggles, or Wiggles, or some such preposterous name. But look at John there; can you conceive it?” The listener, glancing at a very handsome, clean-shaven fellow, faultlessly attired, could not conceive such an absurdity. So I therefore simply give the opinion of Joshua Bixley, Superintendent of the Long Divide Tunnel Company, for what it is worth: “I never took much stock in that bear story, and its captivating old Forester’s daughter. Old Forester knew a thing or two, and when he was out here consolidating tunnels, he found out that Jack Tenbrook was about headed for the big lead, and brought him out and introduced him to Amy. You see, Jack, clear grit as he was, was mighty rough style, and about as simple as they make ‘em, and they had to get up something to account for that girl’s taking a shine to him. But they seem to be happy enough— and what are you going to do about it?”

And I transfer this philosophic query to the reader.

THE YOUNGEST PROSPECTOR IN CALAVERAS

He was scarcely eight when it was believed that he could have reasonably laid claim to the above title. But he never did. He was a small boy, intensely freckled to the roots of his tawny hair, with even a suspicion of it in his almond-shaped but somewhat full eyes, which were the greenish hue of a ripe gooseberry. All this was very unlike his parents, from whom he diverged in resemblance in that fashion so often seen in the Southwest of America, as if the youth of the boundless West had struck a new note of independence and originality, overriding all conservative and established rules of heredity. Something of this was also shown in a singular and remarkable reticence and firmness of purpose, quite unlike his family or schoolfellows. His mother was the wife of a teamster, who had apparently once “dumped” his family, consisting of a boy and two girls, on the roadside at Burnt Spring, with the canvas roof of his wagon to cover them, while he proceeded to deliver other freight, not so exclusively his own, at other stations along the road, returning to them on distant and separate occasions with slight additions to their stock, habitation, and furniture. In this way the canvas roof was finally shingled and the hut enlarged, and, under the quickening of a smiling California sky and the forcing of a teeming California soil, the chance-sown seed took root and became known as Medliker’s Ranch, or “Medliker’s,” with its bursting garden patch and its three sheds or “lean-to’s.”

The girls helped their mother in a childish, imitative way; the boy, John Bunyan, after a more desultory and original fashion—when he was not “going to” or ostensibly “coming from” school, for he was seldom actually there. Something of this fear was in the mind of Mrs. Medliker one morning as she looked up from the kettle she was scrubbing, with premonition of “more worriting,” to behold the Reverend Mr. Staples, the local minister, hale John Bunyan Medliker into the shanty with one hand. Letting Johnny go, he placed his back against the door and wiped his face with a red handkerchief. Johnny dropped into a chair, furtively glancing at the arm by which Mr. Staples had dragged him, and feeling it with the other hand to see if it was really longer.

“I’ve been requested by the schoolmaster,” said the Rev. Mr. Staples, putting his handkerchief back into his broad felt hat with a gasping smile, “to bring our young friend before you for a matter of counsel and discipline. I have done so, Sister Medliker, with some difficulty,”—he looked down at John Bunyan, who again felt his arm and was satisfied that it WAS longer—“but we must do our dooty, even with difficulty to ourselves, and, perhaps, to others. Our young friend, John Bunyan, stands on a giddy height—on slippery places, and,” continued Mr. Staples, with a lofty disregard to consecutive metaphor, “his feet are taking fast hold of destruction.” Here the child drew a breath of relief, possibly at the prospect of being on firm ground of any kind at last; but Sister Medliker, to whom the Staples style of exordium had only a Sabbath significance, turned to her offspring abruptly:—

“And what’s these yer doin’s now, John? and me a slavin’ to send ye to school?”

Thus appealed to, Johnny looked for a reply at his feet, at his arm, and at the kettle. Then he said: “I ain’t done nothin’, but he”—indicating Staples—“hez been nigh onter pullin’ off my arm.”

“It’s now almost a week ago,” continued Mr. Staples, waving aside the interruption with a smile of painful Christian tolerance, “or perhaps ten days—I won’t be too sure—that the schoolmaster discovered that Johnny had in his possession two or three flakes of fine river gold—each of the value of half a dollar, or perhaps sixty-two and one half cents. On being questioned where he got them he refused to say; although subsequently he alleged that he had ‘found’ them. It being a single instance, he was given the benefit of the doubt, and nothing more was said about it. But a few days after he was found trying to pass off, at Mr. Smith’s store, two other flakes of a different size, and a small nugget of the value of four or five dollars. At this point I was