Geraldine Bonner

“ Down one of the tunnels the figure of Jerry came into view, walking rapidly.
He was smiling, for this summons made his escape from the mine easier than it would otherwise have been. A word or two from Black Dan and then up on the cage, and then—away into the night where love and a woman were waiting. The culminating excitement of the day made his eye brilliant and deepened the color of his face. Full of the joys and juices of life, triumphantly handsome even in his rough clothes, he was a man made for the seduction of women. Black Dan felt it and it deepened his hate. ”

“ At the bottom of the shaft—the “sump” in mining parlance—was a well of varying depths which perpetually exhaled a scalding steam.
Black Dan took his guests to the fifteen-hundred-foot level, whence the greatest riches of the mine had been taken. He was more than usually silent as they walked from tunnel to tunnel and drift to drift. Barney Sullivan was the cicerone of the party, explaining the formation, talking learnedly of the dip of the vein, holding up his lantern to let its gleam fall on the dark bluish “breast” into which the miners drove their picks with a gasp of expelled breath. ”

“ She was smiling slightly, her face singularly sad under the smile. He looked at her and said softly:
“My girl!”
He sat on with her for a space, discussing the move and making plans. With some embarrassment he told her of the fact that he had written to Rion Gracey, applying for a position. The thought that he would be in Virginia called the first real color of life and pleasure into her face that he had seen there for weeks. He saw that the excitement of the move, the hope of change from the environment in which she had so suffered, had had a bracing and cheering effect on her. ”

“ Neither spoke again, till the buggy, cresting the last rise, came out on the shoulder of the mountain, whence the road loops downward through the sage to Washoe Lake. Below them, at the base of the Sierra, the lake lay, a sheet of pure blue, its banks shading from the gray of the surroundings to a vivid green where the water moistened them. There was something human in this evidence of the land’s readiness to bloom and beautify itself when the means were given it. It was a touch of coquetry in this austere, unsmiling landscape that seemed so indifferent. ”

“ The bitterness of his marriage was as wormwood to him. He felt sore toward Mercedes, whose indifference toward him had roused in him the angry amaze that a spoiled child feels [292] toward the stranger who is proof against its blandishments. He felt himself wronged, and in a way, trapped. They made him work like a day laborer for his salary, and his wife had left him. That was what he’d got by marrying! Lupé, poor, dead Lupé, would not have treated him so! And June—what a fool he’d been! He forgot that June had no money, and for that reason he had put her resolutely aside. ”

“ Will you ever again think of June without sorrow and pain?”
He stood motionless as a thing of stone, while his glance devoured the page. He did not read every word, but from the closely written lines sentences seemed to start out and strike his eyes. He turned the sheet and saw farther down a paragraph that told him everything:
“The future is all dark and terrible, but I am going. I am going with Jerry. I am going wherever he wants, I am what he wants to make me. It’s only death that can break the spell. Good-by, dearest, darlingest Uncle Jim. ”

“ It was difficult for Mercedes to believe it, but when she did it kindled sleeping fires in her. She was doubly wounded; heart and pride were hurt. Her overmastering vanity had received its first blow. Not only had she lost the man for whom her feeling was daily growing warmer, but it would be known of all men that he had withdrawn his affections from her to place them on a girl far her inferior in looks, education and feminine charm. That he should have preferred Rosamund was particularly maddening—Rosamund, whom she had regarded as commonplace and countrified. ”

“ A step sounded on the flagged walk and a tall, masculine figure took shape through the density of the fog-thickened atmosphere. She closed the curtains and looked at June with an unsmiling eye.
“You needn’t be afraid of being left alone with anybody,” she said. “Here’s Jerry Barclay.”
June drew back, her eyebrows raised into exclamatory semi-circles, an irrepressible smile on her lips.
“Rosamund,” called Allen from the table, “where’s the ash receiver? Gracey’s got nothing to put his ashes in but the blue satin candy box one of June’s young men gave her for Christmas.” ”

“ The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the city by the sea and there broke in a seething whirl. There was no stock market in the Nevada camp. Pine Street was the scene of the operations of capitalist and speculator—the arena where bull and bear met.
In Virginia men fought against the forces of nature. They matched their strength with the elements of the primeval world. Water and fire were their enemies. ”

“ He turned his face to the horse, his mouth set, his lips compressing words that he dared not utter. It was evidently all true. The thought that she might be already engaged to Rion entered his mind, carrying with it a sensation of appalling blankness. With a flash of revealing truth he saw that his life, with June completely gone from it, would be for ever savorless and without meaning. He had not realized before how much he cared for her.
For a space there was silence. They sped round another buttress and saw an unobstructed semicircle of road before them. ”

“ He wanted to please himself always and to hurt no one, because people, when they are hurt, disturb the joyous tenor of life. Now, where June was concerned, he was not doing any harm. He saw the girl in a perfectly open manner except that he did not see her in her own house. He had a right to spare himself the railings to which he knew Lupé would subject him, and which he dreaded as only a man can who hears them from the lips of a woman he has ruined and no longer loves. ”

“ The city had never looked to June so cheerless. She was a great deal alone, Rosamund’s time being more and more claimed by Lionel Harrower. He was her first lover, and it was a part of Rosamund’s fate that he should have come to her unexpected and unasked for. She was of the order of women who stand where they are placed, doing what comes under their hand, demanding little of life, and to whom life’s gifts come as a surprise. ”

“ He came down to San Mateo that Saturday to talk things over with Rosamund. [219] They were worried and uneasy, a sense of calamity weighing on them both.
Though June was one of those women who obstinately adhere to the bright side, who cling to hope till it crumbles in their hands, she felt, during the summer, premonitions of ill fortune. Those inexplicable shadows of approaching evil that Nature throws forward over the path of sensitive temperaments had darkened her outlook. She questioned herself as to her heaviness of heart, assuring herself that there was no new cloud on her horizon. ”

“ I can’t be your friend, June Allen. There may be men who can be the friend of the women they feel to as I do to you, but I’m not that kind. I can be your husband, only that. There’s to be no play at friendship where I’m concerned, no taking your hand to shake when I want to take you in my arms and keep you there, where no other man in the world can lay his finger on you or think of you as something he can try to win. ”

“ Most people said it had arisen because of his swarthy coloring—he was of an almost Indian darkness of tint—but there were those who declared it was a tribute to his moody taciturnity, for Black Dan Gracey was a man of few words and rare smiles.
Now, standing in the brilliant evening light, the watcher could not but be impressed by the appearance of the two brothers. A fine pair of men, the Gracey boys, muscular, broad-shouldered, and tall; out-door men whose eyes were far-seeing and quiet, who felt cramped in cities, and returned from them with a freshened zest to the stream-bed and the cañon. ”

“ On one wall a heliotrope broke in lavender foam and the creamy froth of the bankshur rose dabbled railings and pillars and dripped over on to the ground. It was a big, cool, friendly looking house with a front door that in summer was always open, giving the approaching visitor a hospitable glimpse of an airy, unencumbered hall.
The move completed, June and Rosamund began to [169] taste the charm of the Californian’s summer life. There were no hotels near them. No country club had yet risen to bring the atmosphere of the city into the suave silence of the hills. ”

“ June looked at him and murmured an affirmative that he could not have heard, but he put his foot on the lowest step. She dropped her eyes to her hands resting on the balustrade, while the beating of her heart increased with his ascending footfall. When he had reached her side she was trembling. In those few sentences from the bottom of the stairs he seemed suddenly to have obliterated the past year. The words were ordinary enough, but his eyes, his tone, his manner as he now stood beside her, were those of the old Jerry, before Mercedes had stolen him away. ”

“ The heat of the afternoon and the excitement of the meeting had called up a faint pink to her cheeks. In her belt she had thrust a branch of wistaria and the trail of blossoms hung down along her skirt. She wore a wide leghorn hat, and in this she had fastened another bunch, the flowers lying scattered across the broad rim, and one [174] spray hanging over its edge and mingling with the curls that touched her neck.
Jerry had never seen her look as she did this afternoon. Love, that she felt assured was returned, had lent her the fleeting beauty of an hour. ”

“ It was a few weeks after the ball that the Colonel heard of the expected arrival in town of Rion Gracey and Barney Sullivan en route to Virginia City.
From the great camp across the mountain wall in the Nevada desert, an electric current had begun to thrill and extend its vibrations wherever men congregated. The autumn rumors that Virginia was not dead persisted. The mutterings of the silver volcano had grown louder and caught the ear of the hurrying throng. The reports of a strike in Crown Point rose and fell like an uneasy tide. ”

“ In the autumn of 1870 the hours for evening entertainments were still early, and the particular entertainment to which the Colonel intended taking June and Rosamund Allen was one of the regular receptions which united the aristocracy of San Francisco at the house of Mrs. Ira Davenport.
The great detached bulks of the buildings that the carriage passed gleamed with lights, for Folsom Street was still the home of the elect. From the arch of lofty porches hall lamps cast a faint gleam into the outer darkness of shrubberies and lawns. ”

“ She felt like a child who has run away to find adventures and is suddenly stricken with the horror of strangeness and the wild and piercing longing for the familiar things of home.
The evening turmoil of C Street had begun. Looking up its length, roofed by its wooden arcade, was like looking into a lighted tunnel, swaying with heads. The glare from the show-windows, the lights from lamps, and the agitated flaring of lanterns on the street hawkers’ barrows, were concentrated within this echoing tunnel and played on every variety of face, as the crowd came sweeping down on June. ”

“ A stillness reigned in the room; death was without the door waiting to get in.
Newbury went toward her. Jerry hung back gazing fearfully at her. She was invested with a strange, alien terror, a being half initiated into awful mysteries. The inflexible sternness of her face did not soften as her husband bent over her and said gently:
“Dearest, Jerry came to see how you were. He’s here. Would you like to see him?”
She gave a low sound, undoubtedly an affirmative. Pancha, who was at the foot of the bed, enunciated a quick phrase in Spanish. Newbury stepped aside and beckoned Jerry forward. ”

“ Barclay, raising his hat and murmuring some conventional words of farewell, turned and left them, and the Colonel and his companion strolled across the road and over the grass toward a bench, behind which a clump of laurels grew shelteringly, a screen against the wind and fog.
“This is the most comfortable of all the benches,” said June artlessly as they sat down. “The laurels keep the wind off like a wall. Even on cold days, when the fog comes in, it’s a warm little corner.” ”

“ The sleepy sounds of midday had died down and [4] the strange, dream-like silence so peculiar to California held the scene. It was like looking at a picture, the Colonel thought, as he turned in his saddle and surveyed the misty line of hill after hill, bare and wooded, dwindling down to where—a vast, sea-like expanse swimming in opalescent tints—stretched one of the fruitful valleys of the world.
Kit Carson, the finest horse procurable in the Sacramento livery stable the Colonel patronized, stamped and flicked off a fly with his long tail. ”