Stories of the Foot-hills Part 7

Melissa, standing among the sycamores below, had seen it all as a sudden, paralyzing vision. She stood still a brief, terrified instant, and then turned and ran down the canon, keeping in the bed of the stream, and climbing over the boulders.

She was conscious of nothing but a wild dismay that she had seen it. She had a vague hope that she might run away from her own knowledge. The swift, unreasoning notion had lodged itself in her brain that it would be better if no one knew what had happened. Perhaps no one else need be told. She avoided the camp, scrambling through the chaparral on the opposite bank, and, reaching the flume path at last, hurried on breathlessly.

Suddenly Melissa stopped. It would not do to approach the house in that way. She must rest a little and cool her flushed face before any one should see her. She leaned against the timbers that supported the flume across the gully, and fanned herself with her hat. The tumult of her brain had not shaped itself into any plan. She only wished she had not seen. It was such a dreadful thing to know, to tell. Insensibly she was preparing herself to dissemble. She was cooling her cheeks, and getting ready to saunter lazily toward the house and speak indifferently. She did not realize that after that she could not tell. There would be an instant in which to decide, and then a dreary stretch of dissimulation.

At this moment she heard the quick hoofbeats of a galloping horse on the road that led down the mountain-side. He was going away! Then certainly she must not speak. They would never find him, and she would keep the secret forever. She listened until the hoof-beats died away.

The flush faded out of her poor little face, leaving it wan and hopeless. After all, it was a dreary thing for him to ride away, and leave her nothing but a dismal secret such as this. A shred of cloud drifted across the sun, and the canon suddenly became a cold, cheerless place. She stepped into the path, and came face to face with Lysander.

"Have yuh seen anything of yer paw, M'lissy? Why, what ails yuh, child?

Y'r as white as b.u.t.termilk. Has anything bit yuh?"

"No," faltered the girl, looking down at her wretched finery; "my shoes 'a' been a-hurtin' my feet. I'm goin' back to the house to take 'em off.

I'm tired."

"I wish y'd set right down here and take off y'r shoes, M'lissy," said her brother-in-law anxiously. "We'll have to kind o' watch yer paw. I had to tell 'im about the spring, an' he struck off right away an' said he was goin' up there. I reckoned he'd go away an' furgit it, but he hain't come back yit. I'm afraid he'll git to talkin' when he comes back to the house, and tell yer maw. It won't do no good, an' there ain't no use in her workin' herself up red-headed about it,--'t enny rate not till Poindexter comes back. We must git hold o' yer paw before he gits to see her, and brace 'im up ag'in. If you'll set here an' call to me if you see 'im below, I'll go on up an' look fer 'im."

Melissa had stood quite still, looking down at the uncompromising lines of her drapery. It was rapidly becoming a pink blur to her gaze. The ghastliness of what she had undertaken to conceal came over her like a chill, insweeping fog. She shivered as she spoke, trying in vain to return Lysander's honest gaze.

"I'll come back an' set here when I've took off my shoes. You kin go on.

I'll come in a minute."

Lysander looked into her face an instant as he started.

"The seam o' yer stockin' 's got over the j'int, M'lissy," he said kindly; "it's made you sick at yer stummick; y'r as white as taller."

VI.

Old Withrow entered his own house with dignity at last.

Strangely enough, when the spiritual and presumably the better part of us is gone, the world stands in awe of what remains. If the bleared eyes could have opened once more, and the dead man could have known that it was for fear of him the children were gathered in a whispering, awestricken group at the window, that respect for him caused the lowering of voices and baring of heads on the part of the household and curious neighbors, he would suddenly have found the world he had left a stranger place than any world to come.

There was no great pretense of grief. Mother Withrow looked at the dead face a while, supporting her elbow with one knotted hand, and grasping her weather-beaten jaw with the other. Perhaps her silence would have been the strangest feature of it all to him, if he could have known. If the years hid any romance that had been theirs, and was now hers, the old woman's face told no more of it than the flinty outside of a boulder tells of the leaf traced within.

"He wuzn't no great shakes of a man," she said to Minerva, "but I don't 'low to have him stood up an' shot at by any o' Nate Forrester's crowd without puttin' the law on the man that done it."

Lysander's attempt at concealment had melted away in the heat of the excitement occasioned by the murder. The drying up of the spring had been no secret in camp. The men who had carried Withrow's body to the house had talked of it unrebuked. Mother Withrow had heard them with a tightening of the muscles of her face and an increased angularity in her tall figure, but she had proudly refrained from the faintest manifestation of surprise. Nor had she asked any questions of Minerva or Lysander. This unexpected reserve had been a great relief to the latter, who found himself not only released from an unpleasant duty, but saved from any reproaches for concealment.

The coroner had come up from Los Angeles, and there had been an inquest.

Sterling had not been present, having ridden to Los Angeles to give himself up; but the men to whom he had told the story when he came to the camp had testified, and there had been a verdict that deceased came to his death from a wound made by a revolver in the hands of Frederick Sterling.

Some of the jury still hung about the place with c.u.mbrous attempts at helpfulness, and Minerva moved tearfully to and fro in the kitchen, wearing her husband's hat with a reckless a.s.sumption of masculine rights and feminine privileges, while she set out a "bite of something" for the coroner, who must ride back to Los Angeles in hot haste.

Ulysses had denied himself the unwonted pleasure of listening longer to the men's whispered talk, to follow the stranger into the kitchen and watch him eat; his curiosity concerning the habits of that dignitary being considerably heightened by the official's haste, which pointed strongly to a rapid succession of murders requiring his personal attention, and marking him as a man of dark and b.l.o.o.d.y knowledge.

The hounds shared the boy's curiosity, and stood beside the table waving their scroll-like tails, and watching with expectant eagerness the unerring precision with which the stranger conveyed a knife-load of "frijoles" from his plate to his mouth. When he had finished his repast, gulping the last half-gla.s.s of b.u.t.termilk, and wiping the white beads from his overhanging mustache with quick horizontal sweeps of his gayly bordered handkerchief, he leaned back and flipped a bean at Ulysses, whose expression of intent and curious awe changed instantly to the most sheepish self-consciousness. The familiarity loosened his tongue, however, and he asked, with a little explosive gasp,--

"Do yuh think they'll ketch 'im?"

"Ketch who?"

"The man that shot gran'pap."

"They've got 'im now."

"Hev they? How'd they ketch 'im?"

"He gave himself up."

"Will they hang 'im?"

The coroner's eyes twinkled.

"Don't you think they'd ought to?"

"You bet!" Ulysses wagged his head with bloodthirsty vehemence.

The great man got up, laughing, and went toward the door, rubbing the boy's hair the wrong way as he pa.s.sed him. The hounds followed languidly, and Ulysses darted up the creaking staircase, and tumbled into the little attic room where Melissa sat gazing drearily out of the window.

"They've got 'im!'" he said breathlessly. "They're a-go'n' to hang 'im!"

The girl got up and backed toward the wall, gasping and dizzy.

"Who said so?" she faltered.

"The man downstairs,--the one that came from Loss Anglus."

Melissa put the palms of her outstretched hands against the wall behind her to steady herself. In the half-light she seemed crowding away from some terror that confronted her.

"I don't believe it. They won't do anything to him right away; it wouldn't be fair. They don't know what paw done. I"--

Her voice broke. She looked about piteously, biting her lip and trying to remember what she had said.

Ulysses was not a critical listener. He had enjoyed his little sensation, and was ready for another. From the talk downstairs he knew that Sterling had acknowledged the killing to the men at the camp. His excitement made him indifferent as to the source of Melissa's information.

"I'm go'n' to the hangin'," he said, doggedly boastful.

Melissa looked at him vacantly.

"How'd they find out who done it?" she asked, dropping her hands and turning toward the window.

"He told it hisself,--blabbed it right out to the men at the camp; then he went on down to Loss Anglus, big as life, an' blowed about it there.

He's cheeky."

Melissa turned on him with a flash of contempt.

"You said they ketched him."