Part 10
Sherwood laughed. “We’ve found some of Crazy Dan’s stores!” and attempted to take one of the little cans. It lifted like lead. He stopped--afraid to put it to the test--and looked at Evaleen queerly; and she (remembering the story she had heard of Dan’s persistence in working the cañon for placer gold) gave a little cry as he started to open it. It seemed too much to dare to believe--to hope for---- Yet----.
He lifted the lid. Gold! The gold dust that Crazy Dan (ay! Miser Dan) had, back in the dead years, hoarded away in the safest place he knew; adding to it month after month, as he delved, and died with his secret still his own.
* * * * *
The Judge was at the County Seat--at the station buying his ticket to go back to his “little girl”--when the train from the West came in. In the dusk he caught a glimpse of a tailor-made suit which seemed familiar to his eye, and that made him look twice at the wearer.
“Why! Bless my soul, child--and Sherwood, too! Well! Well! What are you doing here? I wrote to you about it. Didn’t you get my message, Evy?”
“Yes, Daddy, dear; you said: ‘Be at the station tonight ready to go home--I start from here.’ But as everything was packed I thought I’d come up and join you, and we could both start from here.”
“And,” added Sherwood, after they had gone into the now empty waiting-room, “I wanted to see you, sir, before you left.”
“Why, of course! Glad you came to see me off, Sherwood. You must come down to see us, you know; and meet mother and the girls. We’ll---- Eh! What’s that? * * * What! * * * Evy--my little girl?”
The Judge stuttered and stammered, bewildered at the suddenness of the attack.
* * * * *
Sherwood talked long and earnestly; and the Judge’s eyes wandered to the daughter who had, until now, never seemed other than his “little girl.” But she had “grown up” under his unseeing eyes; and now somebody wanted to take her from him. Sherwood---- Well, Sherwood was a fine fellow; he would make his way in the world in spite of the luck that was against him now.
“My boy,” (and the Judge laid his hands affectionately on the young man’s shoulders as they stood facing each other) “I know you to be a gentleman, and I believe you to be every inch a manly man. I want my child to marry not what a man has made, but what he is made of. You will win in the world’s rough and tumble of money-making, if you’re only given a chance; and I’ve been going to tell you that there’s a place waiting for you in our San Francisco office when you are ready for it. And now I’ll add, there’s a place in my family, whenever Evy says so.
“As to your not having much more than the proverbial shilling just now, that cuts no figure with me. Why not? Let me tell you.”
He put his arm around Evaleen, drawing her to him.
“This child’s mother took me ‘for better or worse’ twenty-five years ago this very night, when I hadn’t a dollar in the world that I could call my own--married me on an hour’s notice, and without any wedding guests or wedding gowns. She trusted me and loved me well enough to take me as I was, and to trust to the future (God bless her!) and neither of us have ever had cause to regret it.”
To have this assurance from the Judge before he knew of the wonderful story Sherwood had to tell of the secret of Crazy Dan’s tunnel, added to the joy of the young people who now felt they were beloved of the gods.
The Judge’s joy over the finding of the treasure box was even greater than Sherwood’s; for the older man had lived long enough to realize (as a younger generation could not) that this wealth would put many possibilities for happiness within their reach that otherwise might not be theirs. To them--the lovers in the rose-dawn of youth, with love so new--love itself seemed enough; save perhaps that the money would make marriage a nearer possibility.
* * * * *
“Darling”--and a new thought, a new hope rang through Sherwood’s earnest tones--“do you believe you love me as well as she--your mother--loved him?”
“Oh, Hume!” was all she said, but the reproach in her eyes answered him.
“Then marry me now, as she did your father, at an hour’s notice. Here--this evening, before the train comes. Judge, why can not this be so? What is there to prevent our being married at once, without all the fussing and nonsense that will be necessary if we wait till she gets home? Let us be married here, and now, and all go away together.”
“Why, bless my soul! This takes my breath away. You young people--what whirlwinds you are! You--Yes, yes, but---- Hey? What’s that? I did? I know; but---- What? I should rather think it would be a surprise to mother and the girls to bring a son home to Christmas dinner. Oh, yes, I know; but---- What’s that you say? Her mother did----! Yes, yes, I know.... Well, well, my lad, I don’t know but you’re right. Her mother---- Love is the one thing--the rest doesn’t matter. Evy, child, it is for you to say.”
And remembering that girl of the long-ago who twenty-five years before had gone to a penniless lover with such a beautiful love and trust Evaleen Blaine, putting her hand with a like trust into her lover’s, walked with him across to the little parsonage, and there became Hume Sherwood’s wife.
* * * * *
When Cadwallader got back to the camp the next morning, he heard much he was unprepared for; for news travels fast where happenings are few. What he heard did not tend to make his Christmas a merry one.
Evaleen Blaine and Hume Sherwood were now man and wife! He did not want to believe it, yet he felt it was true. And Sherwood had sent to the mint (from the “Spencer” mine, too,) the largest shipment of bullion that had ever gone out of the county! Neither did he want to believe this--and did not. There must be some mistake.
He went over to the express office through the snow and the cold; for the rain had turned to snow and the Nevada winter had begun. It would be a cheerless yule-tide for him. It was true as he had heard--true in all particulars, except that the consignment to the mint had been in gold dust, not in bullion.
Elwyn Cadwallader knew mines. Therefore he knew ledges do not produce gold dust; and Sherwood had owned no placers. Whatever suspicion he had of the truth he kept to himself. It was enough for him to know that all he had done to make Hume Sherwood the butt of the camp, that he might all the more surely part him from Evaleen Blaine, had been but the means of aiding him in winning her; and that the richest joke of the camp had proved to be rich indeed, in that it had placed a great fortune in the hands of “the deckel-edged tenderfoot.”
And here ends “The Loom of the Desert,” as written by Idah Meacham Strobridge, with cover design and illustrations made by L. Maynard Dixon, and published by the Artemisia Bindery, which is in Los Angeles, California, at the Sign of the Sagebrush; and completed on the Twelfth day of December, One thousand nine hundred and seven.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.