Part 8

As we enter the heart of the _cañon_, the rocky, vine-clad walls on either side seem to reassure the nervous passenger and the half-fainting lady; and the grade being very easy for quite a while, there is no more lamentation heard till the horses dash full-speed through a laughing, glittering mountain stream, the head-waters of the Cayote, throwing its spray merrily in at the open window. Again and again the brook is crossed, as it makes its quick, flashing way through blackberry clumps and wild grape-vines, glancing up at sycamore and buckeye tree as it hastens along. Suddenly the driver strikes one of the shining white rocks on which the water breaks into foam, and then a general commotion ensues in the stage, and before the passengers have settled back in their original places, a soft, sad music seems to float toward us on the air--the rustling of the gray-green pines that overhang the last rise in the road, and shade so romantically the white cottages clinging to the mountain-side, and built on the plateau that is crowned by the hotel and gardens of the Gilroy Hot Springs.

The stage halts, and after shaking hands with the dozen friends one is sure to find, and partaking of the dinner, which is consumed with ravenous appetite after the drive of two or three hours, it is still early enough for a walk to the Springs before the balmy moonlit night sets in. The terrace-like walk, partly cut out, partly filled in on the steep mountain-side, is overhung by hills rising again on hills; tiny cottages peering out here, there, and everywhere, from out manzanite, laurel and pine trees. Beneath, the mountain falls off into a deep, narrow valley, clothed in luxuriant green, a towering mountain rising on the other side.

There are thousands of silver trout in the streams in the valley; there is an abundance of game in the wild, rugged, but beautiful mountains back of and above the Springs. As in some cases, however, a horrid, vicious-looking lamprey-eel has been found on the rod, instead of a speckled-back trout, so in other cases have brave hunters returned from the chase with blanched faces and reports of startling sights of huge bears and California lions, instead of the tamer game they had expected to bag.

"But it is delightful here for all that!" is the almost involuntary exclamation of those who, on some bright June morning make their way slowly, slowly--drinking their fill of nature, sunshine, and mountain air--to the bubbling, hissing, seething Springs.

We hear this same remark just now from the midst of the group of ladies who are making their way around the gentle curves of the terrace-walk to the Springs; and as the words come from the lips of one who is to figure as the heroine of our short but veracious story, we must take a closer look at her, as she sweeps by, moving along with the rest, yet always a little apart from them. She is carelessly swinging her hat by the strings, and the sun, now and again, as they round some curve in the road, kisses the auburn of her curls into ripples of golden bronze. The _nonchalance_ expressed in air and carriage was affected, it was said, and that she always knew what was going on around her, without ever asking any questions.

"That gentleman has been devouring you with his eyes this last half hour. I noticed him up at the house as we were getting ready to start--and now he is here before us;" and fat, motherly Mrs. Bradshaw laughed as only such large-framed, large-hearted people can laugh.

"I hope he finds me more palatable than the beefsteak we had this morning--it was horribly tough."

"Are you speaking of the gentleman from Siskiyou?" asked the tall lady with glasses, who was Miss Kingsley, and popularly supposed to be getting up a book on "The Resources of California."

"No, of the beefsteak," quickly replied she of the auburn curls. Mrs. Bradshaw nudged her very perceptibly, to which admonition she made answer, _sotto voce_, "I hate old maids and blue-stockings."

Miss Kingsley had drawn herself up to her stateliest height: "I had meant to inquire whether Mrs. Bradshaw was alluding to the gentleman from Siskiyou?"

"Yes, dear; didn't you see how he kept his eyes fixed on Mrs. Clayton, before he turned away when he saw us laughing?"

"I did not observe. My opinion, however, if I may venture to express it, is that Mrs. Clayton, with all her talent for subjugating mankind, will hardly succeed in bringing that gentleman to her feet. This piece of rock, I think, could be inspired with the tender passion just as soon."

"Oh! did he refuse that valuable information in regard to the resources of California?" asked Mrs. Clayton, with mingled indignation and concern.

Mrs. Bradshaw was bubbling over with laughter, while the rest of the ladies shared her mirth more or less openly, according to the degree of friendship entertained for Miss Kingsley.

When the party rounded the last bend near the spring, a tall, spare man, conspicuous in a generous expanse of white shirt-bosom, and low, stiff-brimmed hat, hastily laid down the drinking-cup, and moved out of sight, making the circuit of the bath-houses in his anxiety to avoid the advancing column of fair ones. Uncle George was on hand, as usual, smilingly filling glasses and dippers with the boiling waters, trying between whiles to answer the numerous questions propounded, mostly in regard to the retreating form disappearing among the manzanite on the hillside.

"It's the gentleman from Siskiyou." The words were addressed to Mrs. Clayton, who was blowing little puffs of wind into the glass in her hand, and seemed to have no interest in common with the eager, laughing crowd about. "He and his pardner are both here; they own placer-mines on Yreka Flats, and came here because the gentleman's liver is affected. They're a funny couple--never speak to no ladies, and ain't sociable like, only among themselves. His pardner--there he is now, going up after him," pointing to a low-built, square-shouldered man, with black, bushy eyebrows--"waits on him like a woman, and no two brothers couldn't be more affectionate. His pardner told me his own self that when they first came together, eighteen years ago, he got into a row at Placerville--used to be Hangtown, then--and they were firing into him thick and fast after he was down, when Mr. Brodie stepped in, picked him up and carried him to their cabin, and nussed him till he was well again. You see he limps a little yet; but then Mr. Brodie was the only doctor he had, and he says it's a wonder to him he has any legs left at all, he was so riddled with shot."

Sufficient water having been drank, the ladies wended their way back, scattering as they approached the hotel building--generally spoken of as "the house"--which contained parlor, dining and assembly rooms. Some sought their cottages, others climbed the hill-sides, while still others visited the little stream rushing along through the green depths that the stage-road overhung. Some had escorts, others went alone, or formed groups of three or four; and all gave themselves up to the enjoyment of that perfect freedom which makes the stay at these California watering-places a recreation and a holiday.

As the heat of the sun became more oppressive, the stragglers returned; and the closed window-blinds of the cottages spoke of an unusually warm day for the season. This, however, did not forbid the ushering in of the next day with an extra heavy fog, which dripped from the eaves like rain, and made more penetrating the wind that came in surly gusts and rudely swept back the end of the shawl thrown Spanish-fashion over Mrs. Clayton's shoulder. Her right hand grasped a bottle filled with water from the Springs; and the left, hidden until now under the shawl, was bound up in a white cloth. The wind had carried her hat away, too; and after looking helplessly around, she deposited the bottle on the bench nearest her, and gave chase to the runaway. But the hat was suddenly held up before her, and the bottle taken from the bench. It was the gentleman from Siskiyou, who stammered something she did not understand, and to which she replied sweetly and plaintively, "Thank you, ever so much. I am so helpless with that hand. I sprained it some weeks ago, falling from a carriage, and did not know how bad it was till the doctors sent me here. I must have hurt it again yesterday; and now I've got to go about like a cripple." The voice was like a child's; and a half sob seemed to rise in her throat as she spoke the last words, and a tell-tale moisture shone in her eyes.

He had awkwardly set the bottle back on the bench; and when she prepared to move on, he bent over to seize the bottle and carry it for her. In his nervousness he did not heed that she, too, was stooping forward; and only when their heads came in contact did he realize how near he had stood to her. A deep scarlet overspread his sallow face, while Mrs. Clayton said, "Oh, will you carry the bottle for me? Thanks. I wanted to bathe my hand, and was afraid to go more than once through the fog and wind."

They reached the cottage, where he deposited the bottle on the door-steps, and withdrew with a somewhat awkward, but perfectly chivalrous bow.

After breakfast, when the ground was still too wet to walk out, Jenny, sitting in the low rocking-chair by the open door, was startled by footsteps crunching under the window; and a moment later Mr. Brodie placed a bottle at her feet.

"I thought it might be better for your wrist to have the water hot to bathe it in; that's just from the spring, and I walked fast." In spite of the unvarnished speech, there was something about the man that made it plain to her why people involuntarily spoke of him as "the gentleman," when his partner was always spoken of merely as his partner.

It was only common politeness that she should allow him to sit on the door-step, while she immersed the soft, white hand; and the bottle of hot spring water was repeated, till she declared the ground dry enough to walk down to the spring with him. Any number of necks were stretched from parlor-doors and windows, when the shy, bashful gentleman from Siskiyou was seen escorting Mrs. Clayton; but falling in with a train of ladies at the Springs, they all walked back together. Mr. Brodie, unnoticed apparently by Jenny, and uncomfortable among so many of the "contrary sex," quietly slipped away under the shadow of a clump of young trees, where he was joined directly by his partner, who had watched him uneasily all the morning.

It was a warm, cloudless day, a few weeks later, and Mrs. Clayton had not joined the picnic party--because, Ben. Brodie said to himself, with a flutter of his unsophisticated heart, _he_ had felt too unwell in the morning to go. Going down to the Springs alone, Jenny met his partner, and asked pleasantly whether Mr. Brodie had yet recovered from his attack of last night.

"Thank you, Miss, he's better; but it's my opinion as how he'd get well much quicker if he left these Springs and went down to 'Frisco for a spell."

"But, Mr. Perkins, his liver is affected; and these waters are said to be very beneficial."

"Yes, Miss, it _was_ his liver; but I think as how it's in the chist now; and"--doggedly aside--"mebbee the heart, too; and he'll never be himself again while he's up here."

"Oh, you must not see things so black. See, there comes Mr. Brodie now."

"Yes--" something like an oath was smothered between the bearded lips, and the shaggy eyebrows were lowered portentously--"so I see. Ben, didn't I tell yer to stay in the house, and I'd fetch yer the water?"

Whenever Si Perkins addressed Jenny as "Miss"--which was almost invariably his custom--it made her think of a short conversation between Mr. Brodie and herself, soon after their first acquaintance. He had asked her, with an assumed indifference, but a nervous tremor in his voice, "And you are a widow, Mrs. Clayton?" upon which she had turned sharply and said, snappishly, "Would I be away up here all alone if I had a husband?" It flashed through her mind again, as she saw the partner's darkened brow and working lips when Mr. Brodie answered, "It's all right, Si; I wanted to come;" and he laughed a short, confused laugh that stood for any number of unexpressed sentiments--particularly when Jenny was by.

"Shall we walk up toward the garden?" he asked of Jenny.

"I think there is shade all the way up," she replied, throwing an uneasy look on Si Perkins's scowling face. "You may light your cigar, if you feel well enough to smoke." Mr. Brodie turned to his partner to ask for a match, and the next moment left him standing alone in the sun, as though he had no more existence for him.

They halted many times on their way to the garden. It was in an opposite direction from the Springs; but here as there the road had been partly cut out on the mountain-side--partly filled in--so that it formed a terrace overhanging the dense forest-growth in the ravine below, while on the banks and mountain-tops above grew pines and madrones, the manzanite shrub and treacherous gloss of the poison-oak making the whole look like a carefully planted park. The "garden" was a little mountain valley, taking its name from an enclosed patch, where nothing was grown, but where the neglected fields were kept fresh and green by the little rivulet flowing from the cold spring at the foot of an immense sycamore. Farther on were groups of young oaks, and under these were benches; but Jenny preferred sitting in the shade of the pines on the clean, sweet grass. The birds, never molested here, hovered fearlessly about them, singing and chirping, the blue and yellow butterflies keeping time to the music.

For quite a while Mr. Brodie had been watching Jenny's lithe figure darting hither and thither, trying to take the butterflies prisoners under her hat; her eyes sparkled, and she shouted merrily whenever she had secured a prize, which, after a moment's triumph, she always set free again.

"Come and sit down," called Mr. Brodie to her, "or you will hurt your hand again, and all my three weeks' doctoring will be thrown away."

"It hurts me now," said Jenny, ruefully, "for I struck it against that tree."

She held up the offending hand, and he inspected it narrowly, looking up suddenly into her eyes, as though to read in them an answer to something he had just thought. But it was hard to read anything there, though Jenny had the sweetest eyes in the world--laughing and sad by turns, and of warm liquid light. What their color was, it was hard to determine. They had been called black, hazel, gray; never blue. Her smile was as unfathomable as her eyes; and you could read nothing of her life, her history, her character, from either brow or lip. Her hand alone--it was the right one--as it rested on the sward beside her, might have told to one better versed in such reading than Ben Brodie, how, like Theodore Storm's "Elizabeth," it had, "through many a sleepless night, been resting on a sore, sick heart."

He raised the hand tenderly, not understanding its secret, and asked, stroking it as we do a child's, "What was my partner saying to you as I came up a while ago?"

"He wants you to go to San Francisco, away from here. Would you go and leave me here alone, when you know how lonesome I should be without you?"

She heard his low, nervous laugh, as he moved uneasily, and held the hand tighter; but when she looked up into his face, expecting an answer, it came in his usual abrupt, or, as Jenny said, "jerky" style.

"No, of course I wouldn't go. I'll stay as long as you want me to. I--I--like you--pretty well."

Jenny's paling cheek blazed up crimson, and she looked fairly aghast as she repeated mechanically, "'Like you pretty well.' Thank you. _Like_ me, indeed!" She had drawn away her hand, like a pettish child, and she muttered, a wicked smile breaking over her face, "I don't believe the man _could_ love any one if he tried. But I'll find out;" and she turned again to where he sat, disconsolate at the loss of her hand.

Her quicker ear caught the crackling of dry twigs before he could speak again, and a shrill scream burst from her lips. He was on his feet in an instant, and flung his arms about the trembling form before his eye could follow the direction of hers.

"The bear!" she stammered; "the grizzly--there, there!" and the story of the huge grizzly having been seen in the mountains those last weeks flashed through his mind.

"Be still!" he said, as she glided from his arms to the ground; "he cannot hurt you till he has killed me." He stooped to pick up a fallen branch, and as he did so his eyes came on a level with a large black calf, rolling over and over in the tall grass. He flung the stick from him with a disgusted "Pshaw!" and Jenny dropped her hands from her eyes when his laugh fell on her ear. She joined in the laugh, though hers sounded a little hysterical; and then insisted on returning immediately, and his promise to keep the tragi-comic _intermezzo_ a profound secret.

Days passed before Jenny would venture out again; and poor Mr. Brodie wandered about like one lost, dreading to visit the cottage, because of a sudden indescribable reserve of the fair tenant, yet held as by invisible hands in the nearest neighborhood of the place. One day, sitting with blinds closed and a headache, ready for an excuse to all who should come to tempt her out, Jenny missed the tall form passing shyly by the door half a dozen times per diem. The next morning she met Si Perkins--by the merest accident, of course, on her part--coming from the spring with a bottle of water.

"Is Mr. Brodie sick?" she asked, quickly.

"Yes, Miss; he was took bad night before last; but he's better," he added, anxious to prevent--he hardly knew what.

"Very well; you may tell Mr. Brodie that I am coming to see him and read to him this afternoon." She spoke determinedly, almost savagely, as though she anticipated finding Si Perkins at the door with drawn sword, ready to dispute the entrance.

She was shocked to find Mr. Brodie so pale and thin as he lay on the bed that afternoon; and Si Perkins, in a tone that seemed to accuse her of being the cause, said, "I told you it was his chist, Miss; he's getting powerful weak up here in the mountains, and yit he won't go down."

She was an angel while he was too sick to leave his room, sitting by him for hours, reading to him in her soft child's voice, and speaking to him so gently and tenderly that he felt a better, and oh! so much happier a man when he first walked out beside her again.

Then there came a day when Ben Brodie stopped at the cottage of his kind nurse, and with the air of a culprit asked Jenny to come with him, "away up into the mountains." The light that flashed in her eyes a moment was quenched by something that looked strangely like a tear, as she turned to reach for her hat. It was early afternoon, and most people were still in their cottages, with blinds, and perhaps eyes too, closed. The two walked slowly, or climbed rather, resting often and looking back to where they could see the white cottages blinking through the trees. The wind blew only enough to rustle the pine branches, without stirring the sobs and wails that lay dormant in those trees. Jays and woodpeckers went with them, and many a shining flower was broken by the way. At last Jenny stopped and looked around.

"Don't let us go farther--who knows but what we may encounter another bear?" she said roguishly; and he prepared a soft seat for her under the pines, by pulling handfuls of grass and heaping it up in one place.

She smiled to herself as she watched him; his awkwardness had left him, and for the comfort of one whom he only "liked pretty well," he was taking a great deal of pains, she thought. When she was seated, and had made him share the grass seat, the restraint suddenly returned, and he fell to stroking her hand again, and stammered something about her wrist being better.

"Yes," she affirmed, "and I mean to return to the city in a day or two."

He blushed like a girl. "May I go with you?" he asked; and then jumped at once into the midst of a "declaration"--which had evidently been gotten by heart--winding up by asking again, "and now may I go with you to San Francisco, Jenny? and will you marry me?"

Her eyes had been fixed on the lone bare crag away off across the valley; and the color in them had changed from light gray to deep black, and had faded again to a dull heavy gray.

"You may go to San Francisco, of course, though I shall not see you there. And 'I like you pretty well,' too; but you must not dare to dream that I could ever marry you."

A little linnet in the tree above them had hopped from branch to branch, and now sat on the lowest, almost facing them. When Jenny's voice, stone-cold and harsh, had ceased, he broke into a surprised little chirp, and then uttered quick, sharp notes of reproof or remonstrance. Jenny understood either the language of the bird, or what the wild, startled eyes looking into hers said, for the hand that had lain in his was tightly clinched beside her, telling a tale she would not let her face repeat.

When the lamp had been lighted in her cottage that night, she stood irresolute by the window from where she could see the Brodie-Perkins habitation. On her way to the dining-room she had come unawares on Si Perkins instructing a waiter to bring tea to their cottage; and though she had asked no question, her eyes had rested wistfully on the partner's stern face. Now she paced the room, her face flushed, her hands clasped above her aching head, then dropped again idle and nerveless by her side.

"It is too late," she said, at last; "and it can never, never be. Then why make myself wretched over it?" and with a sudden revulsion of feeling she raised the curtain and looked steadily over to the other cottage. "It is only the law of reprisals, after all, Ben Brodie! To be sure _you_ did not break my heart--but--that other man--and--you are all men." Her voice had died to a whisper; and, drawing writing material toward her at the table, she was in the midst of her letter before the vengeful light died out of her eyes. Once she laid her head on her arm and sobbed bitterly; but she finished the letter, closed and directed it, and turned down the light so that she could not be seen going from the cottage. The night air was damp and chilly, and before descending the three wooden steps that led from the little stoop to the ground, her unsteady hand sought the dress-pocket to drop her letter in; and then she drew the shawl and hood close about her.

She shuddered the next morning, as she threw a last look back into the room from which her trunk and baggage had already been taken, and she muttered something about the dreariness of an empty room and an empty heart. But when her numerous dear friends came to the stage to bid a last farewell, Jenny's face looked so radiant that many a one turned with secret envy from the woman to whom life must seem like one continuous holiday. Si Perkins, with eyebrows drawn deep down, was attentively studying a newspaper by the open window of the reading-room; and when Jenny threw a look back from the stage, she fancied that a trembling hand was working at the blinds of the two partners' cottage; and the sallow, ghastly face, and wild, startled eyes of yesterday, rose up reproachfully before her.

The day dragged slowly on; "from heat to heat" the sun had kissed the tree-tops with its drowsy warmth, hushing to sleep the countless birds that make the mountain-side their home. With the cool of evening came the low breeze that shook the sleepers from repose, and sighed sadly, sadly through the pines.

"Has the stage come in?" asked Ben Brodie slowly, as he lay with closed eyes and feverish brow on his bed in the cottage.