Margaret Collier Graham

“ Matilda had grown older and stooped more, and her knot of sandy hair was less luxuriant than it had once been, but there were no peevish, fretful lines on her face. It began to grow young again now that she saw Alex becoming "such friends with the minister." Mary Frances was a tall, round-shouldered girl, teaching the summer school, and Wattie was a sturdy boy in roundabouts, galloping over the farm, clinging horizontally to half-broken colts, and suffering from a perpetual peeling of the skin from his sunburned nose. Matilda was proud of her children. ”

“ How, indeed, do any of us know that we are not at our worst in our most triumphant moments?
The camp was well-nigh deserted, that morning. Poindexter had gone to Santa Elena to consult his employer, and most of the workmen had preferred the convivial joys of the Mexican saloon at San Gabriel to the stillness of the cañon. Sterling had written a few letters after breakfast, and then, taking his rifle from the rack, sauntered along the little path that led from the camp to the tunnel. The Chinese cook was dexterously slipping the feathers from a clammy fowl at the door of the kitchen tent. ”

“ The barley in the field behind the [Pg 135] house was beginning to head, and every breath of wind stirred it in glistening waves. Beyond the field shone a yellow mist of wild mustard. The California spring, more languorous, even with its hint of moisture, than the cloudless summer, sent a thousand odors adrift upon the air. Even the smell of garlic hanging about the señora could not drown the scent of the orange-blooms, and as for Ricardo's cigarette, surely no reasonable mortal could object to that. ”

“ Melissa hesitated a moment. She could not risk the precious handkerchief in the hands of the cook. No one else was visible. Two or three workmen were sleeping in the large tent under the wild grapevine. She could hear them breathing in loud nasal discord. It was better to go on up the cañon, she persuaded herself with transparent logic.
"It's purty hard walkin' when you've got your shoes on," she said, justifying her course by its difficulties, with the touch of Puritanism that makes the whole theological world kin, "but if I give it to him myself I'll know he's got it." ”

“ They raised their hats when she appeared among the mottled trunks of the sycamores. One of them—the younger, no doubt—sprang to help her when her foot slipped in crossing the shallow stream, and the generous concern he manifested for her safety, and which was to him the merest commonplace of politeness, was to Melissa a glimpse into Paradise.
"By Jove, she's pretty, Poindexter," he had said, as he came back and picked up his banjo; "she has eyes like a rabbit." ”

“ Old Withrow sat on the step, with his chin in his hands, smoking, and two dove-colored hounds stood, in mantel-ornament attitude, before him, looking up with that vaguely expectant air which even a long life of disappointment fails to erase from the canine countenance. Five or six half-clad chickens, huddling together in the first strangeness of maternal desertion, were drinking from an Indian mortar under the hydrant, and mother Withrow, coming to the door to empty her dish-pan, stood a moment looking at them. ”

“ She stood in the light of the doorway, so that the old man could see her tawdry dress and the travel-dimmed red and white of her painted face.
"Is there a man named Jerry Sullivan livin' in this town?" she asked.
Enoch was conscious of a vague disappointment.
"Yes," he said, half reluctantly, "he lives here. I suppose thee's his wife."
The woman looked at him curiously. Then she laughed.
"Yes, I suppose I am," she said; "can you show me where he lives?"
"I can't show thee very well in the dark, but it isn't far. If thee'll wait a minute, I'll take thy satchel and go with thee." ”

“ Sproul turned a highly insulted gaze upon the old woman's impassive face, and tilted her husband's hat defiantly above her diminutive, freckled countenance.
"Lysander kin have as much trouble with his brains as anybody," she said, with bantam-like dignity, straightening her limp calico back, and tightening her grasp on the baby in her arms. ”

“ There were broad acres of yellowing vineyard, fields of velvety young barley, orange-trees in dark orderly ranks, and here and there a peach orchard robbed of its leaves,—a cloud of tender maroon upon the landscape. Lysander collected his wandering glance and fixed it upon one of the pale-green barley-fields.
"It's about there, I reckon. Of course the old woman'll kick; but if the Colonel has laid out to do it he'll do it, kickin' or no kickin'. If he can't buy her out or trade her out, he'll freeze her out. Well, well, I ain't a-carin'; she can do as she pleases." ”

“ It gets away with me how Forrester can dry up a spring at long range that-a-way; there ain't a track in the mud around here bigger 'n a linnet's,—not a track. It's pure deviltry, you can bet on that." Lysander fell back on the devil with restful inconsistency, and fanned himself with his straw hat, curled by much similar usage into fantastic shapelessness.
"I don't believe he done it," said Melissa, obstinately charitable. "I don't believe anybody done it. I believe it just happened. I don't think folks like them care about folks like us at all, or want to pester us. ”

“ When a man has his coat pretty well wadded with greenbacks, he can stand a good deal o' thumpin'."
The ascent was growing rougher and more mountainous. Lysander put on the brake and stopped "to blow" his team. Whiffs of honey-laden air came from the stretch of chaparral on the slope behind him. He turned on the high spring-seat, and, dangling his long legs over the wagon-box, sent a far-reaching, indefinite gaze across the valley. ”

“ I have explored the dim recesses of her sunbonnet, and am prepared to report upon the contents. The lass is comely."
But Poindexter had relapsed into mathematics, and grunted an unintelligible reply.
Melissa heard none of this. All that she heard was the faint, distant strum of a banjo, and a gay young voice announcing to the rocks and fastnesses of the cañon that his love was like a red, red rose. His love! Melissa walked along the path beside the flume in vague bewilderment. ”

“ Nearly every man loves and reverences a woman; but this man loves and reverences women. It is old-fashioned, I know, but it has a breezy sweetness of its own, like the lavender and rosemary of our grandmothers ”

“ He helped her up the bank, making way for her in the chaparral, and tearing away the tangled ropes of the wild-grape vines.
"Tell your father not to send you above the camp again," he said gently, when she was safe in the path; "one of the men will go down with the tools." [Pg 47]
Melissa stood beside the flume a moment, irresolute. Her sunbonnet had fallen back a little, disclosing her rustic prettiness.
"I'm much obliged to you," she said quaintly, exhausting her knowledge of the amenities. "I'll send the hankecher back as soon as I can git it washed and done up." ”

“ 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-glass of buttermilk, 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. ”

“ Withrow's "patch" began, it resolved itself, to Lysander's intent and curious gaze, into a diminutive gray donkey, bearing a confused burden of blankets and cooking utensils, and followed by a figure more dejected, if possible, than the donkey himself. [Pg 30]
"I'll be hanged if the old man hain't showed up!" said Lysander, dropping down on the sled, and throwing back into the pile two boulders he held, as if to indicate a general cessation of all logical sequence and a consequent embargo on industry. ”

“ Parker's appreciation of this brilliant sally seemed to threaten the underpinning of the kitchen.
Eben smiled up into his daughter's face as he lathered his hairy hands.
"I wouldn't make out much at livin' by myself, Idy," he said gently.
"You ain't goin' to get a chance," rejoined his daughter, rushing back to her sputtering skillet, and spearing the pieces of chicken energetically; "you ain't goin' to get red o' me, no matter how sassy you are; I'm here to stay." ”

“ 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 sat in front of the stores in various degrees of undress, slapping each other resoundingly on their thinly clad backs, and discussing the weather with passers-by in loud, jocular tones, were, to Melissa's sober country sense, a light-minded, flippant crowd, to whom life could have no serious aspect. ”

“ Lysander, tired of waiting, came striding through the tarweed, with his hoe on his shoulder.
"I guess it's broke furder on up the cañon, Sandy."
Melissa stepped back, as she spoke, to let him precede her on the narrow path, and the two walked silently beside the empty ditch. Lysander's face gathered gloom as they went.
"It's some deviltry, I'll bet!" he broke [Pg 51] out, after a while. "Danged if I don't begin to think yer maw's right!"
Melissa did not ask in what her mother was vindicated; she had a dull prescience of trouble. Things seemed generally to end in that way. ”

“ With that gentle receptivity which makes some natures the defenseless targets of advice, the inefficient little mother felt herself at times between the upper and the nether millstones of condensed milk and Caudle's food, but her weak, appealing face always brightened into tremulous delight when the rival factions united, as they invariably did, on the subject of the baby's undoubted precocity in the matter of "noticing." ”

“ I like to picture to myself the affection of which such a man is capable, for no doubt he loves this girl of whom he speaks; not, of course, as you—as you ought to love me, but with a rude, wild sincerity, a sort of rugged grandeur. ”

“ Joel returned the following night alone, having left Brice at cheap lodgings near the station. Numberless passers-by must have noticed the patient watcher at the incoming trains, the homely pathos of his face deepening day by day, the dull eyes growing a shade duller, and the awkward form a trifle more stooped with each succeeding disappointment. ”

“ When the two men were out of hearing of the kitchen, Lysander took his father-in-law by the shoulders and shook him, as if by shaking down the loose contents of his brain he might make room for an idea.
"You want to shut up about the spring. It's give out,—dried up. The blastin' and diggin' in the cañon done it, I s'pose, an' Poindexter—that's the engineer—thinks Forrester'll make it all right; but [Pg 64] you don't want to be coaxin' the old woman up there, not if the court knows herself, and you want to keep your mouth purty ginerally shut. ”

“ Sterling lifted his hat with a winsome smile that seemed to illuminate the twilight of poor Melissa's wilted sunbonnet, and the three men started up the cañon, the bay that they pushed aside on the path sending back a sweet, spicy fragrance.
Melissa shouldered her hoe and proceeded homeward.
"He does act awful pullite," she mused, "an' he had on a ring: I didn't know men folks ever wore rings. ”

“ 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 [Pg 73] wished she had not seen. ”

“ Spots of a deep, coppery red glowed through the tan of the old woman's cheeks.
"He said that, did 'e, Lysander Sproul? Then he must 'a' found some woman hard to cheat. Nate Forrester don't hate to do business with nobody he can cheat. The next time you see 'im, tell 'im it's mut'chal."
"I told 'im that," answered Lysander grimly. "I told 'im he didn't hate to do business with the hull female sect no worse than this partikiler woman hated to do business with him; but I reckoned you wouldn't bother 'im if he wanted to go to work on the cañon,—that'd be onreasonable." ”

“ You won't find out by lookin' in the lookin'-glass, I can tell you that."
"Oh, come now, Idy, you hadn't ought to be so mad; I hadn't signed the pledge yet."
He took a step toward her. The girl put out her hands warningly, and then clasped her arms about herself with a shudder.
"Don't you come near me, Parker Lowe," she gasped. "What do I care about the pledge! Didn't you tell me you'd stop drinkin'? Won't a man that tells lies with his tongue tell 'em with his fingers? Do you suppose I'd marry a man that 'u'd come to me smellin' of whiskey, an' him lyin' sick in there? ”

“ Folks that's up an' down like I am don't get nigh as much sympathy as they 'd ought. I tell Starkweather, well folks like him an' Idy ain't fittin' comp'ny fer an inv'lid."
"Mr. Starkweather's lookin' better 'n he did," said Parker, listening rapturously to the thumps of the rolling-pin in the pantry. "I think this climate agrees with 'im."
"Oh, he's well enough," responded Mrs. Starkweather dejectedly, "if he didn't make 'imself so much extry work. Grubbin' out that vineyard, now! I can't fer the life o' me see"—
"Maw!" called Idy warningly, opening the battened door with a jerk—"you maw! ”

“ If I was a man, I'd get even with that lyin' Barden, or I'd know the reason why."
"That's just what I was sayin'," returned Mrs. Starkweather, with malicious meekness. "If your fawther was the man he'd ought to be, he wouldn't be rode over that way by nobody." [Pg 159]
The girl's face flamed until it seemed that her blonde thatch of hair would take fire.
"Pappy ain't to blame," she said angrily; "he can't help thinkin' the way he does. There ain't no call to be mad with pappy; it's all that miser'ble, lyin' Barden. It'll be a cold day fer him when I ketch 'im."
Parker gazed at her admiringly. ”

“ Some of the jury still hung about the place with cumbrous attempts at helpfulness, and Minerva moved tearfully to and fro in the kitchen, wearing her husband's hat with a reckless assumption 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. ”

“ With such natures love is an instinct; and it is to instinct, after all, that we must look for everything that is fresh and poetic in humanity. We have all made this sacrifice to culture,—a sacrifice of force to expression. ”