Chapter II

Camp at the Thousand Springs. A little grass peninsula running out between the river and a narrow lagoon, a part of Decker's ranch, two miles by water below the Springs and half a mile from Decker's Ferry, set all about with a hedge of rose, willow, and wild-currant bushes, sword-grass, and tall reeds,--the grasses enormous, like Japanese decorations,--crossing the darks of the opposite shore and the lights of the river and sky. Our tents are pitched, our blankets spread in the sun, our wagon is soaking its tired feet in the river. Tom and Harshaw are up-stream somewhere, fishing for supper. Billings is bargaining with Old Man Decker for the "keep" of his team. Kitty and I are enjoying ourselves. There is a rip in one of the back seams of my jacket, Kitty tells me, but even that cannot move me.

I say we are enjoying ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with the accent of beauty pressing home, I cannot say. I rather fear for her.

The screws have been tightened on her lately by something that befell at the Harshaw ranch. Our road lay past the place, and Harshaw had to stop for his surveying instruments, also to pack a bag, he said,--with apologies for keeping us waiting.

I think we were all a little nervous as we neared the house. Very few women could have spelled the word "home" out of those rough masculine premises. I wondered if Kitty was not offering up a prayer of thanksgiving for the life she had been delivered from.

Harshaw jumped down, and, stooping under the wire fence, ran across the alfalfa stubble to the house as fast as he could for the welcome of a beautiful young setter dog--Maisie he called her--that came wildly out to meet him. A woman--not a nice-looking woman--stood at the door and watched him, and even at our distance from them there was something strange in their recognition.

Kitty began to talk and laugh with forced coolness. Tom turned the horses sharply, so that the wagon's shadow lay on the roadside, away from the house. "Get out, hadn't you better?" he suggested, in the tone of a command. We got out, and Kitty asked for her sketching-bag.

"Kitty," I whispered, pointing to the house, "draw _that_, and send it to your mother. She will never ask again why you didn't care to live there."

"That has nothing to do with it," she retorted coldly. "I would have lived there, or anywhere, with the right person."

There was no such person. I couldn't help saying it.

She is very handsome when she looks down, proud and a trifle sullen when you "touch her on the raw," as the men say.

"But there _is_ such a person, Kitty," I ventured. I had ventured, it seemed, too far.

"You are my hostess. Your house is my only home. Don't be his accomplice!" I thought it rather well said.

Now that woman's clothes were hanging on the line (and very common-looking clothes they were), so she could not have been a casual guest. Moreover, she was pacing the hard ground in front of the house, and staring at us with a truculent yet uneasy air. Curiosity was strong, and a sort of anger possessed me against the place and everybody connected with it.

When Cecil came out, looking very hot and confused for him, who is always so fresh and gay, I inquired, rather shortly perhaps, "Who is your visitor?"

"I have no visitor," he answered me, as cool as you please. But there was a protest in his eye. I was determined not to spare him or any of the Harshaws.

"Your housekeeper, then?"

"I have no housekeeper."

"Who is the lady stopping at your house?"

"I have no house."

"Your cousin's house, then?"

"If you refer to the person I was talking to--she is my cousin's housekeeper, I suppose."

Tom gave me a look, and I thought it time to let the subject drop. This was in Kitty's presence, though apparently she neither saw nor heard. I walked on ahead of the wagon, so angry that I was almost sick. Instantly Harshaw joined me, with a much nicer, brighter look upon his face.

"Mrs. Daly," he said, "I want to beg your pardon. I could not answer your question before Miss Comyn. The lady, as you were pleased to call her, is Mrs. Harshaw, _my cousin_--Micky's wife, you understand."

"Since when?"

"Day before yesterday, she tells me. They were married at Bliss."

"Well, I should say it was 'Bliss' for Kitty Comyn that _she_ is not Mrs. Harshaw--too," I was about to add, but that would be going rather far. "And what did you want to bring that girl over here for?"

"Mrs. Daly, I have told you,--I thought she loved him."

"And what of his love for her?"

"Good heavens! you don't suppose Micky cares for that old thing he has married! _That_ was what I was trying to save him from. He'd have had to be the deuce of a lot worse than he is to deserve that."

Had it occurred to him, I put it to Cecil Harshaw, to ask himself what the saving of his precious cousin might have cost the girl who was to have been offered up to that end?

"You leave out one small feature of the case," said Harshaw, with a sick and burning look that made me drop my eyes, old woman as I am. "I love her myself so well that, by Heaven! if she had wanted Micky or any other man, she should have had him, if that was what her heart was set upon. But I didn't believe it was. I wanted her to know the truth, and, hang it! I couldn't write it to her. I couldn't peach on Micky; but I wanted to smash things. I wanted something to happen. Maybe I didn't do the right thing, but I had to do something."

I couldn't tell him just what I thought of him at that moment, but I did say to him that he had some very simple ideas for an end-of-the-century young Englishman. At which he smiled sweetly, and said it was one of his simple ideas that Kitty need not be informed who or what her successor was, or how promptly she had been succeeded.

"But just now you said you wanted her to know the truth."

"Not the whole truth. Great Scott! she knows enough. No need to rub it in."

"She knows just enough about this to misunderstand, perhaps. In justice to yourself--she heard you beating about the bush--do you want her to misunderstand you?"

"Oh, hang me! I don't expect her to understand me, or even tolerate me, yet. Mine is a waiting race, Mrs. Daly."

"Very well; you can wait," I said. "But news like this will not wait. She will be obliged to hear it; you don't know how or where she may hear it. Better let her hear it first in as decent a way as possible."

"But there is no decent way. How can I explain to you, or you to her, such a measly affair as this? It began with a question of money he owed that woman on the ranch. He bought it of her,--and a cruel bad bargain it was,--and he never could make his last payment. She has threatened him, and played the fool with him when he'd let her, and bored him no end. His governor would have helped him out; but, you see, Micky has been a rather expensive boy, and he has given the old gentleman to understand that the place is paid for,--to account for money sent him at various times for that ostensible purpose,--and on that basis the bargain was struck, between our governors, for my interest in the ranch. My father bought me in, on a clear title, as Uncle George represented it, in perfect good faith. I've never said a word, on the old gentleman's account; and Micky has never dared undeceive his father, who is the soul of honor in business, as in everything else. I am sorry to bore you with family affairs; but it's rather rum the way Micky's fate has caught up with him, through his one weakness of laziness, and perhaps lying a little, when he was obliged to. How this affair came about so suddenly I can't say. Didn't like to ask her too many questions; and Micky, poor devil, faded from view directly he saw us coming. But at a venture: she had heard he was going to be married, and came down here to make trouble when he should arrive with his bride; but he came back alone, disgusted with life, and found her here. It was easier to marry her than--pay her, we'll say. She has been something over-generous, perhaps. She would rather have had him, any time, than her money, and now was the time. She took advantage of a weak moment."

"A weak and a spiteful moment," I kindly added. "Now if he hastens the news to England, and the Percifers hear of it in New York, how pleasant for Kitty to have all her friends hear that _he_ is married and _she_ is not!"

"Great Heavens!" said the young fellow, "if she would let me hasten the news--that she is married to me!"

"Why don't you appeal to her pride and her spirit now while they are in the dust? Why do you bother with sentiment now?"

I liked him so much at that moment that I would have had him have Kitty, no matter what way he got her.

"Yes," he said; "why not take advantage of her, as everybody else has done?"

"Some people's scrupulousness comes rather late," I said.

"To those who don't understand," he had the brazenness to say. "What is done is done. It's a rough beginning--awfully rough on her. The end must atone somehow. If I don't win her I shall be punished enough; but if I do, it will be because she loves me. And pray God"--He stopped, with that look. It is a number of years since a young man has looked at me in that way, but a woman does not forget.

It was rather difficult telling to Kitty the story of her old lover's marriage, as I took it on myself to do. Not that she winced perceptibly; but I fear she has taken the thing home, and is dwelling on it--certain features of it--in a way that can do no good. From a word she lets slip now and then, I gather that she is brooding over that fancy of hers that Cecil Harshaw offered himself by way of reparation, as she was falling between two stools,--her own home and her lover's,--to save her from the ground. As since that rainy night in the wagon she has never distinctly referred to this theory of his conduct, I have no excuse for bringing it up, even to attack it. In fact, I dare not; she is in too complicated a mood. And, after all, why should I want her to marry either of them? Why should the "hungry generations" tread her down? She is nice enough to stay as she is.

Another thing happened on our way here which may perversely have helped to confirm her in this pretty notion of Harshaw's disinterestedness.

At a place by the river where the current is bad (there are many such places, and, in fact, the whole of the Snake River is a perfect hoodoo) Harshaw stopped one day to drink. The wagon had struck a streak of heavy sand, and we were all walking. We stood and watched him, because he drank with such deep enjoyment, stooping bareheaded on his hands and knees, and putting his hot face to the water. Suddenly he made a clutch at his breast pocket: his Norfolk jacket was unbuttoned. He had lost something, and the river had got it. He ran along the bank, trying to recover it with a stick, and, not succeeding, he plopped in just as he was, with his boots on. We saw him drop into deep water and swim for it, a little black object, which he caught, and held in his teeth. Then he turned his face to the shore; and precious near he came to never reaching it! We women had been looking on, smiling, like idiot dolls, till we saw Tom racing down the bank, throwing off his coat as he ran. Then we took a sort of dumb fright, and tried to follow; but it was all over in a second, before we saw it, still less realized it--his struggle, swimming for dear life, and not gaining an inch; the stick held out to him in the nick of time, just as he passed a spot where the beast of a current that had him swooped inshore.

I am sorry to say that my husband's first words to the man he may be said to have saved from death were, "You young fool, what did you do that for?"

"For this," Harshaw panted, slapping his wet breast.

"For a pocket-book! Great Sign! What had you in it? I wouldn't have done that for the whole of the Snake River valley."

"Nor I," laughed Harshaw.

"Nor the Bruneau to boot."

"Nor I."

"What did you do it for, then?"

"For this," Harshaw repeated.

"For a piece of pasteboard with a girl's face on it, or some such toy, I'll be sworn!"

Harshaw did not deny the soft impeachment.

"I didn't know you had a girl, Harshaw," Tom began seductively.

"Well, I haven't, you know," said Harshaw. "There was one I wanted badly enough, a few years ago," he added with engaging frankness.

"When was it you first began to pine for her? About the period of second dentition?"

"Oh, betimes; and betimes I was disappointed."

"Well, unless it was for the girl herself, I'd keep out of that Snake River," my husband advised.

Kitty's face wore a slightly strained expression of perfect vacancy.

"Do _you_ know who Harshaw's 'girl' was?" I asked her the other night, as we were undressing,--without an idea that she wouldn't see where the joke came in. She was standing, with her hair down, between the canvas curtains of our tent. It looks straight out toward the Sand Springs Fall, and Kitty worships there awhile every night before she goes to bed.

"No," she said. "I was never much with Cecil Harshaw. It is the families that have always known each other." The simple child! She hadn't understood him, or would she not understand? Which was it? I can't make out whether she is really simple or not. She is too clever to be so very simple; yet the cleverness of a young girl's mind, centred on a few ideas, is mainly in spots. But now I think she has brought this incident to bear upon that precious theory of hers, that Harshaw offered himself from a sense of duty. Great good may it do her!

The Sand Springs Fall, a perfect gem, is directly opposite our camp, facing west across the lagoon. We can feast our eyes upon it at all hours of the day and night. Tom has told Kitty, in the way of business, that he has no use for that fall. She may draw it or not, as she likes. She does draw it; she draws it, and water-colors it, and chalks it in colored crayons, and India-inks it, loading on the Chinese white; and she charcoals it, in moonlight effects, on a gray-blue paper. But do it whatever way she will, she never can do it.

"Oh, you exquisite, hopeless thing! Why can't I let you alone!" she cries; "and why can't you let _me_ alone!"

"It is rather hard, the way the thing doubles up on you," says Tom. "The real fall, right side up, is bad enough; but when it comes to the reflection of it, standing on its head in the lagoon, I should lie right down myself. I wouldn't pull another pound."

("_Lay_ down," he said; but I thought you wouldn't stand it. Tom would never spoil a cherished bit of dialect because of shocking anybody with his grammar.)

Kitty throws herself back in the dry salt-grass with which the whole of our little peninsula is bedded. The willows and brakes are our curtains, through which the rising moon looks in at us, and the setting sun; the sun rises long before we see him, above the dark-blue mountains beyond the shore.

"Won't somebody repeat

'There is sweet music here that softlier lies?'"

Kitty asks, letting her eyelashes fall on her sun-flushed cheeks. Her face, as I saw it, sitting behind her in the grass, was so pretty--upside down like the reflection of the waterfall, its colors all the more wonderfully blended.

We did not all speak at once. Then Harshaw said, to break the silence, "I will read it to you, if you don't mind."

"Oh, have you the book?" Kitty asked in surprise.

He went to his tent and returned with _a_ book, and sitting on the grass where she could hear but could not see him, he began. I trembled for him; but before he had got to the second stanza I was relieved: he could read aloud.

"Now _there_ is a man one could live on a Snake River ranch with," I felt like saying to Kitty. Not that I am sure that I want her to.

When he had finished,

"O rest ye, brother mariners; we will not wander more!"

Tom remarked, after a suitable silence, that it was all well enough for Harshaw, who would be in London in six weeks, to say, "We will not wander more!" But how about the rest of us?

Kitty sat straight up at that.

"Will Mr. Harshaw be in London six weeks from now?" The question was almost a cry.

"Will you?" she demanded, turning upon him as if this was the last injury he could do her.

"I suppose so," he said.

"And you will see my mother, and all of them?"

"I think so--if you wish."

She rose up, as if she could bear no more. Harshaw waited an instant, and then followed her; but she motioned him back, and went away to have it out with herself alone.

I took up the book Harshaw had left on the grass. It was "Copp's Manual"--"For the use of Prospectors," etc.

* * * * *

After all, it is not so sure that Harshaw will go to London. There has been an engineer on the ground since last summer, when all this water was free. He has located a vast deal of it, perhaps the whole. Tom says he can hold only just as much as he can use; I hope there will be no difference of opinion on that point. There generally is a difference of opinion on points of location when the thing located is proved to have any value. The prior locator has gone East, they tell us at the ranch, on a business visit, presumably to raise capital for his scheme; which, as I understand it, is to force the water of the springs up on the dry plains above, for irrigation (the fetich of the country), by means of a pneumatic pumping arrangement. His ladders and pipes, and all his hopeful apparatus, are clinging now like cobwebs to the face of the bluff, against that flashing, creaming broadside of the springs at their greatest height and fall. I was pitying the poor man and his folly, but Tom says the plan is perfectly feasible.

The wall of the river cañon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river. Winter and summer the volume of water never varies, and the rate of discharge is always the same, and the water is never cold, though I have just said it is. It looks cold until the rocks warm it with their gemlike tints, like a bride's jewels gleaming through her veil. Back of the bluffs, where it might be supposed to come from, there is nothing for a hundred miles but drought and desert plains. I don't care for any of their theories concerning its source. It is better as it is--the miracle of the smitten rock.

You can fancy what wild presumption it must seem that a mere man should think to reverse those torrents and make them climb the bluff or cram them into an iron pipe and send them like paid laborers to hoist and pump and grind, and light the streets at Silver City, a hundred miles away. And how the cataracts will shout while these two pigmies compare their rival claims to ownership--in a force that with one stroke could lay them as flat as last year's leaves in the bottom of a mill-race!

The particular fall my schemer has located for his own--other claims to be discussed hereafter--is called the "Snow Bank." He says he doesn't want the earth: this one cataract is enough for him. To look at the whole frontage of the springs and listen to their roar, one would think there might be water enough for them both, poor children! Hardly what you'd call two bites of a cherry!

If the springs were the half of a broken diamond bracelet, the Snow Bank would be its brightest gem, lying separate in the case--perhaps the one that was the clasp. It is half hidden by the shoulder of a great barren bluff which, at a certain angle of the sun, throws a blue shadow over it. At other times the fall is almost too bright in its foaming whiteness for the eye to endure.

Kitty is painting it with this shadow half across it; but the light shines upon it at its source. Tom is doubtful if she is showing the fall to the best advantage for his purpose, but he is obliging enough to let the artist try it in her own way first.

"Go up there," she says, "and stand at the head of the spring, if you want to show by comparison how big it is, or how small you are."

He goes, and gets in position, and Kitty makes some pencil-marks on the margin of her sketch. Then she waves her hands to tell him, across the shouting current, that she is done with him. She has been so quick that he thinks he must have mistaken her gesture. Then Harshaw makes the train-conductor's signal for the train to move on.

"You see," she says to Harshaw and me, who are looking over her shoulder, "_that_ would be the size of him in my sketch." She points to the marginal pencil-mark, which is not longer than the nib of a stub-pen. "I can't make a little black dot like that look like a man."

"In this particular sketch, for his purpose, he'd rather look like a dot than a man, I dare say," said Harshaw.

"Well, shall I put him in? I can make a note of it on the margin: 'This black dot is Mr. Daly, standing at the spring-head. He is six feet'"--

"But he isn't, you know," Harshaw says. "He's five feet ten--if he's that."

"Ten and a half," I hasten to amend.

Our lunch that day had been left in the boat. We went down and ate it under the mountain birches at a spot where the Snow Bank empties into the lagoon--not _our_ lagoon, as we called it, between our camp and the lovely Sand Springs Fall, but the upper one, made by the springs themselves, before their waters reach the river. In front of us, half embraced by the lagoon and half by the river, lay a little island-ranch of about ten acres, not cut up in crops, but all over green in pasture. A small cabin, propping up a large hop-vine, showed against a mass of birch and cottonwood on the river side of the island.

"What a place for a honeymoon!" said I.

"There is material there for half of a honeymoon," said Tom--"not bad material, either."

"Oh, yes," I said; "we have seen her--that is, we have seen her sunbonnet."

"Kitty, you've got a rival," I exclaimed: for there in the sunny centre of the island, planted with obvious design right in front of the Snow Bank, _our_ Snow Bank, was an artist's big white umbrella.

"Why should I not have, in a place like this?" she said. "If the schemers arrive by twos, why not two of my modest craft? _We_ shall leave it as we find it; we don't intend to carry it away in our pockets." She stopped, and blushed disdainfully. "I forgot," she murmured, "my own mercenary designs."

"I have not heard of these mercenary designs of yours. What are they, may I ask?" Harshaw had turned on his side on the grass, and half rose on one elbow as he looked at her.

"That is strange," mocked Kitty, with supreme coldness. "You have always been so interested in my affairs!"

"I always shall be," he replied seriously, with supreme gentleness.

"I ought to be so grateful."

"But unfortunately you are not."

"I should be grateful--if you would move a little farther to the right, if you please. That young person in the pink sunbonnet is coming down to water her horses again."

Harshaw calmly took himself out of her way altogether, lighted his pipe, and went down close to the water, and sat there on a stone, and presently, as we could hear, entered into easy conversation with the pink sunbonnet, the face of which leaned toward him over the pony's neck as he stooped to drink. The splashed waters became still, and softly the whole picture--pink sunbonnet, clay-bank pony, pale and shivery willows, and deep blue sky--developed on the negative of the clear lagoon.

There was no use in saying how pretty it was, so we resorted to the other note, of disparagement. I remarked that I should not think a pink sunbonnet would be ravishingly becoming to the average Snake River complexion, as I had seen it.

"_That_ sunbonnet is becoming, you bet!" Tom remarked. "Wait till you see the face inside it."

"Have you seen it?"

"Quite frequently. Do you think Harshaw would sit there talking with her, as he does by the hour, if that sunbonnet was not becoming?"

"As he does by the hour! And why have we not heard of her before?" I requested to be told.

"Business, my dear. She is a feature of the scheme--quite an important one. She represents the hitch which is sure to develop early in the history of every live enterprise."

"Indeed?" I said. And if Harshaw talked with her on business, I didn't see what his talking had to do with the face inside her bonnet.

"I don't say that it's always on business," Tom threw in significantly.

"Who is the lady in the pink sunbonnet, and what is your business with her?" I demanded.

"I question the propriety of speaking of her in just that tone," said Tom, "inasmuch as she happens to be a lady--somewhat off the conventional lines. She waters her own stock and milks her own cow, because the old Indian girl who lives with her is laid up at present with a fever. Her father was an artist--one of the great unappreciated"--

"So that was her father painting the Snow Bank?" I interrupted.

"Her father is dead, my dear, as you would have learned if you had listened to my story. But he lived here a good many years before he died. He had made a queer marriage, old man Decker tells me, and quarreled with the world on account of it. He came here with his disputed bride. She was somebody else's wife first, I believe, and there was a trifling informality about the matrimonial exchange; but it came out all right. They both died, and a sweeter, fresher little thing than the daughter! Adamant, though--bed-rock, so far as we are concerned."

"What do you want that belongs to her?" I asked. "Her island, perhaps?"

"Only right of way across it. But 'that's a detail.' She is the owner of something else we do want--this piece of ground,"--he looked about him and waved his hand,--"and all this above us, where our power-plant must stand. And our business is to persuade her to sign the lease, or, if she won't lease, to sell it when we are ready to buy. We have to make sure of that piece of ground. This place is so confoundedly cut up with scenery and nonsense, there's not a spot available for our plant but this. We'll bridge the lagoon and make a landing on that point of birches over there."

"You will! And do you suppose she will sign a lease to empower you to wipe her off the face of the earth--abolish her and her pretty island at one fell swoop?"

"She knows nothing yet about our designs upon her toy island. We haven't approached her on that. We could manage without it at a pinch."

"So good of you!" I murmured.

"But we can't manage without a place to put our power-house."

"She'll have to sign her own death-warrant, of course. If you get a footing for your power-house you'll want the island next. I never heard of such grasping profanation."

"Well, if Cecy could see his way to fall in love with her,--I wouldn't ask him to woo her in cold blood,--it would be a monstrous convenient way to settle it."

"Why do you say such things before her?" I asked Tom when we were alone. "They are not pretty things to say, in the first place."

"Have you noticed how she is always snubbing him? I thought it time somebody should try the counter-snub. He's not solely dependent for the joys of life on the crumbs of her society."

"Do you suppose she cares whom he talks to, or whom he spends his time with?"

"Perhaps she doesn't care. I should like to give her a chance to see if she cares, that's all."

Tom's location notice being plain for all eyes to read, the mistress of the island naturally inquired what he wanted with the Snow Bank; and he, thinking she would see at once the value to her ranch of such a neighboring enterprise, frankly told her of his scheme. Nothing of its scientific interest, its difficulties, its commercial value, even its benefit to herself, appealed to the little islander. To her it was simply an attempt to alter and ruin the spot she loved best on earth; to steal her beautiful waterfall and carry it away in an ugly iron pipe. Whether the thing could be done, she did not ask herself; the design was enough. Never would she lend herself, or anything that was hers, to such an impious desecration! This was her position, which any child might have taken in defense of a beloved toy; but she was holding it with all a woman's force and constancy.

I was glad of it, I said to Tom, and I hoped she would stand them off for all she was worth. But I am not really glad. What woman could love a waterfall better than her husband's success? There are hundreds of waterfalls in the world, but only this one scheme for Tom.

But anent this hitch, it teases me a little, I confess, on Kitty's account, when Cecil meanders over to the island at all hours of the day. To be sure, it relieves Kitty of his company; but is she so glad, after all, to be relieved?

It was last Friday, after one of Harshaw's entirely frank but perfectly unexplained absences, that he came into camp and inquired if there was any clam-broth left in the kitchen. I referred him to the cook. Finding there was, he returned to me and asked if he might take a tin of it to Miss Malcolm for her patient.

"Who is Miss Malcolm?" I asked. But of course who could she be but the lady of the island, where he spends the greater part of his time? He was welcome to the clam-broth, or anything else he thought would be acceptable in that quarter, I said. And how was the patient?

"Oh, she's quite bad all the time. She doesn't get about. I wonder if you'd mind, Mrs. Daly, if I asked you to look in on her some day? The old creature's in a sad way, it seems to me."

Of course I didn't mind, if Miss Malcolm did not. Harshaw seemed to feel authorized to assure me of that fact. So I went first with Tom, and then I went again alone, leaving Harshaw in the boat with Kitty.

Miss Malcolm's maid or man servant, or both--for she does the work of both, and looks in her bed (dressed in a flannel bed-sack, her head tied up in an old blue knitted "fascinator") less like a woman than anything I ever beheld--appears to have had a mild form of grippe fever, and having never been sick in her life before, she thought she was nearing her end. My simple treatment, the basis of which was quinine and whiskey, seemed to strike old Tamar favorably; and after the second visit there was no need to come again to see her. But by this time I was deep in the good books of her mistress, who knows too little of illness herself to appreciate how little has been done, by me at least, or how very little needed to be done after restoring the old woman's confidence in her power to live. (The last time I saw her she still wore the blue fascinator, but with a man's hat on top of it; she was waddling toward the cow-corral with half a haystack, it looked like, poised on a hay-fork above her head. She was certainly a credit to her doctor, if not to her _corsétière_, she and the haystack being much of a figure.)

Miss Malcolm's innocent gratitude is most embarrassing, really painful, under the circumstances, and the poor child cannot let the circumstances alone. She imagines I am always thinking about Tom's scheme. It is evident that _she_ is; and not being exactly a woman of the world, out of the fullness of her heart her mouth speaketh. That would be all right if she would speak to somebody else. _I_ don't want to take advantage of her gratitude, as she seems determined I shall do.

"You must think me a very strained, sentimental creature," she said to me the last time, "to care so much for a few old rocks and a little piece of foamy water."

I didn't think so at all, I told her. If I had lived there all my life, I should feel about the place just as she did.

Here she began to blush and distress herself. "But think how kind you have all been to me! Mr. Harshaw was here every day, after he found how ill poor Tamar was. He did so many things: he lifted her, for one thing, and that I couldn't have done to save her life. And your two visits have simply cured her! And here I am making myself a stumbling-block and ruining your husband's plans!"

I said he was quite capable of taking care of himself.

"Does your husband want _all_ the water?" she persisted. "Do I understand that he must have it all?"

I supposed she was talking of the Snow Bank, and since she was determined we should discuss the affair in this social way, I said he would have to have a great deal; and I told her about the distance the power would have to be sent, and about the mines and the smelters, and all the rest of it, for it was no use to belittle the scheme. I had got started unintentionally, and I saw by her face that I had made an impression. It is a small-featured, rather set, colorless face, not so pretty as Tom pretended, but very delicate and pure; but now it became suddenly the face of a fierce little bigot, and enthusiast to boot.

"It shall never go through,--not _that_ scheme--not if"--Then she remembered to whom she was talking, and set her lips together, and two great shiny drops stood in her eyes.

"Don't, don't, you child!" I said. "Don't worry about their old scheme! If it must come it will come; but as a rule, a scheme, my dear, is the last thing that ever does go through. There's plenty of time."

"But I can't give in," she said. "No; I _must_ try to hinder it all I can. I will be honest with you. I like you all; of all the strangers who have come here I never liked any people better. But your husband--must _not_--set his heart on _all_ that water! It doesn't belong to him."

"Does it belong to you, dear?"

"The _sight_ of it belongs to me," she said. "I will not have the place all littered up with their pipes and power-plants. Look out there! Look at that! Has any one the right to come here and spoil such a lovely thing as that?"--This is what it is to be the daughter of an artist.

"And how about the other despoiler," I asked--"the young man with the pneumatic pipe?"

"The 'pneumatic pipe'!" she repeated.

"'Pump,' I mean. Is he to be allowed all over the place to do as _he_ pleases? His scaling-ladders are littering up the bluffs--not that they incommode the bluffs any; but if I lived here, I should want to brush them away as I would sweep the cobwebs from my walls."

"I do not own the bluffs," she said in a distant, tremulous voice.

But the true answer to my question, as I surmise, was the sudden, helpless flush which rose, wave upon wave, covering her poor little face, blotting out all expression but that of painful girlish shame. Here, if I'm not mistaken, will be found the heart of the difficulty. Miss Malcolm's sympathies are evidently with compressed air rather than with electrical transmission. I shall tell Tom he need waste no more arguments on her. Let him first compound with his rival of the pump.

* * * * *

I suppose there is just such a low, big moon as this looking in upon you where you sit, you little dot of a woman, lost in the piazza perspectives of the Coronado; and you might think small things of our present habitation--a little tent among the bushes, with wind-blown weeds against the moon, shifting their shadow-patterns over our canvas walls. But you'd not think small things of our Sand Springs Fall by night, that glimmers on the dark cliff opposite--cliff, and mist-like cataract, and the low moon throwing the shadow of the bluff across it, all repeated in the stiller, darker picture of the lagoon. I shall not inflict much of this sort of thing upon you; but the senseless beauty of it all gives one a heartache. Why should it be here, where you and I shall never see it together--where I shall leave it soon, never to see it again? Tom says we are coming back--when the great scheme is under way. Ah, the scheme, the scheme! It looks very far away to-night, and so do some other schemes that I had set my heart on unaware, foolish old woman that I am. As if there was only one way in this--world for young men and women to be happy!

Harshaw brought me your sweet letter yesterday. It was stage-day, and he went up over the bluffs to the ferry mail-box at the cross-roads, where the road to Shoshone Falls branches from the road to Bliss.

I read to Kitty what you wrote me about the Garretts and their children, and the going to New York and then to Paris. (Thank you so much, dear, for your prompt interest in my little bride that isn't to be!) She had two letters of her own which she had read by herself, and afterward I thought she had been crying; but with her it is best not to press the note of sympathy. Neither does she like me to handle her affairs with gloves on, so to speak. So I plunged into the business in a matter-of-fact tone, and she replied in the same. Her objection is to going east to New York, and then to the other side. "I had rather stay in California," she said, "or anywhere in the West." Naturally; westward lies the way of escape from social complications.

She is afraid of the Percifers, and of meeting people she knows in Paris. But an offer like this was exceptional in this part of the world, I reminded her. A nurse for the boy, a maid, and only two little girls of eight and ten on her hands; and such nice people as the Garretts, who have been all over the world!

"Well," she said, "I should certainly like to get away from here as soon as possible. From _here_, not from _you_!" she added, looking me in the face. Her eyes were full of tears. We clasped hands on that.

"What is it? Has anything else happened?" I asked; for I knew by her looks that something had.

"Oh, dear!" she sighed, "I should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won't laugh. It's indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear! I'm so fond of him!"

The "old dear," it seems, is Micky's father--a very superior sort of father for such a son to have, but accidents will happen in the best-regulated families. He is a gallant widower of fair estate, one of those splendid old club-men of London; a very expensive article of old gentleman, with fine old-fashioned manners and morals, and a few stray impulses left, it would seem by what follows. According to the father's code, the son has not conducted himself in his engagement to Kitty Comyn as a gentleman should. Thereupon the head of the house goes to Miss Kitty's mother and makes the _amende honorable_ by offering his hand and heart and fortune to his son's insulted bride! The mother is touched and pleased not a little by this prompt espousal of her daughter's cause; and having wiped away all tears from _her_ eyes, this gallant old gentleman is coming over to America, for the first time in his life, to make his proposal to the bride herself! He is not so old, to get down to particulars; sixty-three doesn't look so old to some of us as it does to Miss Kitty. He is in fine health, I doubt not, and magnificently preserved. Kitty's mother is not at all averse, as I gather, to this way of settling her child's difficulties. She rather pleadingly assures Kitty that Mr. Harshaw senior has solemnly sworn that this is no unpleasant duty he feels called on to perform; not only his honor, but his affections are profoundly enlisted in this proposal. Kitty has had for years a sacred place in his regard; and from thinking of her as a daughter absolutely after his own heart, it is but a step to think of her in a still nearer--the nearest--relation. He begs her mother to prepare her for no perfunctory offer of marriage, but one that warms with every day's delay till he can take the dear child under his lifelong protection. Not to punish or to redress does he come, but to secure for himself and posterity a treasure which his son had trampled under foot. Somehow we did not feel like laughing, after all. Kitty, I think, is a little frightened. She cannot reach her mother, even with a cable dispatch, before this second champion will arrive.

"He's an awfully grand old fellow, you know. I could never talk to him as I do to the boys. If he thinks it his duty to marry me, I don't know if I can help myself. Poor Uncle George! I've always called him 'uncle' like his own nieces, who are all my friends. I never thought that I should be 'poor-ing' Uncle George! But he can't have heard yet of Micky's marriage. Fancy his going down to the ranch to stay with Micky and that woman! And then for a girl like me to toss him aside, after such a journey and such kindness! I don't know how I shall ever have courage to do it. There are fine women in London who would jump at the chance of being Mrs. Harshaw--not Mrs. Micky, nor Mrs. Stephen, nor Mrs. Sidney, but _Mrs. Harshaw_, you understand?" I understood.

"And now," she said, producing the second letter, "you _will_ laugh! And you may!"

The envelope contained a notification, in due form, of the arrival from New York, charges not paid, of some five hundred pounds of second-class freight consigned to Mrs. Harshaw, Harshaw's ranch, Glenn's Ferry (via Bisuka).

"These things belong to me," said Kitty. "They cost me the last bit of money I had that was my own. Mrs. Percifer, who is so clever at managing, persuaded me I should need them directly on the ranch--curtains and rugs and china, and heaven knows what! She nearly killed me, dragging me about those enormous New York shops. She said it would be far and away cheaper and better to buy them there. I didn't mind about anything, I was so scared and homesick; I did whatever she said. She saw to getting them off, I suppose. That must have been her idea, directing them to Mrs. Harshaw. She thought there would be no Kitty Comyn, no _me_, when these got here. And there isn't; _this_ is not the Kitty Comyn who left England--six weeks, is it?--or six years ago!"

"How did the letter reach you?" I asked. We examined the envelope. It bore the postmark, not of Bisuka, but of Glenn's Ferry, which is the nearest post-office to the Harshaw ranch. Micky's wife had doubtless opened the letter, and Micky, perceiving where the error lay, had reinclosed, but some one else had directed it--the postmaster, probably, at his request--to Kitty, at our camp. That was rather a nice little touch in Micky, that last about the direction.

"Come, he is honest, at the least," I said, "whether Mrs. Micky would have scrupled or not. She could claim the things if she chose."

"She is quite welcome," said Kitty. "I don't know what in the world I shall do with them. There'll be boxes and bales and barrels--enough to bury me and all my troubles. I might build me a funeral pyre!"

We fell into each other's arms and screamed with laughter.

"Kitty, we'll have an auction," I cried. "There's nothing succeeds like an auction out here. We'll sell the things at boom prices--we'll sell everything."

"But the bride," said Kitty; "you will have to keep the bride." And without a moment's warning, from laughing till she wept, she began to weep in earnest. I haven't seen her cry so since she came to us, not even that miserable first night. She struggled with herself, and seemed dreadfully ashamed, and angry with me that I should have seen her cry. Did she suppose I thought she was crying because she wasn't going to be a bride, after all?

* * * * *

"Oh, Mrs. Daly, I feel so ill!" were Kitty's first words to me when I woke this morning. I looked her over and questioned her, and concluded that a sleepless night, with not very pleasant thoughts for company, might be held responsible for a good share of her wretchedness.

"What were you lying awake about? Your new champion, Uncle George?" I asked her.

She owned that it was. "Don't you see, Mrs. Daly, mamma doesn't leave room for the possibility of my refusing him. And if I do refuse him, he'll simply take me back to England, and then, between him and mamma, and all of them, I don't know what may happen."

"Kitty," I said, "no girl who has just escaped from one unhappy engagement is going to walk straight into another with her eyes wide open. I won't believe you could be so foolish as that."

"You don't understand," she said, "what the pressure will be at home--in all love and kindness, of course. And you don't know Uncle George. He is so sure that I need him, he'll force me to take him. He'll take me back to England in any case."

"And would you not like to go, Kitty?"

"Ah, wouldn't I! But not in that way."

She sat up in her flannel camp-gown, and began to braid up her loosened hair.

"Kitty," I commanded, "lie down. You are not to get up till luncheon."

"I have a plan," she said, "and I must see Cecil Harshaw; he must help me carry it out. There is no one else who can."

"You have all day to see him in."

"Not all day, Mrs. Daly. He must be ready to start to-morrow. Uncle George will reach Bisuka on the fifteenth, not later. Cecil must meet him there; first, to prepare him for Micky's new arrangement, and second, to persuade him that he does not owe me an offer of marriage in consequence. Cecil will know how to manage it; he must know! I will not have any more of the Harshaws offering themselves as substitutes. It will be very strange if I cannot exist without them somehow."

It struck me that the poor child's boast was a little premature, as she seemed to be making rather free use of one of the substitutes still, as a shield against the others; but it was of a piece with the rest of the comedy. I kept her in bed till she had had a cup of tea; afterward she slept a little, and about noon she dressed herself and gave Cecil his audience. But first, at her request, I had possessed him with the main facts and given him an inkling of what was expected of him. His face changed; he looked as he did after his steeplechase the day I saw him first,--except that he was cleaner,--grave, excited, and resolved. He had taken the bit in his teeth. When substitute meets substitute in a cause like this! I would have left them to have their little talk by themselves, but Kitty signified peremptorily that she wished me to stay, with a flushed, appealing look that softened the nervous tension of her manner.

"I would do anything on earth for you, Kitty," Cecil said most gently and fervently; "but don't ask me to give advice--to Uncle George of all men--on a question of this kind--unless you will allow me to be perfectly frank."

"It's a family question," said Kitty, ignoring his proviso.

"I think it would get to be a personal question very soon between Uncle George and me. No; I meddled in one family question not very long ago."

"It's very strange," said Kitty restlessly, "if you can't help me out of this in some way. I cannot be so disrespectful to him, the dear old gentleman! He ought not to be put in such a position, or I either. How would you like it if it were your father?"

Cecil reddened handsomely at this home thrust. "I'd have a deuce of a time to stop him if he took the notion, you know; it's not exactly a son's or a nephew's business. There is only one way in which I can help you, Kitty. You must know that."

He had struck a different key, and his face was all one blush to correspond with the new note in his voice. I think I never saw a manlier, more generous warmth of ardor and humility, or listened to words so simply uttered in such telling tones.

"What way is that?" asked Kitty coldly.

"Forgive me! I could tell him that you are engaged to me."

"That would be a nice way--to tell him a falsehood! I should hope I had been humiliated enough"--

She snatched her handkerchief from her belt and pressed it to her burning face. I rose again to go. "Sit still, pray!" she murmured.

"It need not be a falsehood, Kitty. Let it be anything you like. You may trust me not to take advantage. A nominal engagement, if you choose, just to meet this exigency; or"--

"That would be cheating," cried Kitty.

"The cheat would bear a little harder on me than on any one else, I think."

"You are too good!" Kitty smiled disdainfully. "First you offer yourself to me as a cure, and now as a preventive."

"Kitty, I think you ought at least to take him seriously," I remonstrated.

"By all that's sacred, you'll find it's serious with me!" Cecil ejaculated.

"Since when?" retorted Kitty. "How many weeks ago is it that I came out here by your contrivance to marry your cousin? Is that the way a man shows his seriousness? You sacrificed more to marry me to Micky than some men would to win a girl themselves."

"I did, and for that very reason," said Cecil.

"I should like to see you prove it!"

"Kitty, excuse me," I interrupted. "_I_ should like to ask Mr. Harshaw one question, if he does not mind. Do you happen to have that picture about you, Mr. Harshaw?"

I thought I was looking at him very kindly, not at all like an inquisitor, but his face was set and stern. I doubt if he perceived or looked for my intention.

"'That picture,' Mrs. Daly?" he repeated.

"The photograph of a young lady that you jumped into the river to save--don't you remember?"

Cecil smiled slightly, and glanced at Kitty. "Did I say it was a photograph of a lady?"

"No; you did not. But do you deny that it was?"

"Certainly not, Mrs. Daly. I have the picture with me; I always have it."

"And do you think _that_ looks like seriousness? To be making such protestations to one girl with the portrait of another in your coat pocket? We have none of us forgotten, I think, that little conversation by the river."

He saw my meaning now, and thanked me with a radiant look. "Here is the picture, Mrs. Daly. Whose portrait did you think it was? Surely _you_ might have known, Kitty! This is the girl I wanted years ago and have wanted ever since; but she belonged to another man, and the man was my friend. I tried to save that man from insulting her and dishonoring himself, because I thought she loved him. Or, if he couldn't be saved, I wanted to expose him and save her. And I risked my own honor to do it, and a great fool I was for my pains. But this is the last time I shall make a fool of myself for your sake, Kitty."

I rose now in earnest, and I would not be stayed. In point of fact, nobody tried to stay me. Kitty was looking at her own face with eyes as dim as the little water-stained photograph she held. And Cecil was on his knees beside her, whispering, "I stole it from Micky's room at the ranch. That was no place for it, anyhow. May I not have one of my own, Kitty?"

I think he will get one--of his own Kitty.

* * * * *

Our rival schemer, Mr. Norman Fleet, has arrived, and electrical transmission has shaken hands with compressed air. The millennium must be on the way, for never did two men want so nearly the same thing, and yet agree to take each what the other does not need.

Mr. Fleet does not "want the earth," either, nor all the waters thereof; but the most astonishing thing is, he doesn't want the Snow Bank! He not only doesn't want it himself, but is perfectly willing that Tom should have it. In fact, do what we will, it seems to be impossible for us to tread on the tail of that young man's coat. But having heard a little bird whisper that he is in love, and successfully so, I am not so surprised at his amiability. Neither am I altogether unprepared, if the little bird's whisper be true, for the fact that Miss Malcolm is becoming reconciled to Tom's designs upon her beloved scenery. For the sake of consistency, and that pure devotion to the Beautiful, so rare in this sordid age, I could have wished that she had not weakened so suddenly; but for Tom's sake I am very glad. She is clay in the hands of the potter, now that she knows my husband does not want "all the water," and that his success does not mean the failure of Mr. Norman Fleet.

Harshaw will take the Snow Bank scheme when he takes Kitty back to London. If he promotes it, I tell Tom, after the fashion in which he "boomed" Kitty's marriage to his cousin, we're not likely to see either him or the Snow Bank again. But "Harshaw is all right," Tom says; and I believe that the luck is with him.